Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, and other AI chiefs are calling for slower development of the technology following fresh warnings that it could annihilate us all. Michael Burry says they’re just helping themselves.
The investor of “The Big Short” fame said in a late Sunday post on X that it was “self-serving” for the bosses of OpenAI, Anthropic, and other AI companies to push for a slowdown.
Burry listed four reasons why:
- He doesn’t view AI chatbots as the path to artificial general intelligence so there’s “nothing” that needs its progress curbed.
- A slowdown “benefits incumbents” and hampers smaller rivals.
- Hailing AI as so powerful it’s an extinction-level threat fuels the “hype & puffery” that feeds public offerings.
- An intentional slowdown provides “cover for real uncontrollable slowing growth.”
On his Substack, Cassandra Unchained, Burry said that Anthropic and OpenAI’s top brass have backed a slowdown “to increase the perception of their power before their IPOs.”
He also said large language models like Claude and ChatGPT won’t achieve “true capacity for reason” so there’s “nothing to fear,” at least for now.
Anthropic and OpenAI did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Burry weighed in after Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an essay urging his peers to “slow the pace” of AI advances to give risk prevention “time to keep up.”
OpenAI’s Sam Altman, xAI’s Elon Musk, and Alphabet’s Demis Hassabis all posted in support of Amodei on X.
Amodei issued his call for cautious progress after former OpenAI and Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon said the two frontier AI labs are “racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives.”
Another Anthropic researcher, Evan Hubinger, echoed Coxon and said he puts the chances that AI will “kill all humans” at over 10% within the next decade.
Yet there’s huge pressure from Wall Street and Washington for AI titans in the US to keep marching ahead.
Investors reacted to the prospect of slower growth by selling AI stocks on Monday. Nvidia, the world’s most valuable public company and a key supplier of AI chips, slid 3% in premarket trading, while peers including Intel, Micron, and SK Hynix slumped more than 5%.
President Trump said over the weekend that “very negative forces” were responsible for the apocalyptic chatter, the worst “won’t happen,” and it was paramount that the US beat China in the AI race.
Burry, who pivoted from running a hedge fund to writing about his personal portfolio on Substack nearly a year ago, has criticized and bet against a slew of AI companies this year.
The investor, known for his prescient bet against the mid-2000s housing bubble, has sounded the alarm on overinvestment in infrastructure, aggressive accounting, hidden debt, and circular transactions in the AI space.
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