Supremacy summary

After selling Loopt and taking a year off to reflect, Altman returned to the startup world with Hydrazine Capital, which focused on early-stage investments. Altman’s sharp eye for promising startups grew the fund tenfold. In 2014, he became president of Y Combinator, expanding its scope to include ambitious projects like self-driving cars and nuclear fusion. His investments in Helion Energy and Retro Biosciences revealed his focus on solving humanity’s biggest challenges: creating limitless energy and extending life.

Altman’s strength wasn’t just in spotting great ideas but persuading others to believe in his vision. His confidence and ambition often left him emotionally detached – a trait he believed was essential for navigating the future risks of AI. Yet, this same drive pushed him to release advanced AI systems before competitors like Google, highlighting a fierce competitive streak.  

One of the biggest challenges in developing AGI is the sheer amount of computing power required. While Hassabis had the funding to attract top scientific talent, he lacked access to the supercomputers and cloud infrastructure that tech giants like Google possessed. Partnering with a big company seemed like a necessary compromise, but it came with ethical concerns. Google, despite its futuristic branding, primarily used AI to boost advertising revenue, a far cry from DeepMind’s vision of using AI for world-changing purposes.

In 2014, DeepMind sold to Google for $650 million, turning down a higher offer from Facebook. The deal came with strict conditions: DeepMind’s work wouldn’t be used for military applications and an ethics board would oversee AI development. While Google initially agreed, it soon abandoned the ethics board idea and integrated DeepMind into its broader Alphabet structure – eroding the promised autonomy.

DeepMind’s journey under Google has been a blend of ambition, ethical struggles, and mounting frustration. The founders initially hoped to remain an independent entity, but as DeepMind’s breakthroughs grew more valuable to Google’s business, independence became a distant dream. While some DeepMind teams focused on ethical applications like health care and energy, others optimized YouTube recommendations and ad targeting, further entrenching Google’s profit-driven agenda.

Hassabis envisioned DeepMind as a “global interest company,” a neutral and ethical steward of AI akin to a United Nations for technology. But his lofty aspirations were repeatedly delayed or sidelined as Google prioritized its corporate goals. Despite the growing ethical concerns around AI misuse and bias, DeepMind failed to establish a robust ethics team, leaving systemic issues largely unaddressed.

Despite Google’s reputation for innovation, it has spent much of the last decade acquiring companies and maintaining the status quo rather than making bold changes. Even after DeepMind’s groundbreaking development of the transformer in 2017, Google showed little urgency. The transformer, introduced in the paper “Attention Is All You Need,” revolutionized language processing by enabling AI to analyze entire sentences and paragraphs simultaneously, powering advanced applications like nuanced translation and humanlike text generation.

The transformer was a game-changer, enabling AI to harness modern computer chip capabilities and paving the way for today’s generative AI. Yet, Google’s leadership remained focused on safeguarding its ad business rather than exploring the technology’s potential. While Google hesitated, OpenAI and startups seized the opportunity. OpenAI leveraged the transformer to develop generative AI models, including GPT, capable of creating humanlike text, images, and more. Startups applied the technology to translation and other applications, leaving Google behind as its researchers, frustrated with bureaucratic inertia, left to launch successful ventures like Character.ai.

OpenAI’s partnership with Microsoft brought much-needed financial stability and promised significant rewards for employees. But not everyone welcomed the shift. Leading researcher Dario Amodei raised concerns that aligning with a profit-driven corporation could undermine OpenAI’s mission of prioritizing AI safety for humanity. Eventually, he left OpenAI to found Anthropic, a public benefit corporation dedicated to balancing AI safety with commercial success.

Microsoft, unlike Google, eagerly showcased its GPT language model to the public. While Hassabis worried about the dangers of giving powerful tools to the wrong hands, Altman believed transparency was crucial for safety. In response, Google pressured DeepMind to develop its own competitive language model, intensifying the race for AI dominance.

In early 2022, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella fully embraced AI’s potential after OpenAI’s Codex evolved into GitHub Copilot, an autocomplete tool for coding that revolutionized software development. With this innovation, Nadella confidently claimed Microsoft had surpassed Google in state-of-the-art AI tools. OpenAI then unveiled DALL-E 2, a text-to-image generator showcasing AI’s creative power, though concerns about biases and harmful misuse persisted.

The game-changer came in November 2022 with OpenAI’s release of ChatGPT. Initially a modest research preview, it became a global phenomenon, drawing over 30 million users by early 2023. ChatGPT’s fluent and knowledgeable responses captivated the world and sparked a competitive frenzy in the tech industry. Subsequent releases, like GPT-4, brought AI closer to AGI, but also stoked fears about job displacement. While Altman likened this transition to the Industrial Revolution, others, like Eliezer Yudkowsky, warned of existential risks, urging a pause in AI research.

AGI holds incredible promise, but companies like Microsoft and Google stand to benefit the most. Unlike past innovations such as electricity, AI’s potential harms – privacy violations and algorithmic biases – are harder to define, allowing tech giants to prioritize profits over ethics. As Microsoft, Google, and Anthropic release increasingly powerful models, safety often takes a back seat to speed.

Efforts to slow AI development all but collapsed in late 2023 when OpenAI’s board, led by Chief Scientist Ilya Sutskever, abruptly fired CEO Sam Altman. Online, Sutskever and the board were branded “decels” for wanting to decelerate AI development, while Altman and his followers were tagged “e/acc” for effective accelerationism. OpenAI staff threatened to leave, and Microsoft, heavily invested in OpenAI, rallied behind Altman. Amid plummeting Microsoft stock and mounting pressure, Altman was quickly reinstated. It revealed the tech giant’s reliance on AI and the cult-like loyalty that Altman commands.