The AI industry is radicalizing
The tech industry and its critics occupy parallel universes.
 

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Matteo Wong

Staff writer

Spend enough time among San Francisco’s tech community—in hacker houses and at hackathons, talking to top AI researchers and robot-apocalypse doomsayers—and you will feel as if you’ve stepped onto another planet. Many people I’ve spoken with in the city treat the words of Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO, like gospel and believe that the arrival of omniscient machines is imminent.

But these techies are not the only ones who have adopted radical beliefs. Spend enough time talking to the AI industry’s strident skeptics and you’ll enter a world in which the global economy is about to collapse under a regime dominated by ChatGPT, biased tech, and hubristic industry leaders. There is no artificial “intelligence” in this view—only, in the words of one critic, “a racist pile of linear algebra.”

I’ve spent the past month reporting on the conflict between these two camps. The core of their disagreement is over the immense amount of capital flowing into generative AI and the huge, unanswered questions about the technology’s capabilities. “Faith fills the void,” I wrote. “Anything can be spun to support either side of the debate.”

(Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Royce DeGrie / Getty.)

 

The story unfolds so rapidly that it can all seem, at a glance, preordained. After transferring to Columbia last fall, as Chungin “Roy” Lee tells it, he used AI to cheat his way through school, used AI to cheat his way through internship interviews at Amazon and Meta—he received offers from both—and in the winter broadcast his tool on social media. He was placed on probation, suspended, and, more keen on AI than education, dropped out this spring to found a start-up. That start-up, Cluely, markets the ability to “cheat on everything” using an AI assistant that runs in the background during meetings or sales calls. Last month, it finished a $15 million fundraising round led by Andreessen Horowitz, the storied venture-capital firm. (Columbia, Meta, and Amazon declined to comment on the record about Lee’s case.)

Lee unapologetically believes that the arrival of omniscient AI is inevitable, that bots will soon automate every job. The language about “cheating” is really just a provocative way to get everyone on board with the idea, Lee told me when we spoke recently. “We have no choice but to keep spreading the word: Do not think it’s cheating,” he said. (“Every time technology makes us smarter, the world panics. Then it adapts. Then it forgets. And suddenly, it’s normal,” Cluely states on its website.) Lee said that it may seem unfair to some people if others can use AI to “be 1,000 times better or more efficient,” but soon this will simply be how the world operates. Even if ChatGPT didn’t get an iota more capable than it is today, already “every single white-collar job in America should essentially be gone already,” Lee said (or “conservatively,” 20 to 30 percent of them). And “I would bet my entire life on AI getting exponentially better.”

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P.S.

Earlier this week, Elon Musk’s Grok chatbot began praising Hitler and calling for a second Holocaust. Somehow, this turn of events wasn’t that surprising: “Grok, as Musk and xAI have designed it, is fertile ground for showcasing the worst that chatbots have to offer,” I wrote with my colleague Charlie Warzel.

— Matteo

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