Good morning. Andrew here. The weekend was one long freakout over the existential risk of A.I., set off not by critics, but by the people building it. Anthropic, OpenAI, SpaceX, Alphabet and Microsoft are all calling for government safeguards. Is this sincere, or just a bid for regulatory capture? Even a real slowdown in A.I. models’ training won’t change the math on data centers and chips, at least in the near term. The supply chain is too constrained. (Notably, Jensen Huang of Nvidia is not saying he’s scared.) As for the cynics: When Elon Musk, Sam Altman and others started OpenAI, they spoke openly about A.I.’s risks. So have Dario Amodei and Demis Hassabis. I’ve been talking to them — on the record — about this very issue for a decade. Could tighter regulation make closed models, like those from Anthropic and OpenAI, more valuable? Sure. But that’s not where these conversations started. In the immediate term, here’s what A.I. leaders clearly want: permission to talk to one another. Is that collusion or an antitrust problem? Maybe. More below. Also, we have an exclusive: Ron Conway and Jay Carney are teaming up on this very issue. (Was this newsletter forwarded to you? Sign up here.)
To pace or not to paceIt’s rare to see Dario Amodei of Anthropic and Sam Altman of OpenAI agree on much. So the world was struck when the leaders of those two artificial intelligence giants called for a slowdown — “pacing,” in Amodei’s words — in developing bleeding-edge models. But many leaders in Silicon Valley, Washington and Beijing have pushed back. “I won’t lie to you — there are real dangers,” Amodei told CBS News over the weekend about his call for a slowdown in developing the most advanced A.I. models. He proposes giving independent A.I. evaluators “employee-like” access to companies’ models (somewhat like nuclear arms inspectors) and fostering international cooperation on safety standards. Many of Amodei’s top rivals backed his calls for a global slowdown, including:
The possible economic and financial consequences are huge. Goldman Sachs researchers estimated last month that A.I. accounts for about 1.8 percent of U.S. G.D.P., potentially rising to nearly 3 percent by 2028. A.I. fervor has also driven the stock markets’ astronomical gains in recent years. A.I.-related stocks — including those of the chipmakers SK Hynix and Samsung Electronics, the Chinese lab Z.ai and the tech investor SoftBank — fell sharply in Asia overnight. S&P 500 and Nasdaq futures are down this morning.
Amodei’s call has been criticized on multiple fronts:
The big question is China. Amodei acknowledged that his plan wouldn’t really work unless the world’s other A.I. superpower agreed to a slowdown. So far, that appears unlikely: An editorial in the state-backed Global Times derided his essay as a “Cold War”-style attack on Beijing’s A.I. industry.
Oil surges again. Brent crude, the international benchmark, jumped to over $108 a barrel this morning, and the average price of diesel in the U.S. hit a record — $6.23 a gallon, according to AAA. That’s after a meeting between Iran and some Gulf states, potentially to discuss the Strait of Hormuz, was postponed indefinitely and as traders continue to grapple with the potential hit to global exports after Saudi Arabia said on Friday that it had shut down a key pipeline after a drone attack. All eyes will be on central banks this week. The Fed is expected to raise its benchmark lending rate on Wednesday for the first time in three years as it contends with high inflation. The Bank of Japan could do something similar on Friday, analysts say. Economists warn that the energy crisis created by the war in Iran could force central banks to make a series of increases in coming months, setting up Kevin Warsh, the Fed chairman, for a potential clash with President Trump. Canada seeks deeper trade ties with the European Union. Prime Minister Mark Carney of Canada has reportedly told his envoy to Europe to investigate cultivating a much closer relationship on trade and defense with the bloc, according to The Wall Street Journal, which cited unnamed sources. The gambit by Carney, who said yesterday that he was looking for a “unique alliance” comes amid an escalating trade war with Trump.
Jay Carney’s new job: Rebuild tech’s bridge to DemocratsJay Carney is heading back to Silicon Valley’s political trenches. Carney, the former Obama press secretary who left Airbnb this summer, has joined SV Angel, Ron Conway’s early-stage venture capital firm, to run a new initiative called Project Blueprint. Its purpose is to rebuild bonds between leaders in the artificial intelligence sector and Democrats who are demanding new rules to regulate the technology. Timing is key as Democrats may get their chance to do just that after the midterm elections in November. “Much of the technology industry has shifted to the political right, leaving a vacuum between technology leaders and Democrats,” SV Angel said in a memo read by DealBook. With a divided government likely after the midterms, “there needs to be a trusted bridge between the people building A.I. and the Democrats who will help write the rules governing it. Without one, both sides are worse off.” The TL;DR: The memo says that A.I.’s critics are right about a lot — that systems now have “real offensive cyber capability”; that safeguards for children “are not adequate”; that job displacement is a true threat; and that community backlash against data centers over power bills and water “is real and growing.” The growing public skepticism is “a failure of the industry’s making,” it adds. Conway has had one of Silicon Valley’s most reliable Democratic checkbooks. He was among the donors who helped push former President Joe Biden to step aside after a disastrous June 2024 debate, and he backed Kamala Harris soon after. Carney’s ties to Washington and tech run deep. He was the White House press secretary from 2011 to 2014 before holding top policy and communications roles at Amazon and Airbnb. “A.I.’s potential for good is enormous,” Carney told DealBook. “But as we’ve seen just this week, the risks and downsides are real and need to be managed.” Sam Altman, OpenAI’s C.E.O., said in a statement: “We need a way for the world to build trust in the technology so that we can all get to share these benefits. National safety requirements for the most capable systems are a great first step, ideally building towards a global framework for advanced A.I. models. I’m glad Ron is bringing the people building A.I. and policymakers together.” Project Blueprint is a shift for Conway. He was an early donor to Leading the Future, the $100 million pro-A.I. super PAC whose backers also include Marc Andreessen and Joe Lonsdale — and which spent more than $1 million attacking Alex Bores, the New York Democrat who ran on stronger A.I. regulation, and lost in a House primary in June. PICTURE OF THE DAY
Business leaders, celebrities and stars packed the U.S. Open men’s tennis final yesterday. (Alexander Zverev of Germany defeated the American Ben Shelton in four sets.) Jeff Bezos and his wife, Lauren Sánchez Bezos, were spotted greeting JPMorgan Chase’s Jamie Dimon.
The space funding race heats upThe European space sector’s reliance on the U.S. has become a top security and business concern in Brussels and beyond. It has prompted efforts by Europe’s top aerospace and military companies to try to build rivals to Elon Musk’s SpaceX, and more recently, has attracted a flood of money to the region’s space start-ups. Open Cosmos is the latest beneficiary. The company, a satellite maker with a headquarters in Britain, announced today that it had raised €300 million (about $346 million) from mostly European backers. Open Cosmos is not alone: Investors have put more than $16.5 billion globally into space tech start-ups so far this year, according to PitchBook, roughly on track to nearly double last year’s haul. Funding is growing even faster for European space-focused start-ups, PitchBook data shows.
The funding will help Open Cosmos expand its satellite manufacturing abilities and accelerate its push into satellite data services.
Open Cosmos has now raised more than $390 million. That gives the 11-year-old company a valuation of about $2 billion, according to two people with knowledge of the funding details who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about the company’s finances. Open Cosmos operates in an increasingly competitive sector. In addition to building satellites, it sells Earth-observation data to governments and businesses. In March, it announced that it would expand into orbital connectivity, or providing high-speed satellite broadband and internet-of-things connectivity to businesses and governments, competing more directly with SpaceX. The climate crisis has been a major business driver, Rafel Jorda Siquier, the founder and C.E.O. of Open Cosmos, told DealBook. Last year, the company booked approximately $175 million worth of contracts from governments and businesses. Many were paying for early alerts, delivered from Open Cosmos’s low Earth orbit satellites, on how floods, wildfires and other weather calamities were ravaging the planet. “These are very acute situations where having information when it’s needed and where it’s needed becomes critical,” he said. We hope you’ve enjoyed this newsletter, which is made possible through subscriber support. Subscribe to The New York Times.
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