Davos kicks off the AI turf war
Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic were slinging mud at each during the World Economic Forum. Also: Sunday CEO Tony Zhao this week of ACCESS.
I’m flying home from Switzerland after a long week in Davos. I stayed up way too late at Barry’s Piano Bar last night due to a rumor that Elon Musk was going to show up. He never did, but the karaoke was still going strong when I finally left.
First, 3 things:
Anthropic's engineering team has had to redesign its coding take-home test for new hires three times because each new Claude model keeps beating it. They're now challenging potential hires to beat Opus 4.5.
Google DeepMind co-founder Shane Legg is hiring a “chief AGI economist” to work on “post-AGI economics, the future of scarcity, and the distribution of power and resources.”
Yikes: Over 50 papers published at the last NeurIPS AI research conference apparently contained hallucinations.
Ganging up on OpenAI
The leaders of the three preeminent frontier AI labs spent this week at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, taking shots at each other like candidates in a presidential primary.
I helped start the news cycle. During an interview on Tuesday, I asked Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis about OpenAI’s decision to test ads in ChatGPT. “It’s interesting they’ve gone for that so early,” he said. “Maybe they feel they need to make more revenue.”
The next day, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei piled it on during an interview I watched at The Wall Street Journal House in Davos. “We don’t need to monetize a billion free users because we’re in some death race with some other large player,” he said. He also teased an upcoming essay focused on the “bad things” AI could bring — a dark counterpart to his optimistic “Machines of Loving Grace” essay from last year.
OpenAI’s retort came from Chris Lehane, its head of policy and perhaps the most formidable political operator in Silicon Valley. Lehane earned the nickname “master of disaster” in the Clinton White House, where he specialized in opposition research and crisis management. At Airbnb, he helped the company survive regulatory battles that threatened its existence. Now he’s the most high-profile policy chief of any AI lab and is applying tactics from his campaigning days to the AI race.
When I sat down with Lehane for breakfast on Thursday morning near the main Promenade in Davos, he was ready to punch back.
