AI: Origin stories of AI 'accel' vs 'decel'

...the roots of the AI 'slow-down' vs 'speed-up' war

The recent ‘Black Swan’ drama at OpenAI had roots that go back almost a decade now. Behind the board room battles with the CEO and amongst the OpenAI founders themselves, is a tale that goes back to the founders of Google and Tesla. And it’s a tale worth understanding, to see where the current civil wars in the AI tech industry and big tech AI ‘Magnificent 7’ between the ‘accelerationists (aka accel, e/aac and r/aac) and decelerationists (aka decel and doomers)’ all started. To acclerate or decelerate AI is the key question of the day. Big debate, and some would say a civil war in terms the directions AI should go. Let me unpack.

The New York Times lays it all out in “Ego, Fear and Money: How the AI Fuse was lit”, a long, well-reported piece worth reading in full. It starts with fireside fireworks between the co-founder of Google and serial founder of Tesla, SpaceX and many others:

“Elon Musk celebrated his 44th birthday in July 2015 at a three-day party thrown by his wife at a California wine country resort dotted with cabins. It was family and friends only, with children racing around the upscale property in Napa Valley.”

“This was years before Twitter became X and Tesla had a profitable year. Mr. Musk and his wife, Talulah Riley — an actress who played a beautiful but dangerous robot on HBO’s science fiction series “Westworld” — were a year from throwing in the towel on their second marriage. Larry Page, a party guest, was still the chief executive of Google. And artificial intelligence had pierced the public consciousness only a few years before, when it was used to identify cats on YouTube — with 16 percent accuracy.”

“A.I. was the big topic of conversation when Mr. Musk and Mr. Page sat down near a firepit beside a swimming pool after dinner the first night. The two billionaires had been friends for more than a decade, and Mr. Musk sometimes joked that he occasionally crashed on Mr. Page’s sofa after a night playing video games.”

“But the tone that clear night soon turned contentious as the two debated whether artificial intelligence would ultimately elevate humanity or destroy it.”

It got heated over a long fireside chat:

“As the discussion stretched into the chilly hours, it grew intense, and some of the more than 30 partyers gathered closer to listen. Mr. Page, hampered for more than a decade by an unusual ailment in his vocal cords, described his vision of a digital utopia in a whisper. Humans would eventually merge with artificially intelligent machines, he said. One day there would be many kinds of intelligence competing for resources, and the best would win.”

“If that happens, Mr. Musk said, we’re doomed. The machines will destroy humanity.”

“With a rasp of frustration, Mr. Page insisted his utopia should be pursued. Finally he called Mr. Musk a “specieist,” a person who favors humans over the digital life-forms of the future.”

“That insult, Mr. Musk said later, was “the last straw.”

The tale accelerates in scope, depth and span across time:

“Eight years later, the argument between the two men seems prescient. The question of whether artificial intelligence will elevate the world or destroy it — or at least inflict grave damage — has framed an ongoing debate among Silicon Valley founders, chatbot users, academics, legislators and regulators about whether the technology should be controlled or set free.

That debate has pitted some of the world’s richest men against one another: Mr. Musk, Mr. Page, Mark Zuckerberg of Meta, the tech investor Peter Thiel, Satya Nadella of Microsoft and Sam Altman of OpenAI. All have fought for a piece of the business — which one day could be worth trillions of dollars — and the power to shape it.”

That fireside chat led to broken relationships between several said of friends, all of who’ve gone to dent the world of AI and technology:

“Mr. Musk and Mr. Page stopped speaking soon after the party that summer. A few weeks later, Mr. Musk dined with Mr. Altman, who was then running a tech incubator, and several researchers in a private room at the Rosewood hotel in Menlo Park, Calif., a favored deal-making spot close to the venture capital offices of Sand Hill Road.”

“That dinner led to the creation of a start-up called OpenAI later in the year. Backed by hundreds of millions of dollars from Mr. Musk and other funders, the lab promised to protect the world from Mr. Page’s vision.”

“Thanks to its ChatGPT chatbot, OpenAI has fundamentally changed the technology industry and has introduced the world to the risks and potential of artificial intelligence. OpenAI is valued at more than $80 billion, according to two people familiar with the company’s latest funding round, though Mr. Musk and Mr. Altman’s partnership didn’t make it. The two have since stopped speaking.”

As Sam Altman who just got rehired at his own company within days of being fired puts it:

““There is disagreement, mistrust, egos,” Mr. Altman said. “The closer people are to being pointed in the same direction, the more contentious the disagreements are. You see this in sects and religious orders. There are bitter fights between the closest people.”

And the story extends deep into the bowels of Google today, its flaship Deepmind acquisition that also got its start even further back in 2010. As the NYTimes stories goes onto to recount:

“Five years before the Napa Valley party and two before the cat breakthrough on YouTube, Demis Hassabis, a 34-year-old neuroscientist, walked into a cocktail party at Peter Thiel’s San Francisco townhouse and realized he’d hit pay dirt. There in Mr. Thiel’s living room, overlooking the city’s Palace of Fine Arts and a swan pond, was a chess board. Dr. Hassabis had once been the second-best player in the world in the under-14 category.”

“I was preparing for that meeting for a year,” Dr. Hassabis said. “I thought that would be my unique hook in: I knew that he loved chess.”

Fifteen years later, Demis Hassabis heads up Google’s efforts to counter OpenAI and Microsoft’s AI efforts from his vantage point at Deepmind in London, heading all of Google’s AI efforts, with its Gemini LLM AI model being the tip of Google’s Ai spear against OpenAI’s GPT-4 and beyond.

But along the way, Demis Hassabis became entwined with the now famous camp of ‘Effective Altruists’ (aka EA), who are now the ‘decel’ tribe vs the ‘accel’ tribe:

“In 2010, Dr. Hassabis and two colleagues, who all lived in Britain, were looking for money to start building “artificial general intelligence,” or A.G.I., a machine that could do anything the brain could do. At the time, few people were interested in A.I. After a half century of research, the artificial intelligence field had failed to deliver anything remotely close to the human brain.”

“Still, some scientists and thinkers had become fixated on the downsides of A.I. Many, like the three young men from Britain, had a connection to Eliezer Yudkowsky, an internet philosopher and self-taught A.I. researcher. Mr. Yudkowsky was a leader in a community of people who called themselves Rationalists or, in later years, effective altruists.”

“They believed that A.I. could find a cure for cancer or solve climate change, but they worried that A.I. bots might do things their creators had not intended. If the machines became more intelligent than humans, the Rationalists argued, the machines could turn on their creators.”

“Mr. Thiel had become enormously wealthy through an early investment in Facebook and through his work with Mr. Musk in the early days of PayPal. He had developed a fascination with the singularity, a trope of science fiction that describes the moment when intelligent technology can no longer be controlled by humanity.”

“With funding from Mr. Thiel, Mr. Yudkowsky had expanded his A.I. lab and created an annual conference on the singularity. Years before, one of Dr. Hassabis’s two colleagues had met Mr. Yudkowsky, and he snagged them speaking spots at the conference, ensuring they’d be invited to Mr. Thiel’s party.”

The whole thing revolves and evoles like a deep game of chess:

“Mr. Yudkowsky introduced Dr. Hassabis to Mr. Thiel. Dr. Hassabis assumed that lots of people at the party would be trying to squeeze their host for money. His strategy was to arrange another meeting. There was a deep tension between the bishop and the knight, he told Mr. Thiel. The two pieces carried the same value, but the best players understood that their strengths were vastly different.”

“It worked. Charmed, Mr. Thiel invited the group back the next day, where they gathered in the kitchen. Their host had just finished his morning workout and was still sweating in a shiny tracksuit. A butler handed him a Diet Coke. The three made their pitch, and soon Mr. Thiel and his venture capital firm agreed to put 1.4 million British pounds (roughly $2.25 million) into their start-up. He was their first major investor.”

“They named their company DeepMind, a nod to “deep learning,” a way for A.I. systems to learn skills by analyzing large amounts of data; to neuroscience; and to the Deep Thought supercomputer from the sci-fi novel “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.” By the fall of 2010, they were building their dream machine. They wholeheartedly believed that because they understood the risks, they were uniquely positioned to protect the world.”

The science fiction references are key in that ‘Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’ is a deeply influencing book for Elon Musk over the years, including his fascination with its meanings for humanity and his ambitions with a safer AI.

The story then goes onto rope in Microsoft and many other tech luminaries like Bill Gates and others. Again, it’s worth reading in whole if only to appreciate that even globally well known technologists are human. They run as much on emotions as rationality driven intelligence. Regardless of their emotional and/or intelligence ‘IQ’. As impressionable by passing moments and interactions as all us humans.

The stories that are driving these early days of the AI Tech Wave however are different from earlier technology waves like the PC, Internet, for the sheer ferocity of the tribal camps between fear and fascination with the possibilities of AI in the short and long term.

The ongoing drama is very much shaping the technologies, and possibly how regulators react to the technologies to potentially slow it down. To accelerate or decelerate is the AI question of the day. e/aac vs EA, if acronyms are your thing. A silicon valley ‘Game of Thrones’ that is the soap opera defining the AI days of our lives.

And yes, it’s all likely going to turn into many best-selling books, TV shows, and movies. Cozy up to the fireside. This is a tech wave unlike any other. Stay tuned.

(NOTE: The discussions here are for information purposes only, and not meant as investment advice at any time. Thanks for joining us here)