The New York Times: Mark Zuckerberg takes aim at Anthropic in debate over AI slowdown
Mark Zuckerberg has taken aim at Anthropic, his rival artificial intelligence start-up, amid the debate over safety and slowing down AI development.
Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s CEO, took aim at rival artificial intelligence start-up Anthropic and its CEO, Dario Amodei, on Tuesday amid a contentious debate over whether to slow down AI development.
In a social media post, Zuckerberg said that leading AI labs should be focused on safety rather than improving their own technology. He did not name Amodei or Anthropic but said that calls to pause AI development industrywide were the wrong approach.
On Saturday, Amodei called for a global AI slowdown over concerns about the technology’s rapidly accelerating capabilities.
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By continuing you agree to our Terms and Privacy Policy.“Every lab has the responsibility and incentive to move at the pace required to train its models safely,” Zuckerberg posted. “Meta has made this commitment and other labs can do this as well.”
Debate over the speed and potential dangers of AI development has engulfed the tech industry in recent days, fuelled by the resignation of a researcher at Anthropic last week who warned that AI companies were “gambling with our lives”.
Mr Amodei then spoke up about a slowdown and was joined by Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI; Elon Musk, whose SpaceX rocket company has been ramping up spending on AI; and Demis Hassabis, the chair of Google DeepMind.
Other tech leaders, such as David Sacks, a venture capitalist and adviser to President Donald Trump, have questioned Amodei’s motivations.
They have suggested he was sensationalising the risks of AI to make it harder for other companies to compete with Anthropic and other leading labs.
In his post, Zuckerberg took a middle ground. He acknowledged the risks of AI but said companies are already incentivised to keep their users safe and can slow progress on their own.
He used last week’s release of Muse, Meta’s new AI “agent” that can use software on its own, as an example and said his company delayed the product’s release for several months to make sure it was secure.
“We didn’t call for everyone else to do this before we would,” Zuckerberg said.
“We just did it as part of our day-to-day work because it was clearly the right thing for people and for us.”
He also jabbed at rival AI labs for racing toward “recursive self-improvement,” which is when AI is used to develop itself. AI companies should instead focus on serving people, he said.
Meta has been aiming to catch up in the AI race after falling behind Anthropic and OpenAI last year.
The company plans to release its most powerful AI model to date, internally called Watermelon, in the coming weeks.
(The New York Times has sued OpenAI and Microsoft, claiming copyright infringement of news content related to AI systems. The two companies have denied those claims.)
Originally published as Mark Zuckerberg Takes Aim at Anthropic in Debate Over AI Slowdown
