Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei shared his thoughts on if the AI industry was in a bubble at The New York Times DealBook Summit on Wednesday. This was in addition to throwing shade on one particular unnamed competitor, which was clearly OpenAI.
Amodei declined to give a simple yes-or-no answer to the question of a bubble, saying it was a complex situation, but instead explained his thoughts about the economics of AI in more detail.
He described himself as bullish on the potential of the technology, but cautioned that there could be players in the ecosystem who might make a “timing error” or could see “bad things” happen when it comes to the economic payoffs.
“There’s an inherent risk when the timing of the economic value is uncertain,” Amodei explained. He said companies had to take risks to compete with each other and authoritarian adversaries — a reference to the threat from China — but added that some players were not “managing that risk well, who are taking unwise risks.”
The issue, he said, is the uncertainty around how quickly the economic value of AI will grow and properly mapping that to the lag times on building more data centers.
“There’s [a] genuine dilemma, which we as a company try to manage as responsibly as we can,” Amodei said. “And then I think there are some players who are ‘YOLO-ing,’ who pull the risk dial too far, and I’m very concerned,” he added, using the slang term for “you only live once,” which is often used to justify risk-taking.
Plus, he spoke to the question around AI chips’ deprecation timelines. That’s another hot-button topic and a factor that could negatively impact the industry’s economics if GPUs become obsolete and lose their value ahead of schedule.
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