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T his week is going by fast, even amidst Big Tech’s overarching theme of wanting to ‘slow down’ AI development. It’s the story taking up all the oxygen this week, and we put it in pole position this week on the Brief.
Our stories: the signals in the noise of Dario Amodei’s 3,300 word manifesto on why we need to slow down AI progress, debate the usefulness of Twitch’s new ‘streaming coach,’ and breakdown the latest big-music-label-and-AI-startup frenemies partnership.
The Innovation Brief is, by its own design and naming, a concise distillation of big and complex tech stories in the world. Even if our first story on Anthropic received the lion’s share of my ~90 seconds of airtime, it’s still not enough time to properly unpack what is going on with these Frontier AI companies.
I mention in the Brief to email or DM me if you want a better extrapolation of my POV on what is going on that subject (and please do), but I wanted to use this write-up to share some reflections I’m having on Dario Amodei’s essay, his interviews, and the AI tech bros’ resounding calls to slow everything down.
If it were six or twelve months ago and Dario came out and said the same exact thing he’s saying now, I believe the sentiment would have been much more positive. Many people forget the origin story of Anthropic, a small group of engineers working at OpenAI that quit and spun off a new startup because they thought safety wasn’t a priority at OpenAI. Anthropic was truly the white hats of AI, the reasonable ones, the group giving off “we’re the good guys” vibes.
Fast forward to today: I watched every second of Dario’s interview, read every word of the essay, and I tried to really reflect on why almost all of it rings hollow and is causing a subsequent backlash. I think the answer actually lies in the growing creator economy.
Everything Dario is saying and doing feels performative. He’s not unique in this, we’ve all become performative in both subtle and ostentatious ways (*cough* social media *cough*). Whether people want or can even handle the actual truth is up for debate. But, what I believe humans desire at a baseline, is the belief that the person speaking to them is telling their truth, authentically, and just being ‘real’ (to borrow a 90s idiom).
I now recognize the feeling I had when I saw and read everything this week. I don’t believe Dario. The world doesn’t believe Dario. I’m not even sure Dario believes Dario. I started comparing him to politicians (on both sides), government officials, athletes, and all the creators and influencers I follow on social. It’s all performance, all the time. Polished performance, candid performance, try-to-act-authentic performance, and for Dario, keep-the-valuation-high performance.
Before you have a chance to call me a hypocrite, I’m going to beat you to the punch. The Brief is a performance! But, my words and thoughts are not influenced or swayed by an outside or ulterior motive, it’s just my personal curiosity amplified. This is all easy for me to say, I don’t hold the fate of humanity in my hands (I don’t think Dario does either, but don’t tell him that!). Regardless, whether someone loves, hates, or is indifferent to the Brief, it can’t influence my curiosity.
I realize now that I do the Brief for myself, yet I’m beyond appreciative to have other people (you!) intrigued enough to watch. I’ll leave with a quote from the comedian Bo Burnham who, in a 2016 standup special about finding happiness in life, said, “I know very little about anything, but I do know this: that if you can live your life without an audience, you should do it.”