By MIKE MAGEE
Has America become an “Island of Musk?” He appears to be in all places and nowhere on the similar time. As Trump’s new finest good friend, he’s opened up the gates of Twitter-hell, morphed into a gradual stream of crypto-cash, and demonstrated his dance strikes alongside Trump at featured venues.
He’s additionally launched “a robotic for each citizen” as a part of a canopy for sagging expectations for the Tesla Cybertruck, and issued a brand new spherical of hole guarantees on his Robotaxi scheme. In brief, Musk’s ADHD apart, he appears a bit extra unhinged than standard.
In distinction, his arch foe, 38-year outdated OpenAI CEO, Sam Altman, is (in the event you’re to imagine him) nearly professorial. In his personal phrases, “Know-how introduced us from the Stone Age to the Agricultural Age after which to the Industrial Age. From right here, the trail to the Intelligence Age is paved with compute, vitality, and human will.”
A part of the conflict revolves round a single phrase, accelerationalism. Destined to develop into the 2025 “phrase of the yr,” this label is more and more assigned to thought leaders in AI who’ve satisfied themselves that AI will quickly rule the world, our politics, and the battle subject, and subsequently “quicker is best” is now the mantra relating to world-dominating generative AI.
This was not all the time the case. Again in 2015, when Elon Musk and a younger Sam Altman teamed as much as launch a non-profit known as OpenAI “to learn humanity,” they each realized that the leased workplaces weren’t sufficiently big for 2 alpha males. However in launching their decade lengthy battle for dominance, they agreed that gradual, clear, and deliberative was higher than quick and reckless. Altman wrote on the time, “In a really perfect world, regulation would decelerate the dangerous guys and velocity up the nice guys.”
Again then, Musk famously warned, “Mark my phrases, AI is way extra harmful than nukes. I’m actually fairly near the leading edge in AI, and it scares the hell out of me.” The place Musk was ”in your face,” Altman was “extraordinarily good and accommodating” which masked a startlingly aggressive underbelly in keeping with those that knew him nicely. As his former associate within the 2011 start-up “Y combinator”, Paul Graham stated, “You could possibly parachute him into an island stuffed with cannibals and are available again in 5 years and he’d be the king.” Sam was 23 on the time.
In February, 2018, Musk jumped ship, apparently disagreeing on technique with Altman. After which Altman’s board, in an all-out coup, fired him on November 17, 2023. Twelve days later, they have been pressured to rehire him when main stakeholder, Microsoft, threatened to tug their appreciable assist. Altman, for his half, displayed a conciliatory tone on Musk’s personal X-platform, tweeting on his return “In my opinion, it’s extremely vital to be taught from this expertise and apply these learnings as we transfer ahead as an organization. I welcome the board’s unbiased overview of all latest occasions.”
On June 7, 2023, 38-year outdated Sam instructed his Congressional questioners that cash wasn’t his motivator. Slightly “I’m doing this as a result of I find it irresistible.” Sen Richard Blumenthal swooned, “It’s so refreshing. He was keen, ready, and keen.” Altman, taking part in to the cameras, stated, “We expect that regulatory intervention by governments might be crucial to mitigate the dangers of more and more highly effective fashions.”
Simply 9 months later, his Senate supporters have been little question confused to open the Wall Road Journal and uncover the headline, “Sam Altman Seeks Trillions of {Dollars} to Reshape Enterprise of Chips and AI. Open AI chief pursues buyers together with the U.A.E for a challenge requiring as much as $7 trillion.”
Because the November Presidential election quick approached, Musk and Altman selected totally different venues. Musk attended Trump’s Pennsylvania rally, labeling himself “darkish MAGA” and drawing a headline from the Rolling Stone journal, “Web Viciously Memes Elon Musk’s Jumpy Trump Rally Look.”
Within the meantime, Bloomberg reported a quieter go to by Altman to the White Home to pursue federal funding to pursue an “Unprecedented Information Heart Buildout.” In an abrupt about face, Altman now intends to go large. How large? Actually, actually large – as much as 7 knowledge facilities every consuming 5 gigawatts of energy (the quantity a nuclear reactor generates to energy 3 million properties). Sam now sees future prosperity as a race to the highest.
In his newest thought piece, he asks how did we arrive on the doorstep of the following leap in prosperity? “In three phrases: deep studying labored. In 15 phrases: deep studying labored, bought predictably higher with scale, and we devoted growing assets to it.”
Musk and Altman do see eye to eye on close to Biblical-level “historical past making.” As Altman wrote concerning the new AI intelligence arms race, “Right here is one slender manner to take a look at human historical past: after 1000’s of years of compounding scientific discovery and technological progress, we now have found out soften sand, add some impurities, organize it with astonishing precision at terribly tiny scale into pc chips, run vitality by means of it, and find yourself with techniques able to creating more and more succesful synthetic intelligence…This may increasingly transform essentially the most consequential truth about all of historical past to this point.”
After all, this previous week’s inconvenient Florida’s Hurricane Milton made historical past of its’ personal. Over 1 1/2 days, it “intensified at an unprecedented charge” morphing from a Tropical Despair to a Class 5 super-Hurricane initiated by 126 twister warnings. That introduced veteran meteorologist, John Morales, to tears.
Local weather scientists have been fast to remind that between 2019 and 2024, Google’s CO2 emissions, due to AI, elevated by 50%. Not surprisingly, tech entrepreneurs who have been within the lead on combating local weather change when the supply level was Appalachian miners and Rust Belt producers, have now gone surprisingly silent on the difficulty. How they’ll sq. that with projected AI knowledge middle consumption of 17% of all U.S. vitality by 2030 stays to be seen.
Musk is now off on his personal, having launched “xAI”, and slicing corners in a recreation of catch-up. In June he opened up an enormous 100 megawatts powered knowledge middle in Memphis, Tennessee coaching AI fashions on the backs of 100,000 Nvidia H100 processors. To energy the plant, he put in 18 pure gasoline generators with out EPA clearance or native permits. The generators will emit 130 tons of poisonous nitrogen oxides. That’s an issue for the folks of Memphis already inhaling F grade air in keeping with the American Lung Affiliation.
Sarcastically, Forbes says a significant aim of Musk’s xAI is to enhance well being care by means of “activity automation, improved medical workflow, and optimization of medical productiveness.” Evolutionary psychologist, Robert Wright, (writer of The Ethical Animal) means that Altman might have intentionally parachuted onto “an Elon-inhabited island” in 2015 with an excellent cautious, checks and balances message to seize Musk funding for Open AI. However lower than a decade later, he’s consuming Elon’s lunch and is king of the island of vitality consuming, decidedly non-green, “accelerationalist” cannibals.
Mike Magee MD is a Medical Historian and common contributor to THCB. He’s the writer of CODE BLUE: Inside America’s Medical Industrial Advanced. (Grove/2020)
