It’s a critical time for the AI industry in the US, which is confronting lawmakers and a general public looking for careful policy planning and an answer to rising populist anger.
Unfortunately, a lot of the industry’s leaders are carrying baggage that’s getting in the way of sending a unified, clear message. OpenAI’s Sam Altman has been painted as a capitalist mercenary. Anthropic co-founder Dario Amodei has been accused by critics of spreading fear. Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg have similarly distracting histories.
On Tuesday, Google’s DeepMind co-founder and CEO Demis Hassabis emerged as a unifying voice with an article calling for a self-regulatory body of AI experts modeled after the US’ Financial Industry Regulatory Authority. He even received words of encouragement from the unabashedly accelerationist All-In host Chamath Palihapitiya and competitors at Microsoft and OpenAI.
Hassabis, who won the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 2024 for pioneering the use of AI in protein prediction, is based in London and has largely avoided the viper pit created by the bare-knuckle AI race playing out in Silicon Valley. That could be one reason his message was so well received: It required an unassailable messenger.