Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei shared his thoughts on whether the AI industry was in a bubble in the New York Times DealBook Summit on Wednesday. This was in addition to throwing shade at a certain 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 complicated situation, but explained his thoughts on AI economics in more detail.
He described himself as optimistic about the technology’s potential, but cautioned that there may be players in the ecosystem who may “get the timing wrong” or see “bad things” happening when it comes to financial returns.
“There is an inherent risk when the timing of economic value is uncertain,” Amodei explained. He said companies had to take risks to compete with each other and authoritarian rivals – a reference to the threat from China – but added that some players were “not managing that risk well, taking unwise risks”.
The issue, he said, is the uncertainty about how quickly the economic value of artificial intelligence will increase and how to properly match it with the lag times for building more data centers.
“There is [a] genuine dilemma, which as a company we try to manage as responsibly as we can,” said Amodei. “And then I think there are some players who are ‘YOLO-ing’, taking the risk too far, and I’m very concerned,” he added, using the slang term “you only live once” that is often used to justify the risk.
Additionally, he addressed the question of AI chip removal timelines. This is another important issue and a factor that could negatively affect the industry’s finances if GPUs become obsolete and lose value sooner.
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“The issue is not the lifetime of the chips – the chips continue to work for a long time. The issue is that new chips are coming out that are faster and cheaper…and so the value of the old chips may decrease somewhat,” Amodei said
He said Anthopic made conservative assumptions on that front and others as he planned for an uncertain future.
The AI company’s revenue has grown 10x annually over the past three years, the CEO said, going from zero to $100 million in 2023, then $100 million to $1 billion in 2024, and will reach somewhere between $8-10 billion by the end of this year.
But Amodei said he would be “really foolish” to simply assume the pattern would continue. “I don’t know if a year from now, if it’s going to be 20 billion or if it’s going to be 50 … it’s very uncertain. I try to plan conservatively. So I plan for the downside of it, but that’s very concerning,” he said.
AI companies like his need to plan how much compute they’ll need in the coming years and how much they’ll need to invest in data centers. If they don’t buy enough, they may not be able to serve their customers. And if they buy too many, they will struggle to keep up with costs or, at worst, could go bankrupt.
Last month, OpenAI found itself in a PR crisis when its CFO said it wanted the US government to “stop back” its company’s infrastructure loans, also known as insuring them so that taxpayers would pick up the bill if OpenAI couldn’t. After the outrage, he withdrew the comments.
More risk-takers could be overextending themselves, Amodei warned, especially if “you’re a person who just wants to ‘YOLO’ things, or just like big numbers,” he said, in a veiled reference to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
“We think we’re going to be OK in, basically, almost all worlds … I can’t speak for other companies,” he said.
