They say your enemy’s enemy is your friend. Sometimes, however, your enemy’s enemy is a little twerp who is almost as bad as your enemy. Rather than creating a strategic alliance, the best thing to do is sit back and watch the pair of them tear each other apart.
What am I talking about? I am talking about the public spat between Elon Musk and Sam Altman, two of the world’s most powerful, overhyped and self-satisfied men. Musk and Altman co-founded OpenAI in 2015, but Musk left a few years later and has been calling Altman, the company’s CEO, names such as “Swindly Sam” ever since.
Their feud intensified last week after Musk’s BFF, Donald Trump, recruited Altman for Stargate, a $500bn (£400bn) project funded jointly by OpenAI, Oracle and Softbank to make the US a world leader in AI. This seems to have rattled Musk, who has been mouthing off about Altman, leading Altman to remark on X: “Just one more mean tweet and then maybe you’ll love yourself …”
I am bringing this up because a video of Altman – which makes him seem like a creepy supervillain – has been getting a lot of attention on Musk-owned X in the past few days. In the clip, from an interview at an AI for Good conference last year, Altman talks about how AI will reshape society.
“I still expect that there will be some change required to the social contract … I do think the whole structure of society itself will be up for some degree of debate and reconfiguration,” he says. The comment doesn’t sound quite as sinister when you look at the interview as a whole, but it has generated a lot of scathing online discussion about how exactly billionaires want to use AI to “reconfigure” society.
I am not saying Musk has anything to do with this Altman clip suddenly going viral. I am just, as the podcasters who dabble in conspiracy theories like to say, asking questions. After all, Musk has been known to boost his own tweets. One certainly wouldn’t put it past him to amplify content that makes Altman look bad.
Of course, it is not as if the AI broligarchs need any help looking like power-hungry sociopaths. Billionaires can’t seem to stop themselves from salivating about how AI is going to usher in a supercharged surveillance state that keeps commoners in line.
Last year, for example, Larry Ellison, the co-founder of Oracle, made headlines after he predicted AI would ensure everyone behaved impeccably. “The police will be on their best behaviour because we’re constantly watching and recording everything that’s going on,” he said during a meeting with financial analysts. “Citizens will be on their best behaviour because we’re constantly recording and reporting.” What about the billionaires who own this technology, eh? Are they going to be on their best behaviour, too? Or do the rules not apply to them?
I think we all know the answer to that question. Indeed, AI is already upending the social contract and reconfiguring society in an autocrat-friendly manner. After Russia invaded Ukraine, for example, authorities started using facial recognition to detain people they thought might protest. But it turns out you don’t even need to “preventively” detain people: just the threat of AI surveillance stops people from protesting, according to a 2023 study of facial recognition in China.
It is not all doom, gloom and the crushing of democratic dissent, however. We may be marching into a tech-enabled despotic hellscape, but at least there is a good chance this hellscape will be clean. Cities including Singapore and New York have been exploring AI and drone surveillance to stop people littering. I am willing to set my civil liberties aside if it means the scumbags in my neighbourhood who put their bins out early and don’t clean up after their dogs get identified and sent to AI-powered purgatory.
The really good news, though? All these tech gurus who fancy themselves special little geniuses entitled to unilaterally “reconfigure” the world are freaking out. Why? Because China has made them look incompetent by releasing DeepSeek, an AI chatbot developed at a fraction of the cost of its US rivals. DeepSeek wiped $1tn off the pre-eminent US tech index in one day. If only I had an AI-powered drone to see just how panicked Altman and Ellison are now.
• Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist
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