The internet may have just witnessed the biggest AI rivalry in display, a clash of egos.
On Thursday, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei provided what is sure to become an iconic image of their feud. The pair went viral for refusing to join hands as the rest of the world’s tech leaders gathered for a moment of unity, sparked by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
Here’s a timeline of how Altman and Amodei went from colleagues to becoming the face of AI’s Cold War.
In July 2015, Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Altman, and a group of elite AI researchers all gathered at the swanky Rosewood Hotel in Menlo Park, California.According to The New York Times, Musk had a falling out with then-Google CEO Larry Page. Weeks later, Musk, Altman, Amodei, Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, and others discussed the formation of a new AI lab to ensure Google had a worthy competitor in the AI space. Musk invited Amodei, per tech journalist Alex Kantrowitz.
Their vision became OpenAI, though Amodei initially elected not to join the startup research lab. Roughly a year later, he changed his mind and joined OpenAI as “Team Lead for AI Safety.”
A who’s who of AI and tech elite gathered in India for a major summit on artificial intelligence. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi took the opportunity to orchestrate a classic image of unity: competing CEOs with their hands raised together. (It’s something Modi has done before with other world leaders, and politicians have been doing forever.)Modi almost got his moment.
While Altman held the prime minister’s hand, the OpenAI CEO didn’t grasp Amodei’s hand, who was positioned to his other side. Amodei grasped the hand of the other person next to him, but not Altman’s. The internet, predictably, had a field day. And the world got a perfect encapsulation of one of AI’s bitter rivalries.
