Investor Michael Burry, known for his role in The Big Short, recently commented on the calls from AI industry leaders to slow down technology development. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei have publicly advocated for a deceleration to allow safety measures to catch up.
Burry argues that these calls for a slowdown are self-serving. He suggests that such measures benefit existing market leaders by hindering smaller competitors. According to Burry, framing AI as a potential extinction threat serves to fuel hype and inflate valuations ahead of potential IPOs.
The investor further claims that current large language models, such as ChatGPT and Claude, lack genuine reasoning capabilities and will not evolve into artificial general intelligence. He believes the industry is using the narrative of controlled growth to mask actual, uncontrollable slowdowns in their progress.
The debate follows warnings from researchers like Evan Hubinger, who estimated a 10% probability that AI could cause human extinction within the next decade. Despite these concerns, both Wall Street and Washington continue to pressure major AI companies to maintain their current pace of development.
