The AI Lab CEO Prisoner's Dilemma
Things are bigger than Dario or Altman let on.
Imagine you were walking out in the woods one day, when you suddenly meet an alien from another planet.
It turns out this alien is really nice. It decides to give you all of its shiny technologies. Ray guns. Anti-gravity spaceships. Teleportation devices. Telepathy headbands. Life extension devices.
You decide to start sharing these alien devices with some of your friends. Suddenly your small group of friends all have superpowers.
You go around, spreading the word. "HOLY SHIT, AN ALIEN GAVE US MIRACULOUS TECHNOLOGY!"
Much to your surprise, people don't give a single shit. They give you blank stares. "So what?" is the typical response.
Most people don't even believe you. Of the small percentage of people who do believe you, they can hardly grasp what it is you have. You tell them you have teleportation and they envision a short trip to the Virgin Islands. Meanwhile, you're thinking of a voyage to Jupiter's moon of Europa.
Your friends keep playing with all of the marvels they were gifted. Some of them iterate on and advance the alien technology. Others open businesses giving people access to use these tools.
Media frenzy starts to build up. Headlines appear like "What is Teleportation? 12 Ways to Use it in your Daily Life." and "Deciding between Immortality and Mortality? Here's How to Know Which One is Right for You."
It's now been a year since you've gotten this alien tech. People still have no clue what the implications of these technologies are. Meanwhile things have not stopped advancing. Ray guns have turned into space lasers, Life extension machines have turned into immortality devices, telepathy headbands now work across all species, etc.
People are getting more curious but few have the access, bravery, or knowledge to try these new tools out. You know that if you fully released them, society's script would flip overnight. Every airline and doctor would be out of business. Governments would be completely unprepared, and militaries are chomping at the bit to get the most advanced version of the tools to turn them into weapons.
This is, more or less, the situation that all AI lab CEOs are in today.
They are in possession of something as profoundly species-altering as the discovery of fire.
Fire was discovered by pre-human hominids. Its discovery led to the evolution of humans, by allowing us to eat more usable calories and meats from cooked meals, enabling our brains to grow larger.
In that way, we are entering a similar precipice now. AI is hitting the self-improving exponential curve. As this happens, AI will become unbelievably more intelligent, discover incredible new sciences, and become incomprehensibly entertaining.
But there's a lot of social upheaval that is bound to come from this. And AI lab leaders know this.
Job loss is the obvious first dilemma. But it seems most lab CEO take advantage of people's general cluelessness around AI, and can skirt this issue when talking about AI with politicians. They simply tell them AI will triple the economy and create opportunity, while skipping over the nature of AI to create mass unemployment.
Every few months enhancements in model capabilities consumes an entire job role, or sometimes an entire field. Translators, graphic designers, certain types of musicians, junior software engineers, and now even some filmmakers and ad producers are being automated by AI advancements.
This situation has created an unintentional prisoner's dilemma for lab CEOs.
A prisoner’s dilemma is a game-theory scenario in which two players must choose between cooperation and self-interest: if both cooperate, they each get a good (but not the greatest) payoff; if one defects while the other cooperates, the defector gets the best payoff and the cooperator gets the worst; fearing that outcome, each rational player defects, so both end up worse off than if they had trusted each other and cooperated.
The conditions of this dilemma are that AI labs need such immense scale to run their training and inference operations, that they need the backing of national governments. The only way to get this backing is with political buy-in, so they have to tell political leaders exactly what they want to hear. ie:
- "AI is going to boost the economy"
- "AI will create newer, higher-impact, higher-paying jobs"
- "AI will give our military the edge over our adversary who has a worse AI"
What they haven't told them is that any sort of mass unemployment situation is even possible.
Until recently.
Lab leaders have held this in their back pocket, as a means of scaring politicians in case their lab fell behind. For instance, shortly after Anthropic recently released Claude 4, their CEO began sounding the alarm that actually, AI is about take 50% of white collar jobs and that the end is near for salaried employment.
The reason to do this is if they're falling behind in the race, they can scare the government and get them to regulate and slow down the industry as a whole. This action amounts to a defection, and we can expect more defections along these lines soon as clear winners and losers in the race are demarcated.
It seems likely that lab leaders are massively holding back where they believe all of this is heading, though. They very well maybe in possession of the keys to the forking of the human species from homo sapiens to homo deus. The changes that are coming down the pipe as a result of AI are not simply enhanced business productivity, or funny image generators, or better coders.
We are staring down the barrel of a complete redefinition of everything that we are. We face a nirvana-like ego-death at the destruction of our work-based identities. We are transitioning to an interplanetary species. We are on the cusp of unlimited fusion energy, and possibly endless lifespans. So much of what was dreamed of but seemed completely impossible for nearly a century is rushing in all at once thanks to the scientific automation being enabled by AI.
I suspect that lab leaders are aware of the magnitude of these changes, but are holding back much of what they show and say, barely able to describe what's coming without sounding like the crazy people announcing they found alien ray guns and teleportation devices.
Nevertheless, they have their visions, and we should all be keenly aware of what the shapes of those visions entail for us.