Inside the Biggest Feud in Artificial Intelligence

Digg reports that The Atlantic published an excerpt from Kevin Roose's forthcoming book The AGI Chronicles[2]. Roose wrote on X that the excerpt tells the story of "the feud between Dario Amodei and Sam Altman"[2].AI Weekly says the book draws on more than 150 interviews at OpenAI, Anthropic and Google DeepMind, plus unpublished company documents and research memos.[1] In that email he wrote that it "would undermine OpenAI's moral legitimacy"[3]. An OpenAI spokesperson told Roose that the company "briefly considered whether to turn OpenAI into an international cooperative endeavor" but "did not consider selling AGI to China or Russia."[3]The Next Web also reports Roose's account that Amodei kept a list of times he felt Altman had misled him. One item involved a list of approved GPT-3 customers, and another involved safety terms in the $1bn Microsoft deal.[3]The Next Web says two people told Roose that Altman offered Kanye West access to the private GPT-3 beta in 2020. Jack Clark, then OpenAI's policy director, stopped it.[3]According to KuCoin News, Roose writes that Amodei and six colleagues set up a private Slack channel called "BATNA," which stands for Best Alternative to a Negotiated Agreement.[4]The Next Web reports that, according to several people who know them, Dario and Daniela Amodei "still despise" Altman and Brockman. It says Dario has called Altman and OpenAI "evil" in internal Slack messages, and some people at OpenAI call the Amodeis "power-hungry virtue-signalers."[3]