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Like the Wild West, artificial intelligence has its frontiersmen. In America they are a dwindling bunch. Anthropic and Openai remain steadfastly committed to pushing the boundaries of ai. Other tech giants, including Google (a former front-runner that is shedding frontier-ai scientists at a rapid pace), are wavering. The hyperscalers appear to find it more lucrative to sell ai infrastructure to their cloud customers than splurge valuable compute on advancing their own models.
What ai doesn’t have is enough settlers. That is, the individuals and businesses who make full use of products such as ai agents, helping to justify the reams of investment pouring into frontier ai. They are put off partly because, like in the Wild West, life on the frontier is reckless. As recent “loss-of-control” episodes by the most advanced models of Anthropic and Openai attest, agents, which are supposed to work on people’s behalf in “alignment” with their values, lie, cheat and steal if necessary. They break free from captivity and form harmful posses to do harm to people. They’d drink whisky and brawl if they could.
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