AI leaders reopen debate on risks of new technologies and Stargate project

At the World Economic Forum (WEF), held from January 20 to 24, 2025, leaders in the artificial intelligence industry discussed the prospects of new technologies and the risks they pose. Some executives warned of potential threats to humanity, while others considered these fears excessive and "two-faced," the Financial Times reports.

The event brought together many industry representatives, such as Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis, Anthropic co-founder Dario Amodei, and artificial neural network pioneer Yoshua Bengio. They used the WEF platform to talk about the risks that AI can pose to humans.

Hassabis noted that it is too late to stop the development of artificial intelligence. He also warned about the potential risks if general AI, which can surpass human intelligence, gets out of control or falls into the hands of malicious actors. He paid special attention to large open-source language models that can be accessed by anyone.

Amodei, whose startup recently received $1 billion from Google, noted that the use of artificial intelligence by governments could lead to authoritarian regimes similar to those described in George Orwell's 1984. by George Orwell. He also emphasized that humanity has not yet learned how to properly control machines that approach the level of human intelligence, let alone artificial intelligence that can surpass human capabilities.

This is particularly the case with large language models that are “open source” and accessible by all. “There's much more at stake here than ...

“It's very strange from people like Dario. We met yesterday where he said that the benefits and risks of AI are roughly on the same order of magnitude, and I said, 'if you really believe

“At OpenAI, we believe infrastructure is destiny,” said OpenAI chief financial officer Sarah Friar. “[Stargate] is about more compute. More ...

AI pioneers including Google DeepMind chief Sir Demis Hassabis, Anthropic co-founder Dario Amodei and “godfather of AI” computer scientist ...

"Yoshua and Dario have made opinions against open source and that's actually very dangerous. Obstacles to open source distribution would lead to regulatory capture by a few players, either of the west coast of the US or China... It's very strange from people like Dario. We met yesterday where he said that the benefits and risks of AI are roughly on the same order of magnitude, and I said, 'if you really believe that, why do you continue to work on AI?" So I think it's a little bit two-faced.", – LeCun said..

At the same time, another topic of debate among industry leaders was the announcement of the Stargate project, which plans to build a large data center, with investments starting at $100 billion and potentially growing to $500 billion in the future. Elon Musk has already expressed his doubts about this project, saying that OpenAI does not have the money to implement such an initiative. Such comments did not go over well with Donald Trump's entourage, who announced the launch of the project.

In addition to this, the Financial Times also previously reported that Stargate does not yet have the necessary funding for such an ambitious project. The publication also notes that this initiative will not receive any financial assistance from the US government, and when it is ready, it will only benefit OpenAI.

However, while artificial intelligence has long been a topic of dispute between Elon Musk and OpenAI, the impact of Stargate on the relationship between ChatGPT and its main investor and partner Microsoft is much more important. Tensions in the partnership between the two companies have been reported long time, and now Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce, one of Microsoft's largest competitors in the cloud services sector, has also commented on it.

"The tension between Mustafa Suleiman [Microsoft's top AI executive] and Sam Altman [OpenAI's CEO] in Davos last year was just the beginning. Now Microsoft is accelerating its own AI development... This pattern mirrors Microsoft's previous relationships with its "partners." This could mean the beginning of the end of the relationship, making it critical for OpenAI to quickly expand to other platforms," Benioff said.

Microsoft spokesperson Frank Shaw commented on such statements by the Salesforce director and said that "Mark has no idea what he is talking about."

Earlier, however, Satya Nadella, Microsoft's CEO, commented on Stargate and Musk's statements that OpenAI had no money for the project. Nadella noted that Microsoft invests $80 billion in artificial intelligence every year, including the development of Azure cloud services, and that these costs are not spent on "AI hype," but on "creating useful things for the real world."