Silicon Valley Is at an Inflection Point

Karen Hao, Silicon Valley Is at an Inflection Point, NYTimes, May 30, 2025.

The 4th paragraph in:

When I took my first job in Silicon Valley 10 years ago, the industry’s wealth and influence were already expanding. The tech giants had grandiose missions — take Google’s, to “organize the world’s information” — which they used to attract young workers and capital investment. But with the promise of developing artificial general intelligence, or A.G.I., those grandiose missions have turned into civilizing ones. Companies claim they will bring humanity into a new, enlightened age — that they alone have the scientific and moral clarity to control a technology that, in their telling, will usher us to hell if China develops it first. “A.I. companies in the U.S. and other democracies must have better models than those in China if we want to prevail,” said Dario Amodei, chief executive of Anthropic, an A.I. start-up.

This language is as far-fetched as it sounds, and Silicon Valley has a long history of making promises that never materialize. Yet the narrative that A.G.I. is just around the corner and will usher in “massive prosperity,” as Mr. Altman has written, is already leading companies to accrue large amounts of capital, lay claim to data and electricity and build enormous data centers that are accelerating the climate crisis. These gains will fortify tech companies’ power and erode human rights long after the shine of the industry’s promises wears off.

The industry is monopolizing AI talent in a dangerous way:

Meanwhile, there are fewer independent A.I. experts to hold Silicon Valley to account. In 2004, only 21 percent of people graduating from Ph.D. programs in artificial intelligence joined the private sector. In 2020, nearly 70 percent did, one study found. They’ve been won over by the promise of compensation packages that can easily rise above $1 million. This means that companies like OpenAI can lock down the researchers who might otherwise be asking tough questions about their products and publishing their findings publicly for all to read. Based on my conversations with professors and scientists, ChatGPT’s release has exacerbated that trend — with even more researchers joining companies like OpenAI.

This talent monopoly has reoriented the kind of research that’s done in this field. Imagine what would happen if most climate science were done by researchers who worked in fossil fuel companies. That’s what’s happening with artificial intelligence. Already, A.I. companies could be censoring critical research into the flaws and risks of their tools. Four years ago, the leaders of Google’s Ethical A.I. team said they were ousted after they wrote a paper raising questions about the industry’s growing focus on large language models, the technology that underpins ChatGPT and other generative A.I. products.

An inflection point:

These companies are at an inflection point. With Mr. Trump’s election, Silicon Valley’s power will reach new heights. [...]

Their influence now extends well beyond the realm of business. We are now closer than ever to a world in which tech companies can seize land, operate their own currencies, reorder the economy and remake our politics with little consequence. That comes at a cost — when companies rule supreme, people lose their ability to assert their voice in the political process and democracy cannot hold.

Technological progress does not require businesses to operate like empires. Some of the most impactful A.I. advancements came not from tech behemoths racing to recreate human levels of intelligence, but from the development of relatively inexpensive, energy-efficient models to tackle specific tasks such as weather forecasting. [...] A.I. tools that help everyone cannot arise from a vision of development that demands the capitulation of a majority to the self-serving agenda of the few.

I agree. The AI industry is dominated by adolescents pretending to be adults. That's not good.

There's more at the link.