Artificial intelligence’s biggest figures sparred on the dangers of the technology’s rapid development at the World Economic Forum this week, as hype surrounds a $500bn AI infrastructure project touted by Donald Trump.

AI pioneers including Google DeepMind chief Sir Demis Hassabis, Anthropic co-founder Dario Amodei and “godfather of AI” computer scientist Yoshua Bengio used the Davos gathering to reiterate warnings about AI threats, due as commercial interests and geopolitical rivalries worry about safety. .

While Hassabis admitted that “the genie can’t be put back in the bottle”, he said artificial general intelligence — if computers surpass human cognitive ability — could threaten civilization if it gets out of control or is hijacked by bad actors. This is especially the case with large language models that are “open source” and accessible to everyone.

“There is more at stake here than just companies or products,” the Nobel Prize winner said in an interview with the Financial Times. “(It’s) the future of humanity, the human condition and where we want to go as a society.”

Amodei, whose startup created the chatbot Claude and is powered by Google and Amazon, said he was concerned about authoritarian governments using AI and was “very concerned about scenarios in 1984, or worse”.

“Science doesn’t know how we can control machines that are at our level of intelligence, and even more if they are smarter than us,” Bengio added to a panel. “There are people who say, ‘Don’t worry, we’ll figure it out.’ But if we don’t figure it out, do you understand the consequences?”

Their stance has been criticized as hypocritical by Yann LeCun, chief AI scientist at Meta, which has spent billions developing an open source LLM called Llama. He said those concerns were belied by stiff competition from his rivals to build, and sell, the best models.

“Yoshua and Dario are making opinions against open source and that is actually very dangerous,” he said in an interview. “Barriers to open source distribution could lead to regulatory capture of some players, whether on the west coast of the US or China . . . (putting) power in the hands of a small number of man.

“It’s very strange for people like Dario. We had a meeting yesterday where he said that the benefits and risks of AI are roughly the same order of magnitude, and I said, ‘if you believe this, why do you keep working on AI?'” LeCun added. . “So I think he’s a little two-faced about it.”

While scientists and engineers debate the risk-reward of AI, business executives are showing unbridled enthusiasm for the technology.

“There are no naysayers,” said Ervin Tu, president of Dutch tech investment group Prosus. “If you have any appreciation for what big language models and agents trained on them can do, you’d be hard-pressed as a person not to conclude that they’re changing and becoming more disruptive in every industry.”

On Wednesday, the febrile atmosphere was further charged by OpenAI, SoftBank and Oracle announced a $500bn US AI infrastructure joint venture called “Stargate”.

Trump hosted their chief executives, Sam Altman, Masayoshi Son and Larry Ellison, in the Oval Office on Tuesday, before signing executive orders this week that will eliminate several guardrails around the development of technology. The new US president says the measures will ensure America’s technological leadership.

“At OpenAI, we believe infrastructure is destiny,” said OpenAI chief financial officer Sarah Friar. “(Stargate) is about more compute. More compute builds better models. Better models address more complex problems and provide more benefits for people and businesses.”

Stargate dominated the debate at Davos for the rest of the week, with many including Elon Musk taking to his social networking site X to ask how the trio will fund the big cost promised.

The FT reported on Friday that Stargate has yet to secure the funding it needs, cannot receive government funding and will only serve OpenAI when it was over. Currently, SoftBank and OpenAI are looking to put forward more than $15bn each for the project, hoping to raise a combination of equity from their existing backers and debt to fund Stargate.

The new venture was also taken as the latest evidence of a fissure in the relationship between Altman and Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella and his top AI executive Mustafa Suleyman, the former DeepMind cofounder who left his own startup and joined the Microsoft early last year.

“The tensions that arose between Mustafa Suleyman and Sam Altman in Davos last year are just the beginning,” said Salesforce chief executive Marc Benioff, who competes with Microsoft to sell AI-powered agents in businesses.

“Microsoft is now accelerating its own AI development . . . This precedent reflects Microsoft’s history with its ‘partners,'” Benioff added. “This could mark the beginning of the end for the relationship, which making it critical for OpenAI to quickly expand to other platforms.”

“Marc has no idea what he’s talking about,” said Microsoft spokesman Frank Shaw.

Microsoft has invested nearly $14bn in OpenAI since 2019 and in return negotiated its intellectual property rights and become the exclusive cloud computing provider. But the latter agreement was terminated along with the announcement of Stargate.

At Davos, Nadella also cast doubt on Stargate’s spending pledges and touted Microsoft’s planned $80bn in capital spending.

“All I know is that I’m good for my $80bn,” he said, later answer to Musk on the social media platform X: “And all this money is not about hyping AI, but about building useful things for the real world!”

Stargate is just the latest example of an infrastructure arms race for US data centers as it prepares for the next phase of the AI ​​economy. Musk’s xAI is building a supercomputer called “Colossus” which contained 100,000 interconnected Nvidia chips in just three months last year and promised to expand the number 10 times.

BlackRock and Microsoft are preparing to launch a $30bn AI investment fund to build data centers and energy projects to meet growing needs from the technology sector. On Friday, Meta chief Mark Zuckerberg said the company will spend between $60bn-$65bn on capital infrastructure this year as it expands its AI teams.

“I have non-stop customer meetings, in every sector. I don’t think there’s a CEO I’ve talked to who doesn’t know they need to deploy AI,” said OpenAI’s Friar. “The AI is not just an agenda; it is no longer an abstract concept or a futuristic vision.”

Additional reporting by Harriet Agnew in Davos