Billionaire venture capitalist Chamath Palihapitiya says America’s AI industry is having a perception problem as leaders send mixed messages to the public.
Earlier this week, NBC released a survey that shows Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is more popular than AI among American adults.
ICE holds a 38% positive view, while AI is near the bottom of the rankings at just 26% favorability.
Palihapitiya says AI is experiencing a big PR problem because leaders are not coherent in their messaging, as CEOs push their own agendas to raise funds and generate revenue.
The billionaire notes that Anthropic’s Dario Amodei talks about job displacement, Palantir’s CEO Alex Karp focuses on AI disrupting society and OpenAI’s Sam Altman just wants to sell tokens.
“So if you take those three messaging veins on a spectrum, one is that we have a sentient super god, and we’re the only ones that can protect you from it. But your days are numbered. That’s Dario.
Alex, which is ‘Hey, hold on a second, you can’t have it both ways. You can’t both say it on the one hand and then try to run the fabric of society and flip it. You need to be much more circumspect.’
And then Sam’s, which is we want to sell tokens as a service.
I think the point is that this industry right now, that revenue traction, if anything else, has distracted people from actually getting on the same page and being much more methodical and much more reliable and trustworthy in explaining all of this and managing the expansion of this.”
According to Palihapitiya, the CEOs of leading AI firms are taking a big gamble in an effort to win the race instead of just being honest about the true state of the technology in America.
“And so what I would say is, all of this fundraising gobbledygook has actually created this breathlessness that is not useful and isn’t helping. And I would say there needs to be a lot more seriousness by these folks to actually run this business thoughtfully. You can’t be a dilettante, you can’t flip-flop, you can’t pressure test, A-B test, this kind of messaging in public, but I understand why you’re doing it, because the stakes are so high, you’re playing this enormous poker game, but I think we need to do a better job of explaining all this to people…
It would be much better if we said soberly, there’s a lot of experimenting. This revenue is great, but we don’t really know what’s real. We’re going to try to figure it out. We’re going to work methodically. There are a lot of regulated industries. We’re going to work within those. We’re not going to flout the law and the rules. Licensure will still mean something. That’s a way better, thoughtful, mature message.
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