The frontier of the AI race is not just about the technology, it's also about the people who lead the labs.
OpenAI's Sam Altman.
There 's no, like, one big magic red button we have that blows up the data center,
which I think some people sort of assume exists.
Anthropik's Dario Amadei.
My feeling is that almost every decision that I make feels like it's kind of balanced on the edge of a knife.
And xAI's Elon Musk.
I don't think anyone's ultimately going to have control over digital superintelligence.
You know, any more than, say, a chimp would have control over humans.
These are the public faces of an increasingly intense contest to build AI models that exceed human capabilities,
whether they call it AGI or superintelligence.
You'll notice I missed out an important player in that list, Demis Hassabis, the boss of Google DeepMind.
He does n't feature as often in the headlines,
even though he 's been at the forefront of AI research longer than any of the others.
DeepMind is, of course, the company that built AlphaGo,
which managed to beat one of the world's best players of the board game Go in 2016.
Demis and his team went on to create AlphaFold, an AI model that can predict the 3D structure of proteins.
He won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for that work in 2024.
For him, the best use of AI is to accelerate science,
as he told my colleague Alex Hearn this week on our Inside Tech video show.