The AI Arms Race Is On. Start Worrying

To create is human. For the past 300,000 years we’ve been unique in our ability to make art, cuisine, manifestos, societies: to envision and craft something new where there was nothing before.

Now we have company. While you’re reading this sentence, artificial intelligence (AI) programs are painting cosmic portraits, responding to emails, preparing tax returns, and recording metal songs. They’re writing pitch decks, debugging code, sketching architectural blueprints, and providing health advice.

Artificial intelligence has already had a pervasive impact on our lives. AIs are used to price medicine and houses, assemble cars, determine what ads we see on social media. But generative AI, a category of system that can be prompted to create wholly novel content, is much newer.

This shift marks the most important technological breakthrough since social media. Generative AI tools have been adopted ravenously in recent months by a curious, astounded public, thanks to programs like ChatGPT, which responds coherently (but not always accurately) to virtually any query, and Dall-E, which allows you to conjure any image you dream up. In January, ChatGPT reached 100 million monthly users, a faster rate of adoption than Instagram or TikTok. Hundreds of similarly astonishing generative AIs are clamoring for adoption, from Midjourney to Stable Diffusion to GitHub’s Copilot, which allows you to turn simple instructions into computer code.

Proponents believe this is just the beginning: that generative AI will reorient the way we work and engage with the world, unlock creativity and scientific discoveries, and allow humanity to achieve previously unimaginable feats. Forecasters at PwC predict that AI could boost the global economy by over $15 trillion by 2030.

This frenzy appeared to catch off guard even the tech companies that have invested billions of dollars in AI—and has spurred an intense arms race in Silicon Valley. In a matter of weeks, Microsoft and Alphabet-owned Google have shifted their entire corporate strategies in order to seize control of what they believe will become a new infrastructure layer of the economy. Microsoft is investing $10 billion in OpenAI, creator of ChatGPT and Dall-E, and announced plans to integrate generative AI into its Office software and search engine, Bing. Google declared a “code red” corporate emergency in response to the success of ChatGPT and rushed its own search-oriented chatbot, Bard, to market. “A race starts today,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said Feb. 7, throwing down the gauntlet at Google’s door. “We’re going to move, and move fast.”

Wall Street has responded with similar fervor, with analysts upgrading the stocks of companies that mention AI in their plans and punishing those with shaky AI-product rollouts. While the technology is real, a financial bubble is expanding around it rapidly, with investors betting big that generative AI could be as market shaking as Microsoft Windows 95 or the first iPhone.

But this frantic gold rush could also prove catastrophic. As companies hurry to improve the tech and profit from the boom, research about keeping these tools safe is taking a back seat. In a winner-takes-all battle for power, Big Tech and their venture-capitalist backers risk repeating past mistakes, including social media’s cardinal sin: prioritizing growth over safety. While there are many potentially utopian aspects of these new technologies, even tools designed for good can have unforeseen and devastating consequences. This is the story of how the gold rush began—and what history tells us about what could happen next.

In fact, generative AI knows the problems of social media all too well.