Mark Zuckerberg came out swinging against Anthropic and OpenAI, two of the world’s most valuable artificial intelligence start-ups, saying the way they developed A.I. software could lead to a centralization of power that would narrow people’s access to the transformational technology.
In an interview on Tuesday with The New York Times, the 42-year-old chief executive of Meta did not call out Anthropic and OpenAI by name. But he said that if leading research labs wanted to develop A.I. technology in a tightly controlled manner — as Anthropic and OpenAI have done — it would be akin to “abandoning our values” in American tech development and stifle innovation.
“So much of the discourse from a lot of the other labs that are developing this is overwhelmingly filled with doom,” Mr. Zuckerberg said. “There needs to be a voice or several voices that are bringing realism to this debate.”
The comments from Mr. Zuckerberg, who rarely gives interviews to traditional news organizations, escalate a debate over how artificial intelligence software should be created that has divided Silicon Valley.
Technologists like Dario Amodei, the chief executive of Anthropic, and Sam Altman, the chief executive of OpenAI, have said some of today’s leading A.I. models are too dangerous to be shared and developed without tight controls. But Microsoft, Nvidia, Google and Meta have disagreed, contending that many A.I. models must be developed largely in the open for people to advance the technology and build new businesses.
