By MIKE MAGEE

Has America became a “Musk Island?” He appears to be all over the place and nowhere on the identical time. As Trump's new finest buddy, he has opened the gates of Twitter hell, turning into a gradual stream of cryptocurrency and demonstrating his dance strikes alongside Trump at featured places.

He has additionally launched “a robotic for each citizen” as a part of a cover-up for declining expectations for the Tesla Cybertruck, and has made a brand new spherical of empty guarantees about his Robotaxi plan. Briefly, excluding Musk's ADHD, he appears a bit extra unhinged than ordinary.

In distinction, his nemesis, 38-year-old OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, is (for those who consider him) virtually professorial. In his personal phrases: “Expertise has taken us from the Stone Age to the Agricultural Age after which to the Industrial Age. From right here, the trail to the intelligence age is paved with computing energy, power and human will.”

A part of the conflict revolves round a single phrase: acceleration. Destined to turn out to be the 'phrase of the yr' in 2025, this label is more and more awarded to AI thought leaders who’ve satisfied themselves that AI will quickly rule the world, our politics and the battlefield, and subsequently 'quicker is best' applies. now the mantra in the case of world-dominating generative AI.

This was not all the time the case. When Elon Musk and a younger Sam Altman teamed up in 2015 to launch a nonprofit referred to as OpenAI “for the good thing about humanity,” they each realized that the rented places of work weren't large enough for 2 alpha males. However in launching their decade-long battle for dominance, they agreed that sluggish, clear and deliberate was higher than quick and reckless. Altman wrote on the time: “In a great world, rules would decelerate the unhealthy guys and pace up the great guys.”

Musk famously warned on the time: “Mark my phrases, AI is way extra harmful than nuclear weapons. I'm actually near the chopping fringe of AI, and it scares the hell out of me.” The place Musk was “in your face,” Altman was “extraordinarily sort and accommodating,” which, in line with those that knew him effectively, masked a surprisingly aggressive underbelly. As his former associate within the 2011 start-up “Y combinator,” Paul Graham stated, “You might parachute him into an island stuffed with cannibals and are available again in 5 years and he could be king.” Sam was 23 years previous on the time.

In February 2018, Musk jumped ship, apparently disagreeing on technique with Altman. After which, in an outright coup, Altman's board fired him on November 17, 2023. Twelve days later, they have been compelled to rehire him when the main stakeholder, Microsoft, threatened to withdraw their vital assist. Altman, for his half, struck a conciliatory tone on Musk's personal X platform, tweeting about his return: “So far as I'm involved, it's extremely necessary to be taught from this expertise and apply these classes as we transfer ahead as an organization. I welcome the board's unbiased overview of all current occasions.”

On June 7, 2023, 38-year-old Sam instructed his questioners in Congress that cash was not his motivation. Fairly “I do that as a result of I get pleasure from it.” Senator Richard Blumenthal swooned: “It's so refreshing. He was keen, in a position and keen.” Altman, taking part in to the cameras, stated: “We consider regulatory intervention by governments can be essential to mitigating the dangers of more and more highly effective fashions.”

Simply 9 months later, his Senate supporters have been undoubtedly confused once they opened the Wall Road Journal and found the headline: “Sam Altman Seeks Trillions of {Dollars} to Reshape the Enterprise of Chips and AI. The top of Open AI is pursuing buyers, together with the UAE, for a challenge costing as much as $7 trillion.”

Because the November presidential election shortly approached, Musk and Altman selected completely different places. Musk attended Trump's rally in Pennsylvania, calling himself “darkish MAGA” and pulling a headline from Rolling Stone journal: “Web Memes Elon Musk's Jumpy Trump Rally Look.”

Within the meantime, Bloomberg reported a quieter go to by Altman to the White Home to pursue federal funding for an “unprecedented knowledge heart buildout.” With an abrupt face, Altman now plans to go huge. How huge? Actually huge – as much as seven knowledge facilities, every consuming 5 gigawatts of energy (the quantity a nuclear reactor generates to energy 3 million properties). Sam now sees future prosperity as a race to the highest.

In his ultimate thought piece, he asks: How did we find yourself on the cusp of the following leap in prosperity? “In three phrases: deep studying labored. In 15 phrases: deep studying labored, acquired predictably higher as we scaled it, and we devoted an increasing number of sources to it.”

Musk and Altman agree on making “historical past” on an virtually Biblical degree. As Altman wrote concerning the new AI arms race within the intelligence subject: “Right here's one scary method to take a look at human historical past: After hundreds of years of mixing scientific discoveries and technological advances, we found out learn how to make sand soften, which may add impurities, with astonishing precision on an awfully small scale in pc chips, movement power by way of them and find yourself with programs able to creating ever extra succesful synthetic intelligence… This may be essentially the most consequential reality about all the historical past thus far can grow to be.”

In fact, this previous week's inconvenient Hurricane Milton in Florida made historical past. Over a day and a half, the storm “intensified at an unprecedented charge,” reworking from a tropical melancholy right into a Class 5 tremendous hurricane, initiated by 126 twister warnings. That introduced veteran meteorologist John Morales to tears.

Local weather scientists have been fast to recall that between 2019 and 2024, Google's CO2 emissions elevated by 50%, because of AI. Not surprisingly, tech entrepreneurs who have been on the forefront of the struggle towards local weather change when the supply was Appalachian miners and Rust Belt producers have now remained surprisingly silent on the difficulty. How they’ll steadiness that towards the anticipated AI knowledge heart consumption of 17% of all US power by 2030 stays to be seen.

Musk is now out on his personal, having launched 'xAI' and chopping corners in a sport of catch-up. In June, he opened a large 100-megawatt knowledge heart in Memphis, Tennessee, the place he skilled AI fashions on the backs of 100,000 Nvidia H100 processors. To energy the plant, he put in 18 pure fuel generators with out EPA approval or native permits. The generators will emit 130 tons of poisonous nitrogen oxides. That's an issue for Memphis residents who already breathe F-class air, in line with the American Lung Affiliation.

Mockingly, Forbes says {that a} key aim of Musk's xAI is to enhance healthcare by way of “job automation, improved scientific workflow and scientific productiveness optimization.” Evolutionary psychologist Robert Wright (writer of The Ethical Animal) means that Altman could have intentionally parachuted onto “an Elon-inhabited island” in 2015 with a super-cautious message of checks and balances to safe Musk funding for Open AI. However lower than a decade later, he's consuming Elon's lunch and is king of the island of energy-hungry, decidedly non-green, “accelerator cannibals.”

Mike Magee MD is a medical historian and common contributor to THCB. He’s the writer of CODE BLUE: Inside America's Medical Industrial Advanced. (Grove/2020)