Dreamforce becomes ground zero for AI slowdown debate
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Illustration: Annelise Capossela/Axios
On Tuesday, the CEOs of Nvidia, OpenAI and Anthropic will converge in San Francisco for Salesforce's giant Dreamforce conference, one day after Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang threw cold water on weekend calls from OpenAI's Sam Altman and Anthropic's Dario Amodei to slow the pace of AI development.
Why it matters: Dreamforce is taking on unique prominence this year as the tech industry debates whether AI is advancing too quickly — and whether the rest of the world can keep up.
Driving the news: Amodei and Huang are scheduled to be part of Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff's star-packed opening keynote, while Altman and Benioff are set for an afternoon fireside chat.
Catch up quick: The long-simmering dialog over existential risk has boiled over in recent days.
- Amodei called for an urgent slowdown over the weekend, warning of dire consequences otherwise. Similar calls followed from Altman and others.
- Huang, meanwhile, rebuffed such concerns at the All-In conference on Monday, taking a live phone call from President Trump, who spent much of his day shooting down the need for an AI slowdown.
Zoom in: Salesforce sees some benefit for itself — and the industry — if the pace of frontier releases over the next few years is slower than has become the norm in recent months.
- "As a builder, them slowing down a little bit is kind of good news because we have a lot of catching up to do, and we could use a little time to catch up," Salesforce president Patrick Stokes said in a Monday press briefing.
My thought bubble: It's good that this long-needed discussion is finally happening.
- But, as our new managing editor for tech, Bradley Olson, points out: Getting the global tech industry to slow down is a lot harder than getting people to talk about the need to do so.
The big picture: The AI debate is spilling over into Dreamforce, but the company is aiming to keep most of the focus on its new products and partnerships.
- One big focus is AIforce, the company's effort to allow customers to access data via AI agents rather than traditional user interfaces.
- AIforce also lets users build their own interface, in real time, by describing what they want. Salesforce says those experiences remain governed by existing permissions and business rules.
- Another new effort is Koa, a reasoning model for sales built over the last six months on top of Nvidia's Nemotron.
- Salesforce says it post-trained Nemotron 3 Super on a proprietary synthetic dataset modeled on three decades of how enterprises work.
- "We always wanted to build a CRM‑specific model, but until Nemotron came along, there wasn't a U.S.‑sovereign, high‑quality base model to fine‑tune," Salesforce executive vice president Jayesh Govindarajan told Axios.
