Axios C-Suite: How to think about the AI gods
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Illustration: Aïda Amer/Axios. Stock: Getty Images
Kevin Roose's new book, "The AGI Chronicles," provides a Rosetta Stone to understanding the three most important architects of modern AI: Dario Amodei, Sam Altman and Demis Hassabis.
Why it matters: Knowing what motivates each man helps explain their business strategies, public posturing and conflicts.
- What follows is my distillation of Roose's take based on his book, interviews and podcast appearances — especially Derek Thompson's Plain English, which explores the three men and their motivations.
- Read the book. ... Listen to the pod.
The survivalist: Dario Amodei (Anthropic)
You can fully trace Dario's warnings (and obsessive worry) about AI catastrophe to ... the atomic bomb. He used to hand every new Anthropic employee his favorite book, "The Making of the Atomic Bomb."
- His hero is Leo Szilard. Szilard conceived the nuclear chain reaction and then urged fellow physicists to keep it secret. He drafted the Einstein letter to FDR that launched the Manhattan Project, then fought to restrain the bomb's use.
- Dario has likened himself to Szilard, who decided once the blueprint of nuclear weapons was known, America had no choice but to build or control it — or lose to Nazi Germany.
Read him as: A man who believes he's building the bomb and must get there before the reckless do. It's unclear if "the reckless" is China or Sam, whom he deeply distrusts.
The seller: Sam Altman (OpenAI)
Sam has two distinct gifts, in Roose's telling: his ability to sell anyone on anything and his unshakable belief in limitless scaling.
- He can figure out what someone wants and give it to them, or appear to. The rap from countless former colleagues: he tells different people different things, leaving people wondering what — if anything — sits at his core.
- This has allowed him to raise insane amounts of money, turn a nonprofit into an IPO-bound behemoth and scale faster than almost anyone. It's also left Dario, Elon Musk and many former colleagues loathing him.
Read him as: The biggest, fastest, at almost any cost. Great for speed. But the purpose is the mystery.
The scientist: Demis Hassabis (Google DeepMind)
Demis got the science right — early. His AlphaFold cracked protein folding and won him a share of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. ("The Thinking Game" documentary is a must-watch on this.)
- But he got LLMs wrong. He literally thought that modern AI would be developed in a lab governed by scientists and global leaders and shown to the public only when big problems were solved.
- He was deeply skeptical of the scaling laws Sam and Dario rode to power — and to substantial early leads. Selling DeepMind to Google suffocated him, so Demis is scrambling to recapture his magic and glory.
Read him as: Probably the most tortured of the three. He's a scientist and purist forced to sprint in a race he didn't want, on a path he doubted, against two men with a big head start.
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