On the 8.49am train through Silicon Valley, the tables are packed with young people glued to laptops, earbuds in, rattling out code.
As the northern California hills scroll past, instructions flash up on screens from bosses: fix this bug; add new script. There is no time to enjoy the view. These commuters are foot soldiers in the global race towards artificial general intelligence – when AI systems become as or more capable than highly qualified humans.
Here in the Bay Area of San Francisco, some of the world’s biggest companies are fighting it out to gain some kind of an advantage. And, in turn, they are competing with China.
This race to seize control of a technology that could reshape the world is being fuelled by bets in the trillions of dollars by the US’s most powerful capitalists.
The computer scientists hop off at Mountain View for Google DeepMind, Palo Alto for the talent mill of Stanford University, and Menlo Park for Meta, where Mark Zuckerberg has been offering $200m-per-person compensation packages to poach AI experts to engineer “superintelligence”.
For the AI chip-maker Nvidia, where the smiling boss, Jensen Huang, is worth $160bn, they alight at Santa Clara. The workers flow the other way into San Francisco for OpenAI and Anthropic, AI startups worth a combined half a trillion dollars – as long as the much-predicted AI bubble doesn’t explode.
Breakthroughs come at an accelerating pace with every week bringing the release of a significant new AI development.
Anthropic’s co-founder Dario Amodei predicts AGI could be reached by 2026 or 2027. OpenAI’s chief executive, Sam Altman, reckons progress is so fast that he could soon be able to make an AI to replace him as boss.
“Everyone is working all the time,” said Madhavi Sewak, a senior leader at Google DeepMind, in a recent talk. “It’s extremely intense. There doesn’t seem to be any kind of natural stopping point, and everyone is really kind of getting ground down. Even the folks who are very wealthy now … all they do is work. I see no change in anyone’s lifestyle. No one’s taking a holiday. People don’t have time for their friends, for their hobbies, for … the people they love.”
These are the companies racing to shape, control and profit from AGI – what Amodei describes as “a country of geniuses in a datacentre”. They are tearing towards a technology that could, in theory, sweep away millions of white-collar jobs and pose serious risks in bioweapons and cybersecurity.
$2.8tn
Forecast for spending on AI datacentres by the end of the decade
Or it could usher in a new era of abundance, health and wealth. Nobody is sure but we will soon find out. For now, the uncertainty energises and terrifies the Bay Area.
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