By MIKE MAGEE
Has America turned into an “Island of Musk?” He seems to be everywhere and nowhere at the same time. As Trump’s new best friend, he’s opened up the gates of Twitter-hell, morphed into a steady stream of crypto-cash, and demonstrated his dance moves alongside Trump at featured venues.
He’s also launched “a robot for every citizen” as part of a cover for sagging expectations for the Tesla Cybertruck, and issued a new round of hollow promises on his Robotaxi scheme. In short, Musk’s ADHD aside, he seems a bit more unhinged than usual.
In contrast, his arch foe, 38-year old OpenAI CEO, Sam Altman, is (if you’re to believe him) almost professorial. In his own words, “Technology brought us from the Stone Age to the Agricultural Age and then to the Industrial Age. From here, the path to the Intelligence Age is paved with compute, energy, and human will.”
Part of the clash revolves around a single word, accelerationalism. Destined to become the 2025 “word of the year,” this label is increasingly assigned to thought leaders in AI who have convinced themselves that AI will soon rule the world, our politics, and the battle field, and therefore “faster is better” is now the mantra when it comes to world-dominating generative AI.
This was not always the case. Back in 2015, when Elon Musk and a young Sam Altman teamed up to launch a non-profit called OpenAI “to benefit humanity,” they both realized that the leased offices were not big enough for two alpha males. But in launching their decade long battle for dominance, they agreed that slow, transparent, and deliberative was better than fast and reckless. Altman wrote at the time, “In an ideal world, regulation would slow down the bad guys and speed up the good guys.”
Back then, Musk famously warned, “Mark my words, AI is far more dangerous than nukes. I am really quite close to the cutting edge in AI, and it scares the hell out of me.” Where Musk was ”in your face,” Altman was “extremely nice and accommodating” which masked a startlingly aggressive underbelly according to those who knew him well. As his former partner in the 2011 start-up “Y combinator”, Paul Graham said, “You could parachute him into an island full of cannibals and come back in five years and he’d be the king.” Sam was 23 at the time.
In February, 2018, Musk jumped ship, apparently disagreeing on strategy with Altman. And then Altman’s board, in an all-out coup, fired him on November 17, 2023. Twelve days later, they were forced to rehire him when major stakeholder, Microsoft, threatened to pull their considerable support. Altman, for his part, displayed a conciliatory tone on Musk’s own X-platform, tweeting on his return “For my part, it is incredibly important to learn from this experience and apply those learnings as we move forward as a company. I welcome the board’s independent review of all recent events.”
On June 7, 2023, 38-year old Sam told his Congressional questioners that money wasn’t his motivator. Rather “I’m doing this because I love it.” Sen Richard Blumenthal swooned, “It’s so refreshing. He was willing, able, and eager.” Altman, playing to the cameras, said, “We think that regulatory intervention by governments will be critical to mitigate the risks of increasingly powerful models.”
Just 9 months later, his Senate supporters were no doubt confused to open the Wall Street Journal and discover the headline, “Sam Altman Seeks Trillions of Dollars to Reshape Business of Chips and AI. Open AI chief pursues investors including the U.A.E for a project requiring up to $7 trillion.”
As the November Presidential election fast approached, Musk and Altman chose different venues. Musk attended Trump’s Pennsylvania rally, labeling himself “dark MAGA” and drawing a headline from the Rolling Stone magazine, “Internet Viciously Memes Elon Musk’s Jumpy Trump Rally Appearance.”
In the meantime, Bloomberg reported a quieter visit by Altman to the White House to pursue federal funding to pursue an “Unprecedented Data Center Buildout.” In an abrupt about face, Altman now intends to go big. How big? Really, really big – up to 7 data centers each consuming 5 gigawatts of power (the amount a nuclear reactor generates to power 3 million homes). Sam now sees future prosperity as a race to the top.
In his latest thought piece, he asks how did we arrive at the doorstep of the next leap in prosperity? “In three words: deep learning worked. In 15 words: deep learning worked, got predictably better with scale, and we dedicated increasing resources to it.”
Musk and Altman do see eye to eye on near Biblical-level “history making.” As Altman wrote about the new AI intelligence arms race, “Here is one narrow way to look at human history: after thousands of years of compounding scientific discovery and technological progress, we have figured out how to melt sand, add some impurities, arrange it with astonishing precision at extraordinarily tiny scale into computer chips, run energy through it, and end up with systems capable of creating increasingly capable artificial intelligence…This may turn out to be the most consequential fact about all of history so far.”
Of course, this past week’s inconvenient Florida’s Hurricane Milton made history of its’ own. Over 1 1/2 days, it “intensified at an unprecedented rate” morphing from a Tropical Depression to a Category 5 super-Hurricane initiated by 126 tornado warnings. That brought veteran meteorologist, John Morales, to tears.
Climate scientists were quick to remind that between 2019 and 2024, Google’s CO2 emissions, thanks to AI, increased by 50%. Not surprisingly, tech entrepreneurs who were in the lead on fighting climate change when the source point was Appalachian miners and Rust Belt manufacturers, have now gone strangely silent on the issue. How they will square that with projected AI data center consumption of 17% of all U.S. energy by 2030 remains to be seen.
Musk is now off on his own, having launched “xAI”, and cutting corners in a game of catch-up. In June he opened up a huge 100 megawatts powered data center in Memphis, Tennessee training AI models on the backs of 100,000 Nvidia H100 processors. To power the plant, he installed 18 natural gas turbines without EPA clearance or local permits. The turbines will emit 130 tons of toxic nitrogen oxides. That’s a problem for the people of Memphis already breathing in F grade air according to the American Lung Association.
Ironically, Forbes says a major goal of Musk’s xAI is to improve health care through “task automation, improved clinical workflow, and optimization of clinical productivity.” Evolutionary psychologist, Robert Wright, (author of The Moral Animal) suggests that Altman may have deliberately parachuted onto “an Elon-inhabited island” in 2015 with a super cautious, checks and balances message to capture Musk funding for Open AI. But less than a decade later, he’s eating Elon’s lunch and is king of the island of energy consuming, decidedly non-green, “accelerationalist” cannibals.
Mike Magee MD is a Medical Historian and regular contributor to THCB. He is the author of CODE BLUE: Inside America’s Medical Industrial Complex. (Grove/2020)
