'Big Short' Michael Burry says AI leaders' calls for slowdown are 'self-serving' and he's not worried

Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, and other AI chiefs are calling for slower development of the technology following fresh warnings that it could annihilate us all. Michael Burry says they're just helping themselves.

The investor of "The Big Short" fame said in a late Sunday post on X that it was "self-serving" for the bosses of OpenAI, Anthropic, and other AI companies to push for a slowdown.

Let's all take a moment to understand how self-serving it is for OpenAI, Anthropic and other execs of big hyperscalers to talk of slowing things down. 1. LLMs are not AI and won't be AGI. There is nothing AI to slow down. 2. Competition is coming up fast, slowing benefits…

He doesn't view AI chatbots as the path to artificial general intelligence so there's "nothing" that needs its progress curbed.

Hailing AI as so powerful it's an extinction-level threat fuels the "hype & puffery" that feeds public offerings.

An intentional slowdown provides "cover for real uncontrollable slowing growth."

On his Substack, Cassandra Unchained, Burry said that Anthropic and OpenAI's top brass have backed a slowdown "to increase the perception of their power before their IPOs."

He also said large language models like Claude and ChatGPT won't achieve "true capacity for reason" so there's "nothing to fear," at least for now.

Anthropic and OpenAI did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Burry weighed in after Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an essay urging his peers to "slow the pace" of AI advances to give risk prevention "time to keep up."

OpenAI's Sam Altman, xAI's Elon Musk, and Alphabet's Demis Hassabis all posted in support of Amodei on X.

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