Could AI’s leading men become as powerful as Ford or Rockefeller?

Dario,Demis, Elon, Mark and Sam. The five most important people in artificial intelligence are so famous that first names alone are enough to identify them. Politicians and journalists hang on their every word. ChatGPT, run by Sam Altman’s OpenAI, has more than 900m weekly users. Dario Amodei’s Anthropic has developed an AI model so good at hacking it has caused panic among policymakers. Demis Hassabis, head of Google’s AI efforts, has won a Nobel prize for his scientific research. Elon Musk, who runs xAI, among other businesses, is the richest person alive. Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta has created the West’s most popular family of open-source models, and is spending enormous sums on AI researchers in an attempt to catch up to the technology’s frontier. In a very real sense, these five men hold the fate of Western civilisation in their hands. It is unnerving that so few men wield such awesome power, particularly men as opportunistic as Altman or as volatile as Musk. But it is hardly unprecedented. AI’s famous five are but the latest example of a common phenomenon in the history of Western capitalism. There are many examples where a small cluster of men has pushed new technologies forward—not necessarily by inventing them, but by bringing them to the masses. In the process, they have accrued enormous power.