OpenAI and Anthropic present two possible futures for AI

It matters which story you tell about the future of artificial intelligence. Is AI just a tool that people can use, like other software? Is it an evil force that destroys creativity? Will it create robots bent on destruction? Or will it make the world incredible, beautiful, equal and perfect in ways we can’t even imagine?

This will shock you, but some of the guys running the biggest AI companies think it’s the latter. Both Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, and Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, have recently written blog posts – Altman’s short and sweet, Amodei’s long and thorough – about the AI-powered world they hope to help create. These are powerful men with huge teams and enormous resources at their disposal; it matters a lot what they think they are building.

In this episode of The Vergecast, The edge‘s Kylie Robison joins the show to discuss the dueling CEO blogs, including the things Amodei and Altman agree on and the things they disagree on. She also tells us about some of the big model launches still to come this year, and what it means that the endless game of LLM one-upsmanship could soon come to an end.

Will Poor then tells us the story of ShakeAlert, an app and platform designed to warn millions of people when an earthquake is coming. If you’ve ever read that famously New Yorker article, you know why Will is nervous about earthquakes. It turns out we have a number of ways to help people, although some pretty surprising challenges stand in the way.

Finally, Allison Johnson joins Will to answer a question from the Vergecast Hotline (866-VERGE11, or email vergecast@theverge.com!) about the Camera Control button on the iPhone 16. Apple had a lot to say about how fast it is. .. but we had to discover that for ourselves.

If you’d like to learn more about everything we discuss in this episode, here are some links to get you started, starting with AI:

And about the camera controls: