LAS VEGAS — It’s another week of artificial intelligence (AI) mania, with products from Snowflake Inc., Zscaler Inc., Workday Inc., Intuit Inc., Salesforce Inc. (again), and others cascading out of their hype machines at a dizzying pace. The Department of Energy just unveiled a massive supercomputer system with NVIDIA Corp. and Dell Inc. An OpenAI data center is coming to Saudi Arabia — on top of its $500 billion Stargate project with SoftBank and Oracle Corp. And President Donald Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” wants to pave the way for unregulated AI for a decade.
There seems to be no end in sight to Big Tech’s grip on the economy and political influence, prompting some to fret whether Silicon Valley is entering an AI era or error? Glorious triumphs or dystopian comeuppance?
The great debate was hyper-charged even more last week after a sizzling New York Times oped by American journalist and data scientist Karen Hao that compared the leading AI giants to modern-day empires.
“These companies are at an inflection point. With Mr. Trump’s election, Silicon Valley’s power will reach new heights. […],” she wrote. “Their influence now extends well beyond the realm of business. We are now closer than ever to a world in which tech companies can seize land, operate their own currencies, reorder the economy and remake our politics with little consequence. That comes at a cost — when companies rule supreme, people lose their ability to assert their voice in the political process and democracy cannot hold.”
Her new book, “Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI,” which details the world of Sam Altman’s OpenAI, chronicles how Silicon Valley threatens to unravel democracy. [The world’s richest person and OpenAI co-founder, Elon Musk, has already called the company the “biggest existential threat” to humanity.]
In an interview with Cambridge Day, Hao observed some disturbing characteristics that Silicon Valley and the AI hierarchy share with old empires. Both lay claim to resources that are not their own while reimagining rules to suggest those resources were always their own. Empires exploit labor. They monopolize knowledge production. And they see themselves as morally superior, Hao said.
For his part, Altman has downplayed Hao’s op-ed and forthcoming book, and instead touted the near-term “breathtaking” capabilities of AI. By next year, he foresees AI agents that perform as scientists and discover new knowledge. With more computing power, he sees AI “solving our hardest problems” within organizations. “Businesses will be able to do things that weren’t possible,” he said Monday night at Snowflake’s conference in San Francisco. Ironically, Altman also referred to 2025 as an “inflection point” for AI, but in a good way.
Silicon Valley’s Day of Reckoning
In their zeal to embrace AI — especially task-specific autonomous agents — at breakneck speed, the grandmasters of Silicon Valley seem willing to take ethical and security shortcuts, compromising the careers and private information of employees and consumers, their growing list of critics contend.
The impact is being felt before twentysomethings enter the workforce. Unemployment for recent college graduates has soared to an unusually high 5.8% as entry-level jobs are being “displaced by artificial intelligence,” research firm Oxford Economics found. And it could get worse: Federal Reserve Bank of New York recently warned the unemployment situation for individuals entering the workforce had “deteriorated noticeably.”
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei recently predicted AI could eliminate half of all entry-level, white-collar jobs within five years amid the rise of physical AI, ruthless cost cutting to offset inflation and a cash crunch, escalating trade wars, and a zeal for enhanced productivity. Anthropic, which has cast itself as the anti-OpenAI, opposes Trump’s big, beautiful bill.
“AI is the new industrial revolution,” longtime tech executive Phil Tee, who is now executive vice president and head of AI innovations at Zscaler, said in an interview. “We’ve reached the stage where mid-level jobs could be automated.”
To that end, AI’s imperial ambitions extend to the concept of building a “digital workforce” whether through AI agents or robotics that replace junior members at a fraction of the cost. Some firms, in fact, have encouraged managers to embrace an “AI-first” philosophy of testing whether a given task can be done by AI before settling on a human to do it. At the same time, AI increasingly is being used to automate back-office tasks, as witnessed by endless announcements from enterprise-software companies.
Even coding isn’t safe. Anthropic claims its most powerful model, Claude Opus 4, can code for several hours uninterrupted.
With AI models hurtling along in reasoning capabilities, can we truly trust all of them? Anthropic’s same Claude Opus 4 has shown an inclination to threaten its creators with blackmail under certain circumstances.
“As we progress, we’ll also address ethical questions surrounding bias, fairness, privacy and accountability,” says AI expert Akli Adjaoute, author of the forthcoming book, “Inside AI.”
With such daunting narratives, you would think a dark, dark cloud is hovering over the San Francisco Bay Area. But experts in the AI, and developers, are pushing back. They argue things aren’t entirely dire — in fact, it’s all just part of the valley credo of “move fast and break things” and fix them later.
“The definition of AI keeps evolving. I’m excited about it for a number of reasons around infrastructure, given significant labor shortages, and the benefits it brings to the public in terms of safety, optimization, and meeting needs,” Bony Dawood, founder of Dawood Engineering, a civil engineering company, and author of the book, “Invaluably Different: Forging Lasting Business Success Through A People-First Culture,” said in an interview.
“I am of the opinion that we are going to uplevel the species [through AI] and I think that’s a good thing,” Fletcher Previn, chief information officer at Cisco Systems Inc., said in an interview. “I see improvements in drug discover and people living longer; a high-water mark of democratizing ideas; access to better education and quality of life; and the labor market getting bigger.”
“Three-fourths of our work career is spent on administrative tasks (44%) and meetings (31%),” he added. “AI will reduce that drastically.”
“I’m not discounting fears, but there is a burgeoning industry of doomerism around AI,” Alex Bates, CEO of HelloSky, said in an interview. “When Anthropic is raising money, they usually bring up alarmist threats [as a self-professed White Knight] for funding. It seems we have similar stories pop up once a year around fear mongering around these transnational companies with wide-ranging impact on society. We have heard and read about existential risks new technologies present. But so far, every important decision is made by humans. There is no billion-dollar AI company created by one person.”
But there are some peripheral consequences. The environment, Bates and others concede, could be compromised to accommodate energy demands required by AI infrastructure expansion.
At the projected growth rate of domestic AI expansion, it could consume as much water as 18.5 million households annually just to cool servers. Indeed, a white paper from energy resilience provider Enchanted Rock, “Speed-to-Power Bottlenecks Undermine US AI Dominance & Data Center Revenue,” says grid delays are stalling billions of dollars in AI investments, and interconnection delays for data centers can stretch beyond seven years. AI could add $4.4 trillion to U.S. GDP, it added, but not without adequate power.
Among the chief culprits are Amazon.com Inc., Alphabet Inc.’s Google and Microsoft Corp., which continue to build in hot, dry areas such as Arizona and Texas. Google, Microsoft and Facebook parent Meta Platforms Inc. used an estimated 580 billion gallons of water to provide power and cooling to data centers and AI servers in 2022 — enough water to meet the annual needs of 15 million households.
A Clear and Present Danger?
The debate over Silicon Valley and its culpability in AI’s rise is likely to only intensify as more companies announce faster, smarter tools. But there is an old guard — namely, tech veterans of several decades — who reject the notion that the valley is solely money- and power-obsessed.
“I’m in tech because I want to make the world a better place,” Tee said. “That said, Silicon Valley is enthralled to [writer-philosopher] Ayn Rand, and AI is the latest turn of the screw. There is so much more money in funding and potential revenue, that for some it is all about the money and creates some behavior. But not everyone.”
Indeed, the economic potential of AI as a multitrillion-dollar industry with the unflagging support of a U.S. government spooked by the threat from China, make it hard not to see it morphing into tech’s biggest wave.
Where it goes, however, is anyone’s guess. “Anyone who tells you they know the long term effects of AI is selling you a bridge to nowhere,” says Jack Gold, principal analyst at J. Gold Associates, said in a message. “It’s like asking AOL back in the day what it means to have dial up email and internet.”
For the past week, at least, the AI narrative has been dark from several insiders.
“With the full support of the federal government, soon they will be able to reshape most spheres of society as they please, from the political to the economic to the production of science,” Hao warned in her New York Times essay.
“Yet the narrative that A.G.I. is just around the corner and will usher in ‘massive prosperity,’ as Altman has written, is already leading companies to accrue large amounts of capital, lay claim to data and electricity and build enormous data centers that are accelerating the climate crisis,” she added. “These gains will fortify tech companies’ power and erode human rights long after the shine of the industry’s promises wears off.”
Warns Stu McClure, CEO of AI cyber firm Qwiet.ai: “The most significant risk in AI isn’t the dystopian scenarios often portrayed in the media, but rather the more immediate and practical challenges of ensuring secure, ethical, and controlled AI deployment. I’ve seen firsthand how AI systems can be vulnerable to manipulation, bias, and unintended consequences and share these concerns in my recurring webinar series, ‘AI Exposed: The Hype Must Die.’ The real risk lies in the potential for AI systems to be deployed without adequate testing, security measures, or understanding of their limitations. This could lead to serious consequences in critical applications like healthcare, financial systems, or infrastructure control.”
