Stephen Morris

And it kicked off this huge spat, which saw them designated as a supply chain risk.

A lot of staff at Google kind of backed Dario Amadei's position and said, we should be doing the same thing.

And we should be asking for the same red lines.

Obviously, Elon Musk and Sam Altman signed on the dotted line, like literally the next day.

to try and get their AI systems into these potentially lucrative government contracts.

And then last week, Google signed its own deal that has language which says it shouldn't be used for mass domestic surveillance and autonomous weapons, but no actual legal safeguard.

The government wrote the contract in a way that it can just disregard that should it feel the need to.

Hundreds of DeepMind staff and Google Cloud staff wrote to Sundar Pichai trying to stop this.

And they didn't.

Demis has been silent on the issue.

He hasn't said anything, although he has been on the record before saying, I don't think either of these things should ever be used for AI, nor do I think AI technology is sufficiently controllable or advanced to be allowed to use for this.

If you're looking for a bear case, if Alphabet continues down that path, it could potentially lose some of its staff to more, say, idealistic rivals.

And it does represent a bit of a sticky issue.

Demis has doomer tendencies in his view of AI if deployed irresponsibly.

And if you do allow the commercial imperative to override these concerns, that could be a potential hit to its lab who would favor more people along the lines of Anthropic.

I mean, what do you think, Maddy?

I think Google is in an incredibly strong position, both from a commercial standpoint, you know, it only takes one or two slips for open AI or Anthropic to fall behind.

A bad model, pointless fight with the government, a damaging court case.

Whereas Google has about 10 safety nets below it.

It can just afford to invest in new things, speculative products, fail in a few and still keep coming back.