Prime Minister Narendra Modi invited leaders of some of the top AI companies to gather on stage as part of a commitment to build more 'inclusive and multilingual' AI around the world. What followed was meant to be a show of unity. Modi lifted Altman and Pichai's hands before an applauding crowd, with others following suit. However, Altman and Amodei, who were next to each other, raised their fists instead of holding hands with one another.
Indian lawmaker Milind Deora took a dig at the pair. "Everyone else locked hands. ChatGPT and Claude kept it strictly professional," he said on X, with a winking face emoji. The moment spread rapidly across social media.
The OpenAI CEO was quick to play it down. "I was sort of confused. Modi grabbed my hand and put it up, and I just was not sure what we were supposed to be doing," Altman told reporters. Anthropic's Dario Amodei did not publicly comment on the incident. Here's the awkward moment.
There's history between Amodei and Altman
The awkwardness has deep roots. Amodei worked under Altman at OpenAI from 2016 to 2020, with his last role as vice president of research, where he focused on safety. He played an instrumental role in launching GPT-2 and GPT-3 and co-invented "reinforcement learning from human feedback."
In late 2020, Amodei, his sister Daniela Amodei, and several senior researchers departed following disagreements with Altman and the board over the company's direction. They went on to found Anthropic in 2021, the company behind the Claude series of language models.
The rivalry took a remarkable turn in November 2023. When Altman was briefly ousted from OpenAI, reports suggested that the board had approached Amodei as a possible replacement and even considered a merger between the two companies. Amodei declined. Altman was reinstated as CEO within days.
The memes following the incident flooded social media:
ChatGPT and Claude fight it out in ads as well
Tensions boiled over publicly just weeks before the summit. Anthropic aired Super Bowl advertisements that appeared to take aim at OpenAI's reported plans to introduce advertising on ChatGPT. Each commercial opened with a loaded word splashed across the screen - "betrayal," "deception," "treachery," and "violation."
In response, Altman posted on X that he "laughed" at the ad but described it as "clearly dishonest," adding that OpenAI's principle was not to insert ads directly into chatbot responses. He also claimed that "more Texans use ChatGPT for free than total people use Claude in the US."
According to Bloomberg estimates, OpenAI is valued at around $500 billion, while Anthropic is valued at approximately $380 billion. Both companies are aggressively expanding globally, including into India. At the summit, Amodei discussed the "serious risks" associated with AI, including the autonomous behaviour of AI systems, their potential misuse by individuals and governments, and the potential for economic displacement.
