Slow Takes Ep. 14: A Trillion Dollars and a Vaccine

Every Monday at 12:45 BST, Leor from Exploring ChatGPT and I go through the week’s AI news without the hype. Watch the episode for the full discussion. Use this for the facts, the links and a little extra context.Slow Takes is also available on the YouTube channel: Exploring ChatGPT.If you know someone who would benefit from more AI news and less BS then please share this with them.Anthropic filed to go public at nearly a trillion dollarsOn 1 June Anthropic confidentially submitted draft paperwork for a stock market listing, after a $65 billion funding round valued the company at $965 billion. Fortune reports that figure eclipsed OpenAI for the first time. The maker of Claude is now within reach of a one trillion dollar valuation, on revenue running at roughly a $47 billion annualised rate, with a public debut possibly as soon as the autumn.A company most people have never knowingly used is priced at close to a trillion dollars. That number is a bet that AI will replace a vast amount of human labour, booked in advance of it actually happening. The valuation is a forecast wearing the clothes of a fact. The question worth asking is what has to come true about the world for $965 billion to make sense, and who decided it should.On the live I’d predicted an autumn float the week before, and the news broke about four hours after we stopped recording, so allow me one moment of feeling clever. Leor did the sober maths: roughly a $47 billion revenue run rate, a 5% operating margin, an implied price-to-earnings ratio north of 500, against Microsoft, in nearly every home and office on earth, valued at only four to five times Anthropic on $100 billion of actual profit. In the short term the market is a voting machine, in the long term a weighing machine. Right now it is voting. For context, $965 billion is roughly the GDP of Switzerland.Florida sued OpenAI and named Sam Altman personallyOn 1 June Florida’s Attorney General James Uthmeier filed suit against OpenAI and named its chief executive Sam Altman in person, reported as the first US state to sue an AI company. The complaint alleges OpenAI marketed ChatGPT as safe while prioritising product and revenue, harvested children’s data, and used sycophancy, the design choice to affirm users excessively, to steer them towards paid subscriptions.For two years the industry has sold safety as a feature while resisting any outside test of the claim. A state attorney general has now put that marketing in front of a court. Whatever the verdict, the discovery process alone could drag internal safety decisions into public view. Consumer-protection law is proving a sharper instrument than the AI-specific regulation that does not yet exist. Accountability arrived through an existing court, not a new one.The second a chief executive can be held personally responsible, you will not believe the speed with which proper governance and safety checks appear, the things we keep being told the technology just cannot do. Sadly, once these companies have raised public money, they can outspend a state attorney general for a decade, and the courts already favour whoever can keep paying lawyers the longest.A Labour MP took Musk’s AI to the High CourtOn 3 June the Labour MP Jess Asato, who represents Lowestoft, filed a claim at the High Court against Elon Musk’s xAI, after users of its Grok chatbot created and shared fake images of her without her consent, in the weeks after she criticised the tool. The claim, brought with the law firm AWO, is for breaches of data protection law and misuse of private information, and seeks damages, a formal acknowledgement that what happened was illegal, and an order requiring xAI to stop. Keir Starmer backed her, saying he was 100% behind her.The harm here already happened, to a named person, generated by a tool marketed as harmless fun. The only remedy on offer is for the victim to sue one of the richest men alive, in her own time and at her own risk. No regulator stepped in first. The burden keeps landing on individuals while the systems stay intact.The platforms always say the moderation is too hard. On the live I kept coming back to one comparison: I can post genuinely horrific content to YouTube and it sails through, but the moment I add a Beatles song without clearing the copyright, it is gone in seconds. The technology to detect and stop sharing exists, we have watched it work for music rights and in Telegram and WhatsApp court orders. We are entering an era where capability has to start coming with accountability.CNN sued Perplexity, and Perplexity said the quiet part out loudOn 28 May CNN filed suit against Perplexity in the Southern District of New York, accusing the AI search firm of scraping more than 17,000 of its stories, photos and videos. The complaint alleges copyright and trademark infringement, including that Perplexity implied an ongoing CNN relationship by offering its content through a paid Comet Plus tier. CNN says it tried to agree a licence last year, failed, then blocked the bot. Perplexity’s response was the whole argument in five words:You can’t copyright facts.This is the same fight as the deepfake and the data claims, moved to the work itself. The journalism that trains and answers these systems was made by people who were not asked and not paid. For an audience of writers, academics and creators, this is the most direct stake of the week. The question is whether the people whose work feeds AI get a say, or only a lawsuit.BigTech has spent twenty years insisting information wants to be free across the internet, while guarding its own data, models and algorithms with everything it has. “Facts are free” only ever seems to point one way. And it was not an accident here, Perplexity had tried and failed to agree a paid deal with CNN, then kept advertising access to CNN’s paywalled tier anyway.AI designed a world-first vaccine, and the scientists told the truthScientists at the University of Cambridge used AI to design the core component of a vaccine, a so-called super-antigen, and tested it in human volunteers, the first time the central part of a vaccine has been designed entirely by AI and then trialled in people. It targets the whole coronavirus family. An initial safety trial ran with 39 participants, a larger study of around 200 is now under way, and the results in the Journal of Infection describe the immune response so far as modest. The team is already applying the method to influenza and Ebola.This is AI worth having. The work is peer-reviewed, runs through human clinical trials, and the researchers are honest that the early results are modest rather than a cure. That honesty is the difference between this and the press releases that open the other four stories. Slow AI has never argued against AI. The argument is about knowing when to use it and when to leave it alone, and a slow, tested, transparent use in medicine is the case for.Even here Leor was honest in a way the hype never is: pro-AI as he is, he admitted he would be a little nervous taking an AI-designed vaccine at this early stage, and argued the real prize is AI built for science and medicine rather than another chatbot upgrade. This is not a model hallucinating a super-germ weapon, it is a specific tool trained for a specific task. My one worry: imagine the company that designs the next breakthrough vaccine charges a pound for the first vial and a thousand for the second.Five stories, one thread. Money at the top, three lawsuits in the middle, a real breakthrough at the end. AI is neither the saviour nor the apocalypse the press releases sell. It is a tool, priced like a religion, costing some people and helping others. Go slow.If you want to practise that noticing with other people every month, the Slow AI Curriculum runs live monthly webinars on the theory, the critical prompts and the dialogue that go with them. Get full access to Slow AI at theslowai.substack.com/subscribe