The AI Slowdown Debate Crashed Salesforce’s Party

AI 发展放缓之争“搅局” Salesforce 年度盛会

Decked out in purple and plaid, Gwen Stefani belted her 2002 single “Underneath It All” to a packed conference center in San Francisco on Tuesday morning—but she was just the warm-up. At the end of her performance, Stefani shouted “Dreamforce! Let’s go!” into a checkered microphone before Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff strode into the spotlight. Dreamforce is billed as the world’s largest enterprise software conference but feels more like attending a megachurch—especially this year.

周二上午，身着紫色格子装的格温·史蒂芬妮（Gwen Stefani）在旧金山挤满人群的会议中心高唱她 2002 年的单曲《Underneath It All》，但这仅仅是开场热身。表演结束时，史蒂芬妮对着一个格子图案的麦克风高喊“Dreamforce！冲啊！”，随后 Salesforce 首席执行官马克·贝尼奥夫（Marc Benioff）大步走上聚光灯下。Dreamforce 被誉为全球最大的企业软件大会，但给人的感觉更像是参加一场大型布道会——尤其是今年。

Benioff roamed the audience while delivering his Dreamforce sermon, followed by a teleoperated camera on wheels that beamed his face to screens hanging from the cavernous room’s ceiling. Within minutes, he ordered up a graph of Salesforce’s annual revenue, which the company projects will top $46 billion in 2027, thanks in part to demand for its AI-powered products. The audience applauded. But hanging over the whole event was a dark question: Is artificial intelligence really worth risking all our lives for?

贝尼奥夫在观众席间穿梭，发表着他的“Dreamforce 布道”，身后跟着一台远程操控的轮式摄像机，将他的面部实时投射到悬挂在宽敞大厅天花板上的屏幕上。几分钟内，他调出了一张 Salesforce 的年度营收图表，预计到 2027 年公司营收将突破 460 亿美元，这在一定程度上得益于对其人工智能产品的需求。观众报以掌声。然而，整个活动笼罩在一个阴郁的问题之下：人工智能真的值得我们冒着生命危险去追求吗？

Between flashy software demonstrations of agents building dashboards, conference-goers watched Silicon Valley leaders debate whether the AI industry should keep barreling ahead or if the government needs to slow AI progress to prevent catastrophic risks stemming from the technology.

在展示智能体构建仪表板等炫目的软件演示之余，与会者们目睹了硅谷领袖们的一场辩论：人工智能行业是应该继续全速前进，还是政府需要放缓 AI 发展步伐，以防止该技术带来的灾难性风险。

Last week, AI researcher Jacob Coxon resigned from Anthropic and publicly warned that companies racing toward self-improving AI systems were “gambling with our lives.” By the weekend, other Anthropic employees were echoing his concerns, and CEO Dario Amodei was urging world leaders to help “pace the frontier” of AI development. Other AI CEOs then began endorsing the idea, including Amodei’s greatest rival, OpenAI’s Sam Altman.

上周，AI 研究员雅各布·考克森（Jacob Coxon）从 Anthropic 辞职，并公开警告称，那些竞相开发自我进化 AI 系统的公司是在“拿我们的生命赌博”。到了周末，其他 Anthropic 员工也纷纷响应他的担忧，首席执行官达里奥·阿莫代（Dario Amodei）敦促世界各国领导人帮助“把控”AI 发展的步伐。随后，其他 AI 公司 CEO 也开始支持这一观点，包括阿莫代最大的竞争对手、OpenAI 的萨姆·奥特曼（Sam Altman）。

But not everyone is on board with the idea. David Sacks, a White House AI adviser, brushed off Amodei’s suggestions and fears of AI doom as “just another bid for regulatory capture.” President Trump went further this week, calling fears about existential AI risk “a hoax.” Despite the challenging political environment, Congress is trying to capitalize on the moment and push ahead with legislation to regulate the AI industry.

但并非所有人都认同这一想法。白宫 AI 顾问大卫·萨克斯（David Sacks）对阿莫代的建议和对 AI 末日的恐惧不屑一顾，称其“不过是又一次寻求监管俘获的尝试”。特朗普总统本周更进一步，称对 AI 生存风险的担忧是“一场骗局”。尽管政治环境充满挑战，国会仍试图抓住时机，推动立法以监管 AI 行业。

Onstage, 6-foot-5 Benioff towered over Anthropic’s CEO, vigorously shaking Amodei’s hand just before asking for his latest assessment of AI progress. While this is undoubtedly Benioff’s show, Anthropic has become a critical partner helping usher Salesforce into the AI era.

舞台上，身高 6 英尺 5 英寸的贝尼奥夫俯视着 Anthropic 的 CEO，在询问他对 AI 进展的最新评估之前，用力地与阿莫代握手。虽然这无疑是贝尼奥夫的主场，但 Anthropic 已成为帮助 Salesforce 进入 AI 时代的关键合作伙伴。

“Let’s say you’re running a car company, and another car company, not yours, they have some kind of safety incident,” Amodei said, making a not-so-subtle reference to OpenAI’s Hugging Face incident. “Obviously, it’s very tempting to attack your competitor,” Amodei added, but the more responsible move is to “organize the rest of the industry and say, what can we do to set standards for everyone?”

“假设你经营着一家汽车公司，而另一家公司——不是你的公司——发生了某种安全事故，”阿莫代说道，含蓄地提到了 OpenAI 的 Hugging Face 事件。“显然，攻击竞争对手是非常诱人的，”阿莫代补充道，但更负责任的做法是“组织行业其他成员，共同探讨我们能做些什么来为所有人制定标准。”

But the Anthropic CEO was careful to note that pacing the frontier doesn’t mean “freezing the technology in place,” and of course, he took a moment to plug Claude’s integration with Salesforce.

但这位 Anthropic 的 CEO 特别指出，把控发展步伐并不意味着“将技术冻结在原地”。当然，他也借机宣传了 Claude 与 Salesforce 的集成。

Moments after Amodei exited, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang appeared and began downplaying the concerns Anthropic has raised. AI safety effectively amounts to an “engineering problem,” Huang argued, and the companies building AI can simply police themselves.

阿莫代下台后不久，英伟达 CEO 黄仁勋登场，开始淡化 Anthropic 提出的担忧。黄仁勋认为，AI 安全本质上是一个“工程问题”，开发 AI 的公司完全可以进行自我监管。

“We don’t need any new laws, we don’t need any new regulation,” Huang told Dreamforce attendees. “You run as fast as you can, but if you feel that at any given point in time, the company is out of control or the products are not going to be safe, you take a pause.”

“我们不需要任何新法律，也不需要任何新监管，”黄仁勋告诉 Dreamforce 的与会者。“你可以尽可能快地奔跑，但如果你在任何时候感觉到公司失控，或者产品不再安全，你就停下来休息一下。”

The debate feels a bit heavy for Dreamforce, but then again, maybe this is the perfect venue for it. As tech executives pitched their various enterprise AI tools, I slipped out of the room, passing the plush mascots and vaguely Hawaiian decorations, to take a call from Sayash Kapoor, an incoming computer science professor at UC Berkeley.

这场辩论对于 Dreamforce 来说显得有些沉重，但转念一想，这或许正是进行此类讨论的绝佳场所。当科技高管们推销着各种企业级 AI 工具时，我溜出了会场，穿过毛绒吉祥物和带有夏威夷风情的装饰，接听了加州大学伯克利分校即将入职的计算机科学教授萨亚什·卡普尔（Sayash Kapoor）的电话。

Kapoor and Princeton professor Arvind Narayanan are coauthors of the book AI Snake Oil and write a Substack together called AI as Normal Technology. The pair are known for cutting through AI marketing hype while not dismissing the technology’s potential. This week, they published one of their longest essays yet, which tries to make sense of “loss-of-control incidents,” referring to events such as OpenAI accidentally letting its agents hack into Hugging Face.

卡普尔和普林斯顿大学教授阿尔文德·纳拉亚南（Arvind Narayanan）是《AI 蛇油》（AI Snake Oil）一书的合著者，并共同撰写了一个名为“AI 作为常规技术”（AI as Normal Technology）的 Substack 专栏。两人以戳穿 AI 营销炒作、同时又不否定该技术潜力而闻名。本周，他们发表了迄今为止最长的文章之一，试图解读“失控事件”，即指 OpenAI 不慎让其智能体入侵 Hugging Face 等事件。

“Part of what we were trying to do in this essay is to move past this false dichotomy to bridge the ground between AI safety and cybersecurity,” says Kapoor. “If you think AI will soon become superintelligent and evade any controls we can put in front of them, of course, alignment seems more important. On the other hand, if you think AI companies have been negligent and avoided taking bog-standard cybersecurity steps, then it’s natural to think that control is what we need to intervene on. I think both of these views have some element of truth in them.”

“我们在文章中试图做的一部分工作，是超越这种虚假的二分法，在 AI 安全和网络安全之间架起桥梁，”卡普尔说。“如果你认为 AI 很快会变得超智能并逃避我们设置的任何控制，那么对齐（alignment）似乎确实更重要。另一方面，如果你认为 AI 公司一直疏忽大意，避免采取常规的网络安全措施，那么自然会认为我们需要介入的是控制问题。我认为这两种观点都有其合理之处。”

In the wake of the Hugging Face saga, Kapoor says he was surprised to learn how few security precautions OpenAI had taken. AI companies need to reckon with their “lack of organizational maturity,” he argues, and accept that loss-of-control incidents won’t be solved by a single breakthrough in security or alignment. He adds that the incident convinced him that policymakers should make AI labs liable for the harms their technology causes.

在 Hugging Face 事件之后，卡普尔表示，他惊讶地发现 OpenAI 采取的安全预防措施竟如此之少。他认为，AI 公司需要正视其“组织成熟度不足”的问题，并接受这样一个事实：失控事件无法通过安全或对齐方面的单一突破来解决。他补充说，该事件让他确信，政策制定者应该让 AI 实验室为其技术造成的损害承担责任。

“The consequences for OpenAI for the Hugging Face hack were basically close to zero. The company was able to largely proceed as is,” says Kapoor. “If you imagine this level of accident in any other industry, you would have seen a monthslong internal investigation, people would have been fired or gone to jail; OpenAI would have had to pay millions of dollars in fines.”

“OpenAI 因 Hugging Face 入侵事件所承担的后果几乎为零。公司基本上可以照常运作，”卡普尔说。“如果你想象一下在任何其他行业发生这种程度的事故，你都会看到长达数月的内部调查，有人会被解雇或入狱；OpenAI 本应支付数百万美元的罚款。”

Kapoor doesn’t wholly endorse Amodei’s proposal to pace the frontier, but he agrees with parts of it. He thinks AI labs need better governance to break out of their “move fast and break things” attitude and that they should let independent evaluators assess their AI safety and security.

卡普尔并不完全赞同阿莫代关于“把控发展步伐”的提议，但他认同其中的部分内容。他认为 AI 实验室需要更好的治理，以摆脱“快速行动、打破常规”的态度，并且应该让独立的评估机构来评估其 AI 的安全性和可靠性。