It's much too fast' The race to create the ultimate AI

In Silicon Valley, rival tech companies are spending trillions of dollars and recruiting top talent as they compete to reach a goal that could change humanity-or potentially even destroy it

- Robert Booth

ON THE 8.49AM TRAIN THROUGH SILICON VALLEY, the tables are packed with young people glued to laptops, earbuds in, rattling out code. As the northern California hills scroll past, instructions flash up on screens from bosses: fix this bug; add new script. There is no time to enjoy the view. These commuters are foot soldiers in the global race towards artificial general intelligence (AGI) - when AI systems become as capable as highly qualified humans or surpass them.

Here in the Bay Area of San Francisco, some of the world's biggest companies are fighting it out to gain some kind of an advantage. And, in turn, they are competing with China. This race to seize control of a technology that could reshape the world is being fuelled by bets in the trillions of dollars by the US's most powerful capitalists.

The computer scientists hop off at Mountain View for Google DeepMind, Palo Alto for the talent mill of Stanford University, and Menlo Park for Meta, where Mark Zuckerberg has been offering $200m-per-person compensation packages to poach AI experts to engineer "superintelligence".

For the AI chip-maker Nvidia, where the smiling boss, Jensen Huang, is worth $160bn, they alight at Santa Clara. The workers flow the other way into San Francisco for OpenAI and Anthropic, AI startups worth a combined half a trillion dollars - as long as the much-predicted AI bubble doesn't explode.

Breakthroughs come at an accelerating pace with every week bringing the release of a significant new AI development. Anthropic's co-founder Dario Amodei predicts AGI could be reached by 2026 or 2027. OpenAl's chief executive, Sam Altman, reckons progress is so fast that he could soon be able to make an AI to replace him as boss.