- Silicon Valley has a new mantra.
- The saying originated from Sam Altman in 2021 but has been repeated recently by various key players.
Silicon Valley hasn't quite moved on from its "move fast and break things" mentality — but it does have a newer mantra that's more representative of the AI era.
Long before ChatGPT hit the market, Sam Altman tweeted this in 2021: "Move faster. Slowness anywhere justifies slowness everywhere. 2021 instead of 2022. This week instead of next week. Today instead of tomorrow. Moving fast compounds so much more than people realize."
Altman followed the post up with a recommendation to be "extremely thoughtful" when moving at speed.
Though he may not have known how AI would impact the world at the time, Altman's statement is still common in the tech world almost three years later.
The emphasis on speed and innovation that was encapsulated by the quote proved popular with founders and CEOs, gaining traction on platforms like X, formerly Twitter.
"I think about this a lot," Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch said in a November response to Altman's post. "This should be your default operating mode."
The sentiment was echoed in a subsequent Microsoft memo about OpenAI last year, The New York Times reported.
"Speed is even more important than ever," Sam Schillace, a top Microsoft exec, wrote to employees after the launch of ChatGPT. He said it would be an "absolutely fatal error in this moment to worry about things that can be fixed later."
Altman's statement and the way it's been put into practice harks back to Mark Zuckerberg's infamous "move fast and break things" mantra. The Silicon Valley motto, popularized by Facebook in its early years, spoke to an ethos of rapid innovation, disruption, and enthusiasm in Silicon Valley.
Work was meant to be approached with an emphasis on speed and experimentation, with little regard for any potential negative consequences. For Facebook, now Meta, these consequences included user privacy concerns, security issues, and unintended societal impacts.
In response to several major scandals, the tech giant later modified the saying to "move fast with stable infrastructure" in an attempt to recognize the need for a more responsible approach to progress.
Now, amid an AI arms race, the tech world is once again focused on speed and shipping products.
Altman has made similar comments since.
"Momentum is everything in a startup," he said. "Startups that win keep winning, and startups that lose keep losing."
Altman's OpenAI had its first major win with its AI-powered chatbot, ChatGPT. The unprecedented popularity of the bot rocked major tech companies, including Google, Meta, and Tesla.
Microsoft's hefty investment and close partnership with the AI lab lit a fire under its old competitors, especially Google. In the wake of the launch, the tech world's focus shifted from a slow and steady AI approach to an intense race to ship products at pace.
But just as Zuckerberg's mantra overlooked some pressing concerns, the rush by various tech companies to release unpredictable AI-powered products has led to embarrassing slip-ups.
The first version of ChatGPT had far from perfect safeguards and the bot was found to emit racist and sexist content in its first few weeks.
It was also very easily jailbroken by tech-savvy users. One workaround just involved telling the chatbot to ignore its content moderation.
Microsoft's eagerness to get one up on Google Search also led to an AI-powered Bing that was downright creepy at first. At Google, the company's first public demo of its ChatGPT rival, Bard, made an embarrassing factual error.
The mistakes made by both companies' products highlighted serious underlying concerns around the tech including AI bias, safety, and the spread of misinformation, but neither company has been eager to hit the breaks on development.
Zuckerberg's "move fast, break things" mantra may have been declared dead in the wake of Meta's Cambridge Analytica scandal 2019 scandal.
Given that today's big AI players are ramping up development, however, despite mounting concerns about its pace, we can only assume that Silicon Valley has not learned from the mistakes of the past.