The air in New Delhi was thick enough to chew. Outside the Bharat Mandapam, the heat was a physical weight. Inside, the air conditioning hummed with the desperate energy of a grid trying to support three thousand laptops and the egos of two men who used to share an office but now barely share a planet.
Sam Altman and Dario Amodei haven't lived in the same reality for years. On Tuesday, they barely managed to occupy the same stage.
It was supposed to be the centerpiece of India’s big AI push—a moment of unity between the two titans of the generative era. Instead, we got a masterclass in high-stakes social discomfort. The "moment" happened forty minutes in. Altman, leaning back with the practiced ease of a man who has already secured his first few billion in sovereign wealth funding, tried to hand a physical tablet to Amodei to demonstrate a collaborative coding interface.
Amodei didn't take it.
He didn’t even look at it. He just stared at the moderator, his hands folded in his lap like a man sitting through a particularly dull deposition. The silence stretched. Three seconds. Five. A lifetime in a room filled with venture capitalists and government ministers. Altman eventually pulled the tablet back, a tight, artificial smile plastered onto his face. It was the kind of look you give a waiter who just told you the kitchen is out of the only thing you wanted to eat.
This isn't just about bad vibes. It’s about the fundamental schism in how we’re burning through the world’s electricity.
Altman is the high priest of the Church of Scale. He wants $7 trillion for a global chip-making initiative. He wants enough power to light up a continent. He’s selling a future where OpenAI is the operating system for existence, and he’s willing to get into bed with any regime or conglomerate that can write the check. He treats "safety" like a software patch—something you release in version 2.1 after the initial launch breaks everything.
Then there’s Amodei. He left OpenAI to start Anthropic because he thought Altman was moving too fast. Now he’s the darling of the "Responsible AI" crowd, a label that mostly serves to make $4 billion in Amazon funding feel less like a corporate takeover and more like a moral crusade. Amodei talks about "Constitutional AI" while burning through his own mountain of compute, trying to build a version of the future that’s exactly like Sam’s, just slightly more anxious about it.
The friction at the summit wasn't subtle. It was granular.
The Indian government is currently dangling a $1.25 billion "AI Mission" carrot, hoping to lure these guys into building local data centers. But the math doesn't work. You can’t build a "sovereign AI" on a budget that barely covers the electricity bill for a single training run of Claude 3 or GPT-4.
During the Q&A, a local founder asked about the cost of tokens for startups in the Global South. Altman gave a polished non-answer about "democratizing intelligence." Amodei looked at his shoes. The trade-off is simple and brutal: if you want the "intelligence," you have to pay the rent. And the rent is rising. The "awkwardness" on stage was the sound of two landlords arguing over who gets to collect the check from a tenant who can’t afford the deposit.
The summit was billed as a "bridge-building" exercise. It felt more like a partition.
Altman spent his solo time talking about the inevitability of AGI, treating it like a weather pattern we just have to prepare for. Amodei spent his time talking about "risks," which is Silicon Valley shorthand for "please regulate my competitors so they can't catch up." They aren't building a future together. They are competing to see who gets to be the gatekeeper of the black box.
By the time the session ended, the two men exited on opposite sides of the stage. No handshake. No polite nod. Just two entourages swirling around their respective suns, moving toward separate green rooms and separate private jets.
Outside, the Delhi smog hadn't lifted. The government ministers were already tweeting about "historic partnerships" and "new eras." But the only thing that felt real was that five-second silence on stage. It was the sound of two men realizing that the world isn't big enough for both of their versions of the end of history.
Who actually believes the "safety" talk when the burn rate is this high?