AI safety debate meets reality at Dreamforce as business leaders say last year's models are enough

At Dreamforce, business leaders say older AI models are enough

The headliners at Dreamforce this week are at the center of the debate on AI safety and whether model development needs to be slowed down. But on the ground at Salesforce's annual mega-conference, attendees said they're just trying to figure out how to take advantage of AI models that are currently available.

"It's already hard enough to keep up," said Alec Bronston, who works at Chicago-based retail data company Spins as senior Salesforce director.

At Salesforce's annual Dreamforce mega-conference in San Francisco this week, the keynote conversations between CEO Marc Benioff and the heads of Anthropic, OpenAI and Nvidia delved into the raging AI safety debate, with the execs opining on whether model development is moving too fast. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, while on stage with Benioff, urged frontier labs to "run as fast as you can." But on the grounds of the 50,000-person event, described over a decade ago as the "Super Bowl of software," the discussion was very different. Far from obsessing over the fears of artificial intelligence and whether the rapid advancements of AI models threaten human existence, attendees said they're having trouble even taking advantage of the technology as it exists today.

"It's already hard enough to keep up," said Alec Bronston, who works at Chicago-based retail data company Spins as senior Salesforce director. A potential slowdown would present "a lot of opportunity to just even catch up and get our feet wet," he said.

Dreamforce had a different tone this year, landing in the middle of a dramatic moment in the AI boom. Days before the conference's kickoff, an Anthropic researcher resigned and, on his way out, said the top labs were "gambling with our lives." That led Anthropic's Dario Amodei and OpenAI's Sam Altman to propose safety initiatives and to push for a slower pace of model development.

In the months leading up to the event, Benioff had been reinforcing Salesforce's role in the AI explosion and batting down the "SaaSpocalypse" narrative, trying to convince investors, customers and employees that AI is an accelerant to its business rather than a threat. Salesforce shares have dropped 8% this year even after a massive pop in August, while other software names like Adobe and Autodesk are down significantly more.

During Salesforce's last earnings call in August, the company unveiled "Claudeforce," a new way for salespeople to access critical data directly from inside Anthropic's Claude chatbot. On the exposition floor, where companies in the Salesforce ecosystem pay big bucks to tout their software and services, the most highly trafficked booth on Tuesday was Anthropic's. Youthful employees of the AI lab donned oversized white sweaters and carried out demonstrations for passersby.

'Way ahead already' Salesforce customers and partners at the conference told CNBC that older and cheaper AI models are plenty powerful for everyday sales and customer service work. Many users are still figuring out their AI budgets and determining if their companies are best served using models from Anthropic or OpenAI, or instead opting for cheaper open-source alternatives. "The frontier models are way ahead already," said Jaya Rohit Vuyyuru, a vice president at consulting firm SummitX. "A lot of the customer base is still getting their...