NEW DELHI: OpenAI's Sam Altman and Anthropic's Dario Amodei didn't hold hands for a group photograph with Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the India AI Impact Summit on Thursday and raised their fists instead, the awkward moment between the once colleagues and now rival CEOs captured on camera and quickly going viral.
The tech giants, including Google CEO Sundar Pichai, had gathered on stage after Modi's address at the summit.
Pichai and Altman were standing on either side of Modi, who held their hands aloft and asked others to join in. However, Altman and Amodei, standing next to each other, conspicuously did not do so and raised their fists, breaking the chain.
The two tech leaders looked distinctly uncomfortable as well.
Altman, 40, has been CEO of the American AI research organisation OpenAI since 2019. Amodei, three years older, is the co-founder and CEO of Anthropic, the American company behind the large language model series Claude.
They worked together in OpenAI before Amodei branched out.
Amodei, his sister Daniela Amodei, and other senior OpenAI researchers left the company in 2020 due to disagreements with Altman and the board over the company's direction. The Amodei siblings subsequently founded Anthropic.