Sam Altman’s Trust Issues at OpenAI
4/13/202649 min
At the end of February, OpenAI’s C.E.O., Sam Altman, made headlines by swiftly cutting a deal with the Pentagon for his company to replace Anthropic, which had balked at the Trump Administration’s bid to use its A.I. technology to power autonomous weapons and aid in mass surveillance. Days earlier, Altman had publicly supported Anthropic’s position in the dispute. Altman’s rise to power and his founding of OpenAI were predicated on placing safety above other concerns in developing artificial general intelligence. Why did he change his stance on such a fundamental issue? The New Yorker writers Ronan Farrow and Andrew Marantz spoke with Altman multiple times and interviewed more than a hundred people for their investigation into the leader of one of the most powerful companies in the world, comparing Altman to J. Robert Oppenheimer. Although there is no smoking gun in Altman’s hand, the writers find that persistent allegations about his conduct underscore the danger of entrusting him to wield such vast power over the future.
Further reading:
- "Sam Altman May Control Our Future—Can He Be Trusted?,” by Ronan Farrow and Andrew Marantz
- “The Dangerous Paradox of A.I. Abundance,” by John Cassidy
- “The A.I. Bubble Is Coming for Your Browser,” by Kyle Chayka
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First 90 secondsDavid Remnick· Host0:00
[on-hold music] You're listening to The Political Scene. I'm David Remnick. Early each week, we bring you a conversation from our episode of The New Yorker Radio Hour.
Speaker 10:13
[upbeat music] This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.
David Remnick· Host0:21
Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Just a few months ago, Andrew Ross Sorkin, the financial journalist, was on this program, and he quoted a figure that was really remarkable. "Virtually all of the recent economic growth in the United States," Sorkin told me, "is investment in artificial intelligence." A lot of people are concerned that a huge bubble around AI is about to pop and take the economy with it, and a few people continue to feel that AI is just overhyped. But I don't think there's really much doubt at this point that, in our lifetimes at least, AI is going to bring changes as significant as the Industrial Revolution 200 years ago. At the center of this world-changing technology is a man named Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI. It was OpenAI that really brought artificial intelligence into most of our lives with ChatGPT, and that exploded into our consciousness in 2022. But the chatbots are just the tip of the iceberg.