Sam Altman Is Dangerous To Silicon Valley

27:03Isn't that Silicon Valley, though? I'm afraid of dealing with them, but they were so nice to me. And yeah, of course, that person has not elaborated more publicly about what they meant. I think this is why people are asking themselves these questions, which is like, you know, the more that we hear about what the board was thinking before they decided to fire Sam, I think the more people are wondering about what are the patterns of behavior that he shows that led to the board trying to make this drastic move. yeah that's actually an interesting point so when sam orton was fired from open ai there was this very strange reaction from silicon valley including some in the media where it was almost like a hunger games everyone doing the symbol thing where everyone was like oh we got to put sam orton back in isn't it kind of strange we still don't know why he was actually fired though i mean helen toner has elaborated like i've never seen a have you seen anything like this in your career i think that it has been surprising that there has not been more of a clear answer um i think you know as as as time has gone on like we have heard a little bit more like i think helen toner has you know to her credit tried to give more information in in recent weeks about what happened.

28:32I think, you know, people were obviously asking this question six months ago. And so I think like there's been a little bit of a delay in trying to get this answer. And I wonder if maybe there just isn't like a very neat answer to it. And so and then in that absence, we get this kind of more of a like murky, multifaceted, multivoiced answer. But yes, I agree that it is sort of surprising that there hasn't been more clarification on what exactly happened or a little bit more granular detail about what led up to it. So on to the AI hype in general. Said that a bit weird, but I'll keep going. Why do you think there's such a gulf between what Sam Altman says and what ChatGPT can actually do?

29:24What Sam Altman says, what are you talking about specifically? As in he says it will be a super smart companion. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That he'll be all of these things. Well, this is something that we get into in episode three, which is a personal interest of mine, which is kind of the psychology of the AI industry right now. And, you know, I what I find so interesting about this and what we try to delve into in episode three and kind of throughout the series is these kind of like extreme projections about AI. And in the industry, you see both positive ones and negative ones. And I think, you know, the negative ones, that's what looks like AI doomerism, AI existential risk, sometimes called AI safety, depending on your point of view.

30:04But, you know, it's these projections that, you know, superintelligence might very quickly and very soon learn to self-improve in a way that allows it to rapidly outstrip our control and our capabilities and could lead to the extinction of humanity. There are so many interesting things to say about the psychology of believing that our human race might either be wiped out or incredibly changed within our lifetimes. And we get into that in episode three. I really wanted to get into the psychology of someone who believes that AI doom is just around the corner. And so we talked to someone who sort of became convinced of this belief soon after the 2016 AlphaGo matches in which the Go playing AI beat the world's champion in Go.

30:53And he talks about, yeah, deciding not to make a retirement account because he was like, what is the point? By the time I reach retirement age, either the world will be dramatically different and money won't matter or we'll all be dead. And I think that even though some people might scoff at that, that's like a real belief that people believe that these extreme possible scenarios are in our near future. And on the other hand, we also see extreme projections in a positive direction. You know, this idea that AI is going to unlock a whole new era of human flourishing that we might expand beyond our planet, that we might be able to give...

31:34Say what? Abundance. Abundance, right, exactly. You know, one of the things we do, I believe in episode three, is do a little bit of a supercut of Sam Albin talking about abundance. It's pretty clear that this is a way that he likes to frame our AI future is going to be this future in which everyone has plenty, right? Everyone has, you know, access to intelligence, abundant energy, abundant access to superintelligence that can help us live kind of our best lives and beyond our wildest dreams. Right. And I, you know, obviously Silicon Valley is a place where people like to make grandiose statements, but this is beyond that, right?

32:15This is not just, this is not just like, you know, we joked about WeWork, WeWork's mission statement was to elevate the world's consciousness. Like, well, galaxies of human flourishing for eons beyond us, like, that is on another scale, right? Like, we're talking about something that is sort of at an unprecedented level of extreme rhetoric. And I think that's really interesting. I think it is a very powerful motivator, both in a, you know, in the Doomer sense and also in the Abundance sense, people believing that what they're working on is the most important technological leap forward for humanity.

32:50talk about a motivating reason to work on this technology, right? Talk about a way to feel powerful or feel like you're making a huge difference. I think that's a really key part of what's driving a lot of work in AI right now. It's driving a lot of work, sure. But with Altman himself, there is this gulf. It is a million mile gulf between the things he says and what ChatGPT is even on the most basic level capable of doing and will be capable. And it just feels like, it almost feels like he's become the propagandist for the tech industry. And it's very strange to me how far that distance is. Because you've got the AI doomers and the AI optimists, I guess you'd call them.

33:38But Altman doesn't even feel like he's in with either. He's just kind of, he'll say one day that he doesn't think it's a creature. The next one he'll say it's going to kill us all. It all just feels like a PR campaign, but for nothing. Yeah, it has been interesting to try to answer the question. You know, one of the questions we tried to answer in the podcast is, does Sam actually believe, you know, because as you mentioned, there are some early clips of him. You know, when I say early, I mean around the time of founding OpenAI 2015 or so. there's some clips of him talking about um you know saying somewhat jokingly that ai might kill us all but there's also this uh you know very famous blog post that he wrote in 2015 in which he says that you know basically super intelligence is one of the most serious risks to humanity you know full stop and so it's clear that at some point in his life he believed kind of what we might now call a more doomer-y outlook.

34:37But as time has gone on, he has, you know, offered views that are a little bit more measured and more positive. You know, he tends to, you know, in his big media tour of 2023, he tended to talk about how AI was going to, you know, his projection was that AI would radically transform society, but that it would be net good, right? That, like, overall, we would be glad that this happened and that it would improve lives, even if in the short term, or for some people, it might prove to be bringing a lot of challenges as well. And so it is, you know, I think one of the interesting things about him is it is a little hard to pin down exactly what he thinks.

35:18I think you're right that I wouldn't consider him like a gung-ho, effective accelerationist. I would not consider him a doomer. He is like somewhere in this large gulf in between there. But I think he's also smart enough to know that making grandiose projections about what AI could bring is a compelling story, right? Like is a story that he can help sell by being like a spokesman for it. And often that is the role of a CEO is to be a really good storyteller, to bring the pitch of the company to the public, to investors, to potential employees, to customers, to try to sell them on this vision of the future and I do think Sam is good at that there is an interesting tidbit in episode three in which we interview a fiction writer who was actually hired on contract by open AI to write like a novella about AI futures and things like that and yeah he just talks a little bit about you know the novella is not I think in active use within open AI but they did at some point see value in commissioning it.

36:30And I think, you know, something that the author, Patrick House, explains to us is, you know, that opening eye, just like many other startups, is really motivated by story, right? And that Sam Altman is inspired by fiction, you know, is inspired by certain kinds of sci-fi. I think this is not unique to Sam. Many founders in Silicon Valley, you know, Elon Musk has talked about this as well, are driven to create things in part because of what they read about when they were younger, these dreams of the future. And so it's just interesting to get his perspective on how motivating a story can be and how motivating this compelling story of like, oh, we're building something that's going to change the course of human history.

37:11Like, you just couldn't ask for a more powerful motivating force. so as altman accumulates power and as he kind of ascends the top of open ai do you think he's done there do you think there's going to be another thing he starts because it feels like you've discussed like ubi and all these other things do you think he has grander ideas that he wants to pursue well obviously i can't speak to what's inside sam's head you don't know the man's mind But, I mean, past indicators would suggest yes. Like, I think he has proven pretty consistently that he's someone who, you know, is, you know, as much as he might focus on one project with a lot of effort, like, he is cooking things on the side.

38:00Like, this is a man, this is going to be an extended metaphor, but this is a man working at a stove that has, like, six burners, not one. And, you know, he, we already know that. What'd you say? Sorry. He's got a big house. He's got multiple houses. The, you know, we already know that, you know, in addition to running OpenAI, he has funded and or helped prompt the founding of or has, you know, been very involved in investing in and supporting other startups that, you know, are part of this kind of ecosystem of businesses that are connected to an AI future or might benefit in an AI future. So, for example, Helion, which is a nuclear fusion company, which he has invested a ton of money into, I think he has said publicly that, you know, his vision is that this is a potential way to provide abundant energy that could then power the technology that we need to, you know, improve AI to the level that we're hoping that it can get to or that he's hoping that it can get to.

39:07At the same time, you know, we've talked a little bit about universal basic income. This has been something that Sam has been a proponent of and an advocate of since at least 2016 when he was running Y Combinator and they started a side research project to study universal basic income by giving cash payments to families in Oakland of, I believe,$1 ,000 a month. That research project is still ongoing. It's now moved away from Y Combinator and is associated with Open Research, which is, I believe, funded by OpenAI. And so it has kind of moved with Sam to his new role. and of course he also co-founded this company called world coin which used these um silver orbs machines to scan uh to take pictures of your um iris and give everyone register every individual human as like a unique human individual and to create this eyeball registry in which by which one could in the future distribute a universal basic income.

40:14So he's funding these energy companies. He's like involved in these sort of the sort of crypto eyeball registry project that will help distribute UBI in this future that he's imagining. Like, I think it's safe to say he's definitely thinking about things beyond just open AI for the future and imagining like, okay, well, if we have this piece that's growing, what else will we need to support it? And I'm sure there are other things he's working on that we don't even know about, right? Like I know he has also funded some like longevity bioscience projects and things like that. I guarantee he's thinking about stuff beyond what we know about.

40:51Final question. Why do you think the entire tech industry has become so fascinated with AI? Do you think it's just Altman or is it something more? I do think ChatGPT started heating up this interest that was already percolating a little bit in the tech industry. But it does seem like something about ChatGPT captured the public imagination, made people imagine very seriously for the first time how AI could affect their lives, their lives individually. It used to be kind of this abstract thing that was a little farther away. Or maybe you understood that you were interacting with AI sometimes, like when you would look at flight price predictors.

41:32Or Siri or Alexa or something. But I think as we talk about this in episode three, but ChatGPT wasn't even new technology. It was actually just a different user interface on a model that already existed, GPT 3.5. And so to me, that actually speaks, I guess, to the power of like making a technology accessible to everyone and in a way that was like easy to use. And, you know, for better or for worse, that kind of got a lot of people in this like public momentum of people thinking about AI feeling, you know, just feeling like it had rapidly increased its capabilities in a short period of time. and yeah something about that really um captured not just you know the minds but also the hearts of people and like like getting them really thinking about like what could a future like this look like and i think while some people were excited a lot of people also reacted with fear right and like i think in the valley like you will hear a lot of people more openly discussing their fears of sort of like job loss or just like dramatic social change that might come about in the next 10 or 20 years.

42:49The feeling I get in conversations that I have in and around San Francisco is, you know, even people who are pretty deep in this technology are uncertain about whether it's going to be overall good or bad. Like, they're just uncertain of how to look back on this time, like whether it will have ended up being a leap forward for humanity or something different.

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44:39Altman has taken advantage of the fact that the tech industry might not have any hyper-growth markets left, knowing that ChatGPT is, much like Sam Altman, incredibly adept at mimicking depth and experience by parroting the experiences of those that have actually done things. Like Sam Altman, ChatGPT consumes information and feeds it back to the people using it in a way that feels superficially satisfying. and it's quite impressive to those who don't really care about creativity or depth and like i've said it takes advantage of the fact that the techie ecosystem has been dominated and funded by people who don't really build tech as i've said before generative ai things like chat gpt anthropics clawed microsoft's copilot which is also powered by chat gpt it's not going to become the incredible supercomputer that Sam Altman is promising.

45:32It will not be a virtual brain, or imminently human-like, or a super smart person that knows everything about you, because it is, at its deepest complexity, a fundamentally different technology based on mathematics and the probabilistic answer to what you have asked it, rather than anything resembling how human beings think or act or even know things. Generative AI does not know anything. How can a thing think when it doesn't know. Eh? Anyone want to ask Brad Lightcap? Miramarati, Sam Altman, any of these questions just once? Hear what they fart out? No? Ah. While ChatGPT isn't inherently useless, Altman realizes that it's impossible to generate the kind of funding and hype he needs based on its actual achievements, and that to continue to accumulate power and money, which is his only goal, he has to speciously hype it, and he has to hype it to wealthy and powerful people who also do not participate in the creation of anything.

46:32And that's who he is. I've been pretty mean about this guy. I really have, but he does have a skill. He knows a mark. He knows how to say the right things and get in the right rooms with the people who aren't really touching the software or the hardware. He knows what they need to hear. He knows what the VCs need to hear. He knows quite aptly what this needs to sound like. But if he had to say what ChatGPT does today, what would he say? Yeah, yeah, it's really good at generating a bunch of text that's kind of shitty. Yeah, sometimes it does math, right? And sometimes it does it really wrong. Sometimes you ask it to do it.

47:11It can draw a picture. Hey, what do you think of that? These are all things, by the way, that if like a six-year-old told you, you'd be like, wow, that's really impressive. Or like a 10-year-old perhaps because that's a living being chat gpt does these things and it does it i know it's cheesy to say but in a soulless way but it really does that because and the reason all of this the writing and the horrible video and the images the reason it feels so empty is because even the most manure adjacent press release still has gone through someone's manure adjacent brain Even the most pallid, empty copy you've read has gone through someone.

47:50A person has put thought and intention in, even if they're not great with the English language. What ChatGPT does is use math to generate the next thing. And sometimes it gets it pretty right. But pretty right is not enough to mimic human creation. But look at Sam Altman. Look who he is. What has he created, other than wealth for him and other people? What about Sam Altman is particularly exciting? Well, he's been rich before, and his money made him even richer. That's pretty good. He was at Y Combinator. Don't ask too much about what happened there. Just feels like sometimes Silicon Valley can't wipe its own ass.

48:35It can't see when there's a wolf amongst the sheep. It can't see when someone isn't really part of the system, other than finding new ways to manipulate and extract value from it. And Sam Altman is a monster created by Silicon Valley's sin. And their sin, by the way, is empowering and elevating those who don't build software, which in turn has led to the greater sin of allowing the tech industry to drift away from fixing the problems of actual human beings. Sam Altman's manipulative little power plays have been so effective because so many of the power players in venture capital and the public markets and even tech companies are disconnected from the process of building things, of building software and hardware, and that makes them incapable or perhaps unwilling to understand that Sam Altman is leading them to a deeply desolate place.

49:27And on some level, it's kind of impressive how he succeeded in bending these fools to his whims, to the point that executives like Sundar Pichai of Google are willing to break Google search in pursuit of this next big hype cycle created by Sam Altman. He might not create anything, but he's excellent at spotting market opportunities, even if these opportunities involve him transparently lying about the technology he creates, all while having his nasty little boosters further propagate these bullshit, mostly because they don't know, or perhaps they don't care if Sam Altman's full of shit. Maybe it doesn't matter to them.

50:06It doesn't matter that Google search is still plagued with nonsensical AI answers that sometimes steal other people's work, or that AI in legal research has been proven to regularly hallucinate, which, by the way, is a problem that's impossible to fix. It's all happening because AI is the new thing that can be sold to the markets, and it's all happening because Sam Altman, intentionally or otherwise, has created a totally hollow hype cycle. and all of this is thanks to sam altman and a tech industry that's lost its ability to create things worthy of an actual hype cycle to the point that this spacious non-technical manipulator can lead it down this nasty ugly offensive anti-tech path the tech industry has spent years pissing off customers with platforms like facebook and google actively making their products worse in the pursuit of perpetual growth unashamedly turning their backs on the people that made them rich and acting with this horrifying contempt for their users.

51:06And I believe the result will be that tech is going to face a harsh reprimand from society. As I mentioned in the rock-com bubble, things are already falling apart. Web traffic is already dropping. And what sucks is the people around Sam Altman should have been able to see this. Even putting aside his resume, I've listened to an alarming amount of Sam Altman talk. and I'm a public relations person who the hell am I I'm someone who's been around a lot of people who make shit up I've been around a lot of people whose job it is to kind of obfuscate things and quite frankly Ormond's really obvious I'm not gonna do any weird lie to me-esque ways of proving he's lying he just doesn't ever get pushed into any depth no one ever asks him really technical questions, or even just a question like, hey, Sam, did you work on any of the code at OpenAI?

52:03What did you work on? I know you can't talk about the future, Sam, but how close are we actually to AGI? And if he says, oh, a few years, that's not specific enough, Sam. How about give me a ballpark? And then when a lies, again, you say, okay, Sam, how do we get from generative AI to AGI? And when he starts waffling, say, No, no, no. Be specific, Sam. This is how you actually ask questions. And when you say things like this, by the way, to technical founders, they don't get worried. They don't obfuscate. They may say, I can't talk about this due to legal things, which is fine. But they'll generally try and talk to you.

52:45Listen to any interview with any other technical AI person. Listen to them and then listen to Sam Altman. He's full of it. It's so obvious. and one deeply unfair thing with the valley is there are people that get held to these standards early stage startups generally do the ones that aren't handed to people like altman or alexis ohenian of reddit or paul graham or reed hoffman they don't get those chances because they're not saying the things that need to be said to the venture capitalists they're not in the circles they're not doing the right things because the right things are no longer the right thing for the tech industry.

53:27And when all of this falls apart, Sam Orman's going to be fine. When this all collapses, he'll find something to blame it on. Market forces, a lack of energy breakthroughs, unfortunate economic things, all of that nonsense. And he'll remain a billionaire capable of doing anything he wants. The people that are going to suffer are the people working in Silicon Valley who aren't Sam Allman. The people that did not get born with a silver spoon in each hand and then handed further silver spoons as they walked the streets of San Francisco. People that don't live in nine and a half thousand square foot mansions.

54:04The people trying to raise money who can't right now because all the VCs are obsessed with AI. The people that will get fired from public tech companies when a depression hits because the markets realize that the generative AI boom was a bubble. When they realized that the most famous people in tech have been making these promises for nobody other than the markets. Well, the markets need you to do something eventually, and I just don't think it's going to happen. And I think that we need to really think, why was Sam Altman allowed to get to this point? Why did so many people like Paul Graham, like reed hoffman like brian chesky like satia nadella back up this obvious con artist who has acted like this forever and what sucks is i don't know if the valley is going to learn anything unless it's really bad and i don't want it to be by the way i would love to be wrong i would love for all of this to just be like sam oldman's actually a genius turns out the whole thing's no no it's not going to happen and i worry that there is no smooth way out of this that there is no way to just casually integrate OpenAI with Microsoft.

55:17Because now there's an antitrust thing going in with Microsoft and acquiring InflectionAI, another AI company. And that's the thing. It feels like we are approaching a precipice here. And the only way to avoid it is for people to come clean, which is never going to happen. Or, of course, for Sam Altman not to be lying for HCI to actually come out of open AI. And by the way, it's going to need to be in the next year. I don't think they've got even three quarters left. I think that once this falls apart, once the markets realize, oh shit, this is not profitable. This is not sustainable. They're going to walk away from it.

55:57When companies realize that generative AI has given them a couple percent profit, maybe. They're going to be pissed because this is not a stock rally worthy boondoggle. This is not going to be pretty. When things fall apart for Nvidia, you're still over $1 ,000 when those orders stop coming in quite as fast. What do you think is going to happen to tech stocks? Startups are already having trouble raising money. And they're having trouble raising money because the people giving out the money are too disconnected from the creation of software and hardware. The only way to fix Silicon Valley perhaps is an apocalypse.

56:40Perhaps is people like Sam Altman getting washed out. I don't want it to happen. I really must be bloody clear. But maybe it won't be apocalyptic. Maybe it would just be a brutal realignment. And maybe Silicon Valley needs that realignment because this industry desperately needs a big bath full of ice and they need to dunk their head in it aggressively and wake the hell up. Venture capital needs to put money back into real things. The largest tech companies need to realign and build for sustainability so they're not binging and purging staff with every boom. And if we really are at the end of the hyper growth era, every tech company needs to be thinking profit and sustainability again.

57:26And that's a better Silicon Valley, because a better Silicon Valley builds things for people. It solves real problems. It doesn't have to lie about what the thing could do in the future so that it can sell a thing today. And I realize that sounds like the foundation of most venture capital. That's fine at the seed stage. That's fine at this moonshot stage where your early, early days. It is not befitting the most famous company in tech. It is not befitting a multi-billionaire. It is not befitting anyone, and it is insulting to the people actually building things both in and outside of technology.

58:02The people I hear from after every episode, they are angry. They are frustrated because there are good people in tech. There are people building real things. There are people that remember a time when the tech industry was exciting, when people were talking about cool shit in the future and then they'd actually do it. Returning to that is better for society and the tech industry. I just don't know when it's going to happen.

58:34Thank you for listening to Better Offline. The editor and composer of the Better Offline theme song is Matt Ossowski. You can check out more of his music and audio projects at mattosowski.com. M-A-T-T-O-S-O-W-S-K-I.com You can email me at ez at betteroffline.com or visit betteroffline.com to find more podcast links and, of course, my newsletter. I also really recommend you go to chat.wheresyoured.at to visit the Discord and go to r slash betteroffline to check out our Reddit. Thank you so much for listening. Better Offline is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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1:00:14Take financial possession of your apartment by December 31, 2025 and save. Discover more at brightviewseniorliving.com. Equal housing opportunity. Stop settling for weak sound. It's time to level up your game and bring the boom. Hit the town with the ultra-durable LGX Boom Portable Speaker and enjoy vibrant sound wherever you go. elevate your listening experience to new heights because let's be real your music deserves it the future of sound is now with lg x boom and for a limited time save 25 at lg.com with code fall 25 bring the boom x boom this is an iheart podcast