Sam Altman’s Trust Issues at OpenAI

25:42And there are blog posts from him in recent years where he talks about, you know, we're right on the cusp of maybe even have cleared the event horizon is one term he uses. And God knows what that means. Well, a trajectory that will bring us very imminently to not only artificial general intelligence, but a further development beyond artificial super intelligence. and in turn to he itemizes, for instance, you know, curing cancer, traveling to other planets. Essentially— Capturing the light cone of all economic value. Okay, I read that. Time out. We put it in quotes. What the hell did that mean?

26:19It's a sci-fi-ish thing that basically means capturing all the economic value in the solar system. So it involves space colonization usually. So we're talking, you know, comfortable living after that. Super abundance. We'll all be chilling. So some of it is the, you know, the Keynesian thing of like in the future, we'll all have lives of leisure and we won't have to work. But you can see how this stuff. Too late for me. And he does, for instance. Well, it's very unclear. And he advocates for, you know, universal basic income. As a part of this future. But when we asked, for instance, you know, what do you think about all of these economic projections that hold that so many jobs are going to be disrupted by this?

27:04The reflection and the grappling with it was not, in my view, terribly deep. You know, he does believe or seem to believe, as he says them, all of his optimistic projections. But then he also says it's a bubble at the same time. And so it's like, how do you? He basically, on the joblessness and the risk of a bubble, he says, well, actually, it's just going to make everything better. Everyone will have access to ChatGPT. That's going to allow people who are unemployed to—I mean, I'm paraphrasing broadly, but essentially, it's going to allow for more startup creation, and that's going to help everyone.

27:40And we'll have a big old foundation, and we're going to do some charitable activity, and that'll help. And also you see, I mean, Ronan, you brought up his blog posts. Just to talk about the shifting pitch over time, you know, people call him this great pitch man. The blog posts now are very bullish, optimistic. We're going to cure cancer. You go back two or three years and the blog posts say we need to solve alignment or we will have a rogue AI that stands out. The alignment problem. So the alignment problem is supposed to be if we build a super intelligence that is not aligned with our interest, it might.

28:12So it doesn't have to come alive and become Hal 9000 or whatever to kill us. We quote a blog post in the piece of someone saying all it has to do is, you know, be misaligned with our interests and accidentally kill us. And the person who wrote that blog post was Sam Altman. One of the things that you're kind of getting at here is a politics kind of – Diplomacy. Ethereal politics. And, you know, some of his rhetoric is kind of utopian lefty. And yet he's made his accommodation with and friendship with the Trumps. Tell me about that. Yeah. So for a long time, he donated to Democrats and he said Trump is this unacceptable threat to America.

28:56Compared him to Hitler. As did his vice president and several other people. And then he, you know, in 2024, he starts to, you know, shift. He dialed back the Hitler. Dialed back the Hitler. We almost went with that as the headline of the piece. And then he starts to say, you know, I think this country will be okay no matter what happens. And it seems very clear, actually, according to a bunch of Biden administration national security officials who we spoke to. He used to go to the Biden White House all the time. All the time and encourage them to regulate more heavily. Right. and say, this executive order doesn't go far enough.

29:33We need to restrict and regulate this technology more. Then Trump comes in, literal day one, literal first day of the Trump administration. They announce massive new data infrastructure projects. And then Trump and his administration start blessing this acceleration off to the races. And the rhetoric of the Trump White House is safety is a false concern. We heard that from, I think, J.D. Vance says this in the piece. And David Sachs, and yeah. Safety has fallen out of favor in Silicon Valley in Washington to a great extent. And one of the things we document in this piece is Sam Altman's various transformations and his conflicting stances at various times also represent a wider sea change.

30:14The moment of the blip when people in this industry were still - The coup attempt. The coup attempt, the firing. When people in the industry were still uncertain about whether you should treat executives who shape this transformative technology as just other executives and hold them to those normal standards, or whether this requires people with an elevated level of integrity because they hold our future in their hands. That was unsettled at the time in a way that really led to these events where you had a company that started as a nonprofit, was still to some extent a nonprofit, a bunch of people who joined signing up for that mission, and they said, this guy is lying too much and he has to go.

30:55And just for the record, now OpenAI is solidly a... It is a for-profit. No less than the others. And it's what was once— Yeah, they call themselves a PBC, but they're— What's a PBC? A public benefit corporation. But functionally, it is a for-profit institution, and what was once the main event, the nonprofit, now has a 27%, 26 %? Yeah, 20, yeah. It has a minority stake. Yeah. So the inflection point of the firing and the reason we look at it as an important one in this piece is a moment where that argument that we should have this elevated standard, the rubber met the road. It was tested. And what we see afterwards, him clawing his way back in this way, partly on the strength of going to a bunch of investors.

31:39As we document, we get inside of those rooms and we see how those conversations went and saying like, hey, these people just fired me for this, you know, vaporous thing. Now, he was able to do that in part because I think that old board that fired him did not acquit themselves strategically in many ways, shall we say. There was not a lot of transparency. But he was able to, in making the argument for himself, also, I think, assert and get into the bloodstream a broader argument that that kind of safety mindedness no longer has a place in a race to achieve AGI with massive economic stakes. And today you see that reality that there is a very fair argument that these firms are on safety engaged in something of a race to the bottom.

32:21Elon Musk isn't the only person that's suing OpenAI. How many court cases are there currently against the company that are related to suicides and murders allegedly prompted by ChatGPT? Yeah. Many ongoing suits for various different things. So some of this has to do with liability. You don't have to believe in the sci-fi existential harms to see the very real harms that are already occurring. Psychosis that is furthered by addiction to these chatbots. Okay, how would that happen? Well, this is not just like a Google search where, you know, this is an ongoing kind of relationship that people have with a chatbot.

33:07And the chatbots can be sycophantic. ChatGPT is now able to convince human observers that it is human more often than humans are able to. So we're in— Please be more specific before I throw myself out the window. This is research published last year that when you look at this test of can a chatbot deceive a human observer into thinking that the chatbot is a human, human beings pass that threshold less often than ChatGPT. And people are doing these quizzes all the time of, you know, can you tell what's AI writing and what's Cormac McCarthy? And, you know, people are no better than 50 percent and stuff.

33:45So we don't. That promises well for our profession. Yeah. Well, so this is why I was going to say we don't we we we word people don't like thinking about this. But it turns out that it kind of is the case that if you take all the words in the universe, crunch them onto a chip, it can kind of create a golem of new words that can kind of infinitely spit out. And we should point out that Condé Nast, the company that owns The New Yorker and Vogue and Wired and all the rest, has a deal like many, many other publication companies with OpenAI and other such companies for that very purpose. Yeah, and like all these – They're limited and I think the fear for a lot of publishers is that they're going to take it anyway and we'll get nothing for it.

34:32Mm-hmm. Like a lot of these dual-use technologies, you know, even the most dire critics of this stuff can't deny that it's useful and fun and engaging. And, you know, if it weren't so useful, it wouldn't pose such an economic threat. And worth pointing out, useful in a very sincere and deep way. I mean, when you look at the medical applications, lives are being saved. For diagnostics and research. For diagnostics, it is a game changer for things like, you know, severe weather warnings. which may sound banal, but that is truly a lifesaver. There are all kinds of applications where this is the real deal already.

35:12I'm speaking with Ronan Farrow and Andrew Marantz, who have just published a long and very thorough account in The New Yorker of Sam Altman's tenure as CEO of OpenAI. Our conversation continues in a moment. This is The New Yorker Radio Hour. Stick around.

35:48This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick, and I've been speaking today with two of our writers, Ronan Farrow and Andrew Morantz. They spent over a year reporting on Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, for a piece that's just been published in The New Yorker this week. They wanted to understand Altman and his vision of the future, but they also wanted to understand where he comes from, including parts of his life that Altman himself seemed wary of analyzing.

36:20You wanted to get a sense of who this guy was, and I think he told you that he was the victim of a really serious homophobic attack when he was a teenager, although he was reluctant to go into it in much detail. How does he think, Ronan, that that moment shaped him, if at all, and how do you see it? If I'm being honest, through this reporting, I feel oddly somewhat connected to Sam. He may have a different view of the rapport. I do think I understand him on a certain level. You know, I had these moments with him where I would ask, Like, what is your personal human experience of so many people around you saying these things about your honesty and integrity?

37:03Because for me, it would be such a terribly devastating thing to hear. And I will say on this point, he is somewhat resistant to self-reflection, is my impression, as he is on a range of these questions. When we talked about his roots and some of these perhaps formative factors, his sexual identity, his Jewishness, his socioeconomic background. Which was prosperous. Prosperous, right. A kind of fancy suburban family. Yeah, upper middle class. A dermatologist, very well connected. His father is a kind of housing activist. he often and particularly on the sexuality question you know he'll even cop to the lack of reflection he's in the piece saying well yes you know I got beat up this time I don't want to talk about it because I think people will see it as me playing for sympathy and being manipulative so he's internalized some of these critiques and also he sincerely in that moment and later when we were fact checking this piece just really emphasized, I want to be dismissive of that.

38:11You know, this did not define me. And when I would ask him some of these questions, you know, what is your experience of this? Have you grappled with this in therapy, for instance? Do you do therapy? You know, he recites a lot of the kind of conventional West Coast wisdom about like breath work and said he has tried and liked therapy vaguely. But it was very clear that amidst this stratospheric rise and a lot of these difficulties and this would be for most of us, I think, painful criticism, there has not been a process of really looking inward. Of reckoning. That is my take, having asked him these questions.

38:53He sort of is breezily dismissive. And I think that that runs through a lot of the professional situations that we narrate, that there are other people who really have a relationship that matters to them internally with the truth of a situation. And I think he is uniquely suited in some ways to this job because he really can effortlessly shift between one version of reality and another as he is marshalling people to his cause. You spent a lot of time in the last year looking into some very lurid allegations about Sam Altman's personal life, his sexual life, what he may or may not have done. What did you conclude?

39:32What can you say about that? So this is one area where it's important to note we didn't set out looking for that. Part of what makes this circumstance extraordinary is the prevalence of this allegation that Sam Altman buys all the time. Another thing that makes it extraordinary is that in addition to those, in my view, more substantive critiques that are so widespread, there are incredibly widespread claims about his personal life that don't stand up to as much scrutiny. Again, in my view, having looked at this for months and months. We capture the way in which actually, ironically, the existence of these falsified or thin claims trumped up by rivals kind of obfuscates the real criticism.

40:14the atmosphere of conflict in this field is we quote one executive saying shakespearean the most dangerous worse than the rise of the internet um and and other businesses the railroads or whatever it might be you could uh historians could debate but certainly we talked to many people in this field who say absolutely yes and you know one of the things we encountered and i'm not talking about like a little bit here and there from arrival i mean i got you know uh the better part of a dozen incoming calls from government officials, from people at investment firms, from rivals. You talk to anyone in this industry, and they will cite this, in many cases, as common knowledge, claims that, you know, Sam pursues minors.

40:55That's a very persistent one. And let's quickly stipulate that there's no... And we found no evidence of this. Sam and I had direct conversations about it. And while obviously, you know, people have been telling us to take things Sam Altman says with a grain of salt, I did feel there was a degree of sincerity in some of those conversations where we would talk, you know, in addition to our on the record conversations, we had, you know, frank personal conversations, where I think I got a picture of his relationship with these allegations. And we put what the facts we uncover can sustain in the piece, which is we found absolutely nothing.

41:27This appears to be untrue. And it's pushed by his opponents. I mean, we have dossiers. Can you say who? From Elon Musk's intermediaries, in some cases paid by Elon Musk. And if Elon Musk were sitting here, he'd say what? Well, we certainly reached out to him for an interview about it, and he declined. He was busy. But we did fact check with other intermediaries of his, and he has responses to some of the things that we say. On this matter, it is incontrovertible that Altman's rivals are pushing this and hard. Microsoft has been a huge funder of OpenAI with a lot of exclusive access to their own products.

42:10And just recently it was reported that Microsoft is considering whether to sue OpenAI and Amazon for a deal that seems to go around Microsoft. Explain what this is all about because it seems like a mess to me. Well, it's one of several examples where business partners or business rivals accuse Altman and OpenAI of making conflicting announcements about deals that they say are incompatible. Now, I will not bore you with the technical particulars of this, but essentially, Microsoft is an exclusive provider of a certain kind of foundational models. And they announced a deal on top of that. Actually, on the same day, they reaffirmed that Microsoft exclusivity with Amazon.

42:52And Microsoft says this new deal, which is to do with enterprise products that allow businesses to build agents. They say that that depends on the very thing that Microsoft is supposed to control exclusively. And, you know, look, they've since then released sort of mutual statements, sort of mutual. Microsoft saying, like, we gather that OpenAI understands their legal obligations here. So it's tense. But you talk to Microsoft executives behind the scenes, and they say, first of all, this was absolutely in conflict, that he announced two conflicting things, that there is no way for him to achieve the thing that is promised in the Amazon announcement, which is essentially we're going to build a new solution that deconflicts these things.

43:36Well, this also gets to the circularity of a lot of these deals. Like a lot of times a meme that you'll see when describing one of – OpenAI has a deal with NVIDIA and NVIDIA has a deal with Amazon and Amazon has a deal with OpenAI. People will just put a picture of an extension cord plugged into itself. Like there are a lot of these deals that are like I buy your stuff, you buy my stuff. Andrew, how big is OpenAI? Does it make a profit? They certainly had lots and lots and lots of investing. Well, how big and do they make a profit are different. Exactly. Exactly. They are burning through cash at an enormous rate.

44:07I mean, so while this piece was in production, we kept having to change. They've just sustained the biggest fundraising round in history to a higher number because they kept closing more fundraising rounds. The latest, I think, was$122 billion. And at the same time, they're still, as far as we can tell, losing money. Where does the money go? So a lot of it is going into data centers. Data centers, right. So they're building one in the UAE that is going to be seven times as big as Central Park and use about as much electricity as Miami. So this is great for the environment. Yeah, perfect for the environment.

44:41But don't worry because AGI is going to fix the environment. I feel better already. And geopolitically, it's worth noting a big thread in this piece is in addition to talking about some of those early ideas that were raised about pitting powers against each other. there is still a present-day reality of this computational power becoming, as Sam has said, the new currency of the world and the factor that may shape the balance of power between nations. And so there are people within this industry and within the national security establishment who feel that this unrestrained and, in Altman's case, often very nakedly transactional approach to getting as much money as possible, which inevitably in the current reality means doubling down on Middle Eastern money.

45:26There are those critics who say that is concentrating a new kind of power that is incredibly geopolitically sensitive under autocracies. That may eventually be beyond our control, that you could wind up with a situation where a dictator has a disproportionate ownership of the most powerful technology on Earth. And that that could pose a real national security threat. But that's where the money is. And that is where the money is. And we should say it's outcome standard in Silicon Valley to fundraise from the Middle East. Hollywood, everywhere. Everywhere. But I will say even against that backdrop, there was a lot more grumbling about Altman's sweeping vision of really getting such a massive amount of money and an exchange promising such a massive amount of infrastructure in UAE particularly.

46:14Where you get your funding for a movie is different than where you put, as some people call it, a country of geniuses in a data center. In other words, if you really think that you're growing a new form of superintelligence. You want to keep it in the family. Exactly. I'm going to ask you both as first Ronan. I get the sense that we all know what Elon Musk at this point means and what Elon Musk wants. Sam Altman is more mysterious, it seems to me, Ronan. What does Sam Altman want? What's the grand ambition here, to be the richest man in the world, to at some point he says that he was more interested in power than he is in money?

46:57What's your sense of that? I don't think it's just a caricature or hyperbole to say, Sam Altman very often wants what you want in this moment. and you know that is what does that mean that is the crux of the matter sam altman more often than not it seems across all of this documentation and sourcing reads what the person on the other side of the table needs and wants and he tells them those are the things he wants and well the the entire founding uh story of the company uh that at a time when safety fears had run wild and were kind of the animating engine of discourse, he was the safety guy. And he told everyone that was his deepest belief.

47:45Now, he says, and not totally unfairly, you know, evolution over time is a real thing. And I've had to adapt to changing circumstances. But even allowing for that, in both that big picture where he's gone from being the safety guy to being the, he would dispute this, but I would say fairly accurate to say no regulation guy. and also in the micro picture, in all of these small interactions. You know, we tell the story of an interaction where he summons Dario Amadei, this now competitor from Anthropic, when prior to the founding of Anthropic, Amadei was a senior person at OpenAI, into a room along with Amadei's sister, who was also at the company, and accused them both of being overly political and working against him.

48:30And then they called in another executive who Altman had said was the source of this rumor. And that executive said, I never said that. And Altman said, well, I never said that either. According to an account from someone there, and we talked about all the people involved, you can see the exact reporting. But the gist is, you know, he will often in the same moment reflect the different views and desires. He is a profoundly, by his own telling, conflict-averse person. And I think the piece holds a lot of sympathy for the reality of that emotionally and the understandability of that, the relatability of that.

49:05But it also doesn't explain it away. This is a trait that is present in him to a truly extraordinary extent that has ramifications for his businesses and for the world. Andrew? Yeah, I think it's important to grasp how much of the initial pitch for this was based on this view of the world that has completely flipped over time because we think of it through the lens of, sure, businesses put out nice press releases and they say we're not going to be evil and then they redefine what they think is evil over time. This is not that. This is, Altman went to great lengths to write blog posts, to convince people, to take people out to dinner, to say, I am the person you can trust to usher this technology into existence without literally killing everyone on earth.

49:56That was literally the pitch. So then for him now to say, we don't need to worry about all that Doomer stuff. Like, it's kind of one of those either you were lying then or you're lying now. And I personally— Or he might argue that something happened in the research on AI that made him less alarmist. He might, but he didn't. What he says is he redefines the problem. Yeah. He redefines the alignment problem away from this civilizational existential thing. Now he defines the alignment problem as something that's annoying, like, you know, Instagram algorithms that tempt you to waste your time. So he just kind of shifts the pitch.

50:36I think it's important to say sometimes people see, you know, heavy duty investigative reporting from The New Yorker, maybe particularly my work, and they think like this is a hit piece about a villain. I would, of course, dispute that characterization. We look at these complex problems fairly. In this case in particular, though, this is something different than cases where we're looking at a single clear-cut criminal allocation. There are people in Silicon Valley who think of Sam Altman as a villain. For what it's worth, I emerge from this reporting not thinking of Sam Altman as a villain. I think he is a complicated character.

51:10I think he often believes what he is saying in the moment. I think what he says about this being rooted in conflict aversion is very likely real. And as one person close to him told us in the piece, he really seems to lack any self-doubt. So that is a superpower. He believes it, I think, when he says it. And I think he's grappling with the consequences. The industry needs to grapple with the consequences, too, I think is the main case I'm making. I really agree. And I think one way of putting this, David, is those memos that were the initial thing that got him fired, if something simple enough, if those memos had contained a simple enough smoking gun, we would have known about it long before this.

51:53They don't contain a single smoking gun. What they contain is a pattern of behavior that you need a 16 ,000-word New Yorker piece to elucidate genuinely. Ronan Farrow, Andrew Morantz, thanks so much. Thanks, David.

52:09You can read that piece at newyorker.com. It's called Sam Altman may control the future, can he be trusted? And you can subscribe to The New Yorker there as well, newyorker.com. This is The New Yorker Radio Hour. Thanks so much for listening. See you next time.

52:28The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Meryl Garbus of Tune Yards, with additional music by Louis Mitchell. This episode was produced by Max Balton, Adam Howard, David Krasnow, Jeffrey Masters, Louis Mitchell, Jared Paul, and Ursula Sommer. With guidance from Emily Botin and assistance from Michael May, David Gable, Alex Barish, Victor Guan, and Alejandra Decket. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Charina Endowment Fund.

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