Sam Altman’s Trust Issues at OpenAI

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0:47You'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. This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. 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.

1:34And 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 chat GPT, and that exploded into our consciousness in 2022. But the chat bots are just the tip of the iceberg. OpenAI is planning to go public this year, and it recently fundraised more money than any company ever.

2:20Ronan Farrow and Andrew Morantz have spoken with over 100 people closely connected to Sam Altman and with Altman himself many times. They began by looking in particular at the week when Altman was very suddenly fired from OpenAI and days later reinstated as CEO. That whole episode has been mired in secrecy and confusion. Ronan and Andrew see the firing, the blip as they call it, as a key to understanding Altman and the problems with his leadership. Their extraordinary investigation in The New Yorker is called Sam Altman may control the future. Can he be trusted?

3:02Now, Andrew, Ronan, you compare Sam Altman to Robert Oppenheimer, who, of course, was pivotal in developing the A-bomb. Oppenheimer not only developed a technology, but in a sense, he defined an age in American life, the atomic age. But there's, of course, something extremely ominous about that comparison, too. So let's begin this way, Andrew. Who is Sam Altman, and why would you compare him to Robert Oppenheimer? Well, for one thing, we compare him to Oppenheimer because he compares himself to Oppenheimer. I mean, constantly. Constant throughout the rhetoric before OpenAI existed for why it needed to exist, there's this constant thread of analogies to the Manhattan Project.

3:45So when he emails Elon Musk out of the blue in May of 2015, he says, hi, Elon. This is Sam. He says, I think we need a Manhattan Project for AI. And it does have this dual-edge nature to it, which is both we're going to be the good guys and defeat the bad guys. Right? So. Where the Americans are going to defeat the Nazis. Yeah. But so in this case, instead of the Nazis, it's either China in a national security context or Google in a competitive corporate context. But there's also the ominous part, Ronan, is the notion that the atomic bomb defined an age, the atomic age. It still looms over our politics and global security.

4:25What is the potential ominous aspect of AI? We hear about it as something that could be fantastic for the development of drugs, for all kinds of things, but it could also wipe out God knows how many jobs. But it goes darker than that. I will say at the outset of this reporting, I was not myself convinced of the much-ballyhood transformative impact of this technology. I really emerged from this more convinced. There's the scenarios that I think you're alluding to, right? the atom bomb-esque ones, the idea that this really could lead to a kind of Terminator Skynet scenario where a rogue artificial intelligence falls out of alignment with what we want and takes control of nukes.

5:10But you don't have to buy into those extreme scenarios to also see the immediate impact that the entire U.S. economy is now propped up by a few companies that are all in on AI, with open AI at the center of it, that most credible projections very immediately foresee millions of jobs being exposed to disruption by this, that it's already taking form as a significant change agent in the way weapons are used in battlefields that they can now just fire without human operators. That is something in the very immediate future. It's taking form in bioweapon development. These are all things that are happening or on the verge of happening, not far-off fantasies.

5:54Now, just to be clear, Andrew, what most of us have in mind in terms of AI is chatbots, which run on large language models. How is that different from the aspiration of an AGI, artificial general intelligence? And that's something that doesn't exist yet. ChatGPT is a useful tool that can help you write emails. And AGI is supposed to be able to do any cognitive task that any person can do arguably better. So it's general because it can not only write emails or play chess, but it can also discover new drugs or solve new medical problems or break new ground in physics. So we're not quite there yet.

6:33What's interesting, Andrew, is that you quickly describe Sam Altman as somebody who really doesn't have that much computer science knowledge. that when it comes to the actual science, the actual technology, Sam Altman is no great genius. So what does he bring to the table that makes him such a transformative figure? Yeah. He, in a sense, you know, what every entrepreneur does is, you know, bring together technical talent and investors and merge them into a solvent company. So in that sense, It's not that remarkable. I think what makes him unusual is he's not bringing this kind of bull in a China shop.

7:13You know, he's not Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos and just saying, I'm going to bulldoze my way to power. He brings this kind of subtle sales pitch around 2014, 2015, 2016, where the public is feeling kind of burned out on the bluster of tech tycoons. You know, everyone's suddenly mad at social media, Republicans for stifling their speech and Democrats for giving us Trump and whatever. And he comes in and instead of saying, who needs Luddite regulators? He says, actually, please regulate me because the thing I'm building is so scary that if you don't regulate me, everyone you love will die. And it turns out to be a counterintuitively very good sales pitch.

7:51And even more importantly, it's a good pitch for recruiting. So it's a pitch to what? He had been at something called Y Combinator, which was a kind of factory for technology and technology investments, a development place, if you will. And then he begins, right, and he begins something called OpenAI, which is what, Ronan? Well, it started out as a nonprofit. And this is really at the heart of the story. This is a distinction that Elon Musk is now suing Sam Altman and OpenAI over. Well, who was involved in OpenAI in the beginning? So at the very beginning, Sam Altman, who had a lot of irons on the fire, right?

8:28He was investing in a lot of different cutting edge areas. And AI became a fascination. He saw the industry moving towards that. And an interesting thing happened where he had been very optimistic about technology in general. But he, I think, saw an inflection point, according to people we talked to who were in conversations with him at the time and knew his thinking, where a lot of the leaders in the industry were becoming more apocalyptic about it. And one of those people was Elon Musk. And in fact, the very people, the scientific researchers who were most capable of building advanced AI were some of the most freaked out about it.

8:59So in order to pitch to them and recruit to them, he had to come to them, according to a lot of people, and say, I'm as scared as you are. And then we learned very quickly, very, very quickly, that a lot of people around Sam Altman discovered that, well, they just don't believe him. And they rebel against him and they think of him as a liar. Why is that, Ronan? These two things are deeply interrelated. Yes, Sam Altman could have presented this with a for-profit motive more openly and perhaps earlier, his critics say. But part of the power of his pitch was that he went to Elon Musk and he said, I hear you.

9:38This could destroy humanity. We need to put something together and we need it to be safety first. And it can't just be about racing to get the technology first. This has to be a scenario where we're willing to slow down on development to keep it safe. It was all rooted in a fear-driven argument. And that was why Google was the bad guy, because Google is for-profit. They're the megacorporation, so we're going to be... The good guys. And that was, as Andrew alluded to, a really powerful recruiting tool, because part of OpenAI's strength was not only did Sam Altman, through these quite extraordinary powers of persuasion, present this sort of fear-driven rationale why he needed to get the money for this, he also was able to go to the brightest minds in the field and say, this is a non-profit.

10:21it. We may not be able to pay as much as Google, but we can give you something else, which is we're the good guys. So what happened a few years ago? The blip? Yeah. What was the blip? So one of the top people who they recruited, who took, who was offered$6 million a year at Google and turned it down in order to go work for the good guys, was this guy Ilya Sutskever, who was on the board around 2020, in 2023. And he started to get the feeling as we quote him in the piece saying, I don't think Sam is the guy who should have his finger on the button to return to the atom bomb analogy. And so he starts to rally the board against Sam.

10:59Now, this has been a lingering question for years in Silicon Valley. What did Ilya see? What is in his secret memos that he compiled? Is there a smoking gun? Is there some one thing that explains it all? And what we found and the reason that you graciously gave us 16 ,000 words to explain it is that there is not one smoking gun. There is this small accumulation of detailed patterns of behavior that add up to, in aggregate, what people like Sutzke ever felt was someone who can't be entrusted with this world-altering technology. For example? There are certainly specific episodes over the history of OpenAI that have not yet been extensively reported.

11:40You know, we have a detailed account of a moment where critics within the company allege, and people threatened to quit over this, A plot was entertained at the highest levels of the company to sell the next generation of this technology, AGI, when it comes, to the highest international bidder, to pit China and Russia and the United States against each other. And that really did prompt some of the safety-minded people in the company to say, you know, as one tells us, this is insane. What would have been the repercussions? I mean, potentially a situation where Vladimir Putin has disproportionate control of the most dangerous technology in the world.

12:17Now, we should say this is something that ultimately did not come to fruition, and OpenAI says, oh, it was just one of many ideas that was considered for a time. But there were people - But that seems a little easy. That was just an idea that we were considering selling this to Vladimir Putin. Well, there you go. There you go. And, you know - It suggests a kind of amoralism, no? Well, and also one of their - That's what the critics say. One of their defenses was, we weren't talking about selling it, we were talking about giving it to them. Much better. So these are all hypotheticals, and they are kind of crazy-sounding hypotheticals, What emerges is a newly deep picture of Sam Altman through inside communications that haven't been out there before.

12:54What was behind his firing? Why those criticisms linger? And exactly how substantiated they are. There are many, many instances that the famous memos that have never been made public and got him fired within this company are now in there. And we really go through the evidence in a very forensic way. You know, this is not a simple piece. I don't think people are going to read this and have everyone reacting in one way. I think there are people who will look at this and they will come to the conclusion that maybe the sort of profit minded people who think safety as the main priority is more of a thing of the past are correct.

13:30There are people who will look at this and say, this is really scary and dangerous. The phrase that the board used at the time was not consistently candid. Liar, I believe, is the word used. Is it not? By many, many people and even things like pathological liar in great duplication across many sources. We talked to more than 100 people that are close to Altman in one way or another. And you talked to Altman six times. So tell me what that experience was like. You went to see him. More than a dozen times in the final fact check. No, no, no. I gather. And what's he like? Because I interviewed him here at the New Yorker Radio Hour.

14:06And I have to say, it was like interviewing a cloud. He answered in a very mild way and in a very skilled way, too, I would say. But I couldn't get my arms around his answer sometimes. We talked about the job loss issue, for example. And here's a bit of that interview from 2023. I don't think that most people won't work. I think for a bunch of reasons, that would be unfulfilling to a lot of people. Some people won't work, for sure. I think there are people in the world who don't want to work and get fulfillment in other ways, and that shouldn't be stigmatized either. But I think many people, let's say, want to create, want to do something that makes them feel useful, want to somehow contribute back to society.

14:49Well, let's slow down for a second. What does this imply in the much broader sense about what change is coming down the road in concrete terms? I think it means that we all are going to have much more powerful tools that significantly increase what a person is capable of doing, but also raise the bar on what a person needs to do to be sort of a productive member of society and contribute because these tools will do eventually. You know, I'd say that I left that interview not all that happy with myself. I didn't feel like I got any great purchase on what Sam Altman was about. But you obviously did with much greater time and much greater access, Ronan.

15:40People find it hard to wrap their arms around exactly what's going on with his motives. He is able to and inclined to tell different groups of people possibly conflicting things that make them all feel that they have the same concerns he has. That is an extraordinarily useful skill for a business person. But over time, what one person after another, a majority of the sources we talked to found, is that they just couldn't rely on any baseline of truth. That to an extraordinary extent, even on small things that are completely unnecessary to have any deception about. You know, we talk about an instance where he's in an office with colleagues apparently claiming that he was like a champion competitive ping pong player.

16:28And Altman says that this was probably a joke, but people thought it was serious enough that they were struck by the fact that then he was one of the worst ping pong players in the office. This is to give you an example of how banal it is sometimes. And then as Andrew pointed out, it extends to people allege that he has concealed some of his financial interests, that he deceived some board members and executives about the safety testing requirements of some products. So it also then filtered into serious stuff. And I will say I've never been on a story before where something this peculiar in that it's not a bright line smoking gun, but it is so prevalent that it is almost, I'm barely being hyperbolic here, all anyone can talk about after walking out of rooms with him.

17:09That is an extraordinary thing and very difficult to grapple with in a piece like this. We try to do it with great subtlety. How is that different from Elon Musk? Well, so this is part of the presentation, the temperamental presentation that Altman brings is not this kind of brash, swaggering. Not at all. Not at all. And so I think that's part of the pattern. If you hear from Elon Musk, I'm not boosting my own Twitter account. And then you find out that he was. You're like, okay. Yeah. Not particularly shocking. Kind of Trumpian. Yes. The Altman thing is very low-key. It's very thoughtful. Part of his pitch is presenting himself as conscientious.

17:46I hear you. One person, we don't quote this in the piece, but one person once called him the Michael Jordan of listening. Part of his— Right. So he looks you in the eye and he looks you in the eye. Yeah, exactly. And reflects back what you want to hear. And I think this is an important sort of summary after spending a year immersed in this. We represent in this piece a range of perspectives. There are the defenders of Altman, of course, and we spoke to many of them and they're represented in this piece. And amongst the critics, there's a spectrum. There's the people who are, you know, diehard safetyists, and they say, look, this technology may kill us all, and he is Machiavellian and sociopathic.

18:28There's all these extreme terms that get used by some critics, and that therefore this is truly dangerous. There are people in between who say, this is just dysfunctional management, that even if you're purely profit-motivated, an executive of a company this important can't be making conflicting representations all the time. I tend to feel inclined towards the analysis of Sam Altman through my own dealings with him in this story that holds, you know, it's not that Machiavellian. I think that he is someone who, he actually grapples with this in a new and more sincere way in this piece. He talks about having had some problems with this.

19:08He doesn't just pretend that this doesn't exist around him. He talks about changing over time. He talks about the deep roots of feeling like a people pleaser, which, you know, I understand. But I think he is reckoning now anew with the costs of that when it's taken to an extreme.

19:30I'm speaking with Ronan Farrow, along with Andrew Morantz. They've co-written a long, deep investigation of Sam Altman and the rise of open AI. That's all on The New Yorker this week. We'll continue in just a moment. This is The New Yorker Radio Hour.

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20:54This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Today, U.S. government agencies are starting to enforce a ban that President Trump imposed Friday barring the federal government from using AI tools made by Anthropic. The Silicon Valley company didn't want its tools... In February, a feud erupted between one of the leading AI companies, Anthropic, and the U.S. government. In short, Anthropic was providing artificial intelligence capability to the Pentagon, but Anthropic wouldn't allow its clawed system to launch autonomous weapons or to be used in mass surveillance. In response, the Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and the Pentagon called Anthropic a national security risk.

21:37Anthropic turned around and sued. And into the breach steps Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, and he swiftly made a deal with the Pentagon and replaced Anthropic. This is the same CEO who said three years ago to Congress that he feared what could happen if AI was deployed incorrectly. I think if this technology goes wrong, it can go quite wrong. And we want to be vocal about that. We want to work with the government to prevent that from happening. But we try to be very clear-eyed about what the downside case is and the work that we have to do to mitigate that. How did Sam Altman, who's now 40 years old, change his mind after all this time on such a fundamental issue?

22:22I put that question to Andrew Moranson and Ronan Farrow, who have jointly published a deep investigation of Sam Altman and his history at OpenAI. We'll continue our conversation now. Andrew, what did Sam Altman say to his own employees about this military contract versus what he said to the government? Altman said publicly, we stand with Anthropic. We think these are the right bright lines for them to hold. Privately, he was negotiating with the Pentagon for the same contract. And this gets to the Shakespearean rivalry stuff as well. This is often personal. This is often petty. But because the stakes are presented as being so high, like literal existential, I mean, people talk about it as who will win the AGI dictatorship.

23:12People talk about it as, you know, who will get the golden ring, who will get the ring of Sauron. So I think they just think if you're Sam Altman or Dario Amadei or Elon Musk, I think in their minds it's like anything is worth doing to win that competition because it is totally existential. What are the financial stakes for Sam Altman running? Immense. One of the things that we talk about is Sam had both positive and negative arguments he used to buoy this company. We've talked about how he marshaled people's fear. He also really rallied people around the optimistic projections of what this technology is going to be.

23:56And 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?

24:33It'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... He believes that. Well, it's very unclear. And he advocates for universal basic income as a part of this future. But when we asked, for instance, what do you think about all of these economic projections that hold that so many jobs are going to be disrupted by this, the reflection and the grappling with it was not, in my view, terribly deep.

25:25You 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, you know, 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. And we'll have a big old foundation, and we're going to do some charitable activity, and that'll help.

25:58Well, 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 stamps out humanity. The alignment problem. So the alignment problem is supposed to be if we build a superintelligence that is not aligned with our interest, it might – so it doesn't have to come alive and become HAL 9000 or whatever to kill us.