I don’t—thankfully—have to follow every statement that Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, makes about the world. Many of these statements seem more like “hustles” or “pitches” than attempts to speak thoughtfully about the future. Even if they are genuine statements of belief, they often read like a teenager’s first sci-fi novel, written under the influence of weed and way too much Star Trek.
Consider, for instance, Altman’s blog post “A Gentle Singularity,” published last year and read by nearly 600,000 people. Its central thesis seems to be that AI is all upside; everything has been great so far, and everything will be even greater in the future! I mean, just wait until we build robots that we can shove these AIs into—then tell those robots to go make more robots.
If we have to make the first million humanoid robots the old-fashioned way, but then they can operate the entire supply chain—digging and refining minerals, driving trucks, running factories, etc.—to build more robots, which can build more chip fabrication facilities, data centers, etc, then the rate of progress will obviously be quite different.
Everything is getting better; indeed, it’s getting better faster thanks to “self-reinforcing loops” like this. Downsides? Trick question! There aren’t any real downsides because people get used to things. Quickly. Just listen to how great it’s gonna be:
The rate of technological progress will keep accelerating, and it will continue to be the case that people are capable of adapting to almost anything. There will be very hard parts like whole classes of jobs going away, but on the other hand the world will be getting so much richer so quickly that we’ll be able to seriously entertain new policy ideas we never could before. We probably won’t adopt a new social contract all at once, but when we look back in a few decades, the gradual changes will have amounted to something big.
If history is any guide, we will figure out new things to do and new things to want, and assimilate new tools quickly (job change after the industrial revolution is a good recent example). Expectations will go up, but capabilities will go up equally quickly, and we’ll all get better stuff. We will build ever-more-wonderful things for each other.
Perhaps you have looked around at the world recently and wondered whether building “ever-more-wonderful things for each other” is actually a good description of what you are seeing.
But any niggles you might have—questions about the insane violence of the post-Industrial Revolution world, for instance, or whether “better stuff” is even the solution to many human problems—barely need to be addressed in Altman’s world. The future’s so bright we need to wear (AI-powered) shades!
(This simplistic attitude is shockingly common among smart Silicon Valley types. Marc Andreessen, the venture capitalist and Netscape co-founder, wrote an infamous 2023 essay in the same “No downsides!” vein. It was stuffed with non-ironic statements like “We had a problem of isolation, so we invented the Internet.” It featured the genre’s Randian fetishization of “the great technologists and industrialists who came before us,” some Nietzsche quotes, and of course howlers like “We are not primitives, cowering in fear of the lightning bolt. We are the apex predator; the lightning works for us.”
Silicon Valley—where nuance goes to die, where “hubris” is just a synonym for “success,” and where nerds see themselves as apex predators.
Meanwhile, tech investor Peter Thiel travels around the globe ranting about the Antichrist, while Mark Zuckerberg drops $80 billion on a failed “metaverse.” These dudes are just not the world-bestriding geniuses they think they are. But they do share a certain will to power—and a sense that they deserve to wield this power.)
If you have doubts about just how great a world dominated by people like Sam Altman might be, you owe it to yourself to read the long (loooooong) profile of him that appeared yesterday in our sister publication The New Yorker. Yes, it’s over 16,000 words, and yes, you will encounter the diaeresis a disturbing number of times, but it is absolutely worth the effort.
My colleague Ashley Belanger already mentioned the piece while discussing OpenAI’s new “industrial policy” document, launched yesterday as well, but I wanted to look a little more closely at what the article reveals about the personalities running key Silicon Valley companies.
For their piece, Ronan Farrow and Andrew Marantz interviewed over 100 people, including Altman, and the report they bring back from this effort is quite depressing; the words “lying” and “sociopath” are used repeatedly. Here are just a few of the relevant quotes:
A board member offered a different interpretation of [Altman’s] statement: “What it meant was ‘I have this trait where I lie to people, and I’m not going to stop.’”…
Altman’s attitude in childhood, his brother told The New Yorker, in 2016, was “I have to win, and I’m in charge of everything”…
As Mark Jacobstein, an older Loopt employee who was asked by investors to act as Altman’s “babysitter,” later told Keach Hagey, for “The Optimist,” a biography of Altman, “There’s a blurring between ‘I think I can maybe accomplish this thing’ and ‘I have already accomplished this thing’ that in its most toxic form leads to Theranos,” Elizabeth Holmes’s fraudulent startup…
Multiple senior executives at Microsoft said that, despite [Satya] Nadella’s long-standing loyalty, the company’s relationship with Altman has become fraught. “He has misrepresented, distorted, renegotiated, reneged on agreements,” one said…
Altman has a relentless will to power that, even among industrialists who put their names on spaceships, sets him apart. “He’s unconstrained by truth,” the board member told us…
One of Altman’s batch mates in the first Y Combinator cohort was Aaron Swartz, a brilliant but troubled coder who died by suicide in 2013 and is now remembered in many tech circles as something of a sage. Not long before his death, Swartz expressed concerns about Altman to several friends. “You need to understand that Sam can never be trusted,” he told one. “He is a sociopath. He would do anything.”
The piece documents what appear to be incredibly flexible ethical and political views. Altman slides smoothly from Democratic booster to Trump whisperer, from hoping that the “insane sci-fi future comes true for all of us” to taking meetings with dictators. AI safety, such a key part of OpenAI’s stated mission a few years back, has largely fallen by the wayside as Altman chased money, power, and deals.
One of the article’s subtexts is that the negative traits on display here aren’t actually bad for business; indeed, they’re quite good for (short-term) business. Whether they are good for business in the long term, where you actually need people to trust you, is an open question.
For some tasks, AI really is amazing; the tech behind things like machine-learning algorithms and large language models is ingenious, but the results always seem to be hawked the hardest by people and companies I don’t particularly like or trust. (Heck, Anthropic used one of my books to train its database, a sin for which it is now paying authors in court.) Give me the same sorts of tools but under my local control, governed by a Wikipedia-style nonprofit and trained on ethically sourced data, and I’d use them a lot more.
But the flexible principles and cartoon villainy currently in vogue among so many of our narcissistic tech and political leaders mean that the public might instead sour on AI tools themselves (and indeed on the whole “Silicon Valley tech scene” in general, which we are already seeing). This is a threat that even OpenAI has identified as a serious problem.
When you look at people like Musk and Trump and Altman—all prominently mentioned in the article—it makes sense that they move in the same circles. Profound thoughts, ethical behavior, rock-solid integrity, self-awareness… who needs any of that crap when you just can übermensch your way through life, cajoling reality into your preferred shape through sheer hustle, outlandish statements, and force of will?
Truly, we are already living in the sci-fi future Altman promised us. And he’s right—it is kind of “insane.”
