A central subtheme of this newletter, brought together in this 2024 Guardian article, has been that Sam Altman should not be trusted:
Strong reporting in The New Yorker by Ronan Farrow and Andrew Marantz makes the case significantly more strongly.
I will let you read the details, of which there are many, for yourself, but here’s a nice summary of Altman that rings true to me:
Read it here.
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As a postscript, another thing I have noted about Altman is that when he is in trouble, he often tries to change the narrative with hype,
Right now he is in trouble. People are increasingly concerned about the economics of his company, and in big scoop The Information just reported that the even CFO has concerns:
Today’s new OpenAI report on Superintelligence (allegedly a New Deal for the AI era) isn’t about something real or imminent (as far as I can tell), instead I suspect that it’s just another Altmanian attempt to distract, in this case from the fact that the economics of his company make no sense.
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Now, go read that article in The New Yorker.
And think about whether we might need some outside review on this man’s decisions (as I argued in Taming Silicon Valley), or whether it would be just fine to leave our fate as a species partly up to him.
If some future OpenAI model could enables a massive bioweapon or cyberattack, would you really want Altman deciding, unilaterally, whether or not it is ok to release the model?
I sure as hell wouldn’t. And after you read the Farrow-Marantz New Yorker investigation, you probably wouldn’t either.