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David Remnick
Editor, The New Yorker
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In the fall of 2023, Ilya Sutskever, the head scientist at OpenAI, began circulating a memo that questioned whether the C.E.O., Sam Altman, was fit to run the company. It alleged that Altman misrepresented facts to OpenAI leaders and board members, and that he misled them about safety protocols. The memo began with a list headed, “Sam exhibits a consistent pattern of . . .” The first item is “Lying.”
That November, the board ousted Altman. But within days, after investors threatened to pull funding and OpenAI staff threatened to quit, he was reinstated.
Visual by David Szauder; Generated using A.I.
Today, Altman is perhaps the most powerful person in a field that is transforming the world and its future. In this week’s issue, two New Yorker writers, Ronan Farrow and Andrew Marantz, profile Altman, who helped found OpenAI in 2015 as a nonprofit. Altman once promised to be a safe steward for A.I. and to lead the company solely for the benefit of humankind. But OpenAI has since become a for-profit business, and Altman has backtracked on some of its safety commitments. Many people now believe, as Sutskever told a board member before Altman’s firing, that Altman shouldn’t “have his finger on the button.”
Farrow and Marantz interviewed more than a hundred people with firsthand knowledge of Altman, including former and current board members, employees, friends, and enemies. They also reviewed hundreds of pages of documents, including Sustkever’s memos, which have never before been reported on in full. Farrow and Marantz also spoke to Altman more than a dozen times in the course of their reporting. Their piece chronicles the secret-handshake deal that made Altman C.E.O. and the surprisingly limited investigation that followed his firing. They report on Altman’s furtive efforts to block A.I. regulation, his ties to Gulf autocracies that seem to have disqualified him for a security clearance, and an internal plan to sell A.I. to foreign governments, including, potentially, Russia and China.
Most people, they report, find Altman’s will to power unusually strong—even in the tech world. “He’s unconstrained by truth,” an OpenAI board member told Farrow and Marantz. “He has two traits that are almost never seen in the same person. The first is a strong desire to please people, to be liked in any given interaction. The second is almost a sociopathic lack of concern for the consequences that may come from deceiving someone.” Farrow and Marantz note that this wasn’t the only time they heard the word “sociopathic” used to describe Altman.
Their investigation arrives as OpenAI is reportedly preparing for an initial public offering set at a potential trillion-dollar valuation. Altman, however, told our reporters that he was not motivated by wealth. As one former employee recalls him saying, “I don’t care about money. I care more about power.”
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