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- [00:02]
A
Campsite media. Hello everyone. Welcome back to Infamous, a production of Sony Music Entertainment and Campside Media. So you may have seen that the company behind ChatGPT and its co founder Sam Altman were being sued by Elon Musk in a $150 billion. Yes, I said billion dollar lawsuit with Elon Musk accusing Sam Altman of basically stealing the company and using it to enrich himself, which is in some ways very rich from Elon Musk, who is within, I guess, some striking distance of becoming the world's first trillionaire. Or he wishes he was. But last week a federal jury rejected Elon Musk's lawsuit, saying that Musk waited too long to file it, which was true. He was way not in the statute of limitations, but he figured he'd go for it anyway. Musk then dismissed this decision as a quote calendar technicality in a post on X and his lawyer vowed to appeal in any case, assuming he loses the appeal, which he probably will. The end of this lawsuit means that Elon Musk has failed to stop the rise of the company named OpenAI. And that is the company that makes ChatGPT. And it is a company that he actually helped create back in 2015. So OpenAI's origin story, which is what we're talking about today, is pretty confusing. It's worth billions and billions of dollars now as one of the leaders in the AI space, but it was actually formed as a non profit. The idea was that the technology was so crazy that to make a for profit company around it would lead to corruption. And yet since ChatGPT's release in 2022 and especially in the last year, Sam Altman has been more and more in the public eye and he's argu become more and more hated. Last month someone threw a Molotov cocktail at his house in San Francisco. In a blog post after the event, he actually connected this attack to a recent story about him in the New Yorker, writing, there was an incendiary article about me a few days ago, which is quite the choice of words given that it was a Molotov cocktail. Now that incendiary article was written by Ronan Farrow and Andrew Morantz and it was a blockbuster. And nobody is saying anybody should be a Molotov cocktail thrown at their house. But this is an article that you really have to read. It is called Sam Altman May Control Our Future. Can he be Trusted? Ronan and Andrew spent 18 months looking into Sam Altman. It is an incredible tale, especially for somebody like me who has a ton of AI anxiety over whether any of us will have jobs in five years. So we have Andrew on today to talk to us about ChatGPT, Sam Altman, and have a very grounded conversation about the personal involved rather than just getting into the doom and gloom about AI. Because I think it's really important that people understand the people behind AI and how this race is unfolding. Andrew, welcome to the show.
- [03:14]
B
Thank you guys. Thanks so much for having me.
- [03:16]
A
Everyone knows ChatGPT. Some people think ChatGPT is my boyfriend. Some people think it is the easiest way to get through college. But who is Sam Altman, where is he from and what is his background?
- [03:28]
B
He's from suburbs of St. Louis, grew up kind of standard tech founder, interested in computers. He's basically exactly my age. So, you know, this is for me a kind of standard generational cohort story. You know, Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman. They can tell the story about when they first got their first computer and how they begged their parents to take them to Radio Shack or whatever. So he's that kind of generational cohort. You know, he went to Stanford and dropped out. We say in the piece, ambitious people go to Stanford, but really ambitious people drop out of Stanford to start companies. And so he did the latter. He went to this now well known startup incubator which was called Y Combinator. He was part of the first class or the first batch, and the first company he did through that didn't work. It was kind of ahead of its time because it was a phone location based thing before everyone had phones that could locate them. But he sort of from there kept failing up, as people in this industry often do, and kind of had the right connections, the right mentors, was very, very close to a lot of the kingmakers in Silicon Valley. So when his phone location company didn't work, he spun that up into a pretty decent acquisition. He then became the head of Y Combinator, where he was really at the center of a lot of the most powerful startups in Silicon Valley. And then when he saw on the horizon that AI was going to be a big thing, he really wanted to get in on the ground floor of that. And he sends this email to Elon Musk in May of 2015 saying, hey, I'm really worried about AI. We should start an AI actually not company. We should start an AI safety nonprofit because we need to have a counterweight to the big bad guy, which is Google. And so we need to start the good guy David to their Goliath. And that was how the idea was born.
- [05:13]
C
Sam Altman was perfectly positioned to be the good guy, David, because I think one of the most brilliant things about your piece is the character details where you say, you know, he went to Stanford, where he attended regular off campus poker games. And Sam Altman says, I think I learned more about life and business from that, meaning the poker, than I learned in college, which I think is fascinating. And you mentioned Loop, which was his. His startup at Y Combinator. I thought it was fascinating that in this startup Loop, it's this social network where people can use the locations of people's flip phones to tell their friends where they were. And Altman struck deals with carriers to tap their capabilities to kind of track the locations of phones, which is already kind of seems to be infringing on people's rights and displaying questionable ethics.
- [06:07]
B
So just taking that line in particular, we had a bunch of editorial conversations around everything in the piece, but around that line, we were like, okay, should we characterize this as a kind of ethical gray area, Maybe a kind of legal gray area? Really, where we kind of landed on it was that this was an area, as so many of these things on the frontiers of technology often are, where the rules hadn't really been fully fleshed out yet. So that is something that you see Altman doing again and again from his earliest days in business, going into a situation where there's some ambiguity, some kind of arbitrage that can be done and meet with people involved, tell kind of all the sides what they want to hear, or sort of mirror back their concerns, and then end up with a deal that ends up working out to his advantage.
- [06:53]
A
I mean, what is incredible also is, as you say, he then took over Y Combinator. Right. And Paul Graham, you say when Graham retired, he recruits Sam, right, to be his successor. And he asks him in his kitchen, like, will you be my successor? And Sam smiles like, it worked. And he'd never seen this kind of smile from Sam. It was like the kind of smile where when you throw a ball of paper into the waste basket across the room and it like, actually goes in and you're just like, yes, I did it. It worked. And you start in your piece, have this sense of this person where, okay, yeah, as you said, he's your age, he grew up in the suburbs, Mom's a dermatologist. You know, he has coming from this sort of like, almost progressive family. He's also gay, which, interestingly, you also talk how he had an incident where he was brutally, physically attacked in a homophobic attack, and he didn't report that incident, he doesn't want to give you details about it. You know, I'm curious how you feel about that. But you start to get this picture of this incredibly complicated person, right, who is now going to do this AI Venture.
- [08:08]
B
He did talk to us several times, and it was interesting, as you say, his ambivalence about going into certain things on the record. He didn't want to seem like he was being manipulative or looking for sympathy. Other times he was less concerned with that kind of thing. He often would say, like, well, I have a concern about not letting dictator type figures get too much power. But he would say, that concern that I have, that's from my Jewish upbringing, not from the gay upbringing. So, like, he would sort of parse out which parts of his biological were applicable to which traits.
- [08:43]
A
But, you know, you and Ronan, to do this piece, you talk to so many people, some on the record, some not on the record. People saying things like, he's a sociopath, he's a liar. I mean, things that you do not see in the New Yorker very often. At what point did Sam agree to give you these dozen interviews? Was it the typical journalist thing where, okay, it's actually after a quorum of people have spoken and he has heard, everybody is telling your story for you, you better get in there with these guys and give your take.
- [09:15]
B
So we went through the front door of OpenAI comms a number of times before really embarking on this piece. We requested an interview eventually. You know, Altman agreed to talk. You know, we tried in the piece not to draw every possible analogy between ChatGPT and the executives at the company that make it, but there were several times when you're talking to one of these people, not, not only Sam, where you do get the sense that, like, you give a prompt and then the response that comes back is very like, tonally proximally appropriate to the prompt that you just gave. And there was a sense in some of these interviews where there was like a turning on a dime ability to pivot tonally right away. That was remarkable.
- [09:57]
C
Well, I think that's something that is worth noting and like, why we wanted to talk about Sam Altman as a person. I mean, everybody has so many feelings about AI right now, but it's like these are driven by personalities. And one of the the things about ChatGPT is, as you just said, it kind of pivots on a dime. It's mimetic, right? It mirrors how you talk to it. And it's kind of people pleasing and Obsequious. And also, by the way, it gets things wrong a lot of the time. Whether you want to call that lying or just not being totally accurate depends on the framing. But that is something that you see within Sam Altman as well, an issue with veracity. I mean, right from the very beginning, some of his employees at Louvre, according to your reporting, remembered Sam Altman bragging about being a champion ping pong player. And then he turns out to be one of the worst ping pong players in the office. Sam Altman says, okay, he was probably joking. But then likewise, a Y combinator, when he takes over, is this 28 year old who's now in this incredibly powerful position where he's kind of a kingmaker. He again faces issues of potentially telling people what they want to hear or not telling the whole truth.
- [11:13]
B
Yeah, it's interesting. And as much as people have these strong feelings and will give you very colorful quotes and give you very specific anecdotes about how they feel betrayed and burned by him, a lot of people are still constantly doing business with him or might want to do business with him in the future, or might feel the need to not want to be on his bad side or might be worried that some favor could be pulled from them. So I bring all that up just to say that obviously the job is just to get to the truth of what happened. This is always a challenge, but it's particularly hard in this world to sift through everyone's ulterior motives and just get to what actually happened. I think that the question of whether there's a pattern here is really the overall question.
- [12:06]
C
So what it seems like to me in reading Andrew and Ronan's story is that Sam Altman does appear to have a pattern of saying what people want to hear, potentially obfuscating the truth to get what he wants as part of a ruthless will to power, which even among the ambitious and Machiavellian types in Silicon Valley, sets him apart. And in the mid 2010s, he gets interested in AI.
- [12:31]
A
So he's this great cutthroat businessman. You know, he's an investor in, by his estimate, about 400 other companies. He's a, he's a really big deal in Silicon Valley. He's sort of the guy that most normal people haven't heard of. Right? And he then starts thinking about the civilization, changing technology of AI and thinks, you know, the way we should really deal with this is to start a nonprofit. I mean, it doesn't pass the smell test here, but somehow he gets elon Musk to buy into this vision that they're going to start a non profit in 2015 around AI and they need to beat Google because Google is ahead of them. I mean, you just see these two guys, both of whom are very complex personalities. Are they both trying to influence each other to say, like, yes, we want to do this in the most moral way possible. So it's definitely should be a nonprofit. And that way it will be for the good of humanity. Let's do this together and be Google and there'll be nothing in it for us. And they're both like, who's zooming who? Like, what the hell is going on here?
- [13:42]
B
Yeah, I mean, that's the $150 billion question, I guess. Is that what Musk was doing? The numbers kind of blend together after a while, but yeah, that's, that's the question that Musk was suing Altman over. These are the seeds that were planted that would later become the Musk vs Altman trial eight years later that was just resolved very, very recently. The jurors were not allowed to hear any evidence that had anything to do with existential risk or catastrophic risk. They weren't allowed to hear evidence about Skynet or Will AI turn us all into paperclips or any of those kind of more exciting total sci fi dystopian scenarios. The reason that's worth bringing up in this part of the story is that, okay, when Sam Altman emails Elon Musk, there is a plausible reading, which is these guys were drinking a lot of the Kool Aid. And I don't even say Kool Aid to mean that it's necessarily all false. I actually think that there are catastrophic harms from AI that are really worth taking seriously. And in fact, we're seeing some of them play out. We're seeing the biggest militaries in human history integrate potentially autonomous drone weaponry into their systems. I'm not mocking people being concerned about catastrophic risk. All I'm saying is that there is this kind of unusual scenario where some of the most power seeking and wealth seeking individuals in history are also very, very concerned about the technology they're building. And whether you think this is true of Elon Musk and Sam Altman, I think it's almost definitely true of some of the other engineers who worked on it. And so you just have this unusual confluence of events where you have some people who are clearly interested in being powerful and making money. You have other people who don't seem primarily motivated by that. Like the money's Nice. But I really want to be like a sort of Mount Rushmore scientist. And then you have this other overlapping category of people who are like, I really want to make these scientific breakthroughs, but I'm worried that if I make too good of a breakthrough too quickly, it will come alive and kill me. And, and all these three things are working in parallel. So when one guy emails the other and says I'm scared of AI, it could be all three of those kind of intertwined in these ways that nobody fully can comprehend.
- [15:53]
C
And I think it's really important to talk about the point in time that this was happening. Like 2015, 2016. This is kind of the moment when the shift from tech optimism is beginning to happen. There had been this idea that tech was going to improve our globalized world world. And like, startups are great and Facebook is helping Egyptians overthrow an evil dictator. And then slowly, it's 2016 election interference. Mark Zuckerberg testifying in front of Congress. Oh, wait, maybe this thing that we thought was so great actually could be not so great. So maybe let's have some guardrails on it. And we get Sam Altman tweeting, we need to be super careful with AI potentially more dangerous than nukes. And this sort of idea that safety should be a first class requirement and that OpenAI would be like a Manhattan Project, you know, the government initiative that led to the creation of the atom bomb.
- [16:47]
A
They also recruit like a Russian AI genius from Google and they're basically recruiting off this idea that Google's not going to do the right thing. We are going to do the right thing here. They're raising money from a nonprofit that provides mosquito netting to the world's poor. I get it. That they don't trust really anyone and they think they're the smartest guys the world. So who else is going to do this? The government? No, they don't trust the government. The academy. Now that's where I would think it should be being done, right? There's people who are working in university computer science departments that are extremely aware of what's happening and have moral certainty around it, and yet those are not the people who are entrusted with this. We're going to send these guys who are glorified venture capitalists, basically, or unglorified.
- [17:36]
B
I mean, one thing that's interesting is your point about the academy piece of it, the government piece of it. One thing that makes Altman stand out is that he, again, by all or vast majority of accounts, we got, he's very good at courting all of the above. He's very good at courting academics. He's very good at talking to elected officials and potential regulators. He's really good at talking to investors. So you talk about computer science professors. A lot of that period before OpenAI formally launched was Sam Altman, but a couple other people going to people like computer science professors and talking to them and saying, here are our concerns. These are some of the most important computer science professors in the world. And saying again, in a language that would appeal to people like that, we're not here for the money. We're not here to take Google's market share. We're not here to ipo. We just want to get this right. You know, we can look back and see that as gullible or naive or whatever. But at the same time, as you say, given the moment in history that this was happening, most of the people who were really close to this stuff felt that they were on the precipice of doing something remarkable and unprecedented and no one else in the world was paying attention. And so to have someone come to them and speak in that language like, you guys are about to make this Manhattan Project size breakthrough, but nobody's funding it, nobody's paying attention, nobody's regulating it. I'm the one who's gonna come along, bring you the resources you need, and take the downside risk seriously. That was what they were waiting to hear, right?
- [19:10]
C
And in that way, it's chatgpt saying to me, gosh, Natalie, you're so smart. The way that you do interviews is so incisive and incredible. This is exactly the kind of thing you should be doing. Things go sour with Elon Musk and some of the other people who put it together in the beginning pretty quickly. Maybe Sam Altman played Elon Musk for a fool. Elon Musk sends in this email saying, guys, I've had enough. Either go do something on your own or continue with AI as a nonprofit, or I'm just being a fool or is essentially providing free funding for you to create a startup. Which is where Elon's kind of like, are you just using my money because you actually want to do a startup and you're pretending you want to do a nonprofit? So Elon Musk is opposed to it being a for profit, and then he quits and starts his own thing x AI. And in this process, I'm going very quickly. But some of these other people also leave and start their own competition.
- [20:05]
A
I mean, and basically board loses faith in Altman again, saying things like this guy is lying. One board member said to you, Andrew, he's unconstrained by the truth. 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 second is an almost sociopathic lack of concern for the consequences that may come from deceiving someone. And you're just like, oh my God, this person is in control of technology. That could change that. That, no, no, no, I shouldn't say could change the world is going to change the world. I do believe in this. I do think this reporting is correct. I don't know if I think it's a technology that's going to kill us all. But you know, you mentioned like o tell the AI to clean up the environment. It thinks what's logical here, hey, oh, let's kill the polluters. Well, that's the human race. I mean, things like that that sound so incredible. What is being built is it starts to be within the realm of possibility. And Sam Altman, with his cute chatgpt that creates this magic where it makes a spreadsheet for me, is in control of this company and he really is building something that people have called an AGI dictatorship. Can you tell us what that is and if you believe that he's building that and that's going to come to pass?
- [21:36]
B
Yeah, I mean, we talked to many economic experts who said that the possibility of a stock market panic is not only plausible, but pretty likely as far as they were concerned if these things do not continue to meet super high thresholds for progress. There's the environmental impacts, obviously, which I think some of the concerns about water have been a bit misunderstood. But a lot of the power concerns are very real and are only going to be aggravated more in the months and years to come. It's a major political concern and then there really is catastrophic risk. I mean, what I will say is that all the thought experiments about will it erase me because I'm like the world's biggest polluter. They are cartoonish thought experiments because that's the way they are posed. But if you pose them in a less stark cartoonish way and you just think about if you took a super powerful technology, made it smarter than the smartest person and then connected it to the Internet, think off the top of your head of 10 gnarly things that could happen and that will just set the stage for why it's not unreasonable for people to be freaked out. I mean, there was a phase of this development of These frontier AI systems where it seemed crazy to the people building it that they would ever be connected to the open Internet. When ChatGPT first came out, you couldn't Google stuff on ChatGPT because it wasn't connected to the Internet. You couldn't say, what day is it, what time is it? It would say, I have my pre trained data set that I was trained on and that's all you can ask me about. And some of that was just to conserve compute resources. But a lot of that was a safety concern. People just thought, well, if we're going to make this thing smarter than any person has ever been, I don't want it to go on the Internet where it can like connect to my bank account and my passwords and stuff. And now we have Claude Mythos where nobody has seen it except for some of the world's top cybersecurity experts. But they basically say, like, this model can hack into anything. And so, no, I don't think it's crazy to be concerned about this stuff. I think the concern is how can you set up a sort of structural reassurance that the people who are the white hat good faith actors who are just trying to save the world from this dangerous technology are not then incentivized in the wrong direction? Because as Sam Altman and Elon Musk were privately emailing about back in May of 2015, if you're a megacorporation like Google and you're incentivized to make profits, how can we be sure that the safety of the world should rest in your hands? We can't. That's why we need this counterweight. And now the counterweight. OpenAI is about to launch what seems on track to be the biggest IPO of all time and is making these unprecedented investments in data centers in the UAE and the middle of the United States and all over the Middle east, where they're becoming bombing targets in the war in Iran. So the timeline is a little different now than it was 10 years ago.
- [24:33]
A
Foreign.
- [24:46]
C
So Elon Musk's lawsuit against Sam Altman and OpenAI was all about the founding of the company, alleging that it breached its initial agreement to develop AI safely as a nonprofit by pursuing OpenAI as a force profit. And Elon Musk wasn't the only person to disagree with OpenAI's path. In 2020, several early employees at OpenAI left to found Anthropic, the company behind the AI chatbot. Claude Anthropic is now one of OpenAI's main rivals. And it has really positioned itself as the safety focused AI option, or what OpenAI was initially supposed to be. Now, that could just be a marketing ploy, but there does seem to be some evidence Anthropic are making different choices. Anthropic's co founder, Christopher Ola, just joined the Pope to champion a partnership between the Catholic Church and the tech industry to develop safeguards for AI. This came right as the Pope put out a huge statement warning against the risks of AI, particularly its use in warfare. Now, Claude Anthropic's main product is already widely used by the Department of War, but earlier this year, Anthropic got into a very publicized fight with the US Government by refusing to allow its AI to be used for mass domestic surveillance and fully autonomous weapons. It's worth bearing in mind that all of this could be spin to position Anthropic favorably ahead of an IPO, especially since its rival, OpenAI, Sam Altman's company, is expected to file to go public in the coming weeks. So, needless to say, the competition is really heating up.
- [26:27]
A
You know, we started off by saying there's this lawsuit. Okay, fine. So Elon Musk loses the lawsuit, but he still has an AI company that he went to start. Whether it's a good one or a bad one, I don't know. But, you know, he did not start
- [26:39]
B
it as a nonprofit, I'll say that.
- [26:40]
A
Right. And obviously, OpenAI, Sam Altman's company is. Is no longer a nonprofit as well. We have the Claude Anthropic, which is supposed to be the good one. And then some people have said to me, like, don't you realize this reporting around mythos, you know, hacking into everybody and how, you know, oh, we're such good guys that we're not putting it out is also part of their game plan for their ipo and how they're trying to situate themselves because they're now trying to say we're the good ones. But basically what it comes down to is there's five or six white guys, and this is the American wing, right? There's obviously guys in China too, like, but they're all guys, it seems, and they are controlling this technology and the deals that can be made around it. And that, to me, is where we get to the interest in these people's personalities that we really need to know, just the way we need to know who's running for office. We need to really have an X ray in the way that your story does on Sam Ohman with each of these people.
- [27:43]
B
Your point is correct. That any of these people are worthy of scrutiny, not just because rich and powerful people are always worthy of scrutiny, but because they have taken on themselves the mantle of, by their own lights, being maybe the most powerful people in human history. I mean, by their lights, if you take seriously what they're saying, and maybe there's reason not to, but if you take seriously what they're saying about the potential sort of future growth of the power of this technology that they are uniquely in control of, they could be the most powerful people ever. Right? So, of course, natural that you need to know who these people are. That said, I do think it's a mistake that I want to be careful for readers to avoid to come away from this piece thinking, oh, I'm now worried about Sam Altman's trustworthiness. I really hope that the race for AGI dictator is won by Demis Hassabis instead at DeepMind, or is instead won by Daario at Anthropic. This is a structural problem, not an individual problem. The individuals matter, but it's not like, oh, as long as the Ring of Sauron is captured by the good guys first, all these problems will be solved.
- [28:55]
A
It does feel that way, though. It somehow does feel that way because you can't conceive of it otherwise. There has to be some hero, you know?
- [29:02]
B
I know, I know, but I don't think, you know, these guys bring up Lord of the Rings analogies all the time. But again, a lot of times with these tech guys reading fantasy or sci fi, they're sort of missing the cautionary tale. The point is, the only person who is qualified to go get the ring is the person who will immediately destroy it and is incorruptible by its toxic influence. The point is not Bilbo went to get the ring, and then he decided to be the world's first trillionaire. But he was a good trillionaire. Like, that's not how the story is supposed to go, right? So if you get out of the individual sort of hero's arc framework and into a more structural framework, it's like, why are we talking about anyone being any kind of AGI dictator? Even if that's like a metaphor, Even if that's five or 10 years away, why are we even entertaining that conversation at all? And it has to do with the inability for us to collectively think our way out of it. It has to do with the inability to regulate. It has to do with the way markets are structured, right? So as much as I do think it's important to put the Focus on this one individual and why we spent 16,000 words doing that. I don't want the takeaway to be, okay, this guy's out of the running. Let's put in the next AGI dictator and keep chugging along.
- [30:12]
C
It would be six of one, half a dozen of the other. I mean, because essentially all of these men are like, driven by the pursuit of capital. That is the ultimate driver here. And we also see them running these sort of black ops against each other. At least Elon Musk seemingly doing that about Sam Altman. I mean, all these rumors about Sam Altman's personal life. He's a gay man. He met his husband in Peter Teal's hot tub, which is just a fantastic image to me. At 3:00am exact at 3:00am you know, he's. Yes, he's worth $3.4 billion. He's having parties, a Survivor themed party with Jeff Pros, the real host of Survivor, at it. Like all this stuff that feels easy to hate and that you're kind of going, oh, my God, these are the people running Silicon Valley. But I think car swish quote in your story was kind of on the Money where she says all these rich guys do wild stuff. Wilder than anything I've been told about Sam Altman. But he's a gay guy in San Francisco, so that kind of gets weaponized because. Yes, I mean, some of the worst accusations against him are that he's sort of using sex workers or what. What exactly were there were the rumors?
- [31:22]
B
Well, the worst accusations against him are the worst accusations you could make against anyone, which is that he pursues underage people. And we found no evidence for that. And that seemed like something that was just being pushed by his enemies, as far as we could tell. And so we had a lot of internal debate about how to frame that in the story. Because, as you say, these rumors are being pushed so aggressively and some of them have something behind them, some of them don't, that so much of it is just parsing through what's worth chasing down and what's not.
- [31:52]
C
Right. And that's like a homo. That's a homophobic trope.
- [31:54]
A
Right.
- [31:54]
C
That like a gay man would be a pedophile.
- [31:57]
A
Right.
- [31:57]
C
And so you found absolutely no evidence of that.
- [32:01]
B
Right.
- [32:02]
A
So where do we go from here? Like, as I said earlier, I. I believe that this is really happening. I think a lot of people are going to lose their jobs. I don't think that's a good thing. I think, you know, particularly in America, you know, a lot of self Worth comes from people having, having a job and having a good job. I've heard people say, okay, well that's going to happen and then there's going to be a revolution and then it's just going to be about how much money we can get back from guys like Sam Altman and Elon Musk to have universal basic income. Our version of abundance will be like, okay, here's your dole basically, and you can use it as you wish, but you know, why don't you, with this leisure time, create a song with AI? And it is true that I do have some friends who are not dyed in wool creatives who are like, look at all the things that I can do. People who are sort of techy are finding a lot of value in it. But how does this work so we don't all catastrophize and have nightmares like, what is gonna. How do we move on from this?
- [33:03]
B
Yeah, this kind of UBI Universal Basic Income Potential future is something that a lot of these guys have been musing about for a while. Altman especially. And look, I do think, I don't know where this goes. I don't think the guys who are in charge of it know exactly where it's going to go. I certainly don't think that Congress does or the New York Stock Exchange does. Like there's no one really in charge. It kind of feels like this kind of emergent property of late hyper capitalism just kind of shifting into overdrive. What I will say is that there are not a lot of things that still feel completely possible in American politics, but it does feel possible to me to make it very hard for something to be built in your community if most people really don't want it. That has been a real problem for data center construction. This cannot proceed at the pace that these mega corporations want or need it to proceed. If there's local opposition, it gets in the way. And that's why you see so much Kevin o' Leary going on TV and taking up this fight with these Utah anti data center people and accusing them of being Chinese agents or whatever. Concern and outrage in Utah, where hundreds of protesters this week flooded this meeting as they voted to move forward with a controversial data center proposal backed by celebrity Canadian businessman Kevin o'. Leary. A lot of the people who want this data center construction to happen yesterday are pretty freaked out by this local opposition. So that's one thing. Like there is some amount of normal people power. It's not always necessarily through the channels that it used to be through, like vote for this presidential candidate and they will or won't start a Manhattan Project. It's like maybe more local opposition, it's maybe more individual congressional races. There is still some amount of Democratic input, which I just think is worth mentioning at a time like this. And I also just think that just because there is a really good pitch deck or just because there's a really convincing possibility of something happening, doesn't always mean it's going to go the way it's forecasted to go. Sometimes that means progress stalls out, sometimes it means it goes faster than expected. Sometimes companies merge. There are all kinds of people changing. Very high level engineers who said, I would never work with this person, going to work with that person, or vice versa, or companies merging. All I know is that there's a lot more volatility and unpredictability and contingency in these things than you might think if you got on the most recent investor call. So I don't think people should feel that it's all faded and this train is just chugging down the tracks and there's nothing that can be done. Actually the level of volatility in this moment is more than we often see in these kind of mega scale projects. So I think people should feel actually some amount of agency.
- [36:00]
C
I feel like something Vanessa and I say to each other often is like, at least it's an interesting time in history. Well, thank you so much, Andrew for coming on and everyone, if they haven't already, should go read this, this New Yorker piece. It is called Sam Altman May Control Our Future. Can he be trusted? Yeah. Where can people find you?
- [36:21]
B
Yeah, thanks so much. I write for the New Yorker. Yeah, go read the piece. It's, you know, it's not a book, so you can actually like get it for less money than a book would cost. And yeah, there's other stuff. I'm always working on AI and not AI related.
- [36:36]
C
And if you claim the piece is too long and you want to put it in ChatGPT to summarize it, you were actually contributing to human enfeeblement, which is a wonderful term in your story about how AI is making us stupider because we're relying on it. So anyway, read it, don't worry about it.
- [36:53]
B
Just, you know, read it at your own pace and don't worry. The thing I always say about these long stories and these stacks of New Yorkers piling up is like, if you have a stack that you feel bad about, just recycle it. Just don't worry. Just start from scratch. Like you don't make yourself feel bad about all the Netflix you didn't watch and cancel your subscription. You know what I mean? Just live your life. It's fine.
- [37:15]
A
Totally.
- [37:15]
C
Yeah. Beautiful.
- [37:16]
A
Be enfeebled. Enjoy. All right. Thank you so much, Andrew, for being here on Infamous.
- [37:27]
C
That's it for Infamous. If you enjoy the show, please leave us a rating and review and tell your friends. If you want to follow me on Instagram, you can find me at the Natrobe. That's N A T R O B E. And if you want to support Vanessa's work, you can buy her book, Blurred Rethinking Sex, Power, and Consent on Campus. See you next week.