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The New Yorker Radio Hour
Sam Altman’s Trust Issues at OpenAI
00:49:32
Ronan Farrow and Andrew Marantz on the rise of the C.E.O. of OpenAI, and how allegations of deceptive behavior continue to dog one of the most powerful figures in tech.
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- [00:00]
WNYC Studios Announcer
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David Remnick
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. And 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. the center of this world changing technology lies is a man named Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI. It was OpenAI that really brought artificial intelligence into most of our lives with ChatGPT, and that exploded into our consciousness in 2022. But the chatbots 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. Ronan Farrow and Andrew Morantz have spoken with over a hundred 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? Now? 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?
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Andrew Morantz
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. So 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?
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David Remnick
So we're the Americans and we're going to defeat the Nazis.
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Andrew Morantz
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.
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David Remnick
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. What 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.
- [04:14]
Ronan Farrow
I will say at the outset of this reporting, I was not myself convinced of the much ballyhooed transformative impact of this technology. I really emerge 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. But you don't have to buy into those extreme scenarios to also see the immediate impact that the entire US economy is now propped up by a few companies that are all in on AI with OpenAI 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.
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David Remnick
Now, 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.
- [05:44]
Andrew Morantz
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.
- [06:08]
David Remnick
What'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?
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Andrew Morantz
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. You 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. And even more importantly, it's a good pitch for recruiting.
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David Remnick
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.
- [07:45]
Ronan Farrow
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.
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David Remnick
Well, who was involved in OpenAI in the beginning?
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Ronan Farrow
So at the very beginning, Sam Altman, who had a lot of irons on the fire, right, he 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 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.
- [08:28]
Andrew Morantz
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. So 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.
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David Remnick
And then we learned very quickly, very, very quickly that a lot of people around Sam Altman don't discover 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?
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Ronan Farrow
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. This could destroy humanity. We need to put something together and we need it to be safety first. And it can't be. 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.
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Andrew Morantz
And that was why Google was the bad guy. Cuz Google is for profit. They're the mega corporation. So we're going to be the good guys.
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Ronan Farrow
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 nonprofit. 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.
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David Remnick
So what happened a few years ago?
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Andrew Morantz
The blip?
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David Remnick
Yeah, what was the blip?
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Andrew Morantz
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, 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. Now 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 Sutskever felt was someone who can't be entrusted with this world altering technology.
- [11:06]
Ronan Farrow
For example, there are certainly specific episodes over the history of OpenAI that have not yet been extensively reported. You know, we have a detailed, 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.
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David Remnick
What would have been the repercussions?
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Ronan Farrow
I mean, potentially a situation where military.
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David Remnick
Right.
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Ronan Farrow
Vladimir Putin has disproportionate control of the most dangerous technology in the world. Now 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,
- [11:59]
David Remnick
it seems a little easy. That wall was just an idea that we were considering selling this to Vladimir Putin.
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Ronan Farrow
Well, there you go, there you go.
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David Remnick
And you know, it suggests a kind of amoralism. No.
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Andrew Morantz
Well, and also one of their, one of their defenses was we weren't talking about selling it, we were talking about giving it to them, like much better. So these are all hypotheticals and they are kind of crazy sounding hypotheticals.
- [12:19]
Ronan Farrow
What emerges is a newly deep picture of Sam Altman through Inside Communications that haven't been out there before. What was behind his firing, why those criticisms linger and exactly how substantiated they are. There are many, many instances. 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. There are people who will look at this and say this is really scary and dangerous.
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Andrew Morantz
The phrase that the board used at the time was not consistently candid liar,
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David Remnick
I believe is the word used, is
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Ronan Farrow
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.
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David Remnick
And you talked to Altman six times. So tell me what that experience was like. You went to see him more than
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Ronan Farrow
a dozen times in the final fact check? Yes.
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David Remnick
No, no, no, I gather. And what's he like? Because I interviewed him here at the New Yorker Radio Hour and 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.
- [13:58]
Andrew Morantz
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 like, contribute back to society.
- [14:24]
David Remnick
Well, 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?
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Andrew Morantz
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.
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David Remnick
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.
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Ronan Farrow
Ronan People 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. And 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, it's not a bright line, smoking gun, but. 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. That is an extraordinary thing and very difficult to grapple with in a piece like this. We try to do it with great subtlety.
- [16:50]
David Remnick
How is that different from Elon Musk?
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Andrew Morantz
Well, so this is part of the, the presentation, the temperamental presentation that Altman brings is not this kind of brash swaggering.
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David Remnick
Not at all.
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Andrew Morantz
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. I 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.
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David Remnick
Right. So he looks you in the eye and then he looks you in the eye.
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Andrew Morantz
Yeah, exactly. And reflects back what you want to hear.
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Ronan Farrow
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, die hard safetyists, and they say look, this technology may kill us all. And he is Machiavellian and sociopathic. There'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. He 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.
- [19:05]
David Remnick
I'm speaking with Ronan Farrow along with Andrew Morantz. They've co written a long, deep investigation of Sam Altman and the rise of OpenAI. That's all in the New Yorker this week. We'll continue in just a moment. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour.
- [19:36]
Andrew Morantz
The headlines never stop and it's harder than ever to tell what's real, what matters and what's just noise. That's where Pod Save America comes in. I'm Tommy Vitor and every week I'm joined by fellow former Obama aides Jon Favreau, Jon Lovett and Dan Pfeiffer to break down the biggest stories, unpack what they mean for the future of our democracy, and add just enough humor to stay sane. Along the way, you'll also hear honest, in depth conversations with big voices in politics, media and culture like Rachel Maddow, Gavin Newsom and Mark Cuban that you won't find anywhere else. New episodes drop every Tuesday and Friday with deep dives every other weekend. Listen wherever you get your podcasts, watch on YouTube or subscribe on Apple Podcasts for ad free episodes.
- [20:15]
David Remnick
This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick.
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WNYC Studios Announcer
Today, US Government agencies are starting to
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Ronan Farrow
enforce a ban that President Trump imposed
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WNYC Studios Announcer
Friday, barring the federal government from using AI tools made by Anthropic.
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Ronan Farrow
The Silicon Valley company didn't want its
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David Remnick
In February, a feud erupted between one of the leading AI companies, Anthropic, and the US Government. In short, Anthropic was providing artificial intelligence capability to the Pentagon. But Anthropic wouldn't allow its CLAUDE 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. Anthropic turned around and sued. And into the breach stepped 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.
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Andrew Morantz
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.
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David Remnick
How did Sam Altman, who's now 40 years old, change his mind after all this time on such a fundamental issue? I put that question to Andrew Morantz 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?
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Andrew Morantz
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. People 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 Amadeo or Elon Musk, I think in their minds, it's like anything is worth doing to win that competition, because it is, it is totally existential.
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David Remnick
What are the financial stakes for Sam Altman? Ronan?
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Ronan Farrow
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. And 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.
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David Remnick
And God knows what that means.
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Ronan Farrow
Well, a trajectory that will Bring us very imminently to not only artificial general intelligence, but a further development beyond artificial superintelligence. And in turn to. He itemizes, for instance, you know, curing cancer, traveling to other planets, essentially capturing
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Andrew Morantz
the light cone of all economic value.
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David Remnick
Okay, I read that timeout.
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Andrew Morantz
We put it in quotes.
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David Remnick
What the hell did that mean?
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Andrew Morantz
It's a sci fi ish thing that basically means capturing all the economic value in the solar system. So it involves space colonization usually.
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David Remnick
So we're talking, you know, comfortable living after that superabundance.
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Andrew Morantz
We'll all be chilling. So some of it is 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
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David Remnick
too late for me.
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Ronan Farrow
And he does, for instance, that he appears to believe it and he advocates for universal basic income totally 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. You know, he does believe, or seem to believe as he says them, all of his optimistic projections.
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Andrew Morantz
But then he also says it's a bubble at the same time. And so it's like, how do you
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Ronan Farrow
he basically on the joblessness and the risk of a bubble, you know, he says, well, actually it's just gonna make everything better. Everyone will have access to ChatGPT. That's gonna 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.
- [25:19]
Andrew Morantz
Well, 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.
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David Remnick
The alignment problem.
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Andrew Morantz
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. We quote a blog post in the piece of someone saying all it has to do is be misaligned with our interests. And accidentally kill us. And the person who wrote that blog post was Sam Altman.
- [26:05]
David Remnick
One of the things that you're kind of getting at here is a politics, kind of diplomacy, ethereal politics. And some of his rhetoric is kind of utopian, lefty. And yet he's made his accommodation with, and friendship with the Trumps. Tell me about that.
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Andrew Morantz
Yeah, so for a long time, he donated to Democrats, and he said, Trump is this unacceptable threat to America.
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Ronan Farrow
Compared him to Hitler,
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Andrew Morantz
as did his vice president and several other people. And then he, you know, in 2024, he starts to, you know, shift. He dialed back the Hitler, dialed back the Hitler. We almost went with that as the headline of the piece, but. And then we. And then he starts to say, you know, I think this country will be okay no matter what happens. And it seems very clear, actually, according to a bunch of Biden administration national security officials who we spoke to, he
- [27:01]
David Remnick
used to go to the Biden White House all the time.
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Andrew Morantz
All the time. And encourage them to regulate more heavily.
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David Remnick
Right.
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Andrew Morantz
And say, this executive order doesn't go far enough. We need to restrict and regulate this technology more. Then Trump comes in, literal day one literal first day of the Trump administration. They announce massive new data infrastructure projects. And then Trump and his administration start blessing this acceleration off to the races.
- [27:24]
David Remnick
And the rhetoric of the, of the Trump White House is safety is, is a, is a false concern. We heard that From, I think J.D.
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Andrew Morantz
vance says this in the piece and David Sacks.
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Ronan Farrow
And, you know, safety has fallen out of favor in Silicon Valley and Washington to a great extent. And one of the things we document in this piece is Sam Altman's various transformations. And his conflicting stances at various times also represent a wider sea change. The moment of the blip when people in this industry were still. That coup attempt, the coup attempt, the firing. When people in the industry were still uncertain about whether you should treat executives who shape this transformative technology as, as just other executives and hold them to those normal standards, or whether this requires people with an elevated level of integrity because they hold our future in their hands. That was unsettled at the time in a way that really led to these events where you had a company that started as a nonprofit, was still to some extent a nonprofit, a bunch of people who joined, signing up for that mission, and they said, this guy is lying too much and he has to go.
- [28:30]
David Remnick
And just for the record, now OpenAI
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Ronan Farrow
is now it is a for profit,
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David Remnick
no less than the others.
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Andrew Morantz
And it's, yeah, they call themselves a pbc, but they're we were talking about
- [28:42]
Ronan Farrow
what's a pbc, A public benefit corporation, but functionally it is a for profit institution. And the what was once the main event, the nonprofit now has a 27%, 26%. It has a minority stake. Yeah. The inflection point of the firing and the reason we look at it as an important one in this piece is, is a moment where that argument that we should have this elevated standard, the rubber met the road, it was tested. And what we see afterwards, him clawing his way back in this way partly on the strength of going to a bunch of investors. As we document, we get inside of those rooms and we see how those conversations went and saying, like, hey, these people just fired me for this vaporous thing. Now, he was able to do that in part because I think that old board that fired him did not acquit themselves strategically in many ways, shall we say, there was not a lot of transparency, but he was able to, in making the argument for himself also, I think, assert and get into the bloodstream a broader argument that that kind of safety mindedness no longer has a place in a race to achieve AGI with massive economic stakes. And today you see that reality that there is a very fair argument that these firms are on safety, engaged in something of a race to the bottom.
- [29:57]
David Remnick
Elon Musk isn't the only person that's suing OpenAI. How many court cases are there currently against the company that are related to suicides and murders allegedly prompted by ChatGPT?
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Andrew Morantz
Yeah, many ongoing suits for various different things. So some of this has to do with liability. You don't have to believe in the sci fi existential harms to see the very real harms that are already occurring. Psychosis that is furthered by addiction to these.
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David Remnick
Okay, how would that happen?
- [30:35]
Andrew Morantz
Well, this is not just like a Google search where, you know, this is an ongoing kind of relationship that people have with a chatbot and the chatbots can be sycophantic.
- [30:46]
Ronan Farrow
ChatGPT is now able to convince human observers that it is human more often than than humans are able to.
- [30:55]
Andrew Morantz
So we're in.
- [30:56]
David Remnick
Please be more specific before I throw myself out the window.
- [31:00]
Ronan Farrow
This is research published last year that when you look at this test of can a chatbot deceive a human observer into thinking that the chatbot is a human? Human beings pass that threshold less often than chatgpt.
- [31:13]
Andrew Morantz
And people are doing these quizzes all the time of, you know, can you tell what's AI writing and what's Cormac McCarthy? And you know, people are no better than 50% and stuff.
- [31:21]
David Remnick
So we don't that promises well for our profession.
- [31:23]
Andrew Morantz
Yeah, well, so this is why I was gonna say we word people don't like thinking about this. But it turns out that it kinda is the case that if you take all the words in the universe, crunch them onto a chip, it can kind of create a golem of new words that can kind of infinitely spit out.
- [31:41]
David Remnick
And we should point out that Kanye Ness, the company that owns the New Yorker and Vogue and Wired and all the rest of the, has a deal like many, many other publication companies with OpenAI and other such companies for that very purpose.
- [31:59]
Andrew Morantz
Yeah. And like all these limited.
- [32:00]
David Remnick
And I think the fear for a lot of publishers is that they're going to take it anyway and we'll get nothing for it.
- [32:10]
Andrew Morantz
Like a lot of these dual use technologies, even the most dire critics of this stuff can't deny that it's useful and fun and engaging. And you know, if it weren't so useful, it wouldn't pose such an economic threat. It wouldn't.
- [32:24]
Ronan Farrow
And worth pointing out, useful in a very sincere and deep way. I mean, when you look at the medical applications, lives are being saved for diagnostics, for diagnostics research. It is a game changer for things like, you know, severe weather warnings, which may sound banal, but that is truly a lifesaver. There are all kinds of applications where this, this is the real deal already.
- [32:48]
David Remnick
I'm speaking with Ronan Farrow and Andrew Morantz, who have just published a long and very thorough account in the New Yorker of Sam Altman's tenure as CEO of OpenAI. Our conversation continues in a moment. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. Stick around. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick and I've been speaking today with two of our writers, Ronan Farrow and Andrew Morantz. They spent over a year reporting on Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, for a piece that's just been published in the New Yorker this week. They wanted to understand Altman and his vision of the future, but they also wanted to understand where he comes from, including parts of his life that Altman himself seemed wary of analyzing. You wanted to get a sense of who this guy was, and I think he told you that he was the victim of a really serious homophobic attack when he was a teenager. Although he was reluctant to go into it in much detail. How does he think Ronan, that that moment shaped him, if at all? And how do you see it?
- [34:14]
Ronan Farrow
If I'm being honest through this reporting I do, I feel oddly somewhat connected to Sam. He may have a different view of the rapport. I do think I understand him on a certain level. You know, I had these moments with him where I would ask, like, what is your personal human experience of so many people around you saying these things about your honesty and integrity? Cause for me, it would be such a terribly devastating thing to hear. And I will say on this point, he is somewhat resistant to self reflection, is my impression, as he is on a range of these questions. When we talked about his roots and some of these perhaps formative factors, his sexual identity, his Jewishness, his socioeconomic background, which was prosperous, prosperous, right kind of fancy suburban family. His mother a dermatologist, very well connected. His father is a kind of housing activist. He often, and particularly on the sexuality question, he'll even cop to the lack of reflection. He's in the piece saying, well, yes, I got beat up. This time I don't want to talk about it because I think people will see it as me playing for sympathy and being manipulative. So he's internalized some of these critiques. And also he sincerely, in that moment and later, when we were fact checking this piece, just really emphasized, I want to be dismissive of that. This did not define me. And when I would ask him some of these questions, what is your experience of this? Have you grappled with this in therapy, for instance? Do you do therapy? You know, he recites a lot of the kind of conventional west coast wisdom about, like, breath work and said he has tried and liked therapy vaguely, but it was very clear that amidst this stratospheric rise and a lot of these difficulties, and this would be, for most of us, I think, painful criticism, there has not been a process of really looking inward, of reckoning. That is my take. Having, you know, asked him these questions, he sort of is breezily dismissive. And I think that that runs through a lot of the professional situations that we narrate, that there are other people who really have a relationship that matters to them internally with the truth of a situation. And I think he is uniquely suited in some ways to this job because he really can effortlessly shift between one version of reality and another as he is marshaling people to his cause.
- [36:53]
David Remnick
You spent a lot of time in the last year looking into some very lurid allegations about Sam Altman's personal life, his sexual life, what he may or may not have done. What did you conclude? What can you say about that?
- [37:09]
Ronan Farrow
So this is one area where it's important to Note, we didn't set out looking for that. Part of what makes this circumstance extraordinary is the prevalence of this allegation that Sam Altman lies all the time. Another thing that makes it extraordinary is that in addition to those, in my view, more substantive critiques that are so widespread, there are incredibly widespread claims about his personal life that don't stand up to as much scrutiny. Again, in my view, having looked at this for months and months, we capture the way in which actually, ironically, the existence of these falsified or thin claims trumped up by rivals kind of obfuscates the real criticism. The atmosphere of conflict in this field is we quote one executive saying Shakespearean, the most dangerous, worse than the rise
- [37:59]
David Remnick
of the Internet and other businesses, the
- [38:01]
Ronan Farrow
railroads or whatever it might be, historians could debate. But certainly we talk to many people in this field who say absolutely, yes. And, you know, one of the things we encountered, and I'm not talking about like a little bit here and there from one arrival. I mean, I got, you know, the better part of a dozen incoming calls from government officials, from people at investment firms, from rivals. You talk to anyone in this industry, and they will cite this in many cases as common knowledge claims that, you know, Sam pursues minors. That's a very persistent one.
- [38:32]
David Remnick
And let's quickly stipulate that there's no.
- [38:34]
Ronan Farrow
And we found no evidence of this. Sam and I had direct conversations about it. And while obviously, you know, people have been telling us to take things Sam Altman says with a grain of salt, I did feel there was a degree of sincerity in some of those conversations where we would talk, you know, in addition to our on the record conversations, we had, you know, frank personal conversations where I think I got a picture of his relationship with these allegations. And we put what the facts we uncover can sustain in the piece, which is we found absolutely nothing. This appears to be untrue by cut. And it's pushed by. By his opponents. I mean, we have dossiers.
- [39:09]
David Remnick
Can you say who.
- [39:10]
Ronan Farrow
From Elon Musk's intermediaries, in some cases, paid by Elon Musk. And.
- [39:17]
David Remnick
And if Elon Musk were sitting here, he'd say what?
- [39:19]
Ronan Farrow
Well, we certainly reached out to him for an interview about it, and he declined.
- [39:24]
David Remnick
He was busy.
- [39:25]
Ronan Farrow
But we did. But we did fact check with. With other intermediaries of his, and he has responses to some of the things that we say on this matter. It is incontrovertible that Altman's rivals are pushing this and hard.
- [39:39]
David Remnick
Microsoft has been a huge funder of OpenAI with a lot of exclusive access to their own products. And just recently it was reported that Microsoft is considering whether to sue OpenAI and Amazon for a deal that seems to go around. Microsoft. Explain what this is all about, because it seems like a mess to me.
- [40:00]
Ronan Farrow
Well, it's one of several examples where business partners or business rivals accuse Altman and OpenAI of making conflicting announcements about deals that they say are incompatible. Now, I will not bore you with the technical particulars of this, but essentially Microsoft is an exclusive provider of a certain kind of foundational models, and they announced a deal on top of that. Actually, on the same day, they reaffirmed that Microsoft exclusivity with Amazon. And Microsoft says this new deal, which is to do with enterprise products that allow businesses to build agents, they say that that depends on the very that Microsoft is supposed to control exclusively. And, you know, look, they've since then released sort of mutual statements, sort of mutual Microsoft saying, like we gather that OpenAI understands their legal obligations here. So it's tense. But you talk to Microsoft executives behind the scenes and they say, first of all, this was absolutely in conflict, that he announced two conflicting things that there is no way for him to achieve the thing that is promised in the Amazon announcement, which is essentially, we're going to build a new solution that deconflicts these things.
- [41:11]
Andrew Morantz
Well, this also gets to the circularity of a lot of these deals. Like a lot of times, a meme that you'll see when Describing one of OpenAI has a deal with Nvidia and Nvidia has a deal with Amazon, and Amazon has a deal with OpenAI. People will just put a picture of an extension cord plugged into itself. Like, there are a lot of these deals that are like, I buy your stuff, you buy my stuff.
- [41:29]
David Remnick
Andrew, how big is OpenAI does it make a profit? They certainly had lots and lots and lots of investing.
- [41:36]
Andrew Morantz
Well, how big and do they make a profit or different?
- [41:39]
David Remnick
Exactly.
- [41:39]
Andrew Morantz
They are burning through cash at an enormous rate. I mean, so while this piece was in production, we kept having to change. They've just sustained the biggest fundraising round in history to a higher number because they kept closing more fundraising rounds. The latest, I think, was 122 billion. And at the same time, they're still, as far as we can tell, losing money.
- [42:01]
David Remnick
Where does the money go?
- [42:03]
Andrew Morantz
So a lot of it is going into data centers.
- [42:05]
David Remnick
Centers. Right.
- [42:06]
Andrew Morantz
So they're building one in the UAE that is going to be seven times as big as Central park and use about as much electricity as Miami.
- [42:14]
David Remnick
So this is great for the environment.
- [42:16]
Andrew Morantz
Yeah, perfect for the environment. But don't worry, because AGI is going to fix the environment.
- [42:20]
David Remnick
I feel better already.
- [42:21]
Ronan Farrow
And geopolitically, it's worth noting, a big thread in this piece is in addition to talking about some of those early ideas that were raised about pitting powers against each other, there is still a present day reality of this computational power becoming, as Sam has said, you know, the new currency of the world and the factor that may shape the balance of power between nations. And so there are people within this industry and within the national security establishment who feel that this unrestrained and in Altman's case, often very nakedly transactional approach to getting as much money as possible, which inevitably in the current reality means doubling down on Middle Eastern money. There are, there are those critics who say that is concentrating a new kind of power that is incredibly geopolitically sensitive under autocracies that may eventually be beyond our control, that you could wind up with a situation where a dictator has a disproportionate ownership of the most powerful technology on earth and that that could pose a real national security threat.
- [43:28]
David Remnick
But that's where the money is.
- [43:29]
Ronan Farrow
And that is where the money is. And we should say it's come standard in Silicon Valley to fundraise from the Middle East, Hollywood, everywhere, everywhere. But I will say, even against that backdrop, there was a lot more grumbling about Altman's sweeping vision of really getting such a massive amount of money and in exchange promising such a massive amount of infrastructure. In UAE particularly, where you get your
- [43:50]
Andrew Morantz
funding for a movie is different than where you put, as some people call it, a country of geniuses in a data center. In other words, if you really think that you're growing a new form of superintelligence, you want to keep it in the family. Exactly.
- [44:06]
David Remnick
I'm going to ask you both as first, Ronan, I get the sense that we all know what Elon Musk at this point means and what Elon Musk wants. Sam Altman is more mysterious, it seems to me. Ronan, what does Sam Altman want? What's the grand ambition here? To be the richest man in the world? At some point he says that he was more interested in power than he is in money. What's your sense of the.
- [44:34]
Ronan Farrow
I don't think it's just a caricature or hyperbole to say Sam Altman very often wants what you want in this moment. And you know, that is the.
- [44:46]
David Remnick
What does that mean?
- [44:47]
Ronan Farrow
That is the crux of the matter. Sam Altman more often than not, it seems across all of this documentation and sourcing, reads what the person on the other side of the table needs and wants. And he tells them those are the things he wants.
- [45:02]
David Remnick
Give me an example.
- [45:03]
Ronan Farrow
Well, the entire founding story of the company that at a time when safety fears had run wild and were kind of the animating engine of discourse, he was the safety guy and he told everyone. That was his deepest belief. Now, he says, and not totally unfairly, evolution over time is a real thing. And I've had to adapt to changing circumstances. But even allowing for that, in both that big picture where he's gone from being the safety guy to being the. He would dispute this, but I would say fairly accurate to say no regulation guy. And also in the micro picture, in all of these small interactions, you know, we tell the story of an interaction where he summons Dario Amadei, this now competitor Anthropic from Anthropic, when prior to the founding of Anthropic, Amadei was a senior person at OpenAI into a room along with Amedei's sister who was also at the company, and accused them both of being overly political and working against him. And then they called in another executive who Altman had said was the source of this rumor. And that executive said, I never said that. And Altman said, well, I never said that either, according to an account from someone there. And we talked about all the people involved. You can see the exact reporting. But the gist is he will often in the same moment reflect the different views and desires. He is a profoundly, by his own telling, conflict averse person. And I think the piece holds a lot of sympathy for the reality of that emotionally and the understandability of that, the relatability of that. But. But it also doesn't explain it away. This is a trait that is present in him to a truly extraordinary extent that has ramifications for his businesses and for the world.
- [46:51]
David Remnick
Andrew?
- [46:53]
Andrew Morantz
Yeah, I think it's important to grasp how much of the initial pitch for this was based on this view of the world that has completely flipped over time because we think of it through the lens of, sure, businesses put out nice press releases and they say we're not going to be evil, and then they redefine what they think is evil over time. This is not that. This is. This is. Altman went to great lengths to write blog posts to convince people to take people out to dinner to say, I am the person you can trust to usher this technology into existence without literally killing everyone on earth. That was Literally the pitch. So then for him now to say we don't need to worry about all that Doomer stuff, it's kind of one of those, either you were lying then or you're lying now. And I personally.
- [47:45]
David Remnick
Or he might argue that something happened in the research on AI that made him less alarmist.
- [47:53]
Andrew Morantz
He might, but he didn't. What he says is he redefines the problem. Yeah, he redefines the alignment problem away from this civilizational existential thing. Now he defines the alignment problem as something that's annoying, like, you know, Instagram algorithms that tempt you to waste your time. So he just kind of shifts the pitch.
- [48:12]
Ronan Farrow
I think it's important to say sometimes people see, you know, heavy duty investigative reporting from the New Yorker, maybe particularly my work, and they think like, this is a, this is a hit piece about a villain. I would of course dispute that characterization. We look at these complex problems fairly in this case. In particular though, this is something different than cases where we're looking at a single clear cut criminal allegation. There are people in Silicon Valley who think of Sam Altman as a villain. For what it's worth, I emerge from this reporting not thinking of Sam Altman as a villain. I think he is a complicated character. I think he often believes what he is saying in the moment. I think what he says about this being rooted in conflict aversion is very likely real. And as one person close to him told us in the piece, he really seems to lack any self doubt. So that is a superpower. He believes it, I think, when he says it. And I think he's grappling with the consequences. The industry needs to grapple with the consequences too, I think is the main case I'm making.
- [49:13]
Andrew Morantz
I really agree. And I think one way of putting this, David, is those memos that were the initial thing that got him fired, if something simple enough, if those memos had contained a simple enough smoking gun, we would have known about it long before this. Yeah, they don't contain a single smoking gun. What they contain is a pattern of behavior that you need a 16,000 word New Yorker piece to elucidate. Genuinely.
- [49:38]
David Remnick
Ronan Farrow, Andrew Morantz, thanks so much.
- [49:40]
Ronan Farrow
Thanks, David.
- [49:45]
David Remnick
You can read that piece@newyorker.com it's called Sam Altman May Control the Future. Can he be trusted? And you can subscribe to the New Yorker there as well. New yorker.com this is the New Yorker Radio Hour. Thanks so much for listening. See you next time.
- [50:03]
WNYC Studios Announcer
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