You don’t build a trillion dollar AI empire by being a saint.
In a seeping new investigative piece from The New Yorker, numerous tech insiders paint a picture of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman as a relentless liar who wants everyone to like him while manipulating even the people closest to him to get what he wants. AI safety, in this slippery portrait of Altman, is merely a bargaining chip he dangles like a carrot to get concerned engineers — and anyone else worried about the tech’s far-reaching consequences — on board, before going back on his word.
Some of these insiders were strikingly blunt in their diagnoses: Altman was a literal “sociopath,” one OpenAI board member alleged.
“He’s unconstrained by truth,” they told The New Yorker. “He has two traits that are almost never seen in the same person. The first is a strong desire to please people, to be liked in any given interaction. The second is almost a sociopathic lack of concern for the consequences that may come from deceiving someone.”
Aaron Swartz, the famed coder and hacktivist who died by suicide in 2013, used similar language to describe Altman. Swartz had been batchmates with Altman in the inaugural class of 2005 at the Silicon Valley incubator Y Combinator, and warned his friends about Altman shortly before his passing.
“You need to understand that Sam can never be trusted,” he told one confidante. “He is a sociopath. He would do anything.”
Altman, it’s worth noting, has been accused by his sister in a civil suit of repeatedly sexually abusing her beginning when she was three-year-old and when he was 12. Altman, his mother, and his brothers all deny the claims.
The New Yorker piece characterizes Altman as more of a businessman than an engineer, leveraging an almost singular ability to get skeptics, be they engineers or the public, to believe that he holds the same priorities as them.
“He’s unbelievably persuasive. Like, Jedi mind tricks,” a tech executive who has worked with Altman told The New Yorker. “He’s just next level.”
One alleged victim of Altman’s double dealing is Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, who used to work at OpenAI but left to found his own safety-focused AI company over differences with Altman.
In notes viewed by The New Yorker, Amodei wrote about negotiating a billion-dollar investment from Microsoft in 2019. Many at the company were reportedly anxious that Microsoft would override OpenAI’s safety commitments, and Amodei made sure to address this by showing Altman a ranked list of safety demands, which Altman agreed to. But when the deal was closing in June, Amodei discovered a provision had been added that obviated the top demand on the list. Amodei confronted Altman about this, but Altman denied the provision existed, even after Amodei read the provision aloud to him.
Another is Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. Multiple executives at the Redmond giant described Altman as repeatedly going back on his word, straining his long-standing relationship with Nadella. “He has misrepresented, distorted, renegotiated, reneged on agreements,” one executive told The New Yorker. An example from earlier this year: on the same day OpenAI reaffirmed Microsoft as the exclusive provider for its memoryless AI models, it announced a $50 billion deal with Amazon as its exclusive reseller of its “Frontier” platform for AI agents. (Microsoft signalled it was willing to sue over this alleged breach of contract.)
Sue Yoon, a former OpenAI board member dished a slightly different, but no less unflattering, view of Altman than the “sociopath” picture. Altman was “not this Machiavellian villain,” she said, but was able to delude himself to in believing his ever-shifting sales pitches. “He’s too caught up in his own self-belief,” she told The New Yorker. “So he does things that, if you live in the real world, make no sense. But he doesn’t live in the real world.”
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