Karen Hao

When he's talking with consumers that he's trying to sell his products to, it's the most amazing digital assistant that you're ever going to have.

When he was talking with Microsoft, you know, in the deal that OpenAI and Microsoft struck, where Microsoft invested in the company, it was defined as a system that will generate $100 billion of revenue.

And on OpenAI's own website, they define it as highly autonomous systems that outperform humans in most economically valuable work.

This is like not a coherent definition.

vision of one technology.

These are very different definitions that are spoken out loud to the audience that needs to be mobilized to ward off regulation or get more consumer buy-in into the industry's quest or to get more capital, more resources for continuing on this journey with ambiguous definitions.

In general, when Altman is writing for the public or speaking for the public, he does not just have the public as the audience in mind.

There are other people that he is trying to motivate or mobilize when he says these things.

And in that particular moment, Altman was trying to convince Elon Musk to join him on co-founding OpenAI.

And Musk, in particular, was spending all of his time sounding the alarm on what he saw as a huge existential threat that AI could pose.

And so in that blog post, if you look at the language that Altman uses side by side with the language that Musk was using at the time, it mirrors all the things that Musk was saying.

It's identical.

Yeah.

And so, you know, like his parenthetical, there are other things that might actually be more likely to happen, like engineered viruses.

It's because up until then, Altman had been talking just about engineered viruses.

And so now that he needs to pivot to speak to an audience of one, to Musk—

He needs to kind of resolve the contradiction between what he's now elevating as his new central fear to be the same as Musk's new central fear with what he had previously been saying.

So that's why he's like, I think this is now, even though before I said this.

Elon Musk did end up co-founding it with Altman.

And certainly from Musk's perspective, he does feel manipulated because he feels like...