Ronan Farrow

This appears to be untrue.

And it's pushed by his opponents.

I mean, we have dossiers from Elon Musk's intermediaries, in some cases paid by Elon Musk.

Well, we certainly reached out to him for an interview about it, and he declined.

He was busy.

But we did fact check 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.

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 concept.

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 thing 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.

I feel better already.

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, you know, 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 those critics who say that is concentrating a new kind of power that is incredibly geopolitically sensitive under autocracies.