Menu
Sign In Search Podcasts Charts People & Topics Add Podcast API Blog Pricing

Ronan Farrow

👤 Speaker
443 total appearances

Appearances Over Time

Podcast Appearances

The New Yorker Radio Hour
Sam Altman’s Trust Issues at OpenAI

And we'll have a big old foundation and we're going to do some charitable activity and that'll help.

The New Yorker Radio Hour
Sam Altman’s Trust Issues at OpenAI

Compared him to Hitler.

The New Yorker Radio Hour
Sam Altman’s Trust Issues at OpenAI

And David Sachs and –

The New Yorker Radio Hour
Sam Altman’s Trust Issues at OpenAI

Safety has fallen out of favor in Silicon Valley and Washington to a great extent.

The New Yorker Radio Hour
Sam Altman’s Trust Issues at OpenAI

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 New Yorker Radio Hour
Sam Altman’s Trust Issues at OpenAI

The moment of the blip when people in this industry were still— The coup attempt.

The New Yorker Radio Hour
Sam Altman’s Trust Issues at OpenAI

The coup attempt, the firing—

The New Yorker Radio Hour
Sam Altman’s Trust Issues at OpenAI

when people in the industry were still uncertain about whether you should treat executives who shape this transformative technology 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

The New Yorker Radio Hour
Sam Altman’s Trust Issues at OpenAI

signing up for that mission, and they said, this guy is lying too much, and he has to go.

The New Yorker Radio Hour
Sam Altman’s Trust Issues at OpenAI

And it's... They call themselves a PBC, but we were told... What's a PBC?

The New Yorker Radio Hour
Sam Altman’s Trust Issues at OpenAI

A public benefit corporation.

The New Yorker Radio Hour
Sam Altman’s Trust Issues at OpenAI

But functionally, it is a for-profit institution, and what was once the main event, the non-profit, now has a 27%, 26%?

The New Yorker Radio Hour
Sam Altman’s Trust Issues at OpenAI

Yeah.

The New Yorker Radio Hour
Sam Altman’s Trust Issues at OpenAI

It has a minority stake.

The New Yorker Radio Hour
Sam Altman’s Trust Issues at OpenAI

The inflection point of the firing and the reason we look at it as an important one in this piece is a moment where that argument that we should have this elevated standard, the rubber met the road.

The New Yorker Radio Hour
Sam Altman’s Trust Issues at OpenAI

It was tested.

The New Yorker Radio Hour
Sam Altman’s Trust Issues at OpenAI

And what we see afterwards, him clawing his way back in this way,

The New Yorker Radio Hour
Sam Altman’s Trust Issues at OpenAI

partly on the strength of going to a bunch of investors.

The New Yorker Radio Hour
Sam Altman’s Trust Issues at OpenAI

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, you know, vaporous thing.

The New Yorker Radio Hour
Sam Altman’s Trust Issues at OpenAI

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.