Chapter 1: What recent investigative piece did Ronan Farrow write about Sam Altman?
All right, joining me today on IHIP News is Ronan Farrow, a contributing writer at The New Yorker, and he is out with a juicy new investigative piece about Sam Altman. The title is Sam Altman May Control Our Future. Can He Be Trusted? Welcome, Ronan. How are you today?
It's great to be here. I'm exhausted from getting this piece out, but it's been really wonderful to see the reaction. I think people across America are starting to really clock how the AI industry is in need of a conversation about accountability.
And let's just so listener, if you don't know, Sam Altman owns ChatGPT. And I know that you probably use that at some point. I've used it at some point. But Ronan, how dangerous potentially is AI?
Well, so part of what's built into this story, Jennifer, is that Sam Altman himself founded OpenAI on a very specific promise. He said, this is the most powerful and maybe dangerous technology in human history. And not everybody agrees with this. But the founders of this company and the people technically inside building this technology of artificial intelligence were sounding these alarms.
They were saying, look, there could be the science fiction scenario of a Terminator Skynet situation. where an AI falls out of alignment with human values and it becomes advanced enough and integrated enough into our systems that it could launch nukes. But you don't even have to go that far to be alarmed. Already right now, we are seeing an environment where AI is powering weapons and war zones.
There's been at least one case where it seems like a drone went rogue without a human operator, where chemical weapons are being identified much, much more rapidly through this technology, where the whole economy has come to depend on a very few AI companies that are heavily leveraged up and borrowing and doing deals with each other. Even the sunniest projections from economists
hold that in the coming years millions and millions of jobs are going to be exposed to disruption and maybe elimination from this so the stakes are real they have not gone away and the story this investigation tells is about sam altman while he was fundraising on this premise of we've got to be scared and therefore give the money to us because we're the safety guys and we're going to go slow and we're not going to be about growth we're going to stay a 501c3 uh
But that very rapidly was replaced in a pattern of him kind of saying one thing critics allege and documents show in this piece and then doing another. And that starts right at the top with the high level direction where this company has become one of the biggest for profit companies on Earth now.
And does Sam Altman know how dangerous this is? Does he know, you said earlier, that he had people that are aware? And it's my understanding from your reporting that you found people from inside the company that had like a safety net to try to put up guardrails.
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Chapter 2: How does Ronan Farrow assess the potential dangers of AI?
his board and executives at this company got together and they fired him because they felt that he was lying too much. And there's people in this piece that say he was lying too much for any executive. And there's people in this piece who say he was lying too much, especially in this context where that can become dangerous.
And the story of what happened after is the story of that wider race to the bottom. This is really a situation where capitalism won out. Sam Altman went into a war room, and we document how he fanned out to all these powerful allies. in the investment community who in turn were connected to heavy hitters in politics.
You know, one of his main defenders is this Silicon Valley Democratic investor Ron Conway. He was at lunch with Nancy Pelosi when he got the text from Sam saying, like, I've been fired. We've all got to go to war. And a bunch of those people did go to war. And in fairness to all of those people, the board that fired Sam Altman did not communicate what was happening. They got bad legal advice.
They stayed quiet. Right now is kind of the first time we're seeing all of the details of what they were really alleging and why he was fired. But in that void, Sam Altman was able to make the case, look, the numbers don't lie. I'm the key to the growth of this company. It's going to fall apart without me. And he came back.
And I document parts of that comeback that are still raising real questions. There was an outside law firm investigation that was kept entirely out of writing. So this goes to your big point, right? There's a lack of guardrails, a lack of accountability. And since then, what we've seen in AI
is a lot of these researchers who are closest to the safety concerns saying over and over again, this is becoming a situation where all of the labs, even ones like there's a company, Anthropic, if anyone listening has used Claude, which was founded by some of these people who left OpenAI because they didn't trust Sam Altman and they wanted to be the safety guys.
They're also watering down some of their safety commitments. They're also in an environment where there's less and less space for AI labs to focus on safety. I think this is a case, Jennifer, where we just need outside eyes on this tech, and we just don't have a political environment where that's happening meaningfully.
So in reading your piece, it reminded me of what I've been observing since Trump was reelected. And you start that at one point, Sam Altman was a Hillary supporter and he seemed to be, you know, for equal rights. He is a gay man and he seemed to be more a left leaning person. And it's not just Sam Altman, it's Marco Rubio and all of the oligarchs. And it seems like
Voting for Trump the third time, my observation, it broke something in people. And in your reporting, some people you interviewed said that they referred to Sam Altman as a sociopath. I had Kara Swisher on the podcast a couple of months ago, and she said, oh, these tech guys, Jennifer, they don't believe in anything. If Kamala would have won, they would have had their pronouns changed.
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Chapter 3: What promises did Sam Altman make when founding OpenAI?
We're seeing right now during the Iran conflict, threats from Iran to strike a planned data center in Abu Dhabi that is a product of all of this lobbying from Sam Maltman. The backdrop of this is developing advanced AI just takes an incredible amount of money.
And a lot of the business dealings we described in this company were about Sam knocking on different doors, particularly in the Middle East, trying to get that money. And the Biden administration was somewhat alarmed by this. And he actually was in a security clearance vetting process that we write about and we get internal emails related to, where experts on security clearances said,
We don't think this guy can get through because he has all of these foreign entanglements and he's raising all this money. The moment Trump came in, all of the regulate us went away and all of the money from the Middle East could flow freely. And, you know, there are safety people in this piece who say that is incredibly dangerous.
That reshapes the balance of power in the world that hands over like the equivalent of nuclear weapons in a whole new context to autocrats. You make the right point. That is the wider story of so many American industries right now. I'm a lawyer by training.
The law firms have in a situation where they could actually be a really important bulwark right through impact litigation against the erosion of democratic values. They bent the knee so quickly, starting with Paul Weiss, if anyone followed that story. Hollywood, media, the consolidation of platforms where there can be this kind of accountability reporting is real.
There are not a lot of places that will give the resources for a reporter like me to work on something like this for a year and a half and get all these documents.
um and and we don't meanwhile have that kind of independent oversight happening through regulation and legislation um there is a huge proliferation of money from ai in politics as i mentioned before you know this is a moment where if you're running for office in america right now you are really having to contend with a ton of the money coming from ai
because a ton of the economy is propped up on AI. And there's just very little way to push back on that. I do, though, believe that if readers see this, they look at this piece, they care. You can encourage independent oversight in journalism by subscribing to places that do it. Maybe that's the New Yorker. Maybe you believe in what we've done with this piece and you think we need more of that.
Please subscribe. And maybe it's ProPublica. There are places doing meaningful work in a shrinking space. A funny example of this is actually as we were closing this piece and we're in deep conversations that are, as you mentioned, very combative with Sam Altman and others at OpenAI, they announced they were acquiring TBPN, this tech podcast.
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Chapter 4: Does Sam Altman understand the risks associated with AI?
And my thing is, and pardon my language here. I think everybody knows I cuss by now. Yet they have all this fuck you money. And then they're just in this constant state of victimhood. They feel like they're so oppressed. And I don't think there's ever been a clearer advertisement against the grotesque accumulation of wealth than this slate of billionaires.
And I wanted to ask you, because I've noticed that Elon Musk and Sam Altman have hate each other. Do you have any insight as to their billionaire beef and to the larger psychology of why these people feel so oppressed when they have everything and a president that will do anything on the planet for them?
This goes back to our conversation about the story mattering in more ways than just with respect to open AI. Whoever has their finger on the button, as one person puts it in this piece, in this industry, they are fallible. And some are more fallible than others.
But even like, you know, I mentioned Anthropic, this competing firm that's it's supposedly they're like the number one safety guys still are the only ones with some vestige of that priority left in AI. They've had, you know, crazy leaks in recent weeks. So The question is, can we trust any of these guys without an outside framework of oversight?
And one of the things that I think reinforces the importance of that question for me is, when I descended into this reporting, I got such a full-face blast of the mud fight between these individuals and the ways in which, as their fingers hover over the button that really may reshape all of our employment, all of our safety, our economy, everything potentially by their own pitch, right?
That is what they are conveying. They are at each other's throats like children. And I document in the piece that Elon Musk, who was a co-founder of OpenAI and now in a gigantic lawsuit is alleging that he was scammed because of this transformation of OpenAI from a non-profit to a for-profit. I won't get into the merits of the case,
except to say that there is this blood feud that you allude to between a lot of these guys, by the way. But this is a great example of it, where as we're entrusting them to such a serious thing, they're spending all of this time and all of these resources trying to murder each other reputationally in Silicon Valley.
There are, you know, allegations about Sam Altman and his personal life that are circulated so widely. They're discussed like it's just common knowledge, specifically like claims that he pursues underage boys that simply appear to be untrue. Like I spent months calling around to everyone. I looked at all of the opposition research dossiers and I couldn't find that.
And the unfortunate thing is that that stuff obscures the very real and very evidence based stuff. And it is extreme. I mean, people are spending money on like chasing each other around with private investigators while our future is in their hands.
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Chapter 5: What allegations surround Sam Altman's leadership at OpenAI?
And look, if you care about accountability journalism, do try to subscribe and support journalists doing this sort of thing.
Yes, and go follow Ronan and subscribe to, and this is in The New Yorker, correct?
It's in The New Yorker. You can read it on thenewyorker.com.
I think it's the most democratic, patriotic thing we can do right now is to support journalists and journalism. Thank you so much.
Thank you for that.
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