Chapter 1: What recent actions did Sam Altman take regarding AI and the Pentagon?
This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.
Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Just a few months ago, Andrew Ross Sorkin, the financial journalist, was on this program. And he quoted a figure that was really remarkable. Virtually all of the recent economic growth in the United States, Sorkin told me, is investment in artificial intelligence.
A lot of people are concerned that a huge bubble around AI is about to pop and take the economy with it. And a few people continue to feel that AI is just overhyped. But I don't think there's really much doubt at this point that in our lifetimes, at least, AI is going to bring changes as significant as the Industrial Revolution 200 years ago.
At the center of this world-changing technology is a man named Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI. It was OpenAI that really brought artificial intelligence into most of our lives with ChatGPT, and that exploded into our consciousness in 2022. But the chatbots are just the tip of the iceberg. OpenAI is planning to go public this year, and it recently fundraised more money than any company ever.
Ronan Farrow and Andrew Morantz have spoken with over 100 people closely connected to Sam Altman and with Altman himself many times.
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Chapter 2: How does Altman's leadership compare to that of historical figures like Oppenheimer?
They began by looking in particular at the week when Altman was very suddenly fired from OpenAI and days later reinstated as CEO. That whole episode has been mired in secrecy and confusion. Ronan and Andrew see the firing, the blip as they call it, as a key to understanding Altman and the problems with his leadership.
Their extraordinary investigation in The New Yorker is called Sam Altman May Control the Future. Can he be trusted? Now, Andrew, Ronan, you compare Sam Altman to Robert Oppenheimer, who, of course, was pivotal in developing the A-bomb. Oppenheimer not only developed a technology, but in a sense, he defined an age in American life, the atomic age.
But there's, of course, something extremely ominous about that comparison, too. So let's begin this way, Andrew. Who is Sam Altman, and why would you compare him to Robert Oppenheimer?
Well, for one thing, we compare him to Oppenheimer because he compares himself to Oppenheimer. Constantly. Constant throughout the rhetoric before OpenAI existed for why it needed to exist, there's this constant thread of analogies to the Manhattan Project. So when he emails Elon Musk out of the blue in May of 2015, He says, hi, Elon. This is Sam.
He says, I think we need a Manhattan Project for AI. And it does have this dual-edged nature to it, which is both we're going to be the good guys and defeat the bad guys, right?
We're the Americans and we're going to defeat the Nazis.
Yeah, but so in this case, instead of the Nazis, it's – either China in a national security context or Google in a competitive corporate context.
But that's also the ominous part, Ronan, is the notion that the atomic bomb defined an age, the atomic age. It still looms over our politics and global security. What is the potential ominous aspect of AI? We hear about it as something that could be fantastic for the development of drugs, for all kinds of things, but it could also wipe out God knows how many jobs. But it goes darker than that.
I will say at the outset of this reporting, I was not myself convinced of the, you know, much ballyhooed transformative impact of this technology. I really emerged from this more convinced. There's the scenarios that I think you're alluding to, right? The atom bomb-esque ones.
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Chapter 3: What led to the 'blip' in Altman's tenure at OpenAI?
But part of the power of his pitch was that he went to Elon Musk and he said, I hear you. This could destroy humanity. We need to put something together and we need it to be safety first. And it can't just be about racing to get the technology first. This has to be a scenario where we're willing to slow down on development first. to keep it safe. It was all rooted in a fear-driven argument.
And that was why Google was the bad guy, because Google is for-profit, they're the megacorporation, so we're going to be the good guys.
And that was, as Andrew alluded to, a really powerful recruiting tool, because part of OpenAI's strength was not only did Sam Altman, through these quite extraordinary powers of persuasion, present this sort of fear-driven rationale why he needed to get the money for this, He also was able to go to the brightest minds in the field and say, this is a nonprofit.
We may not be able to pay as much as Google, but we can give you something else, which is we're the good guys. So what happened a few years ago?
The blip? Yeah. What was the blip? So one of the top people who they recruited, who took, who was offered $6 million a year at Google and turned it down in order to go work for the good guys, was this guy Ilya Sutskeverer.
who was on the board in 2023, and he started to get the feeling, as we quote him in the piece, saying, I don't think Sam is the guy who should have his finger on the button, to return to the atom bomb analogy. And so...
he starts to rally the board against sam now this has been a lingering question for years in silicon valley what did ilya see what is in his secret memos that he compiled is there a smoking gun is there some one thing that explains it all and what we found and the reason that you graciously gave us 16 000 words to explain it is that There is not one smoking gun.
There is this small accumulation of detailed patterns of behavior that add up to, in aggregate, what people like Slutskever felt was someone who can't be entrusted with this world-altering technology.
There are certainly specific episodes over the history of OpenAI that have not yet been extensively reported.
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Chapter 4: What are the key safety concerns surrounding AI development?
I think that he is someone who he actually grapples with this in a new and more sincere way in this piece. He talks about having had some problems with this. He doesn't just pretend that this doesn't exist around him. He talks about changing over time. He talks about the deep roots of feeling like a people pleaser, which, you know, I understand.
Mm-hmm.
But I think he is reckoning now anew with the costs of that when it's taken to an extreme.
I'm speaking with Ronan Farrow, along with Andrew Morantz. They've co-written a long, deep investigation of Sam Altman and the rise of OpenAI. That's all on The New Yorker this week. We'll continue in just a moment. This is The New Yorker Radio Hour.
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This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick.
Today, U.S. government agencies are starting to enforce a ban that President Trump imposed Friday barring the federal government from using AI tools made by Anthropic.
In February, a feud erupted between one of the leading AI companies, Anthropic, and the U.S. government. In short, Anthropic was providing artificial intelligence capability to the Pentagon, But Anthropic wouldn't allow its clawed system to launch autonomous weapons or to be used in mass surveillance.
In response, the Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and the Pentagon called Anthropic a national security risk. Anthropic turned around and sued. And into the breach stepped Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, and he swiftly made a deal with the Pentagon and replaced Anthropic. This is the same CEO who said three years ago to Congress that he feared what could happen if AI was deployed incorrectly.
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Chapter 5: How does Sam Altman justify his shift in stance on AI safety?
And this gets to the Shakespearean rivalry stuff as well. This is often personal. This is often petty stuff. But because the stakes are presented as being so high, like literal existential, I mean people talk about it as who will win the AGI dictatorship. People talk about it as who will get the golden ring, who will get the ring of Sauron. So I think they just think –
If you're Sam Altman or Dario Amadei or Elon Musk, I think in their minds, it's like anything is worth doing to win that competition because it is totally existential.
What are the financial stakes for Sam Altman running?
immense. One of the things that we talk about is Sam had both positive and negative arguments he used to buoy this company. We've talked about how he marshaled people's fear. He also really rallied people around the optimistic projections of what this technology is going to be. And there are blog posts from him in recent years where he talks about, you know, we're
Right on the cusp of maybe even have cleared the event horizon is one term he uses.
And God knows what that means.
Well, a trajectory that will bring us very imminently to not only artificial general intelligence, but a further development beyond artificial superintelligence. And in turn to he itemizes, for instance, you know, curing cancer, traveling to other planets, essentially capturing the light cone of all economic value.
Okay, I read that. Time out. We put it in quotes. What the hell did that mean?
It's a sci-fi-ish thing that basically means capturing all the economic value in the solar system. So it involves space colonization usually.
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Chapter 6: What are the implications of AI on job markets and societal roles?
Mm-hmm.
As did his vice president and several other people. And then he, you know, in 2024, he starts to, you know, shift.
Dial back the Hitler.
Dial back the Hitler. We almost went with that as the headline of the piece. And then he starts to say, you know, I think this country will be okay no matter what happens. And it seems very clear, actually, according to a bunch of Biden administration national security officials who we spoke to. He used to go to the Biden White House all the time.
All the time and encourage them to regulate more heavily. Right. And say this executive order doesn't go far enough. We need to restrict and regulate this technology more. Then Trump comes in.
Literal day one – literal first day of the Trump administration, they announce massive new data infrastructure projects and then Trump and his administration start blessing this acceleration off to the races.
And the rhetoric of the Trump White House is safety is a false concern. We heard that from – I think J.D. Vance says this in the piece.
And David Sachs and – Safety has fallen out of favor in Silicon Valley and Washington to a great extent. 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 moment of the blip when people in this industry were still— The coup attempt. The coup attempt, the firing—
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
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Chapter 7: How does Altman's approach to AI funding reflect his business strategy?
The atmosphere of conflict in this field is, we quote one executive saying, Shakespearean.
The most dangerous... Worse than the rise of the internet? and other businesses, the railroads or whatever it might be?
You could, historians could debate, but certainly we talk to many people in this field who say absolutely yes. And, you know, one of the things we encountered, and I'm not talking about like a little bit here and there from arrival. I mean, I got... You know, the better part of a dozen incoming calls from government officials, from people at investment firms, from rivals.
You talk to anyone in this industry, and they will cite this, in many cases, as common knowledge. Claims that, you know, Sam pursues minors. That's a very persistent one. And let's quickly stipulate that there's no... Sam and I had direct conversations about it.
And while obviously, you know, people have been telling us to take things Sam Altman says with a grain of salt, I did feel there was a degree of sincerity in some of those conversations where we would talk, you know, in addition to our on-the-record conversations, we had, you know, frank personal conversations where I think I got a picture of his relationship with these allegations.
And we put what the facts we uncover can sustain in the piece, which is we found absolutely nothing. 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.
And if Elon Musk were sitting here, he'd say what?
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.
Microsoft has been a huge funder of OpenAI with a lot of exclusive access to their own products. Mm-hmm. And just recently it was reported that Microsoft is considering whether to sue OpenAI and Amazon for a deal that seems to go around Microsoft. Explain what this is all about because it seems like a mess to me.
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