Better Offline - Sam Altman Is Dangerous To Silicon Valley

Episode Date: June 14, 2024

In this episode, Ed Zitron walks through how Sam Altman's ridiculous promises about the future of artificial intelligence could be ruinous for Silicon Valley, and speaks with Bloomberg's Ellen Huet about how Sam Altman - a non-technical founder with little business success - accumulated so much power.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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As I've discussed in the last episode, Sam, has spent more than a decade accumulating power and wealth in Silicon Valley without ever having to actually build anything, using a network of tech industry all-stars like LinkedIn, co-founder and investor Reid Hoffman, and Airbnb CEO, Brian Chesky, to insulate himself from responsibility and accountability. Yet things are beginning to fall apart as years of half-baked ideas and terrible, terrible product decisions have kind of made society sour on the tech industry. And the last month has been particularly difficult for Sam, starting with the chaos caused by OpenAI blatantly mimicking Scarlett Johansson's voice for the new version of ChatGBT, followed by the resignation of researchers who claim that Open AI prioritized and I quote shiny products over AI safety after the dissolution of OpenAI's safety team.

I know, it's just, it's almost cliche. Shortly thereafter, former OpenAI board member Helen Toner revealed that Sam Altman was fired from an OpenAI because of a regular pattern of deception, one where Altman would give inaccurate info about the company's safety processes on multiple occasions. And his deceit was so severe that OpenAI's board only found out about the launch of Chat GPT, which by the way is OpenAIs, first product that really made money, arguably the biggest product in tech. You want to know how they found out about it? Well, they found out when they were browsing Twitter. They found out then, not from the CEO of OpenAI, the company which they were the board of. Very weird. Toneur also noted that

Altman was an aggressive political player, with the board correctly, by the way, worrying the, and I quote again, that if Sam Altman had any inkling that the board might do something that went against him, he'd pull out all the stops, do everything in his power to undermine the board, and to prevent them from even getting to the point of being able to fire him. As a reminder, by the way, the board succeeded in firing Sam Altman in November last year, but not for long, with Altman returning his CEO a few days later, kicking Helen Toner off of the board, along with Ilya Sudkhaver, a technical co-founder that Altman manipulated long enough to build Chat GBT, GBT,

and announced him the moment that he chose to complain. Sutskava, by the way, has resigned now. He's also one of the biggest technical minds there. So how is Open AI going to continue? Anyway, last week, a group of insiders at various AI companies published an open letter asking for their overlords to the heads of these companies for the right to warn about advanced artificial intelligence in a monument, genuinely impressive monument,

to the bullshit machine that Sam Orman has created. While there are genuine safety concerns with AI, there really are, there are many of them to consider, these people are desperately afraid of the computer coming alive and killing, killing them, when they should fear the non-technical asshole manipulator getting rich, making egregious promises about what AI can do. AI researchers, you have to live up to Sam Alman's promises. Sam Alton doesn't.

This is not your friend. The problem is not the boogeyman computer coming alive. That's not happening, man. What's happening is this guy is leading your industry to ruin. And the bigger concern that they should have should be about what Leo Aschenbrenner, a former safety researcher at Open AI, had to say on the Dwark Keshe Patel podcast, where he claimed that security processes at OpenAI were, and I quote, egregiously insufficient, and that the priorities at the company were focused on growth over

stability of security. These people are afraid of open AI, potentially creating a computer that can think for itself that will come and kill them, at a time where they should be far more concerned about this manipulative con artist that's running Open AI. Sam Altman is dangerous to artificial intelligence, not because he's building artificial general intelligence, which is a kind of AI that meets or surpasses human cognitive capabilities, by the way. Kind of like data from Star Trek, they're afraid of that happening when they should be afraid of Altman's focus. What does Sam Altman care about? Because the only thing that I can find reading about what Sam Altman cares about is Sam Bloody Altman. And right now, the progress

attached to Sam Mortman actually isn't looking that great. OpenAI's growth is stalling, with Alex Cantruitt's reporting that user growth has effectively come to a halt based on a recent release claiming that ChatGPT had 100 million users a couple of weeks ago, which is, by the way, the exact same number that the company claimed ChatGPT had in November 2023. ChatGPT is also a goddamn expensive product to operate, with the company burning through capital at this insane rate, it's definitely more than $700,000 a day. It's got to be in the millions, if not more. It's insane.

And while Open AI is aggressively monetizing ChatGBT, GBT, both the customers and to businesses, it's so obviously far from crossing the break-even Rubicon. They keep leaking, and they'll claim, oh, I didn't put that out there. They keep telling people, oh, it's making billions of revenue, but they never say profit. And eventually, someone's going to turn to the money. and say, hey man, you can't just do this for free or for negative.

At some point, Satchinadella is going to call Sam Oatman and say, Sammy, Sammy, it's time. Sammy, it's got to be a real business. I assume he calls him that because of supernatural. But as things get desperate, Sam Orman's going to use the only approach he really has, sheer force of will. He's going to push open AI to grow and sell into as many industries as possible.

and he's a specious hype man he's going to be selling to other specious hype men the Jim Kramer's of the world are going to eat it up and they're all all of them the mock Bernioffs the Satchin Adela's the Sanda Pashai's they're all desperate to connect themselves with the future

and with generative AI and those that he's selling to the company's brokering deals yes even Apple they're desperate to connect their companies to another company which is building a bubble a bubble inflated by Sam Altman.

And I'd argue that this is exceedingly dangerous for Silicon Valley and for the tech industry writ large as executives that have become disconnected from the process of creating software and hardware follow yet another non-technical founder hocking unprofitable, unsustainable, and hallucination-prone software. It's just very frustrating.

If there was a very technical mind at these companies, they might walk away, and I'm not going to give Tim Cook much credit. But looking into it, I can't find any evidence that Apple is buying a bunch of GPUs, the things that you use to power these generative AI models. I found some research and analyst suggesting that they would buy a lot. But now OpenAI is doing a deal with Apple to power the next iOS. And it's interesting.

It is interesting that Apple isn't doing this themselves. Apple, a company with hundreds of billions of dollars in the bank, I believe, that pretty much prints money. That alone makes me think it's a bubble. Now, it might look like an asshole if it comes out they have, but also, why are they subcontracting this to Open AI when they could build it themselves, as Apple has always done? Very strange.

It's all so peculiar. But I wanted to get a little bit deeper into the Sam Olman story, and as I discussed last episode, Ellen Hewitt of Bloomberg, she's been doing this excellent reporting on the man. and joins me today to talk about the subject of her recent podcast. Sam Orman's Rise to Power. Another podcast from some SNL late-night comedy guy, not quite.

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Me. Is there anything to the idea that because you're from Harvard, you only got in because your parents made a huge donation. The yard birds, right? That's the name. The Harvard Yardt. They're open. Do you have a name suggestion?

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Hey, everyone, it's Ryder Strong and Wilfridell from PodMeets World. And now the PodMeets Twirled podcast. We're two men who were completely clueless to reality TV, who now have covered Dancing with the Stars, traitors, and we're gearing up for the season finale of Survivor. So yeah, now we're experts. I know we annoyed a lot of our listeners by our severe lack of survivor knowledge. That is the point of the show.

I'm just going to remind you. I have watched some Survivor. I obviously haven't watched enough. Did people not like it? Yeah. Just because we... Yeah. We'll be recapping the big conclusion

at the 50th season from the final attempts at gameplay to the desperate pleas of finalists to a bunch of ha, who. Ah, ha, ooh. Again, we are experts. So make sure to tune

to Pod Meets Twirled for all our Survivor 50 takes. Listen to Pod Meets Twirled on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. So tell me a little bit about the show you're working on. The show is the new season of Foundering, which is a serialized podcast from Bloomberg Technology. So this is season five. And in every season, we've told one story of a high-stakes

drama in Silicon Valley. I was also the host of season one, which came out several years ago, was about WeWork, and we've done other companies since then. And season five is about Open AI and Sam Altman. And I think we really tried to, you know, cover the arc of the company's creation and where it is now. But in doing so, we really tried to do a character study of Sam Altman. Like, he's a very important person in the tech industry right now with a lot of power. And we really wanted to ask ourselves the question and to help listeners ask themselves the question, should we trust him? Should we trust this person who is currently in a position of a lot of influence

and about whom there have been very serious, you know, allegations and questions raised about, you know, to put it in the words of the Open AI board, his not consistently candid behavior. And I think it's, you know, my hope is that we give listeners a chance to hear kind of the whole story and this like broader, you know, when there's news that's happening, it can happen so quickly. It's hard to get a step back. And I think what the show really does is it collects a lot of information in one place. And we also have lots of new information that you won't hear anywhere else. And interviews with people who, you know, have worked with Sam, who knew him when he was younger. We have an interview with Sam's sister, Annie, from whom he is estranged. And there's a lot of material in there, I think, that tries to get closer to this answer of like, what should we make of this person? How should we?

think about checks and balances of power when we have these companies that are, by all appearances, gathering a lot of power, and therefore the people who are running them have a lot of power as well. So we have, it's a five-episode arc, five-episode season, and the first three episodes are out now to the general public. And the last two will come out on subsequent Thursdays. And if you would like to binge the whole season right away, the episodes are available early to Bloomberg. com subscribers. So you've just started this series about Sam Altman and his upbringing and also the growth of OpenAI and Loebts and everything.

Who are the people that have helped him get where he is today, though? So the making of Sam Altman is a really interesting part of the overall story of Sam Altman. You know, many people know him as the CEO of OpenAI because that's the role he's been in when he has risen to prominence, you know, beyond Silicon Valley. Like I think for many years he was well known in Silicon Valley, but this is like, now he's kind of a household name. And so it's important to understand where Sam came from. You know, he's been in the Valley for, you know, since 2005, I think is when he started

college 2004-2005 at Stanford. And he dropped out and then he joined Wycombinator, the now-famous startup accelerator, but he was actually part of the first cohort of founders ever in YC. And I included Twitch as well, right? Yes, including the co-founders of Twitch and of Reddit. And so Emmett Shear, you know, for those who know Emmett Shear has a very short 72-hour cameo in the OpenAI Sam Alden firing saga. But yes, Emmett and Sam were both in the same YC batch.

So when we think about Sam's early career in Silicon Valley, I think what's important to know is that he rose very quickly in part because he was very successful in making these strategic, advantageous friendships and connections with already established people in the valley. The most important one is Paul Graham, who is one of the founders of Y Combinator and basically like immediately took Sam under his wing when, Sam joined this first batch of YC. And, yeah, Paul's a really important mentor to Sam. He's kind of the first person who really sees in Sam this, you know, ambition, this hunger for power, this, like, drive to really build bigger and bigger companies. Even when, you know, they met when Sam Altman was 19. So Paul, like, sees him as a teenager and sees this future potential. And so, yeah, not only did Paul become a mentor to him and sort of helped build Sam's profile over those early years because he would, you know, Paul Graham is very famous for writing these essays about how to build startups and how to build the best startups. And if you're at all interested in building startups, you've read many of them. They're kind of like almost like a startup Bible. And in many of them, he extols the virtues of Sam Altman. He talks about Sam's ambition. He talks about Sam's cunning, his ability to like, you know,

know, make deals and like think big. But never actually things Sam Oatman has done is what I've found. Yeah, there are some interesting, you know, I've read many of the things Paul has written about Sam. Some of my favorite ones include Paul writing that within three minutes of meeting Sam, this was when Sam was 19, Paul thought to himself, ah, so this is what a young Bill Gates is like, or, you know, this is what Bill Gates was like at 19, I think is the exact quote. So, you know, he really built him up in this way.

And I do think Paul had like unique insight into Sam. Like they were close. They in many ways I'm sure still are. But it is this interesting role where, you know, Paul met Sam when he really didn't have much to his name and he really elevated him early on through his writings as this like startup founder to emulate, right? That other founders should be emulating Sam. And then of course as Sam progresses in the Valley, he also starts to write these like startup wisdom essays. quasi-eacuous startup Bible things. It's in a similar style to Paul.

And then, of course, the most important thing that happens is that in 2014, when Paul decides he no longer wants to run Wycombinator, which at this point is a much bigger vehicle than it was when Sam first started. It's no longer just a few stops. Totally. It has produced Stripe, Dropbox, Airbnb. This is a big job, right, like running Y Combinator. And when Paul wants to hand it off to someone, you know, he has said that the only person he considered giving this to was Sam. So in 2014, when Sam is, I believe, 28 years old, he becomes president of Y Combinator. And this is, you know, he had started a startup.

It didn't really work. He sold it and was starting to dabble in angel investing. And at that point, Paul really elevated Sam to this new position of power. And then he ran YC for a while and then started Open A.I. And in starting Open A.I., he also leveraged these, like, very useful connections with particularly powerful people who could help him, such as Elon Musk, who was able to give the vast majority of the pledged funding to start OpenAI. Later, when Elon Musk splits from OpenAI, Sam makes this very powerful partnership with Satya Nadella

to help fund Open AI. Another important partnership that Sam has made, you know, much earlier on was his friendship with Peter Thiel. And one of the things Peter Thiel does is also, you know, gives him a million of dollars to start investing. This is like before Sam takes over at YC. With hydrazine, right? Yeah. And, you know, another thing that Paul did that really, Paul Graham did that really helped Sam was also he gave, Paul had the opportunity to be one of the first investors in Stripe. Yep. He was offered the chance to invest $30,000 for 4% of Stripe, which of course, now that

stripe is enormous, we all know how valuable that was. And Paul split it with Sam. He was like, oh, I might as well share this with Sam. So Sam has said that that $15,000 for 2% of Stripe has been, you know, one of his best performing angel investments ever. That was something he got. My question is always where he got 15 grand from. He was still working on Looped at the time. It's funny how privileged was, anyway.

Yeah. My guess is 15 grand was, I don't actually know this, but my guess is 15 grand was not hard for him to pull up. And it's one of those things where it really is, you know, access and relationships are the sorts of things that can build a career and can lead to great wealth, right? Like Sam is now, you know, by our own internal accounts and by other lists a billionaire. And this money comes from, you know, not from Open AI, but from these angel investments that he's made early on that have been enormously successful. So you called him in one of the titles, the most Silicon Valley Man alive.

Is this what you're getting at this kind of power player mentality? Yeah, I think it's, it reflects a few things. One, that even though he's, you know, he's in his late 30s, he's been a player in Silicon Valley for such a long time, you know, close to two decades. And also that he's just someone who is extremely well connected. So even before he took over Y Combinator, which I think you could argue is like kind of king of the startup world in some sense.

Like Y Combinator is like, you know, the top accelerator. It's the early stage. Totally. Even before he took over at Y Combinator, I think he was extremely well connected. He's very social. He's very helpful. He's very efficient. Like many people have told me stories in which he, you know, calling Sam and talking for five minutes has solved their problem because he knows exactly the right person to call to fix it. Or, you know, he's really good at making deals. I think it's just clear he's extremely well integrated into this world and has very successfully moved up the Silicon Valley status ladder to the point.

where he is now, which is kind of, you know, one of the, you know, he's the CEO of the, one of the arguably hottest companies in the valley right now. And I think that that's not luck, right? Like, he didn't just come up with, he's not like a nobody who came up with an idea. It's like he, he has the connections and has parlayed his connections into power to bring him to the point he is now. So, in your experience talking to people about Sam Altman, how technical is he, do you think? What have you heard? Because you say there he wasn't lucky, but he also does not appear to have successfully run a business, because looped shut down, two people, well, two executives tried to get him fired from there, he got fired from Y Combinator,

which did very well, but at the same time, YC was basically a conveyor belt for money at one point, not so much recently. Yeah. It just, it feels weird that this completely non-technical, semi-necernical guy has ascended so far. My sense is that's not maybe the most fair description. Like I think Sam is incredibly smart and people say this a lot and I, you know, I believe them. I think his special skill, you know, he obviously knows how to, like, he's an engineer.

He has training. I'm sure he can build a lot of stuff. It seems like his comparative advantage, his special skill is relationships, dealmaking, figuring out who exactly is the right person to help him in whatever he's really trying to get done and figuring out the best way to get something to happen. You know, one of the people I spoke to is someone who knows Sam from when he was younger and knows him personally and said that his superpower is figuring out who's in charge or figuring out who is in the best position to help him and then charming them so that they help him with whatever goal he's trying to get done. And I think that, like, yeah, one can argue that that's actually a really good skill set if you want to build a very big company, which, you know, I think, at this current moment he has, right? Like, Open AI is really, you know, you can, there's a lot that you can say about whether they're upholding their original mission

or that, you know, that's up for debate. But I think that they've obviously been commercially successful so far. So it feels like Silicon Valley on some level. And just to give some thoughts here, within the two episodes I'm doing here, the pattern I've seen with Sam Altman is that everyone seems to want him to win. And there's almost a degree. of they will make it so. Have you seen anyone who's really a detractor or anyone who's not pro-Sam Orman?

Because it's interesting how few people are in tech. Well, there is, I won't get too into it because this is in some of future episodes, which will drop in future weeks. But, you know, I would say in some of the conversations that I've had off the record about people about in some of the conversations I've had off the record with people about Sam. I think, you know, my general impressions are people often do find him impressive in terms of what he has gotten done, you know, the size and scale of his ambitions and the way that he has generally been able to make that happen. I think there's also a lot of people who, you know, are willing to privately

share some gripes that they might have about him. Also, you know, in recent weeks, we've seen people be a lot more public about some of those gripes. We have Helen Toner, a former board member at OpenAI who voted to remove Sam last November, saying publicly in the last few weeks that Sam lied to her and the other former board members, that his, you know, misdirection made them feel like they couldn't do their jobs. And she has also said that people were intimidated to the point where they did not feel comfortable speaking more publicly. about negative experiences they'd had about Sam, that they are afraid to speak more publicly about, you know,

times that he has not been honest with them or has, you know, has, in which they've had challenging experiences. And that has also been reflected in some of the private conversations I've had, in which people, you know, they might have complaints or they might have had, like, challenging situations with him. And I think they just feel like the risk calculus is not worth it to come out and say something like that. But, you know, there have been bits and pieces where people have come out and said things that, you know, Sam has, you know, another thing that the board members have said was that Sam had been deceptive and manipulative.

And that's also followed up by, or not followed up. There was also, I think, back in November, a former Open AI employee who had tweeted something publicly about that, you know, saying that Sam had lied to him on occasion, even though he had also always been nice to him, which I think is a very interesting combination of. Is that Silicon Valley though? I'm afraid of dealing with them, but they were so nice to me. And yeah, of course, that, you know, that person has not elaborated more publicly about what they meant. But I think, you know, I think this is why people are asking themselves these questions, which is like, you know, the more that we hear about what the board was thinking before they decided to fire Sam, I think the more people are wondering about what are the patterns of behavior that he shows. that led to the board trying to make this drastic move. Yeah, that's actually an interesting point.

So when Sam Alton was fired from OpenAI, there was this very strange reaction from Silicon Valley, including some in the media, where it was almost like Hunger Games, everyone doing the symbol thing, where everyone was like, oh, we've got to put Sam Orkman back in. isn't it kind of strange we still don't know why he was actually fired though? I mean, Helen Toner has elaborated.

Like, I've never seen, I've you seen anything like this in your career? I think that it has been surprising that there has not been more of a clear answer. I think, you know, as time has gone on, like, we have heard a little bit more. Like, I think Helen Toner has, you know, to her credit, tried to give more information in recent weeks about what happened. I think, you know, people were obviously asking this question six months ago. And so I think, like, there's been a little bit of a delay in trying to get this answer. And I wonder if maybe there just isn't, like, a very neat answer to it. And so then in that absence, we get this kind of more of like, more.

murky, multifaceted, multi-boiced answer. But yes, I agree that it is sort of surprising that there hasn't been more clarification on what exactly happened or a little bit more granular detail about what led up to it. So on to the AI hype in general. Said that a bit weird, but I'll keep going. Why do you think there's such a gulf between what Sam Altman says and what chat GPT can actually do? What Sam Altman says, what are you talking about specifically? As in he says it will be a super smart companion.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. That he'll be all of these things. Well, this is something that we get into in episode three, which is a personal interest of mind, which is kind of the psychology of the AI industry right now. And what I find so interesting about this and what we try to delve into in episode three and kind of throughout the series is these kind of like extreme projections about AI.

And in the industry, you see both positive ones and negative ones. And I think, you know, the negative ones, that's what looks like AI Dumerism, AI existential risk, sometimes called AI safety, depending on your point of view. But, you know, it's these projections that, you know, super intelligence might very quickly and very soon learn to self-improve in a way that allows it to rapidly outstrip our control and our capabilities and could lead to the extinction of humanity. there are so many interesting things to say about the psychology of believing that our human race might either be wiped out or incredibly changed within our lifetimes. And we get into that in episode three. I think I really wanted to get into the psychology of someone who believes that AI Doom is just around the corner. And so we talked to someone who sort of became convinced of this belief soon after the 2016 AlphaGo matches in which the Go playing AI beat the, the world's champion in Go.

And he talks about, yeah, no long, you know, deciding not to make a retirement account because he was like, what is the point? By the time I reach retirement age, either the world will be dramatically different and money won't matter or will all be dead. And I think that even though some people might scoff at that, that's like a real belief that people believe that this, you know, these extreme possible scenarios are in our near future. And on the other hand, we also see extreme projections in a positive direction. You know, this idea that AI is going to unlock a whole new era of human flourishing, that we might expand beyond our planet, that we might be able to give...

Abundance. Say what? Abundance. Right, exactly. You know, one of the things we do, I believe, in episode three, is do a little bit of a supercut of Sam Alton talking about abundance. It's pretty clear that this is a way that he likes to frame our AI future is going to be this future in which everyone has plenty, right? Everyone has, you know, access to intelligence, abundant energy, abundant access to superintelligence that can help us live kind of our best lives and beyond our wildest dreams. Right.

And I, you know, obviously Silicon Valley is a place where people like to make grandiose statements. But this is beyond that, right? This is not just, this is not just like, you know, we joked about WeWork, WeWork's mission statement was to elevate the world's consciousness. Like, well, galaxies of human flourishing for eons beyond us, like that is on another scale, right? Like, we're talking about something that is sort of at an unprecedented level of extreme rhetoric. And I think that's really interesting. I think it is a very powerful motivator, both in a, you know, in the Dumer sense and also in the abundance sense, people believing that what they're working on

is the most important technological leap forward for humanity. Talk about a motivating reason to work on this technology, right? Talk about a way to feel powerful or feel like you're making a huge difference. I think that's a really key part of what's driving a lot of work in AI right now. It's driving a lot of work, sure, but with Altman himself, there is this golf. It is a million-mile gulf between the things he says and what chat GPD is even, even on the most basic level, capable of doing and we'll be capable. And it just feels like, it almost feels like he's become the propagandist for the tech industry. And it's very strange to me how far that distance is, because you've got the AI Duma's and the AI optimist, I guess you'd call them.

but Orlman doesn't even feel like he's in with either he's just kind of he'll say one day that he doesn't think it's a creature the next one he'll say it's going to kill us all it all just feels like a PR campaign but for nothing yeah it has been interesting to try to answer the question you know one of the questions we tried to answer in the podcast is does Sam actually believe um you know because as you mentioned there are some early clips of him you know when I say early I mean around the of founding Open AI, 2015 or so, there's some clips of him talking about, you know, saying somewhat jokingly that AI might kill us all. But there's also this, you know, very famous blog post that he wrote in 2015, in which he says that, you know, basically super intelligence is one of the most serious risks to humanity, you know, full stop. And so it's clear that at some point in his life he believed kind of what we might now call a more doomery outlook. But But as time has gone on, he has, you know, offered views that are a little bit more measured and more positive. You know, he tends to, you know, in his big media tour of 2023, he tended to talk about how AI was going to, you know, his projection was that AI would radically transform society, but that it would be net good, right?

That, like, overall, we would be glad that this happened and that it would improve lives, even if in the short term or for some people it might. proved to be bringing a lot of challenges as well. And so I think one of the interesting things about him is it is it is a little hard to pin down exactly what he thinks. I think you're right that I wouldn't consider him like a gung-ho effective accelerationist. I would not consider him a dumer. He is like somewhere in this large gulf in between there. But I think he's also smart enough to know that making grandiose projections about what AI could, bring is a compelling story, right? Like, is a story that he can help sell by being like a spokesman

for it. And often that is the role of a CEO is to be a really good storyteller to bring the pitch of the company to the public, to investors, to potential employees, to customers, to try to sell them on this vision of the future. And I do think Sam is good at that. There is an interesting tidbit in episode three in which we interview a fix. writer who was actually hired on contract by OpenAI to write like a novella about AI futures and things like that. And yeah, he just talks a little bit about, you know, the novella is not, I think, in active use within Open AI, but they did at some point see, they did at some point see value in commissioning it. And I think, you know, something that the

author, Patrick House explains to us is, you know, that opening AI, just like many, other startups is really motivated by story, right? And that Sam Altman is inspired by fiction, you know, it's inspired by certain kinds of sci-fi. I think this is not unique to Sam. Many founders in Silicon Valley, you know, Elon Musk has talked about this as well, are driven to create things in part because of what they read about when they were younger, these dreams of the future. And so it's just interesting to get his perspective on how motivating a story can be and how motivating this compelling. story of like, oh, we're building something that's going to change the course of human history.

Like, you just can ask for a more powerful motivating force. So, as Altman accumulates power and as he kind of ascends the top of OpenAI, do you think he's done there? Do you think there's going to be another thing he starts? Because it feels like you've discussed like UBI and all these other things. Do you think he has grander ideas that he wants to pursue? you? Well, obviously I can't speak to what's inside Sam's head. No, you don't know the man's mind. But, I mean, past indicators would suggest, yes. Like, I think he has proven pretty consistently that he's

someone who, you know, is, you know, as much as he might focus on one project with a lot of effort, like he is cooking things on the side. Like, this is a man, this is going to be an extended metaphor, but this is a man working at a stove that has, like, six burners, not one. And, you know, know, he, we already know that, what'd you say? Sorry. He's got a big house. He's got multiple houses. The, the, you know, we already know that, you know, in addition to running OpenAI,

he has funded and or helped prompt the founding of or has, you know, been very involved in investing in or supporting other startups that, you know, are part of this kind of ecosystem of, of businesses that are connected to an AI future or might benefit in an AI future. So, for example, Helion, which is a nuclear fusion company, which he has invested a ton of money into, I think he has said publicly that, you know, his vision is that this is a potential way to provide abundant energy that could then power the technology that we need to, you know, improve AI to the level that we're hoping that it can get to or that he's hoping that it can get to. At the same time, you know, we've talked a little bit about universal basic income. This has been something that Sam has been a proponent of and an advocate of since at least 2016

when he was running Y Combinator and they started a side research project to study universal basic income by giving cash payments to families in Oakland of, I believe, $1,000 a month. that research project is still ongoing. It's now moved away from Y Combinator and is associated with Open Research, which is, I believe, funded by Open AI. And so it has kind of moved with Sam to his new role. And of course, he also co-founded this company called World Coin,

which used these silver orbs machines to scan, to take pictures of your iris and give everyone register every individual human as like a unique human individual and to create this eyeball registry in which by which one could in the future distribute a universal basic income. So he's funding these energy companies. He's like involved in these sort of crypto eyeball registry project that will help distribute UBI in this future that he's imagining. Like I think it's safe to say he's definitely thinking about things beyond just open AI for the future. future and imagining like, okay, well, if we have this piece that's growing, what else will we need to support it?

And I'm sure there are other things he's working on that we don't even know about, right? Like, I know he has also funded some like longevity bioscience projects and things like that. He's, I guarantee he's thinking about stuff beyond what we know about. Final question. Why do you think the entire tech industry has become so fascinated with AI? Do you think it's just Altman or is it something more? I do think ChatGPT started heating up this interest that was already percolating a little bit in the tech industry. But it does seem like something about ChatGPT capture the public imagination, made people imagine very seriously for the first time how AI could affect their lives, their lives individually. It used to be kind of this abstract thing that was a little farther away.

Or maybe you understood that, like, you were interacting with AI sometimes, like, when you would look at like flight price predictors. or things like that. Yeah, exactly. But, you know, I think as we, you know, we talk about this in episode three, but, you know, chat GPT wasn't even new technology. It was actually just a different user interface on a model that already existed, GPT 3.5. And so to me that actually speaks, I guess, to the power of, like,

making a technology accessible to everyone. And in a way that was, like, easy to use and, you know, for better or worse, that kind of got a lot of people in this public momentum of people thinking about AI, just feeling like it had rapidly increased its capabilities in a short period of time. And yeah, something about that really captured not just the minds but also the hearts of people and like getting them really thinking about like what could a future like this look like. And I think while some people were excited, a lot of people also reacted with fear, right? And like I think in the Valley, like you will hear a lot of people more openly discussing their fears of sort of like job loss or just like dramatic social change that might come about in the next 10 or 20 years.

The feeling I get in conversations that I have in and around San Francisco is, you know, even people who are pretty deep in this technology are uncertain about whether. it's going to be overall good or bad. They're just uncertain of how to look back on this time, like whether it will have ended up being a leap forward for humanity or something different. Another podcast from some SNL late-night comedy guide, not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smygel and friends.

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Is there anything to the idea that because you're from Harvard, you only got in because your parents made a huge donation. The group. The yard birds, right? That's the name. The Harvard yard, but they're open to change. Do you have a name suggestion? We're open.

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There are times when the mind becomes a difficult place to live. This is David Eagleman with the Inner Cosmos podcast, and for Mental Health Awareness Month, we're dedicating a series to understanding the mind when it struggles. I'm joined by doctors, researchers, and those with lived experience, We'll talk with singer-songwriter Jewel about anxiety. I started living in my car, and then my car got stolen.

I was shoplifting. I was having panic attacks. I was agoraphobic. And making it through hardship. To be present is a learned skill, and it's hard to be present. We'll talk with John Nelson about clinical depression and the brain implant that saved his life. What I learned is that procedure made me happy because I'm disease-free. And we'll talk with leading experts.

like Judd Brewer about anxiety, and John Hirschfield about obsessive-compulsive disorder, and the science of how the brain can change. This is a month of deeply personal and honest conversations about what happens when the brain goes off course and what we can do about it. Listen to Inner Cosmos on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Ormond has taken advantage of the fact that the tech industry might not have any hypergrowth markets left, knowing that Chad GPD is, much like Sam Altman, incredibly adept at mimicking depth and experience by parroting the experiences of those that have actually done things.

Like Sam Altman, Chad GPT consumes information and feeds it back to the people using it in a way that feels superficially satisfying. And it's quite impressive to those who don't really care about creativity or depth. And like I've said, it takes advantage of the fact that the Takey ecosystem has been dominated and funded by people who don't really build tech. As I've said before, generative AI, things like Chat GPT, Anthropics Claude, Microsoft's co-pilot, which is also powered by ChatGPT, it's not going to become the incredible supercomputer that Sam Altman is promising.

It will not be a virtual brain or imminently human-like or a super smart person that knows everything about you because it is at its deepest complexity a fundamentally different technology based on mathematics and the probabilistic answer to what you have asked it, rather than anything resembling how human beings think or act or even know things, generative AI does not know anything. How can a thing think when it doesn't know? A? Anyone I want to ask Brad Lightcap?

Miramarati, Sam Altman, any of these questions just once? Hear what they fart out? No? Ah! Well, Chat GPD isn't inherently useless. Altman realizes that it's impossible to generate the kind of funding and hype he needs based on its actual achievements, and that to continue to accumulate power and money,

which is his only goal, he has to speciously hype it, and he has to hype it to wealthy and powerful people who also do not participate in the creation of anything. And that's who he is. I've been pretty mean about this guy. I really have, but he does have a skill. He knows a mark.

He knows. He knows. He's not. knows how to say the right things and get in the right rooms with the people who aren't really touching the software or the hardware. He knows what they need to hear. He knows what the VCs need to hear. He knows quite aptly what this needs to sound like. But if he had to say what chat GPT does today, what would he say? Yeah, yeah, it's really good at generating a bunch of text that's kind of shitty. Yeah, sometimes it does math, right? And sometimes it does it really wrong. Sometimes you ask it to do it. It can draw a picture.

hey what do you think of that? These are all things, by the way, that if like a six-year-old told you, be like, wow, that's really impressive, or like a 10-year-old perhaps, because that's a living being. ChatGPT does these things, and it does it, I know it's cheesy to say,

but in a soulless way, but it really does that because and the reason all of this, the writing and the horrible video and the images, the reason it feels so empty is because even the most manure-adjacent press release

still has gone through someone's manure-adjacent brain. Even the most pallid, empty copy you've read has gone through someone. A person has put thought and intention in, even if they're not great with the English language. What ChatGPT does is use math to generate the next thing, and sometimes it gets it pretty right. But pretty right is not enough to mimic human creation. But look at Sam Altman.

Look who he is. What has he created? other than wealth for him and other people. What about Sam Altman is particularly exciting? Well, he's been rich before, and his money made him even richer. That's pretty good. He was at Wycombinator.

Don't ask too much about what happened there. Just feels like sometimes Silicon Valley can't wipe its own ass. It can't see when there's a wolf amongst the sheep. It can't see when someone isn't really part of the system. other than finding new ways to manipulate and extract value from it. And Sam Altman is a monster created by Silicon Valley's sin. And their sin, by the way, is empowering and elevating those who don't build software, which in turn has led to the greater sin of allowing the tech industry

to drift away from fixing the problems of actual human beings. Sam Ortman's manipulative little power plays have been so effective because so many of the power players in venture capital and the power players capital and the public markets and even tech companies are disconnected from the process of building things, of building software and hardware, and that makes them incapable or perhaps unwilling to understand that Sam Altman is leading them to a deeply desolate place. And on some level, it's kind of impressive how he succeeded in bending these fools to his whims, to the point that executives like Sundar Pishai of Google are willing to break Google's search in pursuit of this next big hype cycle

created by Sam Altman. He might not create anything, but he's excellent at spotting market opportunities, even if these opportunities involve him transparently lying about the technology he creates, all while having his nasty little boosters further propagate these bullshit, mostly because they don't know. Or perhaps they don't care if Sam Orton's full of shit. Maybe it doesn't matter to them. It doesn't matter that Google Search is still plagued with nonsensical air,

answers that sometimes steal other people's work or that AI in legal research has been proven to regularly hallucinate, which by the way is a problem that's impossible to fix. It's all happening because AI is the new thing that can be sold to the markets

and it's all happening because Sam Altman, intentionally or otherwise, has created a totally hollow hype cycle. And all of this is thanks to Sam Altman and a tech industry that's lost its ability to create things worthy of an actual hype cycle, to the point that this spacious non-technical manipulator can lead it down

this nasty, ugly, offensive, anti-tech path. The tech industry has spent years pissing off customers with platforms like Facebook and Google actively making their products worse in the pursuit of perpetual growth, unashamedly turning their backs on the people that made them rich and acting with this horrifying contempt for their users. And I believe the result will be that tech is going to face a harsh reprimand from society. As I mentioned in the rockcom bubble, things are already falling apart, web traffic is already dropping. And what sucks is, the people around Sam Ormman should have been able to see this.

Even putting aside his resume, I've listened to a alarming amount of Sam Ormman talk. And I'm a public relations person, who the hell am I? I'm someone who's been around a lot of people who make shit up. I've been around a lot of people whose job it is to kind of obfuscate things and quite frankly, Orman's really obvious. I'm not going to do any weird lie-to-me-esque ways of proving he's lying.

He just doesn't ever get pushed into any depth. No one ever asks him really technical questions or even just a question like, Hey Sam, did you work on any of the code at OpenAI? What did you work on? I know you can't talk about the future. Sam. But how close are we actually to AGI? And if he says, oh, a few years, that's not specific enough, Sam. How about give me a ballpark? And then when they lies, again, you say, okay, Sam,

how do we get from generative AI to AGI? And when he starts swaffling, say, no, no, no, be specific, Sam. This is how you actually ask questions. And when you say things like this, by the way, to technical founders. They don't get worried. They don't obfuscate. They may say, I can't talk about this due to legal things, which is fine. But they'll generally try and talk to you. Listen to any interview with any other technical AI person. Listen to them and then listen to Sam Altman. He's full of it. It's so obvious.

And one deeply unfair thing with the valley is, there are people that get held to these standards. Early stage start-ups generally do. The ones that aren't handed to people like Altman or Alexis O'Henian of Reddit or Paul Graham or Reid Hoffman. They don't get those chances because they're not saying the things that need to be said to the venture capitalists. They're not in the circles. They're not doing the right things because the right things are no longer the right thing for the tech industry. And when all of this falls apart, Sam Orman's going to be fine. When this all collapses, he'll find

something to blame it on. Market forces, a lack of energy breakthroughs, unfortunate economic things, all of that nonsense, and he'll remain a billionaire capable of doing anything he wants. The people that are going to suffer are the people working in Silicon Valley who aren't Sam Orman. The people that did not get born with a silver spoon in each hand and then handed further silver spoons as they walk the streets of San Francisco. People that don't live in nine and a half thousand square foot mansions. The people trying to raise money who can't right now because all the VCs are obsessed with AI. The people that will get fired from public tech companies when a depression hits

because the markets realize that the generative AI boom was a bubble. When they realized that the most famous people in tech have been making these promises for nobody other than the markets. Well, the markets need you to do something eventually, and I just don't think it's going to happen. And I think that we need to really think, why was Sam Orkman allowed to get to this point? Why did so many people, like Paul Graham, like Reid Hoffman, like Brian Chesky, like Satchinadella, back up, this obvious con artist, who has acted like this forever? And what sucks is, I don't know if the valley's going to learn anything unless it's really bad. And I don't want it to be, by the way. I would love to be wrong.

I would love for all of this to just be like Sam Orton was actually a genius. turns out the whole thing is not. No. It's not going to happen. And I worry that there is no smooth way out of this, that there is no way to just casually integrate open AI with Microsoft.

Because now there's an antitrust thing going in with Microsoft acquiring inflection AI, another AI company. And that's the thing. It feels like we are approaching a precipice here. And the only way to avoid it is

for people to come clean, which is never going to happen. Or, of course, for Sam Orkman not to be lying. For AGI to actually come out of Open AI. And by the way, it's going to need to be in the next year. I don't think they've got even three quarters left. I think that once this falls apart, once the markets realize, oh shit, this is not profitable, this is not sustainable, they're going to walk away from it.

When companies realize that generative AI, it's given them a couple percent profit, maybe. they're going to be pissed because this is not a stock rally worthy boondoggle this is not going to be pretty when things fall apart for

for Nvidia you're still over $1,000 when those orders stopped coming in quite as fast. What do you think is going to happen to tech stocks? Startups are already having trouble raising money and they're having trouble raising money because the people

giving out the money are too disconnected from the creation of software and hardware. The only way to fix Silicon Valley. Perhaps is an apocalypse. Perhaps is people like Sam Ortonman getting washed out. I don't want it to happen. I really must be bloody clear. But maybe it won't be apocalyptic.

Maybe it would just be a brutal realignment. And maybe Silicon Valley needs that realignment. Because this industry desperately needs a big bathful of ice and they need to dunk their head in it aggressively and wake the hell up. Venture capital needs to put money back into real things. The largest tech companies need to realign and build for sustainability so they're not binging and purging staff with every boom.

And if we really are at the end of the hypergrowth era, every tech company needs to be thinking profit and sustainability again. And that's a better Silicon Valley, because a better Silicon Valley builds things for people. It solves real problems. It doesn't have to lie about, what the thing could do in the future so that it can sell a thing today. And I realize that sounds like the foundation of most venture capital.

That's fine at the seed stage. That's fine at this moonshot stage where your early, early days. It is not befitting the most famous company in tech. It is not befitting a multi-billionaire. It is not befitting anyone, and it is insulting to the people actually building things both in and outside of technology. The people I hear from after every episode, they are angry. They are frustrated because there are good people in tech.

There are people building real things. There are people that remember a time when the tech industry was exciting. When people were talking about cool shit in the future and then they'd actually do it. Returning to that is better for society and the tech industry. Just don't know when it's going to happen. Thank you for listening to Better Offline. The editor and composer of the Better Offline theme song is Matt Rosowski. You can check out more of his music and audio projects at Mattisowski.com.

M-A-T-T-O-S-O-S-K-I.com. You can email me at E-Z at Better Offline.com or visit Better Offline.com to find more podcast links and, of course, my newsletter. I also really recommend you go to chat. Where's Your Ed dot at to visit the Discord and go to R-S-S-Better-O-Line to check out our Reddit. Thank you so much for listening. Better Offline is a production of Cool Zone Media. from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com,

or check us out on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Another podcast from some SNL, late-night comedy guy, not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smygel and friends. Me and hilarious guests from Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman help make you funnier. This week, my guest, SNL's Mikey Day

and head writer Streeter Seidel help an a cappella band with their between songs banter. Where does your group perform? We do some retirement. homes. Those people are starving for banter. Listen to humor me with Robert Smigel and friends on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Why are we all so obsessed with romance? On the Radio 831 podcast, join us, Sanjana Basker and Tyler McCall as we unpack all the trending tropes, fuzzy adaptations, book talk drama, and celebrity love stories with hot takes

and sharp guests. Each episode digs into what these stories reveal about desire, fantasy, to see identity and how we love now. Listen to the Radio 831 podcast on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Joey Dardano, and on my new podcast, Hope from a Hypocrite, I'll be changing lives, helping people in need with thoughtful solutions. Sike, I'm a comedian. I'm not qualified to give good advice.

Join me and my comedian friends as we riff, rant, and recommend some of the most legally dubious advice known to me. This is Help from a Hypocrite, the worst advice from the dumbest people you know. Listen to Help from Hypocrit Wednesdays on the IHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an IHeart podcast. Guaranteed human.