There is a lot in the news these days that is depressing so it takes a lot for me to point to one article and say that it may be a top competitor to be the most depressing thing that I have read this year. It is a long profile of OpenAI head Sam Altman and it deals with him and all the other big players jockeying to be the biggest player in the AI world.

[T]he founding premise of OpenAI was that it would have to be different. The founders, who included Altman, Sutskever, Brockman, and Elon Musk, asserted that artificial intelligence could be the most powerful, and potentially dangerous, invention in human history, and that perhaps, given the existential risk, an unusual corporate structure would be required. The firm was established as a nonprofit, whose board had a duty to prioritize the safety of humanity over the company’s success, or even its survival. The C.E.O. had to be a person of uncommon integrity.

But Altman is portrayed in the article by many who have worked with him as utterly untrustworthy and a power-seeker, whose actions did not match the noble goals that it had set forth.


Altman told early recruits that OpenAI would remain a pure nonprofit, and programmers took significant pay cuts to work there. The company accepted charitable grants, including thirty million dollars from what was then called Open Philanthropy, a hub of the effective-altruism movement whose commitments included supporting the distribution of mosquito nets to the global poor.
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If everything went right, the OpenAI founders believed, artificial intelligence could usher in a post-scarcity utopia, automating grunt work, curing cancer, and liberating people to enjoy lives of leisure and abundance. But if the technology went rogue, or fell into the wrong hands, the devastation could be total. China could use it to build a novel bioweapon or a fleet of advanced drones; an A.I. model could outmaneuver its overseers, replicating itself on secret servers so that it couldn’t be turned off; in extreme cases, it might seize control of the energy grid, the stock market, or the nuclear arsenal. Not everyone believed this, to say the least, but Altman repeatedly affirmed that he did. He wrote on his blog in 2015 that superhuman machine intelligence “does not have to be the inherently evil sci-fi version to kill us all. A more probable scenario is that it simply doesn’t care about us much either way, but in an effort to accomplish some other goal . . . wipes us out.” OpenAI’s founders vowed not to privilege speed over safety, and the organization’s articles of incorporation made benefitting humanity a legally binding duty. If A.I. was going to be the most powerful technology in history, it followed that any individual with sole control over it stood to become uniquely powerful—a scenario that the founders referred to as an “AGI dictatorship.”

There are hundreds of billions, even trillions, of dollars sloshing around provided by investors who think that there will be a big payoff, even though it has not made any real money yet.

Two of the biggest lying greed heads Altman and Elon Musk initially worked together to start OpenAI as a counter to the expected dominance of Google in the field. But they fell out and Musk left to start his own company called xAI. Musk later went to court claiming that he had invested in Open AI to be a nonprofit designed to serve the public good but that Altman had improperly converted it to a for-profit company. His lawsuit claimed fraud and breach of charitable trust.

In 2015, Elon Musk and Sam Altman founded OpenAI together as a nonprofit. Its mission—“to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity”—was explicitly intended to counter Google’s potential dominance of the technology, which seemed almost foreordained at the time. Musk pledged up to a billion dollars to prevent that outcome. It didn’t take long for the two men to disagree over the chain of command. Each thought he alone deserved to run the show. About two years and thirty-eight million dollars later, Musk took his remaining nine hundred and sixty-odd million dollars and went home.

The idea that Musk wanted to create something for the public good and not to enrich himself further, and that his generosity had been taken advantage of by Altman, should have been sufficient to send any jury into fits of laughter. But while they did not do so (at least openly in court), during jury selection one prospective juror assessed Musk to be “a greedy, racist, homophobic piece of garbage,” while a more restrained prospect deemed him only “a world-class jerk”. They took only two hours to decide against him.

Musk is probable the only person who can make Sam Altman look good by comparison. The top players in the AI world all seem to be lying, greedy, amoral, sociopaths and the depressing thing is that these people seem to have free rein in developing and using and unleashing on the public a novel technology that can have huge ramifications for the entire world, with possibly disastrous consequences and almost no governmental oversight.