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.
…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 probably 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.
It can’t come soon enough.
It’s worth remembering that Altman is also a crypto bro with a weird and legally-problematic scheme to scan everybody’s eyeballs, and that he was briefly ousted from OpenAI by the board for an alleged “pattern of deception and subversiveness”.
I have high hopes of him ending up in jail next to Sam Bankman-Fried, although the odds aren’t great under the current “it’s all legal if you’re rich enough” ethos…
Well, I don’t think it’s entirely co-incidental that (a) a lot of them come from the crypto world, and (b) the whole thing really took off in the “crypto winter” following the collapse of FTX. We could argue about the merits of the technology, but as a business, it all feels very scammy.
AI was always going to be something dictators would love, whether it started off with governmental oversight or not (huh, “governmental oversight”: Trump’s mere existence has all but cemented the term as a laughable phrase). There is a lot of abuse of the technology still to come. I don’t think the existence of Musks and Altmans will make all that much difference.
In related news, Molly White is expanding her efforts to track the crypto industry’s efforts to influence US politics to include the AI industry, since they’re using exactly the same playbook, and many of the players are the same people: I’m launching Tech Influence Watch as AI follows crypto into politics
Molly is a real treasure (independent journalist, long-time wikipedian, and inspirational advocate for the open web) and you should definitely be following her work. Her hard work and attention to detail are amazing.
The same selfless Musk who wanted to solve world hunger but just needed to know to whom to write the check?
That these bros are sociopaths follows naturally: they have succumbed to Big Rich Guy brain damage, an occupational hazard that spreads among them like the plague and is impossible to avoid. It turns anyone who wasn’t already a sociopath into one, or into a worse one. Stupendous lying, greed, and amorality follow.
Luckily, I think that they have succumbed to the delusion that they will be gods, and/or that they already are. I say luckily because, IMO, what they are doing and selling now, LLMs, will never become intelligent, and so their fantasies of world domination will not come true from their efforts. LLMs will be very useful in many fields (if they ever spend the time to get them to work better), but not intelligent. That’ll be worked on by some researchers in a university (not American, of course, US science is dead) and advanced step by tiny step, to a new fundamental breakthrough that is more than an LLM. JMHO.
A business model that requires billions in new chips every two or three years, massive tracts of land and expensive new buildings, and more electricity and water than the earth is capable of producing, is not sustainable. These bros are acting out Poe’s story “The Masque of The Red Death” to perfection.
But, the crash, which I also hope may be ASAP, will devastate all of us, and not just the sociopaths.
Given that these days I wake up praying to see these companies file for bankruptcy
Problem of Evil. Restated, AI version
If God wants to but is unwilling to stop these AI companies then he is as impotent as normal person against billionaires
If God is able to but does not want to stop these AI companies then he is just like the slimy evil sociopathic assholic billionaires
If God neither wants to nor is able to stop these AI companies then he is just a normal investor wanting number to go up , why call him God ?
If God is both willing to and able to stop these AI comanies then why the f do we have them ?
It gets worse, of course.
SpaceX’s IPO is claiming that their “AI” — Grok — can take in trillions:
https://prospect.org/2026/06/10/elon-musk-spacex-ipo-retirement-savings-index-funds-stock-market/
Yes, Nazi kiddie porn creation is worth trillions.
Bubbles on top of more bubbles.
In fairness, he’s not claiming that Nazi kiddie porn is worth trillions… He’s claiming that xAI (a business which is currently doing so well that it’s renting its key strategic resource -- AI compute capacity -- to its own direct competitors) will not only come to dominate the enterprise software business (a business it does not currently operate in at all, and which has notoriously steep incumbency advantages) to the extent that it completely displaces the existing incumbents (who are some of the most successful businesses in history, largely because of those incumbency advantages), but it will in fact grow the market for that business to account for something like 20% of world GDP.
In addition, he’s also really talking up the prospect of building AI datacenters IN SPAAAAACE -- an idea so ridiculously impractical that it makes the usual metaphors about chocolate teapots wholly inadequate, and in fact makes the idea of building the world’s biggest luxury beach resort at the South Pole look like a really solid, practical plan.
All of which raises an interesting question: is Musk consciously committing the biggest investment fraud in history, or is he so completely clueless about his own businesses, and so surrounded by sycophants and yes-men, that he genuinely believes this nonsense? Either way, financial historians (if there are any) are going to look back on this era in amazement and wonder: “how on Earth did anybody fall for this?”
Meanwhile, oil futures are down again because Trump’s said there’s going to be a deal soon… Again.Truly, we are living in an age of complete fucking idiocy, the likes of which has never been seen before.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go and move the few remaining US investments that I didn’t get rid of immediately after Trump’s inauguration…
Dunc @9, about Musk, it’s the latter possibility. Musk has been locked in the solitary confinement (nothing but sycophanants and yes-men reflecting back his own mind) of his billionaire brain for so long that, not only is he a grandiose sociopath, he is actually delusional about his god-like power and his ability to achieve anything that he has an idea about. Anything that he can imagine can exist in material reality as soon as he snaps his fingers, because he is so powerful and right, such a visionary, that it can come about. Solitary confinement drives people mad.
Give all the Big Rich Guys long enough and they’ll all get there.