Investigating Altman With Ronan Farrow and Andrew Marantz

00:00:02
Speaker 1: As Media.

00:00:05
Speaker 2: Hello, and welcome to Better Offline. I'm, of course your host ed zitron no monologue this week. Quit complaining, because I've brought you all something far better. I am joined by Ronan Pharoh and Andrew Morantz of The New York who just put a massive piece about Sam Altman, the dampest man in Silicon Valley history, which is my comment, not theirs, and I think I want to thank you for joining me both of you. First of all, I want to ask a really just blunk question, Ronan, considering your history of the people you've reported on, why Sam Altman, what drew you to him?

00:00:49
Speaker 3: Well, this is fundamentally different than stories I've done that started with, you know, a single clear cut lead of about criminality. This was a situation where I was coming off of reporting you may be familiar with about Elon Musk and his whole empire, and I had a lot of sources in the world of AI, including Sam Altman, who was on the record in that piece. And you know, this was no novel genius projection on my part. Obviously, it was at a moment when AI was becoming the kind of fulcrum of Silicon Valley and it became apparent to me that there were under examined questions about the trajectory of the technology and the integrity of the stewards of it. We really started looking at that with an open mind. You know, Andrew is on this beat of big tech all the time and is also well sourced up in this world. And we both, i think, sat down and we're having our conversations about what the most salient points of contention were in this world, and we're equally open to criticism about all of the labs, all of the figures. This question of why Sam Maltman was fired, what the specific alleged proof points were, and whether those questions were something we should care about. Were they right to care then and should we still care now? Are those problems ongoing? Those really emerged as just a lingering, unanswered set of questions that hadn't been you know, fully proved out and backed up in this kind of a forensic way.

00:02:38
Speaker 2: Right, So why was he fired?

00:02:40
Speaker 4: Like what?

00:02:41
Speaker 2: Because the piece kind of got into it. But it's all over, Like the answers were all over the place from everyone, and each person seems to have a different interpretation.

00:02:49
Speaker 3: Andrew, you want to start yeah.

00:02:51
Speaker 1: I think one of the abiding frustrations and curiosities from this is the whole world saw Sam Altman get fired, and then the whole world watched as he returned, and that was never really adequately explained in the public narrative, and so we really go into with sort of more documentation, I think than ever before, exactly what was going on. And as Ronan says, you know, it was not this sort of one smoking gun thing like it wasn't you know, Oh you know, Sam Altman was strangling baby puppies in the office and nobody knew it until now, right. This is a much subtler, slower accumulation of what his critics say are manipulations telling two different stories to people. The idea of telling different people what they want to hear comes up a lot, and so this is the kind of thing where you kind of need a New Yorker story, I say sort of self interestedly, but like I do think that you kind of need to put all the facts in one place for them to make sense. And there have been really good books about this. There have been a lot out there. I mean, we're obviously not first to this story, but I I just think it's hard to understand what the allegations even are without lining it all up in one place, and you kind of have to centrally start from this premise of Sam Altman did not go to everyone and say AI is going to be a really big deal. It's going to be a product we can try to sell. It's going to be a good investment pitch for us. Let's all go and make a bunch of money.

00:04:20
Speaker 4: Right.

00:04:20
Speaker 1: What he was saying was, you guys, you engineers, you need to come along with me and build this technology with me, specifically, because I will be circumspect, I will be safe, I will argue for regulation, I will keep it in this nonprofit AI safety research lab format. And it was the betrayal of those promises that they felt was the fireable offense more so than anyone smoking gun thing.

00:04:45
Speaker 2: Except he was kind of brought back by capitalism. Like it was very it was. I remember when it happened. There was a journalist posting that they were crying with happiness about it. It was genuine one of the darker moments I can think in Silicon Valley history, because it's like, Wow, Brian Chesky in Sacha Thedella got together and held hands, got that Sam Wulman back up. It was just so bizarre.

00:05:08
Speaker 1: It is weird, and it speaks to you know, this thing again that people consistently allege in the documents we saw and during our interviews of this sort of telling different stories to different communities of people. I mean, one of the most basic examples of this, right is turning to the safety nonprofit people and saying this will always be a safety nonprofit, and then turning to the VC investment community and saying, let's go, guys, rock it to the moon, let's go make a bunch of money, and kind of simultaneously holding both of those communities seemingly in the palm of his hand until he wasn't able to anymore.

00:05:40
Speaker 3: You're exactly right to frame it as capitalism winning, and I think we were fascinated in this case of what's called the blip, you know, this brief firing and then all undoing the firing, because it does feel like it is about much more than Sam. The thing that OpenAI originally was when it was founded as a nonprofit and in the way Andrew described, was pitched on the basis of these fears from the people developing the technology where the founders of this company were saying, listen, this is so dangerous that we're comparing it to nuclear weapons, and we need to create a noble minded research lab without a profit motive. They recruited on that basis, people tod pay cuts to go there on that basis. And this moment when the board that was empowered to remove a CEO if they felt that CEO could not be trusted with that mission, when they tried to do that, and basically investors who really didn't know what the hell was going on at the time, that's one of the things we document. You know, the board really fumbled the ball. We can talk about how, but the long and short of it is that those investors rallied around Sam Altman, who really stood to make them a lot of money, and they were worried that their money would go away if the company fell apart. And so it is a part of a bigger story about the way in which Silicon Valley builds companies based on hype and at least not solely real value, and where the initial promises very often don't pan out, and what winds up governing is I think it's valid when people in this piece have the criticism of, you know, we're now seeing a race to the bottom on the very safety issues that open AI was supposed to be founded around, and the blip was a turning point that encapsulated that.

00:07:46
Speaker 2: Yeah, with that in mind, do you buy that Sam Wilton gives a shit about safety? Do you actually think that the safety mission Matt stem Atol, You've spoken to him a few times.

00:07:56
Speaker 3: I think when he talks about still caring about and prioritizing safety, Look, maybe I am just kind of too generous in my assumptions about people. I assume that he believes the story that he is telling himself, which is very often has the same contour. Namely, what he cares about is winning. That's the word he uses, and he has set up the rationales in his mind and in the way he conveys it to others so that him winning and consolidating as much power as possible is the same thing as humanity winning. So for him, when he talks about these things, there is no daylight between them. You know. He says in the piece that his definition of winning is a crazy up level for everyone. You know, we're all going to be hearing diseases and forming blockbuster startups, and he really, I'm really, you know, paraphrasing but barely exaggerating. He talks about it in these terms, and I think he really does think that him controlling the technology is the most direct path to that. He often says in conversations that accusations are the truest form of confessions or variations of this thought. You know that when people launch a criticism about someone else, they're very often projecting something about themselves. And it's interesting because in the course of my Elon Musk reporting, he talks about Musk in this very specific way where he says, on the record, you know, I believe Elon is interested in saving humanity, but only if he's the one who can do it. And I thought about that quote about Elon a lot as I was in my conversations with Sam.

00:09:45
Speaker 1: I mean, the the other thing I would say on this safety question, right, is a lot of these terms safety, agi itself, super intelligence, intelligence itself. These all are are vague enough terms, and they're they're poorly defined enough that there can always be this kind of slippage and equivocation. And sometimes that's unavoidable, but sometimes people can use it to their rhetorical advantage, right, So on questions of safety or alignment, what you would often find is that the Sam Altman of twenty fifteen, or even frankly twenty twenty three would be talking about the alignment problem as a literally existential problem. If we don't solve this, a rogue AI could kill literally every person on Earth. And then you go back to him two years later and he's saying, the alignment problem is this slightly annoying thing that kind of tempts you to, you know, spend more time on chat GPT, the way that algorithm, you know, Instagram's algorithm is out of alignment with the way you want to spend your time. That is absolutely not what he meant by it two years prior, but the word is the same, so he can kind of skate by with that.

00:10:48
Speaker 2: I mean, this is in the nicest way. Why do you believe him two years ago? But not? But like, what do you think he's changed? Do you think he just well, he's talking differently, Like that's I'm not accusing you of it. I'm just like Sam will Land's whole vibe is to me personally, just saying quite deceptive.

00:11:05
Speaker 1: So I'm just I'm just wondering what you've seen. I'm not saying that I believed him. I'm saying that his employees believed him Congress to some extent belief in the public life.

00:11:14
Speaker 3: I think that's a very important point ed. I think your analysis is correct, and actually the perspective from which we write the piece is these have always been shifting assurances, And actually part of what we emphasize and document is that even at the time of those older assurances, where Sam Altman was the biggest doomer in the industry, he was saying and doing conflicting things at the same time. In many cases, you know, we document through a lot of internal communications a period of time in which many researchers were joining the company on the promise that this would forever be a noble nonprofit. But simultaneously, Sam Altman and Greg Brockman and his co founder, we're having very concerted conversations about how quickly and effectively they could get out of the nonprofit structure. Essentially, we talk about cases where he's saying on the hill, we need regulation, you know, we need to start even a new government agency to regulate AI. And then simultaneously he's working against regulations.

00:12:19
Speaker 2: Well, just to.

00:12:20
Speaker 1: Bolster the point you're making, Like, what really does seem clear is that whether they should have believed it in retrospect, a lot of these early employees, early recruits, early co founders, really do seem to believe it. I mean, unless there was this kind of you know, long game where they were like, we're going to write these emails to each other in twenty fifteen, and then ten years later they'll come out and it'll all look like this was all I mean, I guess that's possible, But from all appearances, it really seems like at least a lot of the key people really did believe this pitch at the time.

00:13:00
Speaker 2: Although my way of reading it personally is also it felt like a lot of rich guys kind of farting around. It was just the conversations they have back and forth, just the banality of it all, just like what if this happened, and this happened I believe really a suits caper. He seems to, however people may feel about him in general, he seems to at least buy this. The Altman Elon Musk emails were very much like to two guys at an airport bar after a few waiting for their flight. It was very very interesting watching this unfold over time, because the modern Sam Mormon is very much more like a tech CEO Capital T, capital C. Like, he's very much a iron it like maximizing profit and growth and the like you said. The safety stuff kind of seems just like on the side. Now, it's more important that we just get this thing public.

00:13:49
Speaker 1: Yeah. Well, and I mean it's sort of like two guys at the airport bar, except that the hundreds of millions of dollars of investment they're talking about actually are real. I mean, yes, you know, so it is. I think you're right. There's a kind of combination of things going on here. And I would be prepared to believe that in that particular case of Musk and Altman emailing each other, that there is some kind of gamesmanship or brinksmanship going on, and that even what they say in private might not be fully what they mean. But when you get outside of that type of a circle, when you talk about the early recruits to open AI, the later recruits, the people who took massive pay cuts to you know, give up six million dollars salaries at Google to come work for them, clearly this pitch of where the good guys was doing some work for those people, And I also think that we should we should keep in mind how effective the public pitch was. I mean, coming on the heels of Mark Zuckerberg and you know all these other you know, sort of social media tycoons going out to the public and saying you should be so grateful for these, you know, convenience machines that we're building, and you should, you know, give us all your data, and you should feel bad anytime you want to regulate us again. Altman's pitch was totally the opposite. It was, We're going to be conscientious. This is so dangerous that you actually have to regulate us, and we are just begging for our hands to be tied again. Whether in retrospect that seems like a genuine pitch or not is sort of separate from the question of how effective it was.

00:15:08
Speaker 2: So let's talk finances. Within the piece, there wasn't a ton of stuff about money, but there was this quote from a senior executive at Microsoft who said, I think there's a small but real chance Altman is eventually remembered as a body made off of Sam Bankman Freed level scammer. Did you what kind of financial stuff did you hear about OpenAI?

00:15:27
Speaker 3: If anything, I mean, this is all very far out there already. We have a board member in the piece talking about how the company is levered up in a scary way right now. I mean, this is a company with one of the fastest cash burn rates in the history of startups. The spend level is almost unimaginable in the risk towards AGI, and so it really does require it's almost not an exaggeration to say the money in the world. And this governs a lot of the different activities that we write about in the Peace Right. Sam Altman for years courting Middle Eastern money. Everyone in Silicon Valley is courting Middle Eastern money and sidelining concerns about working with autocrats to various extents, Sam Altman is doing it on a unique level, you know, agreeing to and catalyzing the building of massive infrastructure, even including in the Middle East. You know, and over the objections we talk about, like concerns that short circuited a security clearance vetting process because there were so many red flags in the national security establishment about these dealings with the Middle East. We talk about you know, gifts and trips on yachts with UAE officials. So you know, this is a drive for more and more and more. And we talked to you know, startup experts and economists who say one of the consequences of that is a whole lot of circular deals. You know, none of this is new either, but this is a situation where it is the general Silicon Valley archetype of building companies on hype and promises before actual value, inflating a massive balloon of valuation, and it's it's putting it on a far grander scale where there's a whole ecosystem of partners that are just borrowing and borrowing and borrowing from each other on the assurance that they're all going to buy each other's products. It's an I'll scratch your back, you scratch mind situation over and over again. In some cases, you know, Altmann is running into problems because there are conflicting or at least allegedly conflicting deals being announced, Like on the same day we talk about tensions in the Microsoft relationship, particularly around this recent Amazon deal. There is yes, it's it's to do with you know, the exclusivity having been reaffirmed for Microsoft in terms of the underlying stateless models, and then open Ai announcing well now at the same time in the same day, well, we have this additional deal on top of that with Amazon, you know, for our enterprise products that allow the building of agents, which they're saying is going to happen in a stateful environment, and that's going to be because they're creating new technology that will deconflict this with the underlying stateless models from Microsoft. The long and the short of it is a bunch of people at Microsoft field this is not technically possible, and you have to rely on the underlying stateless models to create agents that are stateful, essentially with memory. That's a lot of technical jargon to get at the point, which is there's a slew of deals where critics say they're circular and someone's going to have to pay up. Maybe a lot of people are going to have to pay up. Sam Altman's one of the people who has said we're looking at a bubble and that a lot of people are going to lose a lot of money.

00:19:00
Speaker 2: Which is it's funny though whenever he talks about it, it's never him, never let it's never like I'm gonna lose. I will be. But it kind of gets back to what you were saying. It's like the only one who can usher in this AI future is Sam Mortman. The only person who will not get destroyed in the bubble is Sam Mortman. Makes me wonder if he's like a fantasist or an arcist or a sociopath. It's like, I think at least one of those words was in the in the piece.

00:19:24
Speaker 1: Those words are definitely in the piece.

00:19:26
Speaker 3: And yeah, not from us, to be clear, Yeah, yeah, yeah, yes, yes, these closely with the man. But it's remarkable. You know, you're rarely on a story I don't know about you, Andrew, where so many people use the word sociopath unprompted by us.

00:19:41
Speaker 1: And yeah, and look, I mean again, I think it's very I think readers should come to this with a lot of skepticism about how much of this is kind of industry competition. And we we tried to not you know, let people launder talking points through our story, right where very everyone in this world is kind of a ruthless competitor, right, so it wouldn't be of very high bar to say, you know, I talked to this guy's corporate competitor, and they called them a sociopath. Like, it's not that kind of criticism that we're talking about. We're talking about these very long standing, kind of documented patterns that people can dispute. But it's not just kind of these off the cuff observations. I think to your point about the bubble stuff, like, your audience will be very familiar with this, because I know you cover this stuff a lot, But this question of is it a bubble or is it actually a very useful or even potentially economically transformative technology, It's not really as clean a buying area as that because a lot of the biggest bubbles in market history have come from, you know, infrastructure projects that ultimately got used, right, I mean this is a kind of basic economic history point, but I think it's worth reiterating. The railroads, the canals, the you know, the even fiber optic cable. All of this stuff eventually gets used. The question is does the speed at which the investors are building it match the usefulness in real time?

00:21:00
Speaker 3: Yeah?

00:21:00
Speaker 2: And I mean I would debate that point and have done so many times, because GPUs depreciate in three to six years and there's no way that this gets used afterwards. But putting that all aside, it is still this weird thing of it's something in my own work I've noticed it's weird we're discussing this still, like it's weird that we have no clarity, because even within your piece, we don't really have clarity about what is going on like that, very the one thing that stood out to me, like they're still trying to work out a business model. That whole thing about pitting world powers against each other was truly insane, like that Greg Brockman, You'll have to run through it again. But it was like, as I understood it would be Greg Brockman suggesting that they make something powerful enough to sell the different nations and create a bidding war like mission impossible except with the chat bart.

00:21:45
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, this is this is again you know, like you say, there's a lot of kind of guy at the bar speculation going on. And so this is in the early days when because Opening Eye back then was a nonprofit who's legally binding fiduciary duty was the safety of all of humanity, they hired someone to come in and say, Okay, how can we deploy this? You know, potentially dangerous thing safely, and this person, the way it was told to us came in with all kinds of you know, fifty page you know, detailed white papers about how we can model it on the Barok Plan and the way that you know, the nuclear weaponry was first brought safely into the world, and the way that that was told to us again was that that plan then somehow morphed into Okay, instead of doing this you know kind of safe international game theory, non zero cooperation thing, why don't we just you know, start an auction between China, Russia, the US, maybe a few other world governments and see who either wants to be given the technology or who can be sold the technology. Now, obviously this is disputed and also even more obviously this is not something that happened, but the fact that that kind of idea was being batted around and apparently was taken outside the walls of the organization and was pitched to potential investors, it really does speak to how welid all, Yeah, it's it's really a crazy situation. And the way, you know, we got people denying this, but they didn't say like this is made up. They just remembered the details of it differently.

00:23:13
Speaker 2: So you you spoke to Sam Ortman a few times, right, yep, like more than to what seemed to actually get under his skin because it's over the last I've watched a lot of Samuel I've I've watched the Orkman channel for hours, and he seems fairly calm most of the time, but occasionally something will really irritate him, like very suddenly, like Brad Gertz. Brad getson. I think it is the venture capitalist who was talking about valuations and he said, well, get someone to buy all your shares, or when he was on the hard Fork podcast on one of the Glazing sessions, he got very angry about The New York Times suing him and suing Open Ai. Even what was his mood like, like, what was what were the questions he was up for? What were the things he got a bit worrisome about?

00:23:59
Speaker 3: Well? He The truth is, I think both of us picked up on from both Sam and institutionally from Open Ai some degree of apathy about the integrity and lying allegations that got him fired. I think that there is real sensitivity and concern about the reporting in the piece around the law firm investigation that was used to kind of validate his staying on. And my background is as an attorney in part, and I went very deep on talking to people at the law firm and Andrew and I really looked at this question. And look, the defense of that outside investigation from some of the lawyers involved is on full display in the story. But I think the widespread criticism of it is and has merit. Which is we report for the first time that nothing was put in writing except for the eight hundred word press release that open AI put out, which acknowledged only a breakdown in trust. It is true that private companies sometimes keep outside investigations when they want the outcome to be exonerative out of writing, you know, to limit it liability and because of privilege issues. But when you look at the annals of high profile scandals like this, where the goal is to restore trust and confidence, I think there is a much better case that this should have been memorialized in a more intensive way, that it should have been released at least within the company, if not publicly. And and look, you don't have to turn to us. There was a whole set of executives and stakeholders in this company who were shocked that there was no actual report released, so you know, there was a real effort to obfuscate some of this stuff in the view of many people around it, and we report on a number of alleged irregularities there. That's a good example of a nuts and bolts matter where there is concern, and honestly, my legal analysis is there should be because if this company goes through its IPO, there are actually legal standards by which shareholders could demand more information about that. And we talk to people around this who are saying, well, there might need to be a new investigation at some point, so there are some practicalities like that. Obviously, he was, as you might imagine, also very concerned about all of the elon rivalry stuff in the piece and all of the scuttle butt that is so far out there in Silicon Valley about his personal life, you know, which we looked at very incisively and fairly. But I think your point is well taken, which is the core allegations about integrity and honesty don't seem to much get under his skin. And when I asked him, even on a personal level, from the perspective of someone where if this was set about me so widely. You know that I had a real problem with honesty and was, in the view of many people around me, compulsively lying and telling people conflicting things that would be devastating and would trigger a lot of deep self reflection and work on myself. And so even when I asked him within that personal framework, you know, listen, are are you? Is this something that you have talked about in therapy? How do you talk to yourself about this trait? How do you carry the weight of that? I don't know about your impressions you were in that interview, Andrew, I did not sense a lot of like deep bracing self reflection or self confrontation. There was kind of a slightly anodyne discussion of like, yeah, I've tried therapy on occasion, you know, I love breath work, and not a lot of I mean, look, and maybe he is just choosing not to reveal.

00:28:02
Speaker 2: Yeah, but that's all very potentially true. Yeah, it's I was literally talking to a friend of the show, Steve Burke from Games Next Us about this the other day. It's like if someone if everywhere on I don't know, if you saw the Iran was threatening Stargate UA. So the olken Aidata center in the Middle East. Everyone was talking about it like yeah, fuck him up, destroy it, blah blah. And it's like, now that you said that, I'm wondering if he cares about that either, because if I'd made a product and I went online and like, Okay, a large contingent, very annoying people liked it, but tons of people like disgusted about I would be a little more concerned. And it sounds like he doesn't really care. Like you brought up like the person who killed killed themselves because the reason chat GPT is well, did he have any reaction to that or the negativity against open aye or was it the same kind of anodyne reaction.

00:29:09
Speaker 3: Andrew.

00:29:10
Speaker 1: I mean, we got statements to the effect of, you know, this responsibility weighs very heavily, and you know, I have no judgment about what's in his head or heart. I think that one way that this might seem different from like a sort of more standard micro human scale reaction could be that a lot of these people, based on their public statements alone, see themselves as kind of playing in this big sort of enders game, kind of galactic simulation scenario. Right, So I don't you know, this is not something that Sam Altman said to us, and this is not something that I'm imputing to him. But you know, if you you know, follow the way that Musk and Altman and a lot of these people think they are avowedly playing this galactic scale. Now, there's a possibility that that's just hype and that's just to get the next investment round, and that's a totally plausible possibility. But to the extent that that stuff seeps into their self conception at all, there's a way of reading it that says, you know, maybe some eggs are going to get broken to make the big galactic omelet.

00:30:16
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's is. I keep thinking about how many times people call to a sociopath as well, because it's just this profile is very interesting because a lot of it was going through stuff that being reported, but like getting it deeper and deeper and deeper. But in the end, compared to like other monsters you have covered, Rona just being blunt, Almond almost seems quite tepid, despite the scale of all of this, despite how like how much is theoretically or otherwise at stake, he just seems and all of these people Dariya Ramaday included just seem like business guys. They talk about the big philosophical things, but when you get down to it, business guys, regular business guys. There's like a distinct lack of emotion to it. But not in not in an interesting not interesting is not the work, but like colorful way, it's just very cold.

00:31:08
Speaker 3: Yeah, I hear you. I think so. First of all, I really stay away from in my own mind in how I frame things these terms like you know, monster or villainy. Even by the way, when reporting on you know, someone who's like very clearly guilty of like serial violent crime, I think my job, almost especially when the fact pattern is really demming, is to kind of excavate what's sympathetic, be strenuously, strenuously fair. This is more in line with you know, reporting I did on Musk, reporting I've done in other cases that's you know, more about national security issues where the centerpiece is not some portrait of damning criminality. The analysis of Altman's elege edged you know, pathological or compulsive lying is very subtle. It is undertaken with if anything, I think maximum generosity to him. You know, in the course of any piece like this, you have a lot of conversations with the subject of the reporting about what's in and what's out, and I really erred on the side in a lot of cases of generosity towards Sam. I feel for anyone who's under this kind of a microscope. I think it's correct, you know, if you have this much power to be held accountable, but I want to do it in a way that is not unkind, and that is tough but really fair. So I've been struck, actually by the range of reactions to the piece. I think Andrew and I did our job well in the sense that I see people who are like, this is, you know, the most horrifying thing ever, and this is a completely untrustworthy person who needs to be kept away from any position of authority. And I also see people who are like, you know what, this feels actually like a sympathetic portrait. My mom was calling me last night, I having read the piece, saying, you know, I just see interviews with him, and I sense this kind of charm and vulnerability, and you know, I read the piece and he's a complicated guy. But I think you did a really good job actually also making him sympathetic. So I think the fact that the fact pattern can accommodate this range of perceptions is telling. And my hope is that the power of what we've done is precisely in that kind of forensic nuance. The facts are very unimpeachable. I think it is very difficult to argue with the idea that there is a serial honesty problem here and a preponderance of people around him who consider it to be a problem. And to your point of like, is this all milk toast? Doesn't matter? I think what it comes down to is, yes, he is a businessman, and this is a world of businessmen that we are looking at. Sam Altman's degree of dissembling appears to be so noteworthy that it transcends and breaks through and becomes a constant topic.

00:34:07
Speaker 2: What do you mean by dissembling?

00:34:08
Speaker 3: Sorry, the allegation that Sam Altman says conflicting things to different people, and at times says things that are simply untrue. It is so pervasive that it breaks through and becomes a topic of conversation around him across his career, over and over again. Is one thing we document, even against the backdrop of all of the Silicon Valley businessmen, all of the expectation which is, you know, to a dismaying extent, increasingly just what people assume is normal, that there will be some degree of pitchmen, you know, hyping based on things that aren't totally grounded in fact. Even with all of that, even with the kind of race to the bottom in terms of truth and trust in Silicon Valley and America right now, particularly in American business, Sam Altman is noteworthy, and that to me made him actually an extraordinarily interesting and challenging subject to write about, because while it does exist in subtlety, the accumulation of facts that got him fired is striking even above and beyond that backdrop and that set of norms.

00:35:20
Speaker 2: So, as we wrap up, you spoke with Dario ama Die of Anthropic a few times, right, or at least it wasn't wasn't clear how many conversations happened. How does he compare to Sam personality wise and as far as believing it all goes?

00:35:34
Speaker 1: I mean, I think personality wise they're quite different, and we've seen them sort of clash, you know, the sort of like memes of them being unwilling to even you know, touch hands and all of that stuff. I think that's pretty real and you know, there are many different styles of this. I think, you know, Sam and Elon have obviously very different public personas Ilia Setskiver has a very different public presentation. The Dario thing, I think is complicated, right because Anthropic was spun off from open AI. They were, you know, the Open AI safety people who left to form their own company, and now there's this danger of them perpetuating this race to the bottom with you know, getting the same you know, Middle East autocracy money that they critiqued other companies for doing of. You know, there was this whole dust up around the Pentagon stuff, but that only was able to happen because Anthropic was doing so much classified work for the Pentagon in the first place. Right, So it's not that there are these very clean distinctions, at least to an outside the industry kind of perspective. And look, I mean, I think your point about like how much of this is just par for the course business stuff is a really important one. And also your your question is the right one, like why should anyone have invested so much in this rhetoric in the first place? And I think one way of approaching that is, like to the people who are really close to this I think this does go be on like narcissism of small differences stuff and like who puts the nicer wrapper on the you know, who does better branding? Like these people again, in their private correspondence when they don't think anyone's looking, they talk about this like it's Lord of the Rings literally, like they talk about you know, and so again, you can think that's all diluted, and many people do, And frankly, a lot of people we spoke to said in retrospect, I can't believe I was so naive that I bought into all this stuff. But when you have convinced yourself that that's what's going on, whether it's right or wrong, the stakes feel extremely high. And if you believe the rhetoric, you know, it's it's kind of you know, it's funny. I was listening when you were talking about this, Like you could say the same thing about someone who was really taken in by a political movement and say, right, oh, did you really believe Obama when he said he was going to go after the banks, you know, on the campaign trail? Or did you really believe Trump when he said he was going to not start any new wars?

00:37:54
Speaker 2: Yes?

00:37:55
Speaker 1: People believe it, and the betrayal of that belief can hit really hard. And so you know, yes, politicians lie, and yes, you know, business pipe men tell stories to investors, but like doesn't mean that people don't get taken in by it.

00:38:08
Speaker 2: So final question, actually in line with that, do you think sam Oltman sees himself as a businessman or as a as a statesman?

00:38:18
Speaker 3: Almost that's a really interesting question. I think that you know, he I honestly since in my conversations with him that he sees himself as something quite singular, and the grandiosity of his claims about his mission, you know, when he was telling recruits that he believed that this technology could eventually what was the exact quote, Andrew capture the light cone of all the value in the universe. I think he exhibits a trait that I have seen writing about various Silicon Valley moguls of this era, which is they do have a kind of Messianic quality to how they see themselves, you know, not as businessmen, not as statements but statement, but as everything to everyone, as super governmental. I think Elon is a much more extreme example of that. Psychologically, the kind of Messiah complex. There's much more mania there. Sam is someone who you know, as evidenced by the fact that he participated in this story so deeply, still wants to kind of play by the rules and within a system to some extent. But the reality around all of these guys is, we have let Silicon Valley grab all of the levers of power in the United States. It is such a center of gravity economically, it is I mean, one could say more or less the entire economy at this point, and it is bankrolling a huge, huge swath of politics now. So it is very hard, I think for the people at the forefront of that to consider themselves anything but messianic. And you add to that the specific contour of AI in which these guys really believe and not without reason, that they are birthing the future of the earth, that this may supersede the human species as the next dominant thing. I think that really magnifies the messianic quality. Yeah, and so that all goes to the responsibility question. Like yes, to Andrew's point. You know, business people, they fib and they dissemble and they are guilty of empty hype. And that is the whole saga of Silicon Valley from the beginning the fact that Sam Altman is not, in my view, you know, a villain in any clear cut way, and the piece goes to pains to be generous to him. To me makes this a more interesting story because both things can be true. You can have someone who is not a monster, but who is still in a position of so much power that if they have this particular trait of no one can trust them, and what they say is going to happen with the most dangerous technology on earth might not be what happens. That is something that we should all care about, and I think it just speaks to this wider set of structural issues where this is the most acute need we have as a species for proper governance and regulation, and that is all falling away and it's all in the hands of these private, unaccountable individuals.

00:41:46
Speaker 2: Well, thank you so much Andrew Rohan for joining me this. It's been an awesome conversation. The peace be linked. Yeah, thank you for joining me.

00:41:53
Speaker 1: Thank you so much, Ed, Thank you so much, Ed.

00:42:04
Speaker 2: Thank you for listening to Better Offline.

00:42:06
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00:42:32
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00:42:37
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00:42:39
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