Open AIs Sam Altman faces disturbing allegations in an expose. We have to tell you about this. There was a damning expose on Altman published recently in the New Yorker informed by interview with his colleagues and some guarded documents. In the fall of 2023, Ia Suetskever, OpenAI's [00:00:25] chief scientist sent secret memos to three fellow members of the organization's board of directors. For weeks, they'd been having further discussions about whether Sam Altman, OpenAI's CEO, and Greg Brockman, his second in command, were fit to run the company. But as he grew convinced [00:00:44] that the company was nearing its long-term goal, creating an artificial intelligence that could rival or surpass the cognitive capabilities of human beings, Listen to that, what? His doubts about Altman increase. Sutskever worked with like minded colleagues to compile some [00:01:06] 70 pages of slack messages and HR documents accompanied by text that explains some things, okay? They wanted to give it context. He sent the final memos to the other board members [00:01:23] as disappearing messages to ensure that no one else would ever see them. He was terrified. A board member who received them recalled, They allege that Altman misrepresented facts to executives and board members, deceive them about internal safety protocols. One of the memos [00:01:41] about Altman begins with a list. Headed Sam exhibits a consistent pattern of first item is lying. According to Sutzkever, any person working to build this civilization altering technology bears a heavy burden and is taking on unprecedented responsibility. But the people [00:02:02] who end up in these kinds of positions are often a certain kind of person, someone who is interested in power, politician, someone who likes it. And one of the memos he seemed concerned with entrusting the technology to someone who just tells people what they want to hear. Altman [00:02:18] was in Las Vegas attending a Formula One race when Sutskever invited him to a video call with the board, then read a brief statement explaining that he was no longer an employee of OpenAI, gangsta. The board, following legal advice, released a public message saying only [00:02:35] that Altman had been removed because he was not consistently candid in his communications. That's one way to clean it up, these lawyers are something else. Many of OpenAI's investors and executives were shocked. Microsoft, which had invested some $13 billion in OpenAI, learned [00:02:55] of the plan to fire Altman just moments before it happened. I was stunned, Sacha Nadella, Microsoft's CEO, later said. Other business partners were similarly blindsided. Ronan Farrow, [00:03:11] Andrew Marantz of The New Yorker with this blockbuster reporting. OpenAI was on the verge of closing a large investment from Thrive, a venture capital firm founded by Josh Kushner. Jared's brother [00:03:26] got it, whom Altman had known for years. The deal would value OpenAI at $86 billion. Allow many employees to cash out millions in equity. Kushner emerged from a meeting with Rick Rubin, [00:03:44] the music producer, to a missed call from Altman. We just immediately went to war, Kushner later said. With the board silent, Altman's advisors built a public case for his return. Lehane has insisted that the firing was a coup orchestrated by rogue, altruist adherence of a belief [00:04:05] system that focuses on maximizing the well-being of humanity, who had come to see AI as an existential threat. At one point Altman conveyed to Miriam Marati, who had given Skiver material for his memos and was serving as interim CEO of OpenAI in that period, that his allies were going [00:04:24] all out, finding bad things to damage her reputation as well as those of others who had moved against him. That's according to someone with knowledge of the conversation. Within hours of the firing, Thrive had put its planned investment on hold and suggested that the deal would be employees [00:04:43] would thus receive payouts only if Altman returned. Microsoft soon announced that it would create a competing initiative for Altman and any employees who left OpenAI. Public letters demanding his return circulated at the organization. Some people who hesitated to sign it received imploring [00:05:02] calls and messages from colleagues. Majority of OpenAI employees ultimately threatened to leave with Altman. This is like a movie. Less than five days after his firing, Altman was reinstated. The colleagues who facilitated his ouster accused him of a degree of deception [00:05:20] that is untenable for any executive, dangerous for a leader of such transformative technology. We need institutions worthy of the power they wield, Maradi told us. The board sought feedback. I shared what I was seeing. Everything I shared was accurate. I stand behind all of it. Altman's [00:05:38] allies, on the other hand, have long dismissed the accusation. After the firing, OpenAI investor Ron Conway texted Airbnb co-founder Brian Chesky, crisis communications manager Chris Lehane too, demanding a public relations offensive. This is reputational to Sam, he wrote. He told [00:05:59] the Washington Post that Altman had been mistreated by a rogue board of directors. In a tense call after Altman's firing, the board pressed him to acknowledge a pattern of deception. He attributed the criticism to a tendency, especially early in his career, to be too much of a conflict [00:06:14] avoider. But a board member offered a different interpretation of a statement. What it meant was, I have this trait where I lie to people and I'm not going to stop. That's narcissists, I can tell you that right now. That's narcissists. While working at another tech company called [00:06:30] LÜT, Groups of Senior Employees Concerned with Altman's Leadership and lack of transparency asked Loup's board on two occasions to fire him as CEO. What about his time at Y Combinator? An investor told us that Altman was known to make personal investments selectively into [00:06:48] the best companies blocking outside investors. Altman denies blocking anyone. By 2018, several YC partners were so frustrated with Altman's behavior that they approached founder Paul Graham to complain Afterward, Graham started telling people that although Altman had agreed [00:07:06] to leave the company, he was resisting in practice. Altman told some YC partners he would resign as president, but become chairman instead. In a statement, Graham told us, we didn't have the legal power to fire anyone. All we could do was apply moral pressure. In private though, [00:07:26] he has been unambiguous that Altman was removed because of YC partners mistrust. His account of Altman's time at Y Combinator is based on discussions with several YC founders and partners in addition to contemporaneous materials, all of which indicate that the parting was not [00:07:44] entirely mutual. On one occasion, Graham told YC colleagues that prior to his removal, Sam had been lying to us all the time. So Altman had generally been a techno-optimist, but his rhetoric about AI soon turned apoclyptical. Africa, it was bad. Sorry folks, I'll keep [00:08:06] the glasses on. In public and in his private correspondence with Musk and others, he warned that the technology should not be dominated by a profit seeking mega corporation. Well, I've thinking a lot about whether it's possible to stop humanity from developing AI, he wrote [00:08:24] to Musk. If it's going to happen anyway, it seems like it would be good for someone other than Google to do it first. He outlined the overarching principles that such an organization would have. Safety should be a first class requirement. Obviously, we'd comply with aggressively support [00:08:42] all regulation. And he and Musk settled on a name, Open AI. Yes, Musk then invested tens of millions of dollars into Open AI. Altman told early recruits Open AI would remain a [00:09:00] pure nonprofit. Programmers took significant pay cuts to work there. Then Altman's main consistent demand seems to have been that if OpenAI were reorganized under the control of the CEO, that job should go to him. Ted Skivers seemed uncomfortable with this idea. He sent [00:09:16] Musk and Altman a long plaintive email on behalf of himself and Brockman. Subject line, honest thoughts. He wrote, the goal of OpenAI is to make the future good. and to avoid an AGI dictatorship. [00:09:32] He continued addressing Musk. So it is a bad idea to create a structure where you could become a dictator who relates similar concerns to Altman. We don't understand why the CEO title is so important to you. Your stated reasons have changed and it's hard to really understand [00:09:49] what's driving it. I think they know. Guys, I've had enough, Musk replied. Either go. do something on your own or continue with OpenAI as a nonprofit. Otherwise, I'm just being a fool who is essentially providing free funding for you to create a startup. quit acrimoniously [00:10:07] five months later. Once Musk departed, it was decided that Altman would get the CEO title in exchange. He agreed to resign if the other two deemed it necessary. Most of the people we spoke to shared the judgment of such skeever and our mode A. Altman has a relentless will [00:10:26] to power that even among industrialists who put their names on spaceships sets him apart. He's unconstrained by truth, the board member told us. He has two traits that are almost never seen in the same person. The first is a strong desire to please people to be liked [00:10:44] in any given interaction. I'm thinking of another person, and I know you are too. The second is almost a- sociopathic lack of concern for the consequences that may come from deceiving someone. Okay, so now we know there's another guy like this, and we're having to deal with [00:11:04] him and his dictatorship. Wow. One of Altman's batch mates in the first Y Combinator cohort was Aaron Schwartz, brilliant but troubled coder. Died by suicide in 2013 and is now remembered [00:11:20] in many tech circles as something of a sage. Not long before his death, Swartz expressed concerns about Altman and several friends. You need to understand that Sam can never be trusted, he told one. He is a sociopath, he would do anything. In addition to Altman's extensive [00:11:42] character flaws, he has even technocratic aspirations that are no secret. um Watch this. We see a future where intelligence is a utility, like electricity or water, and people buy [00:12:02] it from us uh on a meter and use it for whatever they want to use it for. I was never really into sci-fi movies. This is more disturbing than anything Hollywood can come up with. One [00:12:18] man who is part Terminator, I don't know, think of another villain, kind of all mixed into one, enabled by others and their greed and their proximity to power. This is, wasn't a fun read [00:12:36] for me, despite my, I will glasses on. This was a scary read. This was a dark read. It's like this train, whether you agree with Altman or not, or you think he has a redeeming quality or not. This AI and what's been started, can never moonwalk back. And I am petrified at [00:13:00] this point. What say you? Yeah, I think the word you were looking for when it was leaving your brain a little bit was apoplectic. yeah, that's so perfect. That is what this is. Apoplectic, there you go. There you have it. So the moral pressure, at one point they said that they [00:13:19] were gonna put moral pressure on these people to do the right thing. What? No, moral pressure doesn't do anything in an industry. that operates without morality or almost in spite of morality. When the people running the industry feel as though they themselves are above morality, [00:13:37] Elon Musk even famously said that empathy in humanity is a weakness and it needs to be eradicated if the human race wants to go forward the way that he wants to go forward. And that is what is so key about all of this is that we didn't get any kind of buy in in any of this. This [00:13:55] is not a democratic way. to run a country or to run a globe, right? How many people do you know who are actually excited about the advent of AI? Not just the advent of AI, but having these people being the ones who are running it and deciding how people are going to use [00:14:12] it, how governments are going to interact with it, how the world is going to interact with this technology. They tell us all the time about the risks involved with this technology and implementing it on such a wide scale so quickly, but They don't do anything about those risks. [00:14:28] They don't give us any ways that they're trying to mitigate these risks. They're just saying this is what we're gonna have to deal with because we have to hurry up and get this thing to market because we need to make some of our investment back. And that is what matters. And if all of humanity crumbles because of it, which is something that is cited as one of the risks [00:14:47] of this technology, then so be it, at least we're able to get paid in the meantime. But these people, think they're so high brain. They just sit around together in circles of sorts and they just talk to each other, mulling over these big philosophical questions of the day. [00:15:04] They have the luxury to do that, deciding for themselves what they, by virtue of their own ill gotten wealth, that they are the best ones to make decisions for all of humanity. They think that they are worthy of making these decisions on our behalf. in spite of what it is that [00:15:20] we actually want. They think that they're so much smarter than the rest of us that we don't even know what it is that we want. We're the ones who are holding back humanity, and they're the ones who are going to push it forward and If there is a humanity that survives any and all of this, then they will be remembered fondly for it. In their minds, that is what they're [00:15:38] doing all of this for. They are insisting on this technology, and in their insistence, they are forcing it upon an entire global population that does not want it. They are building all these data centers in our backyards against our will. People are protesting across the [00:15:55] country on both sides of the aisle. This is a like a remarkably non-partisan issue. The people are having a protest and they're holding even their local leaders accountable. The local leaders who are letting things like data centers be built in a place where the people do not [00:16:12] want those data centers built. They pretend to be altruistic, just I know everyone in this audience knows this. But there is no billionaire or billionaire wannabe. that is a true altruist. These people are narcissists and even within that classification, they are the worst of [00:16:29] them. And it's like what you were saying, Sharon, they're villains. Batman is kind of a psycho and he's incredibly self centered. He can't pay more taxes. But what he can do is he can make a whole city just endure his weird fantasies so he can play dress up. and fight his BFF, [00:16:46] the Joker. That's what we're dealing with here. And people are dying because of it. People are losing jobs because of it. They're losing their livelihoods because of it. Our democratic institutions are collapsing because of it, or they're about to, right? Because in this world, this is like the founding fathers deciding that the American people need an electoral [00:17:05] college because we can't actually be trusted with the final vote. So it's all just repackaging of the same thing. And then I tossed it to you and now I want to hide it under my desk. All right. Okay, it's all true. This is like I said Terminator, the cyborg assassin who [00:17:25] went back decades in time to kill. And the thing about it is and you were going to go to break but I'll put it like this. So the billionaire narcissist that you're talking about, yes, who think that they can just buy up all the beachfront property in Malibu and be safe. [00:17:42] It's going to consume you too, you fools. You're not gonna be able to escape it. Like she said, you think you're so smart. You're not gonna be able to escape it either.