This week we are revisiting a 2016 New Yorker profile of Sam Altman by Tad Friend for insight into how we got where we now are with regards to AI and its seeming inescapable ubiquity. The article is quite revelatory, as it shows us Altman in a more nascent moment in his rise to "tech superstardom." And what do we find? A monomaniacal sociopath with dreams of infinite growth and little regard for the consequences of his actions on the lives of other people. It's quite amazing and quite depressing at the same time, but we managed to have a good time exploring this portrait of a fundamentally detestable person that grants its subject, a delusional and likely evil ghoul, the patina of respectability.
We open the episode looking at a piece that suggests OpenAI, once the golden child of Silicon Valley, may have a difficult road ahead of it.
Tad Friend's 2016 profile of Sam Altman in The New Yorker
Bloomberg on OpenAI's potential fall from grace
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