The Fly in Sam Altman’s Ointment

Yesterday, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman published a blog post in which he wrote:

We are now confident we know how to build AGI [artificial general intelligence] as we have traditionally understood it. We believe that, in 2025, we may see the first AI agents “join the workforce” and materially change the output of companies. We continue to believe that iteratively putting great tools in the hands of people leads to great, broadly-distributed outcomes.

We are beginning to turn our aim beyond that, to superintelligence in the true sense of the word. We love our current products, but we are here for the glorious future. With superintelligence, we can do anything else. Superintelligent tools could massively accelerate scientific discovery and innovation well beyond what we are capable of doing on our own, and in turn massively increase abundance and prosperity. (My emphasis)

Massively increase abundance and prosperity. Really? When has “America, Inc.” ever voluntarily given average Americans a massive increase in abundance and prosperity? Consider the Gilded Age (roughly 1890-1910). According to a PBS documentary by that name, by 1897 “the richest 4,000 families in the U.S. (representing less than 1% of the population) had about as much wealth as other 11.6 million families all together.” According to Time Magazine,

[W]hile the original Gilded Age inspired a wave of political change, from the first march on Washington to the rise of the Populists, its fallout did not lead to the end of inequality in the United States…. [T]here have been several major cycles of inequality in the U.S. since then: the mitigation of inequality during the Progressive era, the return to inequality in the 1920s, the great equalizer that was the Great Depression and the New Deal, and then the rise of inequality once again in the late 20th century. That trend has continued to this day, and Americans are now living in an era that has been called a new Gilded Age.

Altman’s checkered history as OpenAI’s once and future CEO casts a shadow of hypocrisy over his rosy prediction. Altman was briefly ousted as CEO in November 2023. Due to pressure from employees and investors, he was quickly reinstated. However, the backstory to his brief termination is telling. According to at least one board member who supported the initial Altman firing, “The board is a nonprofit board that was set up explicitly for the purpose of making sure that the company’s public good mission was primary, was coming first — over profits, investor interests, and other things…. But for years, Sam had made it really difficult for the board to actually do that job by withholding information, misrepresenting things that were happening at the company, in some cases outright lying to the board.” The following May, OpenAI disbanded the team assigned to studying the long-term risks of AI. Faced with these facts, should “We the People” believe that OpenAI and its CEO have our best interests at heart?

Even if we take Altman at his word, OpenAI isn’t the only nor the biggest contender for control of AGI. Isn’t it far more realistic to believe that the billionaires and trillion-dollar corporations that will own and control AGI will exploit it to the max to increase their own wealth and power? Elon Musk, one of (if not the) richest in the world, seems determined to be at the center of the AGI revolution. Musk has had an on-again, off-again love affair with OpenAI. In 2024, he sued the company, claiming it had violated the founding agreement in which Musk had played a part. Note this excerpt from a March 5, 2024 OpenAI retort entitled “OpenAI and Elon Musk”:

The mission of OpenAI is to ensure AGI benefits all of humanity, which means both building safe and beneficial AGI and helping create broadly distributed benefits. We are now sharing what we've learned about achieving our mission, and some facts about our relationship with Elon. We intend to move to dismiss all of Elon’s claims.

We realized building AGI will require far more resources than we’d initially imagined

Elon said we should announce an initial $1B funding commitment to OpenAI. In total, the non-profit has raised less than $45M from Elon and more than $90M from other donors.

When starting OpenAI in late 2015, Greg and Sam had initially planned to raise $100M. Elon said in an email: “We need to go with a much bigger number than $100M to avoid sounding hopeless… I think we should say that we are starting with a $1B funding commitment… I will cover whatever anyone else doesn't provide.” ⁠

We spent a lot of time trying to envision a plausible path to AGI. In early 2017, we came to the realization that building AGI will require vast quantities of compute (sic). We began calculating how much compute(sic) an AGI might plausibly require. We all understood we were going to need a lot more capital to succeed at our mission—billions of dollars per year, which was far more than any of us, especially Elon, thought we’d be able to raise as the non-profit.

We and Elon recognized a for-profit entity would be necessary to acquire those resources

As we discussed a for-profit structure in order to further the mission, Elon wanted us to merge with Tesla or he wanted full control. Elon left OpenAI, saying there needed to be a relevant competitor to Google/DeepMind and that he was going to do it himself. He said he’d be supportive of us finding our own path.

In late 2017, we and Elon decided the next step for the mission was to create a for-profit entity. Elon wanted majority equity, initial board control, and to be CEO. In the middle of these discussions, he withheld funding. Reid Hoffman bridged the gap to cover salaries and operations.

We couldn’t agree to terms on a for-profit with Elon because we felt it was against the mission for any individual to have absolute control over OpenAI. He then suggested instead merging OpenAI into Tesla. In early February 2018, Elon forwarded us an email suggesting that OpenAI should “attach to Tesla as its cash cow”, commenting that it was “exactly right… Tesla is the only path that could even hope to hold a candle to Google. Even then, the probability of being a counterweight to Google is small. It just isn’t zero”.

Musk has one foot—-some might say both feet—-in the Trump White House. He has predicted the advent of genuine AGI by 2026. And he aims to control it, either via OpenAI or an entity of his own. If he and his allies succeed, do you expect them to make a massive increase in abundance and prosperity a top priority? Do you expect Donald Trump—-taking his lead from another Republican president, Teddy Roosevelt—- to use the power of the presidency and the federal bureaucracy & courts to drive the AGI revolution in the direction of the public good?

If you do, there’s a very charming bridge in Brooklyn I’d like to talk about with you.