How Did Someone So Smart Make This Strangely Obvious Mistake
Sam Altman's "Her" story may not end as he wanted
I. High-Agency Valley
Oh, no. Another article about the Scarlett Johansson thing. But wait, I assure you this one is a bit different than the others you have surely already read. It’s less about what’s happened and more about what led Sam Altman to make a series of mistakes—strangely obvious for someone so smart—that put him in this compromising situation.
Let’s start elsewhere: Silicon Valley is a misnomer.
The valley part is fine. It’s the silicon that I disagree with. As most people know—especially entrepreneurs who’ve tried it firsthand—hardware startups are hard (just ask Jensen). That’s why it’s much more popular to do software. But programs and algorithms aren’t silicon. What successful founders of both software and hardware startups have in common is something else, an uncanny predilection for a key character trait: high agency.
All tech CEOs stand out for their high agency (yes, including Sundar Pichai), understood as the ability to get what you want by using any means at your disposal.
There are few things harder than climbing to the top rank in a powerful corporation. Incentives to step on your peers’ faces are continuous—for you and them—and being ruthless against competition—whether internal or external—is not a choice but a must. You can get the playbook from the early days of Facebook, Microsoft, and Apple.
It’s the most resourceful people who always, eventually get what they want (if you think being a CEO is all about connections, you get those also by having high agency). One interesting resource I’ll get back to later is quietly stepping on unethical and perhaps even dubiously legal grounds without getting caught (you know, a willingness to destroy potential competition through lobbying or a lack of hesitancy to scrap the entire internet with absolute indifference to creators).
You don’t get very far in the high-tech center of the Western world without high agency, that’s why Silicon Valley is actually High-Agency Valley.