Sam Altman Is Going to Win

Four facets for four foes

I. Humor

I find it oddly satisfying that Elon Musk lives in perpetual pursuit of his comic side—the one thing he can’t afford—while Sam Altman, his nemesis since that falling out that drove the former into a deep hatred of OpenAI and turned the latter into the most wanted name among Silicon Valley VCs, is effortlessly witty. I have to admit that, though I have little in common with either of them and more than enough reason to be wary of both, I think Musk is closer to being a positive force in the world. I don’t trust Altman—call it a hunch—and still, I find him way more likable. The part of me that values humor above goodwill (and seemingly rules over my primal and tribal instincts) will invariably prefer a nonchalant “one man’s slop is another man's treasure” to a validation-seeking “Even my hat has a hat.” And so I think, if my intuition is right, and unlike Altman, Musk errs more out of bad PR and an embarrassing lack of comedic timing than out of malice, then we’re screwed. Because if there’s one thing I know for sure, it’s that the funny man wins over the crowd.

II. Nerve

Altman wants to be a leader more than he wants to do the right thing. He wants things done his way or not at all. He would never let some blogger with a taste for fan fiction, forecasts, and polyamory—no matter how much influence he might have over the sharpest minds in AI today—steal the spotlight. So even if he’s written and spoken about the importance of safety and alignment, he would never kneel before them. Dario Amodei, of Anthropic, sins in exactly the opposite direction: he’s afraid. A fear so deep it’s incomprehensible to anyone who hasn’t wandered the fringes of rationalist thought. Fearful, but still honorable, because if one must be afraid, what better target than the end of everything itself? For Amodei, the risks of AI aren’t risks; they’re a warning, a herald of doomsday. His obsession with the pessimistic version of superintelligence and the singularity keeps him from playing the role he could for the public, because who can afford to identify with a madman these days? It also keeps him, through his need to mechanistically interpret whatever happens in his lab, from ever triumphing over steel-willed Altman and his once-beloved OpenAI.

III. Charm

Despite my recurring decision to report on every step OpenAI takes, I’ve never hidden my preference for DeepMind. The DeepMind from before Google, back when the capture was at least subtle. When the purity of scientific research wasn’t yet tainted by the chase for ROI. I don’t judge—it’s not like I don’t want money too—but the thrill they once stirred in me has faded, almost without me noticing. I still hold a kind of youthful love for that DeepMind of Demis Hassabis and Shane Legg, one that makes all the more sense because AlphaGo was my first encounter with artificial intelligence. Their work echoed the same intellectual ambition and richness of spirit I might have felt toward Einstein’s relativity or the quantum mechanics of Schrödinger, Bohr, and Dirac—if you’ll allow the comparison. And while my weakness for DeepMind has a bittersweet flavor now that it exists in full possession and under the shadow of Google, Hassabis’s feels tragic. A genius, a scientist, a Nobel Prize winner, and still unable to navigate the waters of popularity the way Mr. Sam Businessman can. I guess life is not that different from a high school playground, after all.

IV. Focus

I’ll dedicate the last paragraph to the underdog par excellence: Mark Zuckerberg. Zuck, as we friends call him, doesn’t fight with Altman. In fact, he doesn’t fight with anyone. He just keeps fleeing forward, chased by his own shadow—the shadow of a long string of mistakes, the latest of which was a disaster of Babelian proportions that, while negligible in consequence, left him exposed. The truth is, Zuck doesn’t know where to hide next. Each day, he decides based on what his rivals are doing, what the public wants, what investors demand, what the President promises, and what his engineers swear by. He will never resemble his ideal self—no matter how many chains he wears, how many oversized shirts he puts on, or how much jiujitsu he practices—and yet he’ll do whatever it takes to win. Because he’s a phoenix, not a lizard, in human form, reborn from his ashes again and again. Despite the relentlessness and the grit, Altman has nothing against Fickle Zuck. And nothing is exactly what he needs. Because if one thing can beat extreme agency toward anywhere, it’s extreme agency toward somewhere: A firm belief beats a careless empire.