OpenAI & Sam Altman on the front burner

In the prickly Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI (Penguin Press), Karen Hao tracks the fallout from the GPT breakthroughs across OpenAI’s rivals—Google, Meta, Anthropic, Baidu—and argues that each company, in its own way, mirrored Altman’s choices. The OpenAI model of scale at all costs became the industry’s default. Hao’s book is at once admirably detailed and one long pointed finger. “It was specifically OpenAI, with its billionaire origins, unique ideological bent, and Altman’s singular drive, network, and fundraising talent, that created a ripe combination for its particular vision to emerge and take over,” she writes. “Everything OpenAI did was the opposite of inevitable; the explosive global costs of its massive deep learning models, and the perilous race it sparked across the industry to scale such models to planetary limits, could only have ever arisen from the one place it actually did.” We have been, in other words, seduced—lulled by the spooky, high-minded rhetoric of existential risk. The story of A.I.’s evolution over the past decade, in Hao’s telling, is not really about the date of machine takeover or the degree of human control over the technology—the terms of the A.G.I. debate. Instead, it’s a corporate story about how we ended up with the version of A.I. we’ve got.

The “original sin” of this arm of technology, Hao writes, lay in a decision by a Dartmouth mathematician named John McCarthy, in 1955, to coin the phrase “artificial intelligence” in the first place. “The term lends itself to casual anthropomorphizing and breathless exaggerations about the technology’s capabilities,” she observes. As evidence, she points to Frank Rosenblatt, a Cornell professor who, in the late fifties, devised a system that could distinguish between cards with a small square on the right versus the left. Rosenblatt promoted it as brain-like—on its way to sentience and self-replication—and these claims were picked up and broadcast by the New York Times. But a broader cultural hesitancy about the technology’s implications meant that, once OpenAI made its breakthrough, Altman—its C.E.O.—came to be seen not only as a fiduciary steward but also as an ethical one. The background question that began to bubble up around the Valley, Keach Hagey writes in “The Optimist: Sam Altman, OpenAI, and the Race to Invent the Future” (Norton), “first whispered, then murmured, then popping up in elaborate online essays from the company’s defectors: Can we trust this person to lead us to AGI?”

Benjamin Wallace-Wells.

 

"Prickly?"

 

Karen Hao's book is now out.

 

 

I've begun my study. apropos, see some prior posta:

Silicon Valley's Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity
"Artificial General Intelligence?" Human existential risks?

Making the World a Bitter Place

ERRATUM

 

A decades-long friend of mine is now a Microsoft software engineer working on the Azure AI platform. A quick msg yesterday:

 

 

MAY 21ST UPDATE

 

 

Wow. Interesting.

 

MORE...

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…OpenAI is angling to replace every major tech firm: ChatGPT is an internet search tool as powerful as Google, can help you shop online and remove the need to type into Amazon, can be your work software instead of the Microsoft Office suite. OpenAI is even reportedly building a social-media platform. For now, OpenAI relies on the smartphones and web browsers people use to access ChatGPT—products that are all made by business rivals. Altman is trying to cut out the middleman and condense digital life into a single, unified piece of hardware and software. The promise is this: Your whole life could be lived through such a device, turning OpenAI’s products into a repository of uses and personal data that could be impossible to leave—just as, if everyone in your family has an iPhone, Macbook, and iCloud storage plan, switching to Android is deeply unpleasant and challenging….

Almost 20 years ago, when Apple introduced the iPhone, Steve Jobs said in a now-famous speech that “every once in a while, a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything.” Seeming to be in pursuit of similar magic, today’s video announcing OpenAI’s foray into hardware began with Altman saying, “I think we have the opportunity here to kind of completely reimagine what it means to use a computer.” But Jobs had an actual product to share and sell. Altman, for now, is marketing his imagination.

A QUICK DIVERSION

 

Saw this on PBS Newshour.
 

dignity.us

'eh?

 

OK, topically relevant, define "civility."

 

KAREN HAO UPDATE

 

Deeply into AI Empire. Switching back & forth between earlier and later chapters. A couple of cites:

 

 

Wonderful reading.

 

Stay tuned...

ControlAI.com: prior post follow-up

UPDATE, NEW BOOK COMING OUT

From a brilliant longtime AI insider with intimate access to the world of Sam Altman's OpenAI from the beginning, an eye-opening account of arguably the most fateful tech arms race in history, reshaping the planet in real time, from the cockpit of the company that is driving the frenzy

When AI expert and investigative journalist Karen Hao first began covering OpenAI in 2019, she thought they were the good guys. Founded as a nonprofit with safety enshrined as its core mission, the organization was meant, its leader Sam Altman told us, to act as a check against more purely mercantile, and potentially dangerous, forces. What could go wrong?

Over time, Hao began to wrestle ever more deeply with that question. Increasingly, she realized that the core truth of this massively disruptive sector is that its vision of success requires an almost unprecedented amount of resources: the “compute” power of high-end chips and the processing capacity to create massive large language models, the sheer volume of data that needs to be amassed at scale, the humans “cleaning up” that data for sweatshop wages throughout the Global South, and a truly alarming spike in the usage of energy and water underlying it all. The truth is that we have entered a new and ominous age of empire: only a small handful of globally scaled companies can even enter the field of play. At the head of the pack with its ChatGPT breakthrough, how would OpenAI resist such temptations?

Spoiler alert: it didn’t. Armed with Microsoft’s billions, OpenAI is setting a breakneck pace, chased by a small group of the most valuable companies in human history—toward what end, not even they can define. All this time, Hao has maintained her deep sourcing within the company and the industry, and so she was in intimate contact with the story that shocked the entire tech industry—Altman’s sudden firing and triumphant return. The behind-the-scenes story of what happened, told here in full for the first time, is revelatory of who the people controlling this technology really are. But this isn’t just the story of a single company, however fascinating it is. The g forces pressing down on the people of OpenAI are deforming the judgment of everyone else too—as such forces do. Naked power finds the ideology to cloak itself; no one thinks they’re the bad guy. But in the meantime, as Hao shows through intrepid reporting on the ground around the world, the enormous wheels of extraction grind on. By drawing on the viewpoints of Silicon Valley engineers, Kenyan data laborers, and Chilean water activists, Hao presents the fullest picture of AI and its impact we’ve seen to date, alongside a trenchant analysis of where things are headed. An astonishing eyewitness view from both up in the command capsule of the new economy and down where the real suffering happens, Empire of AI pierces the veil of the industry defining our era.

Excerpted in The Atlantic.

"Artificial General Intelligence?" Human existential risks?

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Well, that was a pretty wild read.

How did we build large language models? How do they think, if they think? What will the world look like if we have billions of AIs that are as smart as humans, or even smarter?

In a series of in-depth interviews with leading AI researchers and company founders—including Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, DeepMind cofounder Demis Hassabis, OpenAI cofounder Ilya Sutskever, MIRI cofounder Eliezer Yudkowsky, and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg—Dwarkesh Patel provides the first comprehensive and contemporary portrait of the technology that is transforming our world.

Drawn from his interviews on the Dwarkesh Podcast, these curated excerpts range from the technical details of how LLMs work to the possibility of an AI takeover or explosive economic growth. Patel’s conversations cut through the noise to explore the topics most compelling to those at the forefront of the field: the power of scaling, the potential for misalignment, the sheer input required for AGI, and the economic and social ramifications of superintelligence.

The book is also a standalone introduction to the technology. It includes 170 definitions and 17 visualizations, explanations of technical points made by guests, classic essays on the theme from other writers, and unpublished interviews with Open Philanthropy research analyst Ajeya Cotra and Anthropic cofounder Jared Kaplan.

The Scaling Era offers readers unprecedented insight into a transformative moment in the development of AI—and a vision of what comes next.

Patel, Dwarkesh. The Scaling Era: An Oral History of AI, 2019–2025 (p. 347). (Function). Kindle Edition.

 Loved it. Who are these cats? 

A fun read.

 

Relevant to these:

 

 

Adam Becker

Shannon Vallor

"The First Buddy"

 

NEW RELEASE COMING

 

 

We shall see. Science Magaizne pre-pub review.

 

One I'd forgotten:

This was in my Kindle stash. I had started into it a while ago, and then forgotten it given my crush of recent readings..

 

See also "Cognition in Strange New Minds."

 

A picture is beginning to emerge...

 

BACK TO DWARKESH & LEECH

  

 

UPDATE

 

"... Like with any technology – it can be used for good or bad, and the more powerful it is the greater the potential benefit or harm. AI is the nuclear weapon of the digital world. I think the biggest legitimate concern is that it will become a powerful tool in the hands of authoritarian governments. AI could become an overwhelming tool of surveillance and oppression. Not thinking about this early in the game may be a mistake from which there is no recovery."

From The Neurologica Blog.

 

RELATEDLY

 

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If you were tasked with building a panopticon, your design might look a lot like the information stores of the U.S. federal government—a collection of large, complex agencies, each making use of enormous volumes of data provided by or collected from citizens...

Yeah. Recall my "Total Information Awareness" riff.

_____

 

UPDATE

Silicon Valley Braces for Chaos
The center of the tech universe seems to believe that Trump’s tariff whiplash is nothing compared with what they see coming from AI.

"...In Silicon Valley, where the technological future is the center of today’s world, the president is easily reduced to memedom—not the most powerful man on the planet, but just some guy trolling everybody on the internet. The real power, the big sucking sound, is apparently in California. Trust the autopilot to stay the course. Where that takes us exactly, no one can say."

ARF…

ERRATUM: OK, IS THIS AI?

 

(Yeah, ya gotta click through to watch it on YouTube. "Age Restricted.")

 

 

Lordy, Mercy.

QUICK ERRATUM

 

Jus' fer grins, I typed "artificial intelligence" into the blog post search window at the top of this post. Stuff going back a decade.

 

CODA

 

Mothers’ Day 2025

Pakistan vs India, trading iterative reciprocal escalating armed hostilities. Each in possession of ~170 operational nukes.

  

Are we still comfy?

#SecDefBro Pete Kegseth

I'm not.

 

SATURDAY UPDATE

 

 

The first American Pope

 Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost.

Everyone is thrilled today, it would seem. Gushing goodwill everywhere.

 

We'll see how he will address a number of highly contentious issues, e.g.,

Click

 

Excellent book.

 

I've had my recurrent say on reproductive rights topics.

 

Justice Alito's Happy Mothers' Day
 

Dobbs takedown of Roe

  

Diploid Dave, Zoe Zygote

 

And, what about our theocrat-wannabee Fundamentalist Evangelical Christian Nationalist militants? Inextricably intermingled with the Heritage Project 2025 crowd.

 

I joke that I'm a "fully recovered Episcopalian, itinerant dilettante UU, small-"a" atheist (simply "without theology"), and secular Zen sympathizer." Progeny of Irish & English Catholics (paternal side) and German Protestants (maternal forebears). Simply  can't get past all the anthropomorphism, essentially.

On deck,coming soon:

 #Meritfauxcracy

The Donclave

Silicon Valley's Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity

 

Finished this one. A great, timely,sobering read. I'll just leave you with this excerpt:

...The way Kurzweil and his fellow singularitarians talk about the technology to come makes it seem like they’re playing a video game like Civilization, where there is a technology tree laid out in front of them clearly, and humanity (or indeed any intelligent species) is just working its way through that preexisting tree. But technology isn’t on rails, barreling down a set course beyond anyone’s control. Moore’s law isn’t a law of nature; it was a decision. That decision was made by the executives running the computer industry, and holding to that decision required (and still requires) careful planning, along with enormous amounts of money, materials, and human attention. The laws of physics and other sciences set boundaries on the possible range of technology, but the actual technologies that humanity develops within those boundaries are determined by choices and social pressures. Yet Kurzweil, and others of his ilk, frequently discuss technology as if it’s an implacable, inhuman force with its own desires, running down a path that has absolutely nothing to do with the collective choices of humanity. This is present throughout Kurzweil’s claims about the Singularity: we will have nanotechnology, we will saturate the universe with our intelligence, rather than we may or we could choose to.

This rhetoric of inevitability serves several convenient purposes. For the people developing their ideas into technology, such rhetoric offers absolution for any unpleasant and unforeseen consequences of their inventions, because they were only uncovering the already extant course of technology, rather than steering it themselves. When there’s no room for human agency, there’s no room for moral responsibility either. And if the future of technology really is on rails, then much can be revealed simply by careful examination of the purportedly inevitable route—a route that leads straight to the vision of the Singularity. This offers the promise of not only accurately predicting the future (and the sense of control that comes with), but also (and more importantly) endless life in a future filled with the transcendence and control that characterize the ideology of technological salvation. With the end of nature and the advent of a universe that is simply one enormous, artificial computer—where we live in still-more-artificial worlds generated by those computers—the promise of control is total, especially for those who know how to control computers. This is a fantasy of a world where the single most important thing, the thing that literally determines all aspects of reality, is computer programming. All of humanity, running on a computer, until the end of time.

Let’s take a moment to consider what this would be like. Presumably, there would be a simulated world, something like the real world—that is to say, something like our own. Human minds would want at least a simulacrum of nature, and providing one to the uploaded minds running on the machine would be easy enough with all that memory and processing power. There would be none of the inhuman originality of nature, but there would be an attempt at re-creating it, to create a pleasant environment for the uploaded people to live in. All of this is fantasy, of course, but when asked to describe what life would be like for uploaded people after the Singularity, this is the kind of answer that Kurzweil and others give. They describe what sounds for all the world like a high-definition metaverse that you can’t actually leave, a permanent virtual reality that shares some of the basic features of our own real world, or a real world destroyed and reshaped to more closely resemble an immersive computer game. To the singularitarians, the largest and most crucial difference, the one they keep coming back to in their descriptions, is the end of death. Kurzweil’s work is just the latest entry in the annals of the oldest fantasy of humanity. Even if personal immortality were possible through technological means, ultimately cosmology would place limits on the duration of physical structures, but Kurzweil doesn’t accept those limits either. He called overcoming cosmological forces the “goal of the Singularity,” and this is indeed the point of the entire enterprise. The destruction of nature is secondary. The objective is to tame the universe, to make it into a padded playground. Paving over every paradise is just the side effect of building the universal parking lot, where nothing bad can ever happen again. Nobody would age, nobody would get sick, and—perhaps above all else—nobody’s dad would die.

“We collected everything my father had written—now, he died when I was 22, so he’s been dead for more than 50 years—and we fed that into a large language model,” Kurzweil said in 2024. “And then you could talk to him, you’d say something, you then go through everything he ever had written, and find the best answer that he actually wrote to that question. And it actually was a lot like talking to him. You could ask him what he liked about music—he was a musician. He actually liked Brahms the best. And it was very much like talking to him.” In a 2023 Rolling Stone profile—following up on the one fourteen years earlier—Kurzweil revealed some of the content of that conversation: “[Kurzweil] asked his ‘Dad Bot,’ as he puts it, what he loves most about music (‘The connection to human feelings’), his gardening (‘It’s the kind of work that never ends’), and his anxieties (‘Often nightmarish’). ‘What’s the meaning of life?’ he finally typed to his Dad Bot. ‘Love,’ his Dad Bot replied.” These responses look like the kind of thing one would expect from a generic version of ChatGPT, rather than a conversation between a professional musician and his adult son. But Kurzweil is sanguine that his “Dad Bot” will improve too. “I think as we get further on, we can actually do that more and more responsively, and more and more that really would match that person and actually emulate the way he would move and so on, [and his] tone of voice,” he says. “Computers are going to make things even better. I mean, just the kind of things you can do now with a large language model didn’t exist two years ago.”

Kurzweil’s attempt to resurrect his father feels poignantly deluded. It’s also a striking illustration of how Kurzweil’s confidence in the increasing power of technology—according to his strict schedule—is accompanied by his Panglossian insistence that more technology, especially computer technology, is always an improvement. He certainly thinks that technological dangers exist—nuclear weapons, for one, as well as certain applications of nanotechnology—but he thinks the solution is to build more technology that detects and counters those dangers. “Yes, there are dangers, but the computers will also be more intelligent to avoid kinds of dangers,” he says. And as for the superintelligent post-Singularity computers themselves, he’s confident that they’ll treat us well, whether or not we merge with them. “I would expect the intelligence that arises from the Singularity to have great respect for their biological heritage,” he writes.

This mirrors Kurzweil’s obvious respect and love for his late father. But not all children feel that way about their parents. Despite Kurzweil’s many questionable claims, this one—the idea that a superintelligent AGI will treat humans with respect—is easily the most contentious among his intellectual successors today. Eliezer Yudkowsky and his followers agree with Kurzweil that, surely, something is at hand. But rather than the Singularity, they fear a rougher beast is slouching toward us, with exponential speed.

Becker, Adam. More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley's Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity (pp. 87-90). (Function). Kindle Edition. 

The Science Magazine review that alerted me to the book.

'Powerful, intelligent, rich people with poor ideas can be terribly dangerous indeed. That is why this is a serious issue rather than a “quirky tour of wacky ideas.” We must rightfully protest: Who has appointed these deranged individuals to be the stewards of mankind?'

Elon Musk, anyone?

Riveting book, this one. I've moved on to his prior book.

 

UPDATE

 

apropos of Elon. On deck.

 

Click

Nothin' to see here, folks.

 UPDATE2

 

More titles of topical interest.

 

Stay tuned,,,

Let Us Prey