<\/p>\n
\u201cWeirdly adorable\u201d. Friendly with many reporters, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has assumed the role of the upbeat face of AI\u2019s future.<\/span>Credit: <\/span>Eamon Gallagher<\/cite><\/p>\n But as the cryptographers proceed, they realise \u2013 too late \u2013 that it\u2019s a cookbook. That, dear reader, is the story of OpenAI.<\/p>\n It was founded in 2015 as a non-profit to serve man, to keep an eye on galloping artificial intelligence technology and ensure there were guardrails and kill switches \u2014 because when AI hits puberty, it will be like aliens landing.<\/p>\n When I interviewed them at their makeshift San Francisco headquarters back in 2016, the OpenAI founders \u2014 Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Ilya Sutskever and Greg Brockman \u2014 presented themselves as our Praetorian guard against the future threat of runaway, evil AI, against bad actors and bad bots and all the lords of the cloud who had Mary Shelley dreams of creating a new species, humanity be damned.<\/p>\n \u201cWe are explicitly not trying to enrich ourselves,\u201d Sutskever said.<\/p>\n Brockman was equally high-minded: \u201cIt\u2019s not enough just to produce this technology and toss it over the fence and say, \u2018OK, our job is done. Just let the world figure it out.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n But OpenAI is tossing a lot of alarming stuff over the fence. Musk is gone, and Altman is no longer casting himself as humanity\u2019s watchdog. He\u2019s running a for-profit outfit, creating an AI cookbook. He\u2019s less interested in peril than investors, less concerned about existential danger than finding AI\u2019s capabilities. \u201cWhen you see something that is technically sweet,\u201d Robert Oppenheimer said, \u201cyou go ahead and do it.\u201d<\/p>\n The government has nibbled the edges of regulation, but the quicksilver AI has already leaped ahead of the snail-like lawmakers and bureaucrats. Nobody, even in Silicon Valley, has any clue how to control it.<\/p>\n OpenAI\u2019s wild ride two weeks ago was farcical \u2014 a coup against Altman that collapsed and turned into a restoration. But it was also terrifying because it showed that we are totally at the mercy of Silicon Valley boys with their toys, egos crashing, temperaments colliding, ambition and greed soaring.<\/p>\n Altman recently called his fellow OpenAI founder Elon Musk \u201ca jerk\u201d.<\/span>Credit: <\/span>Getty<\/cite><\/p>\n Whatever you want to say about Musk\u2019s recent unravelling \u2014 his manic edge; his offensive tweets; his strange, angular cybertruck \u2014 he has been passionate in working against rogue AI. The perhaps quixotic quest of aligning AI progress to protect human values has caused Musk many a sleepless night and many a fractured friendship.<\/p>\n He lured Sutskever, a dazzling Russian engineer, from Google to OpenAI. Larry Page, a co-founder of Google and an AI accelerationist, was furious at his good friend Musk for poaching Sutskever and broke with him. Page dismissively told Musk he was \u201ca specist\u201d for siding with the human species in the AI argument.<\/p>\n Musk also scrapped with Altman. As Walter Isaacson wrote in Elon Musk<\/em>, the mercurial mogul summoned Altman in February, asking him to bring OpenAI\u2019s founding documents. Not too long after, Musk tweeted, \u201cI\u2019m still confused as to how a non-profit to which I donated $100M somehow became a $30B market cap for-profit. If this is legal, why doesn\u2019t everyone do it?\u201d<\/p>\n Speaking to Kara Swisher, Altman called Musk a \u201cjerk.\u201d<\/p>\n As with Shakespeare, personality clashes are shaping life-or-death decisions in the battle over AI. One thing that may have touched off the rebellion against Altman was that he diminished Sutskever\u2019s role at the company.<\/p>\n We still don\u2019t know exactly what happened. Did the board see some progress in the AI algorithm that jolted them enough to fire Altman for fear he was pushing products without enough regard for safeguards?<\/p>\n Certainly, AI is getting better at reasoning, making fewer mistakes, hallucinating less \u2014 the term for making up stuff \u2014 and doing complicated math puzzles.<\/p>\n Musk recently praised Sutskever for having \u201ca good moral compass\u201d. Was the young engineer, who joined the doomers on the board and delivered the bad news to Altman before recanting, influenced by his mentor at Google, Geoffrey Hinton?<\/p>\n Hinton, the so-called godfather of AI, was stunned by OpenAI\u2019s miracle baby, ChatGPT, realising we may be only a few years from AI being smarter than we are. Hinton gloomily told 60 Minutes<\/em> in October that AI could malevolently turn on us, manipulating us with what it has learnt from being fed all the books ever written, including works of Machiavelli.<\/p>\n Unlike Musk, who can be awkward and go into \u201cdemon mode,\u201d according to Isaacson, Altman is smooth in his dealings with investors, techies and lawmakers, comfy in T-shirt and jeans. One top Silicon Valley scientist described the 38-year-old Altman as \u201cweirdly adorable\u201d. Friendly with many reporters, he has assumed the role of the upbeat face of AI\u2019s future.<\/p>\n But do we want someone with a sunny disposition about AI? No. Not when, as Musk warned last Thursday, \u201cThe apocalypse could come along at any moment\u201d.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n