Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?

The statements around the sexual abuse allegations seemed to be the most puzzling to me - his sister’s allegations and claims of underage partners because he has a tendency to hook up with younger partners. It does seem like this piece gives him a pretty clean bill of health in that matter - I guess would you be able to talk about how you investigated?

Did you do any extra investigations into Annie’s allegations? It feels to me like the unstated conclusion is recovered memory can’t be trusted, which is a popular understanding but a very wrong one put out by the now defunct and discredited False Memory Syndrome Foundation. It was founded by the parents of the psychologist who coined DARVO, directly in reaction to her accusing them of abuse.

Dissociation is real (I have a dissociative disorder, and abuse I “recovered” but did not remember for much of my adolescence and early adulthood has been corroborated by third parties) and many CSA survivors have severe memory problems that often don’t come to a head until adulthood. I know you didn’t dismiss her claim, but the way the public tends to think about recovered memories is shaped primarily by that awful organization.

Disclaimer: I have no association with any AI company and have never met Altman or any of the other top AI scientists.

The real question is: can anyone be trusted if the fever dreams of super-intelligence come true? Go ahead and replace Sam Altman with someone else - will it make a difference? Any other CEO is going to be under the same overwhelming pressure to make a profit somehow. I think the OpenAI story is messier because it was founded for supposedly altruistic reasons, and then changed.

Methinks many of Altman's detractors protesteth too much. He's doing his job as it is defined (make OpenAI profitable.) Nothing of substance in this article seemed to make him exceptionally "sociopathic" compared to any other tech CEO. It goes with the territory.

What depressed me most is that trillions of dollars are being raised for building what will undoubtedly be used as a weapon. My guess is the ROI on that money is going to be extremely bad for the most part (AI will make some people insanely rich, but it is hard to see how the big investors will get a return.) Could you imagine if the world shared the same vision for energy infrastructure (so we could also stop fighting wars over control of fossil fuels and spewing CO2?) A man can dream...

All fair points on trauma and memory.

As noted in the piece, we spent months talking to Altman's partners and what we found and didn't is as described.

Fair request, here you go: https://x.com/RonanFarrow/status/2041203911697068112

As is always the case with incredibly precise and rigorously fact-checked reporting like this, where every word is chosen carefully (the initial closing meeting for this one was nearly eight hours long, with full deliberation about each sentence), there is more out there on that subject than is explicitly on the page.