Investigation Raises Serious Concerns Over Sam Altman's Trustworthiness

Just a couple of weeks after PetaPixel wrote about the juvenile culture overseen by Sam Altman at OpenAI, the New Yorker has written a damning article about Altman questioning his trustworthiness.

The long article published on Monday and written by Ronan Farrow and Andrew Marantz looks at allegations that Altman has trouble with the truth, telling different versions of it to different people.

Farrow and Marantz spoke to a lot of people who know or have dealt with Altman, many of whom say they don’t trust him. “He’s unconstrained by truth,” says one former OpenAI board member.

Altman is accused of being desperate to please the people he’s talking to, while simultaneously having no issue with screwing people over. In 2023, Altman was ousted from OpenAI before returning less than one week later. The former chief scientist of OpenAI, Ilya Sutskever, sent a secret note to other members of the board saying, “I don’t think Sam is the guy who should have his finger on the button.”

The New Yorker also reports that he shows surprisingly little knowledge of the AI software his company builds. Futurism notes that he confuses basic AI terms, and is inept at programming and machine learning. One former OpenAI researcher, Carroll Wainwright, says, “he sets up structures that, on paper, constrain him in the future. But then, when the future comes, and it comes time to be constrained, he does away with whatever the structure was.”

One senior executive at Microsoft went so far as to suggest that Altman could eventually be remembered as a “Bernie Madoff- or Sam Bankman-Fried-level scammer.”

“Much of the piece revisits previously reported events through anonymous claims and selective anecdotes sourced from people with clear agendas,” OpenAI says in response to the New Yorker’s story.

Alarmingly, OpenAI released a whitepaper titled “Industrial Policy for the Intelligence Age: Ideas to Keep People First”, which says there could be some downsides to AI and there should be a “conversation about governing advanced AI.”

Business Insider notes that the proposals include taxing big companies and rich people to make up for all the potential job losses, particularly companies that use AI to replace workers.

Image credits: Header photo licensed via Depositphotos.