The Optimist : Sam Altman, OpenAI, - and the race to Invent the Future. By Keach Hagey.
In November 2023 Altman was abruptly fired by the company's board, only to be reinstated days later after staff members and investors revolted.
From the outside, many critics saw the coup as a last-ditch effort to stop OpenAI from becoming the very Eye of Sauron it was founded to restrain.
Hagey renders this moment as a conventional board mutiny : Director's had tired of Altman's '' duplicity and calamitous aversion to conflict.''
One of them, the OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever, recalls that Altman ''would tell him one thing, then say another, and act as if the difference was an accident.''
Sutskever said he regretted his vote to oust Altman but after Altman returned to OpenAI, Sutskever left the company.
HAO'S version is darker. Relying on lot of the same sources as author Keach Hagey she presents Altman as a paddler of ''many little lies and some big ones, who helped create a '' directionless, a chaotic and back-stabbing environment.''
In her book, Sutskever comes to see Altman as engaging in what some of his colleagues call '' psychological abuse.''
Together, these two excellent and deeply reported books forms a diptych. On one panel stands Altman as the secular prophet preaching human progress and boundless optimism.
Hagey calls Altman a '' brilliant deal maker with a need for speed and love of risk, who believes in technological progress with an almost religious conviction.
'' On the other panel is Altman the opportunist. He uses idealism as a tool, harnessing the concept of human progress to build an empire the way Europeans once used Christianity to justify conquest.
Altman recently told the statistician Nate Silver that if we achieve human level A.I., poverty really does just end.'' But motives matter.
History suggests that some technologies aimed at growth have taken a bad situation and made it worse.
The efficiencies of the cotton gin, for instance, saved on labor but made slavery even more lucrative.
If the aim is not, in the first place, to help the world, but instead to get bigger - better chips, more data, smarter code - then our problems might get bigger too.
The World Students Society thanks Tim Wu, a law professor at Columbia University and the author of the forthcoming '' The Age of Extraction : How Tech Platforms Conquered the Economy and Threaten Our Future Prosperity.''
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