OpenAI leaders horrified staffers after proposing an “insane” plan to enrich the company by pitting world governments against each other.
This anecdote of near comic-book-villainry comes from The New Yorker’s sweeping new investigation into CEO Sam Altman, which documents his alarming pattern of lying and manipulating to build his AI empire, a behavior that some insiders likened to that of an actual “sociopath.”
Altman’s second-in-command Greg Brockman features heavily. In 2017, according to the reporting, he hatched a geopolitical scheme which internally came to be known as the “countries plan.” Unimpressed by his ethics adviser’s suggestion to avoid a nuclear-like arms race by forming an international body to cooperate on AI safety, Brockman openly mused about playing world powers like China and Russia against each other, such as by starting a bidding war for its tech. According to the ethics adviser, Page Hedley, Brockman’s logic seemed to be, “It worked for nuclear weapons, why not AI?”
“The premise, which they didn’t dispute, was ‘We’re talking about potentially the most destructive technology ever invented — what if we sold it to Putin?’” an exasperated Hedley told The New Yorker.
OpenAI’s then-policy director Jack Clark described it as a “prisoner’s dilemma, where all of the nations need to give us funding,” and that “implicitly makes not giving us funding kind of dangerous.”
A junior researcher recalled thinking at the meeting where the plan was discussed that it was “completely f*cking insane.”
The plan was eventually dropped months later, after some employees threatened to quit.
Of employee dissent, Hedley opined that it “was always something that had more weight in Sam’s calculations than ‘This is not a good plan because it might cause a war between great powers.’”
Altman also tried his hand at manipulating governments — namely, the US.
Beginning in 2017, he would repeatedly tell US intelligence officials that China had supposedly launched an “AGI Manhattan Project,” referring to artificial general intelligence. For OpenAI and thereby the US to stay on equal footing, his company would need billions of dollars in government money. When officials pressed for a source, Altman replied ambiguously that “I’ve heard things.”
One official who looked into the claims concluded that Altman had made it all up: “It was just being used as a sales pitch.”
Altman, the reporting described, casted himself as an Oppenheimer-like figure. While the driving physicist behind the invention of the atomic bomb used “impassioned appeals about saving the world from the Nazis to persuade physicists to uproot their lives,” it wrote, “Altman leverages fears about the geopolitical stakes of his technology.”
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