Sam Altman: When People Tell You Who They Are

I just read a post from Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI. If you don't know who he is, that's ok, but he's very much a big deal regardless. In the wake of someone throwing Molotov cocktails at his house last night, he published a kind of treatise on his personal blog.

I don't know Altman personally, and I should note that while I have used OpenAI's service often, I mostly use AI from Anthropic these days. My content pipeline for this blog, for instance, was built using Claude.

That being said, I am impressed by Altman's candidness and capacity for self-awareness in his post. He examines his own actions:

I am not proud of being conflict-averse, which has caused great pain for me and OpenAI. I am not proud of handling myself badly in a conflict with our previous board that led to a huge mess for the company.

That's pretty introspective, but it leads later to this: "I am a flawed person in the center of an exceptionally complex situation." I have respect for anyone, but especially a leader in a very public, hyper-examined position, to make such admissions.

He goes on to talk about the nature of AI and how he believes it should not be controlled by companies like the ones he runs, but rather by strong democracies. "It is important that the democratic process remains more powerful than companies." I take that as a shot across the bow of the current US administration, as well as the adversarial nations competing for AI hegemony.

I also appreciated his words on the impact to both individuals and society with regard to AGI:

The only solution I can come up with is to orient towards sharing the technology with people broadly, and for no one to have the ring. The two obvious ways to do this are individual empowerment and making sure democratic system stays in control.

This is a very densely worded remark (not dense in the sense of being stupid, but rather packed with a lot of information). Whether we are able to completely trust Altman here is a valid question. Doesn't his conflict with his previous board, and the defections from OpenAI from folks leaving in protest to both his leadership and the dangers of the tech they're producing, indicate that we should question him here?

Is this a new Sam Altman? Have we misunderstood what OpenAI stands for?

I for one am also a spectator in this. While I'm using AI and evaluating it continually, I do not have an insider perspective to the likes of OpenAI or Anthropic. However, I have learned that when people tell you who they are, it's best to listen closely and believe them, while at the same time verifying the validity of what they claim as best we can.

Note: the image above was pulled from Altman's blog and remixed with ChatGPT before pasting it into Claude. The irony.