Ronan Farrow and Andrew Marantz on Sam Altman’s Trust Problem

Sam Altman has spent years presenting himself as the face of AI: The guy warning that the technology could change everything, and the guy insisting that he should be the one to build it. Now we are facing some overdue questions: Can we trust Sam Altman with the massive power AI may generate? And should we trust anyone with that power?

Ronan Farrow and Andrew Marantz join me to talk about their New Yorker profile of the OpenAI CEO, the internal fights around OpenAI’s mission, and why so many people who’ve worked with Altman keep coming back to the same concerns about trust.

We talk about Altman’s talent for telling different audiences different things; why Silicon Valley’s usual tolerance for founder myth-making looks different when the product is AI; and how OpenAI went from warning about dangerous race dynamics to helping kick one off with ChatGPT.

Then we broaden out: if the real problem is structural, not just personal, what kind of oversight should exist for the people building a technology they say could reshape all of our lives?

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