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Sam Altman's bad week continues, as a car stopped and appears to have fired a gun at the Russian Hill home of OpenAI’s CEO.
It appears that, if measured by deed, Mr. Altman may be in contention for the title of most hated business executive in the country.
Unless I am profoundly misinformed about the base rate of assassination attempts on tech CEOs, it appears AI anxiety has apparently reached a precipitation point among American youth, to the point where discontent is crystalizing into direct action. I've seen this in my personal life. My youngest brother is a bright kid - top of his class, eagle scout, 1400+ on his SATs as a junior, the whole shebang. He's completely given up on his original goal of going to college for something software-related, and he's not only adrift about what he's going to do with his future, but he's angry about it. I hope he has a support network sufficient to keep him on the right track, but I don't like what I see.
I'm not exactly old, but I'm sure as hell not young either. For those of you who are 25 or under, what does it feel like on the ground right now?
As someone in that age range I feel complete contempt for the Luigi worshippers and anti-AI/data center people and can’t relate to their worldview at all. The friends I have in this camp are exactly the people I would expect, namely those who have a dogshit understanding of, well, everything, and have lived pretty coddled lives. I want this trend to stop immediately (I work not in Silicon Valley but at a company that is deeply important to the AI boom) but have no faith that it will. If the violence against AI companies proceeds up the supply chain in a sort of real life Butlerian Jihad I’ll probably be killed sometime in late 2027.
I have close to 0 sympathy for the world view driving this stuff. I myself suffer from at least a few of the grievances that people commonly ascribe to my generation (owning a house seemingly further out of reach every year, politically homeless, dealing with Boomerism in every facet of adult life), yet I don’t see how desiring to kill CEOs and protest data centers and burn down warehouses would solve any of it. It makes sense only if you have a completely cartoonish perspective on life informed entirely by fiction. It’s the mindset of a toddler throwing a tantrum. In fact, I think such things exacerbate almost all of the problems underlying the aforementioned grievances. I think due to fertility collapse the developed world essentially needs transformative AI to remain the developed world. It is the least bad solution by far. That people don’t understand this and actually believe the opposite enrages me. Young so-called progressives are now actually the most conservative (in the sense of opposing Progress) force in society. It’s environmentalists against nuclear all over again.
We have an elite completely devoid of virtue and with an inverted sense of noblesse oblige. Why should people feel any loyalty to an elite which is completely contemptible in their behaviour? The current billionaire class manage to make the corrupt people of Versailles seem virtuous.
The current elite needs to either shape up or get replaced.
To my knowledge Sam Altman does not possess any of the characteristics you’ve listed here. He consistently states he wants the benefit of the technology his company is developing to be widely distributed and documents of his internal communications with Elon and his co-founders (from their ongoing trial) show that this a sincere concern of his.
No one is asking for loyalty to the elite, I’m asking for “loyalty” (if you want to call it that) to the basic expectation of liberal democracy that you don’t just try to kill people because you disagree with them.
But Altman lies constantly about everything. He started off saying he was running a non-profit, then weaselled out of it. Ilya hates him and accused him of lying. Dario hates him and accused him of lying. Helen Toner accused Altman of failing to inform the board about the ChatGPT launch and hiding his financial interest in the OpenAI Startup Fund.
Even in that very trial it brings out their plans to basically run off with Elon's money and make a for profit.
He might just be saying that because it sounds a lot better than 'this is my path to universal domination, you dumb, dumb fucks'. Deceptive people shouldn't be trusted.
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