by Once upon a time, no one outside of tech circles had heard of Sam Altman. But then his company, OpenAI, launched ChatGPT, and suddenly he was everywhere – touring the world, giving interviews to drifting journalists, giving audiences to curious politicians etc. the acceptable face of digital capitalism.
Then the OpenAI board suddenly fired him, apparently on the grounds that he wasn’t being completely honest with them. When Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft (who had invested $13bn in OpenAI), heard about it, however, he was very sad. And in no time, Altman was fired and put back in the driver’s seat of OpenAI. And the world was moved by all the drama. Which shows that appearances can be deceiving.
If the world had read Tad Friend’s profile of Altman, which appeared in the New York in 2016, it could be less overawed. “I have narrow interests in technology,” he told Cara. “I have no patience for things I’m not interested in: parties, most people. When someone examines a photograph and says, ‘Oh, he’s feeling this and this and this,’ all these fake emotions, I look forward with an alien intelligence.” Altman’s great strengths, Friend said, are “clarity of thought and an intuitive understanding of complex systems. His greatest weakness is his lack of interest in ineffective people, which unfortunately includes most of us. Her dedication was terrifying at first, and then gradually calmed.”
Two recent events suggest it may be time to dial down the “positive” bit. The first was to reveal that OpenAI was rowing back on its previous aversion to the “military and warfare” use of its technology. The second was the announcement that Altman was spending up to $7tn (£5.6tn) out of the United Arab Emirates for the chip and AI business. To put Altman’s ambitions into context, the amount he wants to raise is just under a third of US GDP and quite close to his £6.3tn federal budget for 2022. And, on a historical note, it’s $3tn more more than the $4tn (adjusted for inflation) the USA spent on the second world war.
His desire seems crazy. And yet the Silicon Valley crowd thinks he’s a genius. So what’s going on?
So what does $7tn get you? Well, as the Program helpfully points out, it’s enough cash “to satisfy Nvidia, TSMC, Broadcom, ASML, Samsung, AMD, Intel, Qualcomm, and every chip maker, designer, intellectual property holder, and equipment vendor of consequence.” increase. completely – and still have a trillion left”. But Altman isn’t just aiming to be a modern-day John D Rockefeller – owning everything. He would like Do things – specifically the GPUs (graphics processing units) required by machine learning systems. That means building semiconductor manufacturing units (fabs). These cost around $20bn each and take four or more years to commission and become productive. They also need a highly skilled workforce – something the US semiconductor industry lacks by about 70,000.
In addition, these plants are huge consumers of water, in a world that is rapidly becoming scarce. But Altman would have enough dosh to build 350 of the monsters. I could go on, but you get the message. This wish seems crazy. And yet the Silicon Valley crowd thinks he’s a genius. So what’s going on?
The answer is that most of them belong to the church of technology, of which Altman is an energetic member. Zealous members of this sect believe that the world is fundamentally broken, and that the only way to fix it is with technology. They’re excited about AI because it’s finally a technology that makes it possible fix everything – economic growth, healthcare, productivity, education, even the climate crisis. Curiously, however, warfare seems to be missing from the list.
The only problem is that this magical technology requires unimaginable amounts of data and computational power. Our future, it seems, depends on infinite amounts of what the industry now calls “computing”, and Altman is to be applauded for having the courage to say out loud how much of it is needed to to save civilization.
He deeply understands the responsibility he has. “Democracy only works in a growing economy,” he told Friend in 2016. “Without a return to economic growth, the democratic experiment will fail.” If he does, however, Altman will be ready. In a discussion about aggressive AI and nations fighting with nuclear weapons over scarce resources, he said: “I try not to think too much about it. But I have guns, gold, potassium iodide, antibiotics, batteries, water, gas masks from the Irish Defense Forces, and a large patch of land in Big Sur that I can fly to.” It’s good to know that $7tn will be in safe hands.
What I was reading
Technology group idea
Adrienne LaFrance has written a great essay in the Atlantic on the techno-authoritarian ideology that underpins Silicon Valley.
Dead hand
Robert Hutton’s Swiftian take on Britain’s zombie Conservatives 14 years on in the Critic magazine.
Sing it proud
A thoughtful post on Substack titled “Why I preach to the choir” is written by former US employment secretary Robert Reich.
