The stereotype of the evil boss is older still than Bond villains. But today’s tech leaders are actively turning Google’s former “don’t be evil” motto on its head, making its and Facebook’s previous misdemeanours look like child’s play. Hold on to your seats…
Sam Altman: He who thought he could do anything
What would happen if, in a heavily-regulated sector like pharmaceuticals, the CEO of a pioneering company released a groundbreaking new drug without approval from his/her board? Without going through all the regulatory checks and balances? What if that product went on to become the most rapidly-adopted by hundreds of millions of people worldwide?
In pharma, that CEO would have been fired. In tech, that CEO – Sam Altman, the boss of OpenAI – is not only celebrated; he ended up reinstating himself and firing the board that fired him. Like Elon Musk, Altman is a sociopathic liar, as former OpenAI board member Helen Toner is now free enough to say.
In her recent interview with TED’s AI podcast, Toner describes how OpenAI’s board discovered the existence of ChatGPT via a tweet. And how Altman lost the trust of his board by repeated lying, gaslighting and repeated toxic behaviour. This is why said board moved to fire him, in November 2023… and ultimately failed. Altman has now replaced the board with people of his choosing, who, like him, are more focused on making money than on doing good.
Behaviour that’s also confirmed by the recent departures of OpenAI’s co-founder and chief scientist, Ilya Sutskever, who also led its superalignment team, as well as that of his co-team leader Jan Leike, who tweeted “over the past years, safety culture and processes have taken a backseat to shiny products.” I.e. money first, responsibilty later. Sutskever had even participated in the board’s November 2023 attempt to oust Altman, before publicly apologising.
Further confirmation of said toxicity came with Vox’s revelation that any former OpenAI employees criticising the company could risk their share in equity: stakes worth millions a pop for such a valuable firm. Former OpenAI engineer William Saunders confirmed the existence of this dubitable arrangement in a recent and edifying podcast interview with the Center for Humane Technology… an interview that may cost him millions. Altman ended up apologising for the existence of “no criticism” clause in the company’s off-boarding documents, but it was too late. Because guess who put that clause there in the first place…
The toxic behaviour that Toner refers to in her TED interview also applies beyond the walls of OpenAI’s plush offices, as the recent Scarlett Johansson affair confirms. When Altman tweeted about GPT-4o, the latest version of the model behind ChatGPT, simply with the word “Her”, his intentions were very clear. In a trite desire to make life imitate art, he wanted the voice of GPT-4o to sound like Johansson’s AI character in Spike Jonze’s 2013 film. He had even reached out to the actress a while back, for permission to use her voice. She said no. Altman tried again, two days before the app’s release. Her agent said no. The voice that OpenAI released in the end sounded so much like Johansson that she publicly complained, threatening legal action; so Altman had to backpedal, removing the voice.
It’s yet another signature trait of the sociopathic liar: going ahead and doing exactly tf you want, until you get caught. I should know: I’ve experienced tech’s toxic “don’t ask for permission, ask for forgiveness” attitude first hand. It’s as pernicious a Silicon Valley adage as Zuckerberg’s “move fast and break things”… which now sounds cute compared with Altman’s antics.
Unsurprisingly, it doesn’t end there. Altman is so determined of the importance of his mission – to reach Artificial General Intelligence, or AI which is as intelligent as humans, if not more so – that he will stop at nothing to get there. He’s publicly said that nuclear fusion, which he’s personally investing in, will be the only way to power energy-ravenous AI moving forwards. He doesn’t care what it costs, as he told a conference last year (“we have never made any revenue. We have no current plans to make revenue. We have no idea how we may one day generate revenue,” Altman said, adding that AI would probably work it out for them 🤷🏻♂️).
And perhaps most worryingly, he’s fully prepared for the apocalypse that people like him say will inevitably be caused by AI (to convince us of how ‘awesome’ it is): Altman is an out-and-out survivalist. “I have guns, gold, potassium iodide, antibiotics, batteries, water, gas masks from the Israeli Defense Force, and a big patch of land in Big Sur I can fly to,” he told The New Yorker magazine in 2016; an article which chillingly recounts a gathering of Silicon Valley’s most powerful Bond villains/tech leaders, adding that in the event of a major catastrophe, Altman would fly away to fellow villain Peter Thiel’s purpose-made bunker in New Zealand. Not even HBO’s Silicon Valley could’ve made that up.
Elon Musk: He who would be king
Naturally, all this villainy is quite incestuous: Altman co-founded OpenAI with Elon Musk, who left when it became clear his partner wanted to make money with AI, not to stop it getting out of control. And Musk made his first millions with PayPal, co-founded with Peter Thiel (whose main gig, Palantir, helps the world’s most notorious dictatorships spy on their own citizens).
It’s hard to believe someone like Musk really co-founded OpenAI to keep AI in check. Indeed, he recently founded xAI, a blatant rival, which offers answers to “life, the universe and everything” (just like the supercomputer in “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”, tech billionaires’ favourite book).
That’s said, it’s not in AI that Musk is the scariest. It’s in (geo)politics. The same week he forced The Tesla board, despite a significant legal challenge, to give him a pay package more than double that of the next-best-paid CEO in the world (that of Palantir!), he tweeted that Germany’s close-to-nazi AfD party wasn’t that bad (I looked for the tweet on his feed, but the rest of it made me too nauseous). His typically shit-stirring tweet came about the same time far-right parties swept the floor in June 9’s European elections. Including the Rassemblement National in France… who recently stopped talking to the AfD, precisely because they are too far-right, even for them. Clearly not for Musk…
Fortunately, precisely because of Musk actively amplifying toxic voices on Twitter, his social network no longer has the impact it did. But how can such a dangerous and incendiary person be allowed to be in charge of any social network?
Not to mention wifi satellites… Late 2023, Musk admitted to refuse the Ukrainian army access to his Starlink service just before they were about to make a major strike against the Russian army, thereby making that strike impossible. Why should he have the power to make military-level decisions? I remember reading at the time that US Army generals were in a dither over whether to stand up to Musk, or to cave in, at risk of losing such essential support as that of SpaceX (now NASA’s biggest subcontractor). In other words, the world’s most powerful army is now scared of Musk. How can that end well?
Musk has also blatantly lied about killing monkeys. Neuralink, his startup working on the fantastic idea of putting chips into brains – why not “sharks with frikkin’ laser beams”? – has been investigated by US authorities after numerous deaths of test-subject monkeys. The lie was Musk’s claim that the animals were “close to death” anyway. Something swiftly debunked by a former employee, who told WIRED “the claim is “ridiculous”,” since “up to a year’s worth of behavioral training was necessary for the program, a time frame that would exempt subjects already close to death.”
What about Musk’s repeated claims that widespread autonomous cars are just around the corner? He’s been telling that porky pie annually for over ten years now. And his nauseous long-termist plan to take us all to Mars? Noone even knows yet if humans can reproduce there, let alone get there, or even breathe there, if that is we could indeed set foot on the barren, inhospitable planet. Remember when we thought he wanted to save our planet with Tesla? Turns out who Musk really wants to save are the future generations. Who may have no ancestors if people like him get their way…
Peter Thiel: The shadowy kingmaker
Way less of an attention-seeker than Musk, or even Altman, Peter Thiel has been pulling the strings of Silicon Valley for decades. Though less is published about him than about his fellow Bond villains, he is perhaps the most villainous, as biography The Contrarian, by Max Chafkin, depicts. According to the NY Times’ review of the book, Thiel:
- Worked with Musk at PayPal, despite finding him to be a “fraud and a braggart“
- Was the first investor in Facebook, and had an early meeting with Cambridge Analytica, via Palantir, before it nearly brought Zuckerberg’s site to its knees
- Hosted parties with scantily clad men, supported anti-gay senator Ted Cruz, and brought down media brand Gawker simply for outing him eight years previously
- Has invested in projects as crazy as seasteading, or living on oilrig-like platforms suspended in the sea (also hilariously parodied in HBO’s Silicon Valley)
- Has spoken for Trump at the Republican National Convention
- Ran away to Maui during the COVID crisis… and has since won numerous coronavirus-related contracts for Palantir, thanks to which the company is now riding high (remember, it has the world’s highest-paid CEO after Elon Musk).
What can we say, apart from “villainy pays”? Dr Evil would be proud…
BetterTech 