Bonjour,
We were back in the studio on Wednesday talking spray tans and Mythos. Missed it? No problem, reruns are available wherever you get your podcasts.
I’ll be in SF next week. If you're around HMU to link and build etc.
ily,
advertisement
If you are a startup building with agents, look no further than Vercel. Their Agentic Infrastructure gives you and your agents everything you need to ship. And if you're supported by one of their hundreds of VC or accelerator partners, you have access to exclusive discounts and benefits. Check out the platform thousands of companies use from day 0 to IPO at https://vercel.com/startups.
This week, The New Yorker published what some may describe as a hit piece on Sam Altman and OpenAI. It was written by famed journalist and noted nepobaby (son of Mia Farrow and Woody Allen) Ronan Farrow, and co-written by Andrew Marantz.
The piece took them a year and a half to investigate, during which they obtained never-before-disclosed internal memos and interviewed over 100 people. The result is a deeply researched look at one of the world's most powerful men.
The article is a cool ~16,000 words, the listening time runs the length of a feature film at 1 hour and 45 minutes, and had me all:
Just kidding, I read it so you don’t have to. The story covers the founding of OpenAI, its evolution from a nonprofit focused on AI safety to a ruthless commercial enterprise, the iconic firing and rehiring of Sam by the board brought on by longtime colleague Ilya Sutskever, raises questions around national security and foreign fundraising, and begs the question: is Sam Altman a sociopath?
IMHO, I kept waiting for a true smoking gun moment, which I fear never really came. But the story is filled with little anecdotes and a cast of characters that makes it ripe for a miniseries.
Altman interrupted his “war room” at six o’clock each evening with a round of Negronis. “You need to chill,” he recalls saying. “Whatever’s gonna happen is gonna happen.” But, he added, his phone records show that he was on calls for more than twelve hours a day. At one point, Altman conveyed to Mira Murati, who had given Sutskever material for his memos and was serving as the interim C.E.O. of OpenAI in that period, that his allies were “going all out” and “finding bad things” to damage her reputation, as well as those of others who had moved against him, according to someone with knowledge of the conversation. (Altman does not recall the exchange.)
So the girls Boys of Boys Club have done the good work to cast the series appropriately. How’d we do?
