Inside Sources Say Sam Altman Is a Sociopath

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Noel Joshua Hadley

You don’t build a trillion dollar AI empire by being a saint.

In a seeping new investigative piece from The New Yorker, numerous tech insiders paint a picture of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman as a relentless liar who wants everyone to like him while manipulating even the people closest to him to get what he wants. AI safety, in this slippery portrait of Altman, is merely a bargaining chip he dangles like a carrot to get concerned engineers — and anyone else worried about the tech’s far-reaching consequences — on board, before going back on his word.

Some of these insiders were strikingly blunt in their diagnoses: Altman was a literal “sociopath,” one OpenAI board member alleged.

“He’s unconstrained by truth,” they told The New Yorker. “He has two traits that are almost never seen in the same person. The first is a strong desire to please people, to be liked in any given interaction. The second is almost a sociopathic lack of concern for the consequences that may come from deceiving someone.”

Aaron Swartz, the famed coder and hacktivist who died by suicide in 2013, used similar language to describe Altman. Swartz had been batchmates with Altman in the inaugural class of 2005 at the Silicon Valley incubator Y Combinator, and warned his friends about Altman shortly before his passing.

“You need to understand that Sam can never be trusted,” he told one confidante. “He is a sociopath. He would do anything.” 

Altman, it’s worth noting, has been accused by his sister in a civil suit of repeatedly sexually abusing her beginning when she was three-year-old and when he was 12. Altman, his mother, and his brothers all deny the claims.

The New Yorker piece characterizes Altman as more of a businessman than an engineer, leveraging an almost singular ability to get skeptics, be they engineers or the public, to believe that he holds the same priorities as them.

“He’s unbelievably persuasive. Like, Jedi mind tricks,” a tech executive who has worked with Altman told The New Yorker. “He’s just next level.”

One alleged victim of Altman’s double dealing is Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, who used to work at OpenAI but left to found his own safety-focused AI company over differences with Altman.

In notes viewed by The New Yorker, Amodei wrote about negotiating a billion-dollar investment from Microsoft in 2019. Many at the company were reportedly anxious that Microsoft would override OpenAI’s safety commitments, and Amodei made sure to address this by showing Altman a ranked list of safety demands, which Altman agreed to. But when the deal was closing in June, Amodei discovered a provision had been added that obviated the top demand on the list. Amodei confronted Altman about this, but Altman denied the provision existed, even after Amodei read the provision aloud to him.

Another is Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. Multiple executives at the Redmond giant described Altman as repeatedly going back on his word, straining his long-standing relationship with Nadella. “He has misrepresented, distorted, renegotiated, reneged on agreements,” one executive told The New Yorker. An example from earlier this year: on the same day OpenAI reaffirmed Microsoft as the exclusive provider for its memoryless AI models, it announced a $50 billion deal with Amazon as its exclusive reseller of its “Frontier” platform for AI agents. (Microsoft signalled it was willing to sue over this alleged breach of contract.)

Sue Yoon, a former OpenAI board member dished a slightly different, but no less unflattering, view of Altman than the “sociopath” picture. Altman was “not this Machiavellian villain,” she said, but was able to delude himself to in believing his ever-shifting sales pitches. “He’s too caught up in his own self-belief,” she told The New Yorker. “So he does things that, if you live in the real world, make no sense. But he doesn’t live in the real world.”

More on OpenAI: Sam Altman Watches Awkwardly As He’s Shown Bizarre ChatGPT Issue

The post Inside Sources Say Sam Altman Is a Sociopath appeared first on Futurism.

Sacred Scripture

Acts 28 ends abruptly and that’s never sat right with me. With the inclusion of Acts 29, we are given a nice well-rounded finale to Luke’s biography and some interesting closure to Pontius Pilate as well. Join me as I continue my Lost Books of the Bible series on YouTube, reading from Acts 29, 3 Corinthians, and the Phoenix of Tertullian.

You can read along with these texts and more on our Sacred Scripture page. 

IN the summer of 2019, I was seated in the wine cellar of a walled Medieval town high above the Dordogne Valley of France, not far from Sarlat-la-Canéda, making phone calls, writing reports. I have given this story in other places and it appears as though you’re about to hear it again. Rob Skiba is a name you that you might be familiar with. Though he had made a name for himself as a Nephilim researcher, more recently Rob had taken a dive into the deep end of the pool via flat earth research. The recorded interviews I conducted between he and Rick Hummer, a fellow flat earth investigator and close friend of his, was published while still occupying that very wine cellar. Read all about it. Chicago Is Not a Mirage.

Word quickly spread. Within a few short weeks, dozens of flat earth researchers began accepting my invite for a private interview, if not a series of interviews. From a 17th-century tower built by King Louis XIV, and with a stunning view of the Alps, I sat down with Robbie Davidson, founder of the Flat Earth International Conferences, conducting multiple sessions. While staying in Dumfries, Scotland, David Weiss agreed to take part in the interviews, as did Bob Knodel of Globebusters. There were others. But when I asked the interviewees to discuss the moments that shaped their lives, among the many PSYOPs, false flag attacks, and hoaxes that were discussed, only these men committed commentary to the false 9/11 narrative.

The resulting recordings ballooned into The Unexpected Cosmology, a book which became a website and was even intended as an anthology. And of course, the following discourse was originally a chapter. It was Walt Disney who stated, “Disneyland will never be completed. It will continue to grow as long as there is imagination left in the world.” Those sentiments remain applicable here as well. American Sensationalism: The 9/11 Interviews was always intended to be expanded upon with the inclusion of new researchers. So I’m sorry to say the project became stagnant during the Covid-19 psychodrama. I took a break to tackle other projects. We lost Rob Skiba. Rob offered hours of private conversation regarding his life but we never got around to the big one. 9/11. It was in the cards. Sadly, Bob Knodel died soon afterwards. Voices are being squeezed from an entire generation. Gnosis passes with them.

In the aftermath, the FE community became fractured. People began going their separate ways. Robbie Davidson, among a noted few others who were interviewed for the project, got up and left the movement altogether. It is not my intent to erase his or the contributions of others if only brief. They came, they went, their testimonies remain.

The original vision may have hit roadblocks but it is not forgotten. I expanded this paper a few years later to include testimony from author Pauly Hart, a dear friend of mine. I had wanted to continue that trend every year thereafter but you know how it goes. For the 25th anniversary of the attack I have redirected my efforts to its first large scale expansion, including Andrew Hoy and Darrin Geisinger into the mix. Perhaps others will lend their experiences to the recorder in time.

The following is their report.

Read the 9/11 Interviews

Watch the Interviews