Sam Altman Is Dangerous To Silicon Valley
Better Offline
Cool Zone Media and iHeartPodcasts
4.6 • 688 Ratings
🗓️ 14 June 2024
⏱️ 55 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In this episode, Ed Zitron walks through how Sam Altman's ridiculous promises about the future of artificial intelligence could be ruinous for Silicon Valley, and speaks with Bloomberg's Ellen Huet about how Sam Altman - a non-technical founder with little business success - accumulated so much power.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is an I-Heart podcast. |
| 0:02.5 | Guaranteed Human |
| 0:03.5 | Quarzone Media |
| 0:07.8 | Hello and welcome to Better Offline. |
| 0:10.5 | I'm your host, Ed Zetron. |
| 0:32.8 | As I've discussed in the last episode, Sam Altman has spent more than a decade accumulating power and wealth in Silicon Valley without ever having to actually build anything. |
| 0:37.8 | Using a network of tech industry all-stars like LinkedIn co-founder and investor Reid Hoffman and Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky to insulate himself from responsibility and accountability. |
| 0:44.4 | Yet things are beginning to fall apart as years of half-baked ideas and terrible, terrible |
| 0:49.8 | product decisions have kind of made society sour on the tech industry. |
| 0:57.0 | And the last month has been particularly difficult for Sam, starting with the chaos caused |
| 1:03.0 | by Open AI blatantly mimicking Scarlett Johansson's voice for the new version of ChatGBT, |
| 1:09.0 | followed by the resignation of researchers who claim |
| 1:11.8 | that Open AI prioritized, and I quote, shiny products over AI safety, after the dissolution |
| 1:18.3 | of OpenAI's safety team. I know, it's just, it's almost cliche. Shortly thereafter, |
| 1:25.1 | former OpenAI board member Helen Toner revealed that Sam Altman was fired |
| 1:29.2 | from an Open AI because of a regular pattern of deception, one where Altman would |
| 1:33.5 | give inaccurate info about the company's safety processes on multiple occasions, and his deceit |
| 1:38.8 | was so severe that OpenAI's board only found out about the launch of ChatGPT, which by the way is OpenAI's |
| 1:45.9 | first product that really made money, arguably the biggest product in tech. |
| 1:50.3 | You want to know how they found out about it? Well, they found out when they were browsing Twitter. |
| 1:54.6 | They found out then, not from the CEO of OpenAI, the company which they were the board of. |
| 1:59.8 | Very weird. |
... |
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