OpenAI’s Sam Altman is becoming one of the most powerful people on Earth. We should be very afraid
By Gary Marcus,
The Guardian
| 08. 03. 2024
Image by TechCrunch from Flickr licensed under CC by 2.0
On 16 May 2023, Sam Altman, OpenAI’s charming, softly spoken, eternally optimistic billionaire CEO, and I stood in front of the US Senate judiciary subcommittee meeting on AI oversight. We were in Washington DC, and it was at the height of AI mania. Altman, then 38, was the poster boy for it all.
Raised in St Louis, Missouri, Altman was the Stanford dropout who had become the president of the massively successful Y Combinator startup incubator before he was 30. A few months before the hearing, his company’s product ChatGPT had taken the world by storm. All through the summer of 2023, Altman was treated like a Beatle, stopping by DC as part of a world tour, meeting prime ministers and presidents around the globe. US Senator Kyrsten Sinema gushed: “I’ve never met anyone as smart as Sam… He’s an introvert and shy and humble… But… very good at forming relationships with people on the Hill and… can help folks in government understand AI.” Glowing portraits at the...
Related Articles
By John H. Evans, Craig Callender, Neal K. Devaraj, Farren J. Isaacs, and Gregory E. Kaebnick, Issues in Science and Technology | 07.04.2025
The controversy around a ban on “mirror life” should lead to a more nuanced public conversation about how to manage the benefits and risks of precursor biotechnologies.
About five years ago, the five of us formed a discussion group to...
By Geoffrey A. Fowler, The Washington Post | 07.17.2025
Nearly 2 million people protected their privacy by deleting their DNA from 23andMe after it declared bankruptcy in March. Now it’s back with the same person in charge — and I still don’t trust it.
Nor do the attorneys general...
By Angus Liu, Fierce Pharma | 07.22.2025
A brief skirmish between Sarepta Therapeutics and the FDA has ended before escalating into a full-on regulatory clash, as the company has bowed to the agency’s demand.
In a surprising reversal, Sarepta on Monday said it will pause all shipments...
By Rob Stein, NPR | 07.16.2025
Scientists can protect children from being born with certain devastating genetic disorders by creating "three-parent" babies, according to the results of a landmark study released Wednesday.
British researchers used the experimental technique to help families have eight children who appear...