A recent road trip forced me to think hard about OpenAI, ChatGPT, and the future of AI. We hit town after ten o’clock. Murray knows the town as well as I do, which is why we got lost almost immediately. Highway 101 cuts through the east side of town and it’s easy to find a grocery store or Fred Myer. We were on a different mission full of mystery and dangerous implication.
Some of that is Murray’s fault – he prowls Western Oregon in search of various treasures to resell on eBay. I got a phone call from him last week, an estate sale out on the coast. It gives him a chance to get out of the house, and it supplements his disability insurance. Murray’s van looks as though it shouldn’t be allowed within 500 yards of an elementary school. The trouble started almost immediately.
“We’re supposed to be on the 38,” Murray whines and curses – a panicked sea captain at the helm of his 2006 Dodge Sprinter van. “Where’s the 38?”
I say nothing. Murray made a fool of himself at our breakfast stop – insisting that his eggs be remade and his coffee refilled any time it dropped below three-quarters’ full. I white-knuckled it through breakfast, expecting to be thrown out at any second. Thankfully, we escaped with hot food in our stomachs and a full tank of gas to find OR-38. The Umpqua highway sucked us through miles of rural Oregon like a boat caught in a whirlpool.
We find Coos Bay and head toward our destination, crossing South Slough on a low bridge past a large shellmound, the final resting place for millions of oysters. We stop at a nearby store for directions and I can’t help comparing my books to each of those shells. Is that what my work looks like when it arrives at a publishing house? Murray negotiates with our host, a wine-drunk beachcomber based out of a faded fifth-wheel trailer who tried to get rich flipping abandoned storage lockers.
How We Got Here
I couldn’t help sensing a connection between their malevolent transactions and the OpenAI saga. In case you’re unaware, Sam Altman founded OpenAI alongside Peter Thiel and Elon Musk. Altman would go on to officially join OpenAI as its CEO in 2019 and remain there…until last Friday evening when Altman was forcibly removed as CEO. Altman was as good as gone, so it seemed. The following Monday,CEO Satya Nadella announced that Altman and Brockman were joining Microsoft. The next day, we found out Sam Altman was not an official Microsoft employee, because Sam Altman is officially back as CEO at OpenAI.
Some news outlets – looking at you, ABC – are framing this story as ‘good guy whistleblower vs. evil AI overlords’ but that seems to be an oversimplification. Other details are seeping out – the about what precipitated the drama. Look at what happened after Altman saw the Toner Paper. “Altman was not pleased with Holt after the paper was published, and he shared his concerns with the OpenAI employees through an email … OpenAI’s head of research, Ilya Sutsekver, initially debating whether to oust Toner from the board. However, surprisingly, he then chose to move against Altman instead – a decision he would regret within days.”
The timing of Altman’s departure seems to be related to the Toner Paper more than a still-published blog post warning about AI’s intrinsic dangers. Additionally, hundreds of OpenAI employees threatened to quit the company and jump ship to Microsoft over Altman’s firing on the following Monday. Even more alarming, Sutskever, the OpenAI cofounder and chief scientist who allegedly started the whole issue, had turned on OpenAI’s board.
A snarl from the ramshackle trailer drew my attention. The negotiation reached a critical stage – the wino refused to take less than two thousand dollars for the contents of a shipping container. Murray’s argument was that he couldn’t justify that expense ‘sight unseen’ and our alky – a dead ringer for Walter Brennan in ‘To Have and Have Not’ – countered. “You know where I live,” he wheezed. “If I cheated you, you’d be back here tonight to set my place on fire.”
Angry talk continued about ‘escrow’ and hard dollars. It was all nonsense. Each party saw the iron jaws of defeat at every corner, with no silver medal for second place. No reasoning with someone who’d rather be right than happy. I walked across the street where a bustling restaurant operated out of a deconsecrated church.
Humans Must Grow Up Before AI Does
The more we learn, the more we know that as smart as Sam Altman, the OpenAI board, and the collective company are – their moves seem to be more emotional than rational. They come across as angry, petulant toddlers. Not a good look for a company valued at $80 Billion.
Where’s the voice of sanity in all this drama? Where’s the one person saying ‘hey folks … not like this?’ Where’s the cooler heads that need to prevail? Negotiators talk about the value of emotional intelligence, empathy, and intuition when successfully facilitating the release of a human hostage. No signs of emotional intelligence, empathy, and intuition in the ratty little travel caravan on a foggy road outside town. No signs of emotional intelligence, empathy, and intuition in the OpenAI conversations, either.
There’s a moment in ‘The Imitation Game’ you might remember. Specialists at Bletchley Park, suddenly aware of their technology’s power also understand the responsibility. ‘The team at Bletchley Park cannot act on every decoded message and choose not to save the convoy, despite desperate pleas from Peter, whose brother is a sailor serving on one of the ships.’ Turing’s character arc is that he, although one of history’s smartest people, is still human. There’s empathy in his knowledge, there’s emotional intelligence behind the numbers.
Put Altman into Turing’s shoes for a minute. Movies are stories about people, and those stories communicate emotional truths like the ‘Jerk with a Heart of Gold’ trope. You don’t see the Jerk with a Heart of Gold here, just a thousand people suffering from Chronic Backstabbing Disorder.
Take a step back, get some therapy, and do some meditation. Then answer me this: How can billionaires justify acting like PTA parents? You literally invented the next phase of human progress. Show a little class, a little dignity. Be the grown-up in the room that everyone needs to see right now.
Guys like Murray will never understand this. He could be spending time with his family, taking a class, anything other than a screaming match in a nasty camper van. Murray is too scared to let go of the paintbrush, and the big picture will pass him by.
We can’t afford to roll the dice as we pivot to a higher level of humanity
The OpenAI / ChatGPT drama have serious implications for the future of AI. No matter how smart the machines get, we’re still rabid little meatbags trying to get our needs met. All of us normals see the danger of putting ultra-powerful tools and trillions of dollars in capital in the hands of people constantly seeking to betray each other. Why can’t they?
Whether Altman, OpenAI, ChatGPT or anyone in AI figures it out in the future is ultimately up to them. We can’t afford to roll the dice as we pivot to a higher level of humanity. Wired summed it up: ‘As we tiptoe toward AGI, we must always make sure that the bots are aligned with the best human values. This won’t happen unless humans are aligned with those, too.’ You can be a spark or a skidmark as you seek to make your mark on the world. Choose wisely. It’s a great time to step back and take a breath, folks. You can’t buy, fake, or generate empathy.
It was dark when Murray dropped me off at home. “Thanks for coming. I needed someone else there in case the little punk got fresh.”
I shrugged. “Time need to feed the cats.”
Murray’s tail lights had faded by the time I opened the front door. Getting to the future depends on learning how to show empathy as we learn about AI – whether we use ChatGPT or OpenAI or neither. Perspective, empathy, emotional intelligence, intuition. We all need a little more grace these days.
Then I sat down to write.
