The joke on the internet asks: “What are the seven most terrifying words in the English language?” The answer: “Ronan Farrow’s been asking questions about you.”
The investigative journalist has a piece in The New Yorker this week, where the subject of said inquiries is Sam Altman, the billionaire founder and CEO of OpenAI, the company that owns ChatGPT.
Farrow’s new piece suggests timely, broader questions of who has power, who should have it, who absolutely shouldn’t … and what we do if they have it, anyway.
OpenAI’s products now reach into everything, from your smartphone to defence contracts to law enforcement. Its operations have a growing hunger for electric power; its datacentres are spreading across the planet; and the labour market implications of its potential to replace jobs suggest an industrial upheaval for white-collar workers on a world-changing scale.
The commercial momentum of this company is such that, despite a projected loss of $14bn in 2026 reported in early March – tripling estimates made in 2025 – OpenAI still held an eye-watering market valuation of $852bn by March’s end.
Farrow’s piece claims the OpenAI board had doubts about whether they could trust Altman when they fired him in 2023.
As per Farrow, Altman then convened a “war room” comprising of crisis communicators – and some influential company investors – to defend his reputation. He was reinstated five days later, reportedly, pressure from investor Microsoft and a threat from 700 staff to resource any competing Altman venture were critically persuasive in discussions.
Three years later, the company, with a CEO its own board did not allegedly trust, has publicly concluded a deal with the US military to use its technology in classified operations.
The deal was announced in the wake of its AI rival, Anthropic, expressing concern that the US government could, potentially, employ its own proprietary AI tools as instruments of “mass surveillance” and for “fully autonomous weapons”.
The Trump administration emphatically ceased business with Anthropic, and OpenAI leapt in.
Facing a backlash, Altman described the original deal OpenAI concluded with Pete Hegseth’s department as “opportunistic and sloppy”. The company subsequently released a statement reassuring the public its Pentagon agreement had “more guardrails than any previous agreement for classified AI deployments, including Anthropic’s”.
At OpenAI’s word, the company believes “strongly in democracy” and that the “only good path forward requires deep collaboration between AI efforts and the democratic process”.
How perplexing! As Jake Laperruque from Tech Policy observes, OpenAI’s cited “red lines” against mass domestic surveillance, direct autonomous weapons systems and high-stakes automated decisions seem to be largely indistinguishable from those “that caused the planned Anthropic agreement not only to fail,…
Source link
Disclaimer
We strive to uphold the highest ethical standards in all of our reporting and coverage. We blogs.grocliq.com want to be transparent with our readers about any potential conflicts of interest that may arise in our work. It’s possible that some of the investors we feature may have connections to other businesses, including competitors or companies we write about. However, we want to assure our readers that this will not have any impact on the integrity or impartiality of our reporting. We are committed to delivering accurate, unbiased news and information to our audience, and we will continue to uphold our ethics and principles in all of our work. Thank you for your trust and support.
Website Upgradation is going on for any glitch kindly connect at [email protected]
