There is absolutely nothing—I mean zilch—in this extensive profile of Sam Altman (and OpenAI), by Ronan Farrow and Andrew Marantz in The New Yorker, that paints Altman in a good light. The profile is based on “more than a hundred people with firsthand knowledge of how Altman conducts business: current and former OpenAI employees and board members; guests and staffers at Altman’s various houses; his colleagues and competitors; his friends and enemies and several people who, given the mercenary culture of Silicon Valley, have been both.”

(I suspect this 17,0000-word story is effectively the pitch for a tell-all book on the history of OpenAI and Altman.)

A couple of choice quotes:

As the technology became increasingly powerful, we learned, about a dozen of OpenAI’s top engineers held a series of secret meetings to discuss whether OpenAI’s founders, including Brockman and Altman, could be trusted. At one, an employee was reminded of a sketch by the British comedy duo Mitchell and Webb, in which a Nazi soldier on the Eastern Front, in a moment of clarity, asks, “Are we the baddies?”

And:

The senior executive at Microsoft said, of Altman, “I think there’s a small but real chance he’s eventually remembered as a Bernie Madoff- or Sam Bankman-Fried-level scammer.”

I don’t know about you, but being compared, unfavorably, to Nazis, Madoff, and Bankman-Fried is pretty fucking damning.

This may be one of the finest applications of Betteridge’s law of headlines. It's an absolute must-read.