It’s a classic trajectory. You start as a likeable and geeky tech tyro, you morph into a squillionaire with disagreeable habits, and somewhere on the way you become loathed by large sections of the population.
It happened to Bill Gates – remember when he was an amiable nerd making glitchy but intriguing software? Now he is a mogul apparently injecting us with nanobots. Look at the career of Elon Musk, once a move-and-break-things hero sending amazing jets into the sky. Now he’s the brooding Trumpite Satan, who has supposedly turned Twitter into a fascist hellhole. Steve Jobs of Apple nearly went through the same process, but avoided it by the devious means of dying too young.
Now the same evolution seems to be happening to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. Except it is happening to him much faster than any of the other fallen tech titans, which is fitting, given that he works in AI, an industry where everything is turned up to 11 and ‘exponential’ is expected.
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