A Conversation With Sam Altman, Cast in a New Light

CASEY NEWTON Disbelief. It didn’t make any sense. We had just talked to the guy 48 hours earlier, and he seemingly had no indication that this was coming. OpenAI was riding high, on top of the world, and all of a sudden he’s fired. The blog post from OpenAI didn’t even really explain why — it just insinuated some things without really saying anything. So my first reaction was, What is happening? Shortly after that, Kevin and I hopped on a Google Meet with the podcast team to figure out what we were going to do.

Did you worry that the news would blow up the interview, which you had yet to publish?

KEVIN ROOSE Obviously the best thing would have been to interview him about all of this after it happened, to get his take on it. But we couldn’t do that. We just happened to have this very fresh interview with him in which he didn’t know he was about to get fired. But he did talk about a lot of the issues that we have since learned are at the heart of the conflict between him and the board of OpenAI. To me, it felt revelatory, illuminating and urgent to get it out as soon as we could.

Did you detect any hint of the rift?

I wish I could tell you that I knew, but I don’t think any of us knew.

No, absolutely no indication that this was coming. The reporting that we have since then backs up the fact that this was a complete surprise to him and to everyone except those on the board.

Which parts of the interview did Mr. Altman’s ouster cast into new light?

It was clear to me that Sam was trying to walk a careful line between these two warring factions in the A.I. world: You could call them the optimists, the people who think that this technology should move faster, and the pessimists, the people who think that it’s already moving too fast. Sam was trying to be very thoughtful and deliberate about aiming down the middle of that debate. But he was very clear with us that he believed this technology needed to move faster. I thought that was illuminating at the time he said it, and even more so after he was fired, because, while we still don’t know the exact cause of the firing, it seems to have been a source of conflict within OpenAI.