As a young reporter, Steven Levy went to MIT and ended up in the center of the early days of AI. Out of that experience, he wrote a cover story for Newsweek about Garry Kasparov and Deep Blue, called "The Brain's Last Stand." Since then, Levy has interviewed nearly every major businessperson and engineer in the AI business. Including Sam Altman. Levy has known Altman since about 2007; he's known Greg Brockman for five or six years. He's been writing about Satya Nadella for years too (most recently, for a WIRED Big Interview). And, he's been covering OpenAI since the moment Altman and Musk announced the venture, as a nonprofit, in 2015. So when he set out to profile Altman and his band of AI megaminds earlier this year, Levy was acutely attuned to the tension at the heart of the company. First off, as you may have heard by now, considering the dramatic news swirling around the company last week, OpenAI has some of the weirdest bylaws around. The company's goal is to supercharge AI to match or exceed human capabilities while keeping it "safe." But that pursuit demands wildly expensive computing power, and in 2019 Altman and his colleagues were forced to hedge most of that nonprofit stuff in exchange for investment. Now employees must navigate a corporate split personality that puts most of them under a for-profit, product-focused entity deeply linked to Microsoft and its cunning CEO, Nadella—while balancing the nearly spiritual, long-term vision of superhuman intelligence. Just about everyone agrees they're playing a dangerous game. Levy's in-depth feature landed on the cover of WIRED's October issue, along with an image of OpenAI's leadership team and words that now sound prophetic: "Dear AI Overlords, Please Don't F*ck This Up." Of course, OpenAI's internal tensions exploded into the public eye last week: Altman's been kicked out! But here's Nadella, swooping in to nab him as a Microsoft employee. Wait! Altman's negotiating a return. Annnnd he's back. Read our extensive coverage of the chaos at OpenAI here. —Sandra Upson | Features Editor |
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