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On a balmy Saturday afternoon in March, a crowd gathers in the parking lot as Dirk Fucik, owner of Dirk’s Fish & Gourmet Shop, presides over his customary seafood sampling event. Amidst the alluring scent wafting from the grill, Fucik invites eager onlookers to savor an array of oceanic delicacies, including salmon, shrimp, tuna, and fish cakes.
“Try these copi cakes,” Fucik urges, introducing the unfamiliar fish cakes to some intrigued guests. Their puzzled expressions accompany inquiries about the nature of the fish. “They used to be known as Asian carp,” he adds.
In 2022, Illinois launched a marketing campaign spotlighting the invasive carp, which have gained infamy for displacing native fish in the Mississippi River and its surrounding streams. The Chicago Tribune reported that the federal Great Lakes Restoration Initiative earmarked $600,000 for a five-year promotional drive to boost the fish’s consumption. Concerns over the unappetizing name “carp” led to a rebranding initiative. Its new name, “copi,” is derived from “copious,” symbolizing its abundance in state waters.
Esteemed restaurants in Chicago such as Ina Mae Tavern and Gaijin joined the cause to popularize copi as a food source, crafting enticing recipes and leveraging their influence to amplify the campaign. Spearheading the promotional efforts is Tetra Tech, a consulting firm, that manages a dedicated webpage and an Instagram account. The latter regularly features upbeat promotional videos with catchy rhythms and slogans proclaiming, “An invasive species that is delicious!”
But two years into the campaign, enthusiasm among chefs and restaurants to promote the fish has waned. Except for Dirk’s, all participating restaurants and fish markets in Chicago have quietly removed copi from their menus.
“Nobody bothered to order them,” says an operations manager at one of the partnering restaurants, who requested anonymity to avoid jeopardizing their relationship with the Illinois Department of Natural Resources (IDNR). Despite having a pleasant, mild flavor, the fish is very bony and hard to process, the manager says. Converting the fish into chopped or ground form was an alternative, yet selling patties at a profitable price point proved challenging. According to the manager, copi was removed from their menu within two weeks of promotion.
Brian Schoenung, program manager at the IDNR overseeing the copi campaign, acknowledged challenges in maintaining partnerships. In addition to supply chain disruptions and manufacturing failures, the campaign has had to navigate diminishing media interest along with lukewarm consumer reception.
“We had a dip, and that dip has not been insignificant,” Schoenung says. “We got a lot of media right off the bat. As things fall out of the spotlight, you’re going to see a little bit of a backslide.”
Emblazoned with promotional materials featuring the slogan “Choose Copi,” Dirk’s introduced copi burgers in salsa and teriyaki flavors, and it continues to offer chopped and ground carp.
However, the persistent negative stereotypes surrounding carp make it a hard sell. Fucik says that many consumers mistakenly associate copi with common carp, imagining them to be bottom-dwelling creatures with a muddy flavor. On the contrary, the four species designated for consumption primarily inhabit upper water regions, feeding on algae, wetland flora, and, notably for black carp, mussels, and snails. Fucik frequently finds himself explaining the distinction to customers, emphasizing that copi, unlike their European counterparts, are mild-flavored and boast high levels of omega-3 fatty acids while maintaining low levels of mercury and other contaminants.
Due to its relatively low demand, copi doesn’t grace the menu at Fucik’s restaurant. Sales of frozen fish patties notably lag behind seafood staples like salmon and tuna. On average, about 100 pounds of copi move in a month, compared to the rapid turnover of salmon, with 100 pounds often selling out in a single day.
“I don’t sell a ton of it, but I don’t mind buying it,” Fucik says. “It’s a good cause, and it’s a good fish. And it would be nice to figure out a way to eradicate [them].”
Invasive carp found their way into American waters through deliberate introduction, as detailed in the 2017 book The Death and Life of the Great Lakes by Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reporter Dan Egan. In 1963, researchers at a federal lab in Arkansas advocated for importing these bottom-feeding fish as a natural means of water purification, aiming to reduce reliance on chemical treatments. Amidst growing environmental awareness spurred by Rachel Carson’s influential book, Silent Spring, which illuminated the dangers of widespread herbicide and pesticide use, there arose a pressing need for alternative, environmentally friendly solutions. The U.S. Department of the Interior’s Fish Farming Experimental Laboratory imported three cardboard boxes of juvenile grass carp, native to Asia and renowned for their insatiable appetite for seaweed, with hopes of them cleaning up weed-choked rivers and irrigation ditches across the Southern United States.
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Within a decade of the grass carp’s introduction, an Arkansas fish farmer, in pursuit of his own batch of exotic weed-eating fish, accidentally imported three other Asian carp species: black, bighead, and silver carp. However, these carp didn’t fulfill their intended purpose. Silver and bighead carp, as filter feeders, depleted plankton and other nutrients from the waters they inhabited, while black carp sustained themselves on mollusks. Recognizing the potential ecological threat posed by these species, the fish farmer handed them over to the government. State fishery workers attempted to breed the carp in a laboratory but were unsuccessful. So they released the fish into the river and expected them to perish. To their surprise, the carp thrived and rapidly reproduced.
As reported in Egan’s book, the carp began proliferating in the wild, with baby bighead and silver carp appearing in rivers and streams throughout the South. They starve out their competition by stripping away the plankton upon which every other fish species directly or indirectly depends. Bighead carp can grow larger than 100 pounds and consume up to 20 pounds of plankton daily. The invasive carp biomass in some stretches of rivers in the Mississippi basin is thought to be more than 90 percent.
Silver carp, slightly smaller than bighead carp, have gained notoriety as YouTube sensations due to their tendency to leap out of the water like aquatic missiles when disturbed by the sound of a boat motor. This makes them a significant concern for recreational industries and water sports. Their disruptive behavior, coupled with their impact on the fish market, make them a primary target among interest groups for government intervention.
“The Great Lakes provide a lot of jobs and bring a lot of money into the region,” says Molly Flanagan, chief operating officer at Alliance for the Great Lakes, who works on invasive species policies. “If invasive carp get into the lakes or get into the rivers that feed the lakes, it could have devastating consequences for our $7 billion a year fishing industry and our $16 billion a year recreational boating industry across the region.”
Around 2010, the invasive carp crisis gained high-level policy attention. Following the aftermath of Hurricane Ida in 2009 (there were concerns fish would jump over to the other lake due to the hurricane), policymakers rushed to devise strategies to prevent the intrusion of carp into the Great Lakes, according to Flanagan. A study conducted by the Great Lakes Commission explored various measures to impede carp from migrating northward, including a proposal to reverse the flow of the Chicago River (again) to sever the connection between the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River Basin — an essential conduit for invasive species movement. However, the exorbitant costs associated with this plan rendered it unfeasible, Flanagan said. Nevertheless, the study prompted Congress to urge the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to conduct its own investigation.
Among the options explored is the inclusion of the fish on restaurant menus. The White House had appointed a special committee to address the invasive carp issue, and it was keen on exploring the possibility of turning them into a food source. To test the market, they enlisted out-of-state chefs to prepare complimentary samples, offering them frozen carp at no cost.
In 2010, Fucik received a call from the White House. Initially dismissed as a scam, the phone call proved to be legitimate when Fucik got in touch with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Fucik’s lifelong passion for fish stems from memories of growing up in a Catholic household where fish was a dietary staple, plus regular summer fishing trips with his uncle. After working in the fish market for several years, he opened his store. So when it turned out the call really was from the White House, Fucik immediately embraced the invitation and began to experiment with new recipes incorporating the fish.
The same year, Fucik showcased hundreds of carp burgers at Taste of Chicago, a summer food festival in the city. Despite initial hesitation from some diners, many found themselves pleasantly surprised by the taste. As word of mouth spread, eager patrons quickly formed lines in front of his venue.
Then, Fucik noticed a decline in the momentum of the campaign. He attributes this downturn to an incident in Minneapolis, where an Asian business delegation arriving at the airport was confronted with a sign urging them to “Kill Asian Carp,” a well-intentioned plea aimed at curbing the spread of the invasive species. The visitors found the message off-putting.
In 2014, Minnesota state senators successfully passed a measure mandating that Minnesota agencies designate the fish as “invasive carp.” This move was adopted by other government agencies during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in response to the surge in anti-Asian hate crimes. According to the Associated Press, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service changed its designation to “invasive carp” in 2021.
In Illinois, the main concern is the infiltration of carp into Lake Michigan via the Illinois River, which connects to the Great Lakes through the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal. To counter this threat, the state has implemented a series of measures — electronic barriers, locks, and dams strategically positioned at key choke points along the waterway –– to prevent the fish from swimming upstream into Lake Michigan. By deploying multiple barriers, policymakers hope that even if an invasive carp could bypass one, it would encounter another barrier, the DNR’s Schoenung says. The state also implemented contracted removal efforts, paying 10 cents per pound to fishers to incentivize commercial harvesting. According to Schoenung, since the autumn of 2019, approximately 22 million pounds of carp have been removed through these initiatives. Targeted removal has reduced the fish’s population by half and successfully prevented invasive carp from establishing a population in Lake Michigan. In the South of Joliet’s Brandon Road Lock and Dam, the carp population has decreased by nearly 90 percent, according to Schoenung.
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Following the earlier marketing attempts, the copi campaign emerged as a pivotal initiative to provide an outlet for commercial fishers to offload their catch. A majority of the harvests find their way into fertilizers, pet meals, and bait for lobsters and crayfish in Southern states. However, recognizing the nutritional value of carp — high in protein and omega-3 fatty acids — and its status as one of the most consumed fish worldwide, there’s a compelling case to diversify the use of these fish by incorporating them into the domestic food market. The high costs of transportation hindered efforts to simply export the fish.
“By doing so, you’re making the best use of a valuable resource, and you’re also incentivizing harvest,” Schoenung said.
In other regions, particularly in Asia, copi is an essential part of the culinary culture. Historical records trace Chinese consumption of carp back to the Tang Dynasty, according to the U.N. During this period, the family name of the emperor sounded similar to the Chinese name for Eurasian carp, or common carp, the only fish cultured in China at the time. To avoid potential political innuendo, the royal family prohibited the sale and consumption of common carp by the public. This restriction led farmers to turn to alternative species for aquaculture, including bighead carp, silver carp, grass carp, and black carp. These species thus thrived in China and became significant protein sources, symbolizing fortune.
Many ethnic groups are bewildered by Americans’ aversion to the fish. The phenomenon even caught the attention of a Korean television outlet that dispatched a crew to interview Fucik. Schoenung noted that the fish’s name change has little impact on the international markets in the U.S. Many foreigners are accustomed to eating carp and indifferent to the stigma around its former name.
Johnny Zheng, an established entrepreneur based in Chicago’s Chinatown, has become an organic participant in the campaign in recent years. Hailing from China’s Eastern Fujian province, he fondly remembers eating carp cakes and carp fish balls during his childhood. Propelled by a strong sense of cultural pride, he says he has made it his mission to challenge the negative perceptions surrounding carp by introducing it to mainstream markets.
In his role as president of the Mid-America Restaurant Association, Zheng discovered a factory specializing in repurposing carp into fertilizers and animal feed. Frustrated by how his cherished childhood delicacy was underutilized, he took over the factory and resolved to transform the fate of the fish by redirecting them to the dinner table.
“When Asian carp make headlines, the coverage is always negative. It’s reminiscent of other narratives about things from China such as its technology — a portrayal of invasion into mainstream American society and driving out its local supply,” Zheng says. “I know this narrative is wrong and want to prove that Asian carp are not mere ‘trash fish.’ They can be delicious and serve as a valuable source of protein.”
Zheng’s primary customers are Chinese, and not the average American. To reshape the fish’s public perceptions, Zheng invested substantial capital in transforming carp into packaged goods. His factory produces fish heads, as well as fish balls and fish noodles. These products have gradually found their way onto the shelves of numerous Asian groceries. In 2022, he opened another restaurant, A Fusion, in Chicago’s Bridgeport neighborhood, to prominently feature the fish on the menu. By creating a dedicated supply chain and culinary outlet for carp-based delicacies, Zheng says he hopes to promote their consumption while honoring their culinary potential.
Despite waning media attention to the cause, Zheng says he remains committed to popularizing copi among U.S. customers. While his investment has yet to yield a noticeable outcome, he says he is faithful that his investment will soon generate an impact.
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Schoenung says he expected the campaign to be a marathon. Creating a market for something unfamiliar to many U.S. diners will take more than an overnight operation, but he remains confident that it will eventually take off.
“We’ve got the right pieces in place — we’ve got the marketing, we’ve got the stories, and we’ve got the fish supply,” Schoenung says. “Just building those other pieces, and linking it all together, I am very hopeful and very confident that we’re going to be able to do that.”
For now, Fucik plans to continue to sell copi in small amounts, holding onto hope for future funding that would allow him to host more events promoting the fish. He remains optimistic that public perception of the fish might change through continuing media exposure. Perhaps a headline reporting an injury caused by carp leaping out of the water could reignite interest in consuming the fish, thrusting it back into the news cycle, he says.
“I’m sure we’ll have another surge in interest at some point in time when something comes up,” Fucik says. “Somebody will get hit by a carp in the head in their boat and it’ll make the news. Then all of a sudden they’ll get resurrected again, and they’ll be showing all the videos and then it’ll trickle down to me again. Things get recycled because there is always a new generation of people who haven’t heard about it.”
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Xuandi Wang
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“The thing people forget about human babies,” mused Sam Altman, the entrepreneur whisperer turned artificial intelligence diviner, to The New Yorker’s Tad Friend in 2016, “is that they take years to learn anything interesting.” Tough but fair, although any babies reading this oughtn’t feel too embarrassed: Altman pointed out elsewhere in the piece, which was titled “Sam Altman’s Manifest Destiny,” that we grown-ups aren’t too quick on the uptake ourselves.
“There are certain advantages to being a machine,” said Altman, the 38-year-old who—with the hectic exception of the past five-ish days; more on that in a moment!—has been the high-profile and highly influential CEO of OpenAI since 2019. His company recently flirted with an implied valuation of $80 billion; it is behind products like the smart image generator DALL-E and the beguiling large language model chatbot ChatGPT. “We humans are limited by our input-output rate—we learn only two bits a second, so a ton is lost,” Altman told Friend. “To a machine, we must seem like slowed-down whale songs.”
It’s easy to imagine a tech leader like Altman sympathizing with the plight of such a bot. When you’re a guy who likes to operate not just on a different wavelength from most other mortals, but in a whole nother realm of consciousness—one in which the goal of achieving AGI, or “artificial general intelligence,” is considered possibly world saving or world ending, depending on who is doing the extrapolations—those brisk whirs of industry tend to resonate better than humanity’s low, musical moans.
Why, just the other day—last Thursday, to be specific—Altman sat at a developer conference and described a recent experience that had left him positively vibrating with wonder. “On a personal note,” he told interviewer Laurene Powell Jobs and the rest of the APEC audience, “just in the last couple of weeks, I have gotten to be in the room when we sort of, like, push the veil of ignorance back and the frontier of discovery forward.” I’ve heard people use this kind of language to describe, like, the glory of childbirth, but in Altman’s case, he was describing the arrival of a different little bundle—lines of code on a computer that could go on to change the world.
And yet, even the sleekest, purringest, many-billion-dollar flywheel can get smoked by a dumb, sudden bird strike; even the deepest-dwelling whales can surface at random and upend a vessel. Why, just the other day—last Friday, to be specific—the OpenAI board of directors abruptly decided it would be prudent to fire its CEO into the sun. And so, without telling anyone, including its publicly traded partner and mega-investor Microsoft, it went ahead and did it, with a ruthlessness that might have pleased the machines if everything hadn’t turned out so aggressively, humanly awkward instead.
It’s always jarring when a real story feels fake, when everyone is skeptical of buying what you’re telling. Sometimes, the very people most familiar with a story are the ones most moved to try to explain things via shared fiction.
Even among the techno journos and cyber doomers and network statists and “See, corporate governance matters!” nerds who have been glued to the sudden goings-on and votings-out at OpenAI—even among those of us who are terminally online enough to have tuned in eagerly last Friday to a highly speculative and information-light Twitter Spaces event about Altman’s odd ousting cohosted by Martin Shkreli; ask me how I know—we couldn’t help but notice that the past five days have unfolded like something you’d find on TV.
Like an episode of Succession! Like a whole season of Succession, I should say, with enough rapid twists and U-turns in the power struggle timeline to make GoJo seem slo-mo by comparison. On Wednesday morning, when I woke up to the news that we’d reached a finale and Altman was coming back to OpenAI as CEO, my rotted brain could only think about Tom Wambsgans saying to Kendall Roy: “I’ve seen you get fucked a lot, and I’ve never seen Logan get fucked once.” And when I learned that Altman’s return involved a board of directors shake-up that installed both former Salesforce co-CEO Bret Taylor and former jetsetting Harvard president and compulsive opiner Larry Summers (?!?) … I mostly thought about how ’ol “Lawrence of Absurdia” would have been quite the character on Silicon Valley. (“Larry sucks up, and he bullies down” has the makings of a Russ Hanneman motivational speech, you know?)
But mostly, all this time, I’ve thought about Survivor: specifically, one of those humdingers where the tribal council has started but there are still 24 minutes left in the episode. Just consider that, between the close of the stock market’s trading hours at 4 p.m. Eastern time Friday and the opening of the stock market’s trading hours at 9:30 a.m. Monday, all of the following happened:
If it’s true that they torched an $80 billion company cause they thought they were too close to building God, then that’s orders of magnitude the most punk rock thing I’ve ever heard of.
— Joe Weisenthal (@TheStalwart) November 18, 2023
People make fun of academic jargon, but the phrase “decel safetyist” is currently being uttered by dozens of perfectly respectable people in the worlds of business and tech. Everybody is ridiculous.
— Phillip Maciak (@pjmaciak) November 20, 2023
And that accounting of the weekend absurdity doesn’t include the most Silicon Valley detail of them all, the one so on the nose it seemed scripted, but only because it happened after the opening bell:
Breaking news: The OpenAI drama is real.
We checked our data and last night, SF saw a spike in low-quality sleep. There was a 27% increase in people getting under 5 hours of sleep. We need to fix this.
Source: @eightsleep data
— Matteo Franceschetti (@m_franceschetti) November 20, 2023
The breakneck pace of updates continued once the workweek got under way: There were lots of reports about meetings, more OpenAI employees signing the petition; wives doing work; Salesforce’s Marc Benioff getting roasted; Shear trying and failing to learn why Altman got sacked in the first place; things of that nature. For a time, Altman existed in a sort of quantum state, employed (though not quite yet) by Microsoft and fired from (but still looming over) OpenAI. On Tuesday night, a New York Times story noted the deep rift between Altman and some of the members of the board—one of whom, Helen Toner, had criticized OpenAI in an academic paper she wrote and had also said that the company, and the mission, and humanity, could be better off without Altman.
I fell asleep thinking this might last for a while, feeling sorry for tech reporters whose Thanksgiving might be ruined. And when I woke up, Sam was back.
I know some readers might be thinking: What’s up with all the Sams? And you know what, they’re right to do so. Because there really are a number of similarities between Altman and another Sam of recent yore—Bankman-Fried—whose fraud trial I spent my October observing.
Both have totally aptronymic last names, if you think hard about it, man. Bankman-Fried had a disagreement with a business partner named Tara Mac Aulay that led to a professional schism; Altman had a disagreement with a now-former board member named Tasha McCauley that led to Friday’s professional schism. (As a side note, McCauley married Joseph Gordon-Levitt in 2014, which I understandably have no parallel for, but it feels essential to mention.) Both had game-changing moments while on hikes just outside San Francisco: Bankman-Fried charmed Michael Lewis into writing a book, while Altman “relinquished the notion that human beings are singular” and began thinking more deeply about the power and might of simulating intelligence. (So, like, same, except exactly the opposite.) Bankman-Fried named his investment firm Alameda Research in an attempt to sound less crypto-y; Altman had an early entity he called Hydrazine, named after the compound used in rocket fuel.
And both Sams ultimately became well-known and willing avatars for their respective nascent industries, always ready to don those little nude nub microphones they hand out at tech conference panels and opine about P values and the future of crypto or AI. They may not have written the code underlying their ventures, but they sure spoke the media’s lingua franca. (Wait, were they the personality hires?!) In their own ways, they cultivated press relationships: Bankman-Fried’s attention to his own narrative was so deliberate that the prosecution used it against him in court, while Altman’s rapport with some reporters may have helped him this weekend, as one opined.
But the other quirky Samilarity is that both of their ascents had ties to effective altruism, the rationalist-adjacent worldview that seeks to define, quantify, and ultimately encourage the actions that can do the most good for all of humanity—both now and in the future. For Bankman-Fried, effective altruism was, at least nominally, an ethical framework that compelled him to seek greater and greater sums of money and encouraged him to take bigger and unwieldier financial swings. (He struck out.)
Altman’s engagement with EA is murkier. On Twitter, a coalition of shitposters, venture capitalists, and chaos slurpers—whoa, everything really IS (a) securities fraud and (b) college football—have started half-jokingly calling themselves “effective accelerationists,” or “e/acc,” of late, a salvo against what they consider to be the gloomier-and-doomier EA types. Altman offers glimpses of futures that both EA believers and e/acc trolls want, and some in the latter group have interpreted his reverse-Grandpa Simpson as a sign that perhaps he shares their merrier approach to AI R&D. Whether he actually does is something I assume we’ll find out when our strawberry overlords come to town.
While the Altman drama was in full flux, much of Silicon Valley hearkened back to its most notorious founder ousting of all time: that of Apple’s Steve Jobs, a farewell so famous that Uber’s Travis Kalanick later tried to turn the breakup into a verb. “If only twitter had been around during the john sculley / steve jobs conflict,” wrote Founders Fund principal Delian Asparouhov (recently described as “the man speed-running the new space race”). “History is so much more interesting when you watch it play out live on a timeline.”
It wasn’t just the firing of Jobs that is relevant to Altman’s situation, though. It was the way his eventual return only enhanced his power and influence.
Walter Isaacson’s biography of Jobs quotes him in 1983, two years before the split with Apple, when he recruited Sculley away from PepsiCo with this winning pitch: “Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water, or do you want a chance to change the world?” But in the real world, Jobs and Sculley clashed over the disappointing sales of, among other products, the Macintosh. An attempt by the Apple cofounder to appeal to the board of directors following a demotion led instead to his departure from the company. “I am but 30 and want still to contribute and achieve,” Jobs wrote in a parting letter to the company’s vice chairman.
A little over a decade later, at the end of 1996, Apple was floundering, and Jobs was brought (and bought) back into the fold. At the time, I was a teenage employee of an online chat company with Apple roots that had Sculley as a board member and investor, as well as a huge Apple dweeb who handled the return of Jobs like a Marvel fan glimpsing a bygone fav in a mid-credits scene. When Apple debuted its “Think different” campaign in the fall of 1997, I downloaded a grainy QuickTime of the ad and watched it again and again.
By then, the company was back on the rise. Earlier that summer, I had attended the Macworld expo in Boston, where Jobs went on stage and made a pivotal announcement about a big, stabilizing $150 million investment from … Microsoft. Jobs was but 42, and still had a whole lot to contribute and achieve; to doom and bless the world with. Or, as he might’ve put it, he had a few more one more things up his sleeve.
Altman’s exile, depending on whether you calculate the end of it as his show of support from Microsoft or his return to OpenAI specifically, lasted roughly between one-twentieth and one-tenth of 1 percent as long as Jobs’s did. But it included a larger, undefined number of heart emoji tweets, that’s for sure. Like Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn sneaking into their own funeral service, both Altman and Brockman got to observe an enormous amount of employee support for their leadership. Now, back atop the company, they get to figure out what to do with it, and how to ensure that all this goodwill doesn’t break bad.
Since the will they or won’t they nature of this story has given way to (some?) clarity, this is the biggest focal point surrounding OpenAI’s future. In a pair of televised appearances Monday evening, Microsoft’s Nadella had amiably and CEO-ishly hedged about whether he thought Altman would wind up in-house at Microsoft or whether he’d be able to return to OpenAI. “I’m open to both options,” he said on CNBC. “One thing I will not do is stop innovating.” (He’s running!) Over the past few days, Microsoft served as an important backstop for OpenAI, a sort of employer-of-last-resort during what felt like the HR version of a bank run. In exchange for Nadella’s trouble, it stands to reason that OpenAI’s new board—which, at the moment, consists of just three people: Taylor, Summers, and the Quora CEO Adam D’Angelo, who already had a seat—will have a much friendlier and likely more commercial relationship with the company who provides all that computing power in addition to capital. And Microsoft will ostensibly at some point want to push for a board seat of its own.
There are two other parts of the 2016 New Yorker story that feel especially relevant today. The first is a quote from the venture capitalist Paul Graham, a longtime Altman colleague and advocate who once approvingly wrote that “software is eating the world” and had a track record of finding Altman to be formidable. “Sam is extremely good at becoming powerful,” Graham told Friend in the story. It echoed something that Graham wrote back in 2008, linking to a video of Altman presenting his Gossip Girl–approved app, Loopt, at an Apple developers conference while wearing two polo shirts with popped collars: “Sam Altman has it. You could parachute him into an island full of cannibals and come back in 5 years and he’d be the king.”
The second resonant part of that New Yorker story is an anecdote about a leading AI researcher from Google visiting Altman and Brockman. The researcher asks them—I mean really asks them—how they would define OpenAI’s goal. Brockman’s answer is classic Silicon Valley, and classic Silicon Valley. “Our goal right now … is to do the best thing there is to do,” he declares. “It’s a little vague.”
What isn’t as vague is that, going forward, OpenAI is well and truly Altman’s baby—a baby that has a much scarier and expedient learning curve than our human ones do. These past few days have been filled with everyone talking over one another—investors, founders, and observers alike. But to the machines, it was all just background noise, some distant hum of human discord. Sometimes you eat the whale, and sometimes the whale eats you.
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Katie Baker
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