“The media has its own agenda, completely separate from anything going on in the real world, creating the story themselves.” — Keith Teare

Last night, somebody hurled a Molotov cocktail at Sam Altman’s Pacific Heights mansion. I live a couple of hills over, but heard nothing. Meanwhile, the New Yorker hurled its own explosive cocktail at Sam, publishing a 15,000-word hit piece rhetorically entitled “Sam Altman May Control Our Future. Can He Be Trusted?” No, of course, he can’t be trusted. Not according to the New Yorker. Especially with something as precious as, gasp, our future.
Not everyone, however, is sold on this media cult of personality. In his That Was The Week editorial, Keith Teare tells the media to take their hands off Sam. I don’t disagree. Although I’m a bit skeptical of Keith’s attempt to demonize what he defines as a “devious” Dario Amodei. Whether it’s Altman, Amodei or Google’s AI honcho Demis Hassabis, all these guys are prisoners of their company’s structures and cultures. They are also victims of today’s anti-tech hysteria. It’s one thing to blow up Silicon Valley’s cartoonish cult of personality, it’s quite another to hurl bombs at these people’s homes. Enough with all the violence – verbal or otherwise. It never ends well.

Five Takeaways
• Hassabis Is the Anti-Altman. Sixteen years at DeepMind. Same house in Highgate. Decade-old car. He doesn’t want power. He wants scientific enlightenment.
• Reading the Mind of God. Hassabis is a Spinozan. The god of Einstein. Science as spiritual quest. Kant and Spinoza in the Highgate pub.
• The Szilard Pedestrian Crossing. DeepMind’s first office on Russell Square. Turing three doors down. Szilard’s zebra crossing. The modern Manhattan Project.
• Two Categories of Failure. The idiot in charge — swap them out, problem solved. The structural kind — a good person defeated by larger forces. Hassabis is category two.
• The Go Players Who Quit. Some retired. Others kept playing with the machine as tutor. Two responses to superintelligence. Only one is worth having.

About the Guest
Sebastian Mallaby is the Paul A. Volcker senior fellow for international economics at the Council on Foreign Relations and author of The Infinity Machine.
References
The Infinity Machine: Demis Hassabis, DeepMind, and the Quest for Superintelligence by Sebastian Mallaby

About Keen On America
Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen.
Website: https://keenon.tv/ Substack: https://keenon.substack.com/ YouTube: https://youtube.com/@KeenOnShow

Chapters:
00:00:31 A Molotov cocktail at Sam Altman’s Pacific Heights house
00:02:41 The New Yorker hit piece: Ronan Farrow, Andrew Marantz, 15,000 words
00:05:36 Slippery Sam and the zeitgeist
00:07:39 Brian Merchant: it’s open season for refusing AI
00:08:09 Anthropic’s Mythic model finds decade-old vulnerabilities
00:10:46 Why even release it? Dario’s narcissism
00:12:12 Slippery Sam vs Devious Dario
00:14:11 Hassabis as the third way
00:18:29 The Mustafa Suleiman question
00:19:17 Mike Tyson, Kant, Spinoza, and Hobbes
00:22:09 Brian Merchant and the new Luddism
00:23:34 Anthropic makes a new generation redundant every week
00:23:34 Post of the week: Keith rebuilds his sites in 10 minutes
00:26:39 Eric Ries on incorruptible companies
00:30:12 Patagonia, Berkeley Bowl, Mondragon
00:35:43 The end of ownership? Keith goes Marx