{"id":594231,"date":"2026-04-10T06:42:08","date_gmt":"2026-04-10T06:42:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/594231\/"},"modified":"2026-04-10T06:42:08","modified_gmt":"2026-04-10T06:42:08","slug":"openais-sam-altman-has-gone-beyond-hero-and-villain","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/594231\/","title":{"rendered":"OpenAI’s Sam Altman Has Gone Beyond Hero and Villain"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tThere was a moment, after he staved off a boardroom-coup attempt just around Thanksgiving 2023, when Sam Altman<\/a> played like a hero, repelling the dark forces of anti-progress. Behold the Great Conqueror, ushering in an era of prosperity when petty doomsday-minded advisers would stand in his way!<\/p>\n

There was also a moment, after he stepped in\u00a0to take<\/a>\u00a0the Department of Defense\u2019s Anthropic deal in early March, when Sam Altman played like a villain, embracing the dark forces of surveillance. Behold the Archangel, swiping souls and private data in the name of government contracts!<\/p>\n

Whatever the full truth of either description (anyone paying attention\u00a0that November\u00a0<\/a>a few years ago soon realized only Wall Street cheered his comeback), I\u2019d argue Altman at this point in his pop-culture evolution has transcended both those designations and any spectral stops in between. The OpenAI<\/a> leader has now landed on something else, something that may or may not be problematic but can\u2019t be avoided and indeed whose whole point lies in its unavoidability: pure cinema.<\/p>\n

I first mean cinema in a very literal sense. Luca Guadagnino currently sits editing\u00a0Artificial,\u00a0the Amazon MGM dramatization of that 2023 episode, starring Andrew Garfield in the role of the spidery one. The film, backed (with no apparent irony) by the company of a previous ineffable tech character, arrives in theaters later this year and will supply Altman with the tech mogul\u2019s must-have 21st century accessory of a fleeting film festival discourse.<\/p>\n

But by cinema I also mean another, more Kurosawa-like sense, where \u201cpainting and literature, theater and music, come together\u201d \u2014 where trying to assess Altman as good or bad, or even what he is at all, becomes secondary to the point\u00a0that\u00a0he is, and strangely seems to have always been. (Try to pinpoint the first time you heard of him; you\u2019ll likely find it difficult.) Altman represents so many vibes and modes of expression that any moral judgment we might apply fades beneath the point that matters: He is here and very probably always will be, and we will forever be incapable of turning away. Simply calling out Altman as someone to cheer for or root against feels insufficient, even as some people do that (especially the latter one). Mainly he expresses these Kurosawan forms, a figure we look at so hard, for so long, we stop even asking whether we should.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe most immediate reason for this impression comes from a Ronan Farrow-Andrew Marantz\u00a0New Yorker\u00a0piece published Monday, in which an 18-month investigation led to\u00a0the opus<\/a>\u00a0\u201cSam Altman May Control Our Future \u2014 Can He Be Trusted?\u201d Over its 11,000 words, no answer followed (though it leaned toward no), precisely because an answer is beside this cinematic-character point: He will survive all attempts to take him down, even the article that maybe came to do that, because our mind-realtor perpetually subleases him space even in just thinking about that takedown.<\/p>\n

Altman and OpenAI preemptively tried to distract from the piece\u2019s impact with a same-day airdrop of their own literature, a\u00a013-page\u00a0prescriptive document\u00a0<\/a>titled \u201cIndustrial Policy for the Intelligence Age: Ideas to Keep People First.\u201d Some proposals\u00a0landed as laughably naive and pandering (a \u201ctime-bound 32-hour work week\u201d?); some felt startlingly hypocritical (\u201cdevelop and test coordinated playbooks to contain dangerous AI<\/a> systems once they have been released into the world\u201d from a company famous for doing so little testing before?). Yet the divided reception showed Altman\u2019s filmic ambiguities.<\/p>\n

\n\tIn this prescription we had a CEO who \u201cdidn\u2019t just talk about the future \u2014 he tried to redesign it,\u201d as the AI newsletter Analyst Uttam\u00a0described<\/a>. Or, alternatively, as Ars Technica deputy editor Nate Anderson\u00a0wrote<\/a>\u00a0in response to the toss of the word salad, \u201cI don\u2019t \u2014 thankfully \u2014 have to follow every statement that Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, makes about the world. Many of these statements seem more like \u2018hustles\u2019 or \u2018pitches\u2019 than attempts to speak thoughtfully about the future. Even if they are genuine statements of belief, they often read like a teenager\u2019s first sci-fi novel, written under the influence of weed and way too much Star Trek.\u201d<\/p>\n

But the viability of his suggestions were beside the point for us and, most importantly, for him. What mattered was that people were people talking about it and not about the other reams of published text. The whole strategy had a Netflix limited-series feel; you can almost imagine the scene in the script where, wracked with indecision over how to handle the incoming shrapnel, Altman and his puffer-vested media operatives convene to figure out how to deflect it: \u201cAha! A simultaneously timed social manifesto.\u201d You\u2019ve heard of art-washing? Now we\u2019ve got policy paper-washing.<\/p>\n

To Altman\u2019s right and speaking loudest at that streaming-series meeting: OpenAI\u2019s chief global affairs officer Chris Lehane (he\u2019d probably\u00a0want\u00a0<\/a>Rob Lowe, but I\u2019m thinking Woody Harrelson). On the Zoom and further down-table, a host of agreeables sitting in the places where Ilya Sutskever and voices of opposition once sat. And at the head of the room, Vito C. himself, taking it all in and deciding this was the moment, finally, to switch the narrative from a techno-utopian huckster fantasy (universal basic income) to a more upstanding techno-regulator Bernie Sanders fantasy (the \u201crobot tax\u201d).<\/p>\n

Actually the Coppola comparison feels right, but in the inverse: Where the director\u2019s lead character was a loyal and upstanding figure in a fictional bad world, Altman reads as a shifty and disloyal character in a good real one. But in neither case does it truly matter. No one watches\u00a0The Godfather\u00a0to draw conclusions about the protagonist\u2019s moral value \u2014 we watch it because we can\u2019t not. Cinema.<\/p>\n

\n\tOf course, binary heroes and villains can be cinematic too. But cinema at its purest can also be something spellbinding that transcends it, that captivates precisely for living beyond that, and this seems to fit that Kurosawan description; what\u2019s more filmically compelling than the slippery competing perspectives on a samurai murder?<\/p>\n

If this idea seems abstract, conjure your own mental image of Altman. He\u2019s probably on a stage, because often that\u2019s where we see him. But think of his face. What does it look like? Pleading? Petulant? Reassuring? Cagey? Or somehow all and none of these modes, like the\u00a0animation<\/a>\u00a0from the\u00a0New Yorker\u00a0piece\u00a0in which designers deepfaked a dozen visages and had him considering and discarding them as masks.<\/p>\n

Even in the entertainment industry, Altman has reached the place that goes beyond evaluation to imagination. Back in the summer of 2024, Ari Emanuel\u00a0famously called\u00a0<\/a>\u00a0the OpenAI leader a \u201ccon man\u201d at the Aspen Ideas Festival. Altman would follow that with more than a year of overtures to Hollywood in which executives slowly warmed to him. No one captures this arc better than Bob Iger\u2019s Disney, which went from suing a GenAI company<\/a> to putting $1 billion in Altman\u2019s pocket.<\/p>\n

Now he has abruptly ended Sora and that Disney deal, and we can\u2019t decide what to think of him. Altman can\u2019t kill Hollywood if he\u2019s not even trying to operate in it. And yet he lingers in the town\u2019s collective nightmare, a pixelated specter hanging above us like Big Brother in Apple\u2019s 1984 Super Bowl ad<\/a>, somehow representing all the industry threats of GenAI that in fact will be carried out by many others.<\/p>\n

Ridley Scott directed that commercial, and he seems like the most apt auteur for this analogy. Will Altman become Matt Damon, sciencing the shit out of our problems? Or John Hurt, convulsively chest-birthing an alien? Or maybe \u2014 a third possibility we consider less often \u2014 just Geena Davis driving off a cliff and bringing down only himself and his confidants. Even now, with all he\u2019s done and all we know, it remains legitimately hard to predict where in the canon the Altman narrative ends up. Will he become the most powerful and dangerous man on the planet, a rollup of Elon Musk and his DOGE\/ latter-stage X and Mark Zuckerberg and his earlier disinfo-peddling Facebook,\u00a0supercharged with a regimen of Bryan Johnson Blueprint chemicals?\u00a0<\/p>\n

Or will he\u00a0become a symbol of fallen Silicon Valley hubris, a rollup of Elizabeth Holmes and Adam Neumann supercharged with Nick Bostrom Ted Talks? Somehow it all becomes murky. We just sit in this dark auditorium watching him up there on the screen, unable to even\u00a0remember when we bought a ticket.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"There was a moment, after he staved off a boardroom-coup attempt just around Thanksgiving 2023, when Sam Altman…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":594232,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[62,217911,276,277,49,48,278,2747,61],"class_list":{"0":"post-594231","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-ai-digital-issue","10":"tag-artificial-intelligence","11":"tag-artificialintelligence","12":"tag-ca","13":"tag-canada","14":"tag-openai","15":"tag-sam-altman","16":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/594231","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=594231"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/594231\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/594232"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=594231"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=594231"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=594231"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}