\n\t\u201cAggressive technocapitalism wins, safety dies\u201d is a long name for a movie and a short logline for a film, yet the phrase might accurately be used for both when it comes to Artificial.<\/p>\n
Luca Guadagnino<\/a> brought his latest and by far most-topical movie to a world-premiere at the 64th New York Film Festival Monday evening, the first stop of what has already seemed like an unusually long journey. Ditched<\/a> by Amazon MGM Studios after its parent company\u2019s $50 billion investment<\/a> in OpenAI<\/a>, the film, as it turns out, would be non-grata at a large tech firm even if it never signed on for that 5 percent equity stake in Sam Altman<\/a>\u2018s company. Persistently bleak under the rays of the California sun, Artificial (now under the aegis of Anora studio Neon<\/a>) is the movie of the moment \u2014 the origin story of our current AI<\/a> quagmire at the literal, psychological and pretty much every other level.<\/p>\n Or as NYFF programming chief Dennis Lim said before the screening:<\/p>\n \u201cWe are already in a threshold period. We need to understand how we got here, and the film you\u2019re about to see shows us that way.\u201d<\/p>\n The movie is notably faithful, at times dutifully chronological and nearly always horror-movie bracing on the subject of the rise of capitalist AI, as Ilya Sutskever, an idealistic and socially unpolished Russian immigrant, shows up at the office door of Geoffrey Hinton, a godfather of AI, at the University of Toronto in 2003. There he will learn under the well-intentioned eventual Nobel Prize winner, soon following him to Google and its Bay Area halo. As observers of the space well know, Sutskever ends up meeting Sam Altman at a 2014 conference, where the Y Combinator financier, already well established in Silicon Valley at barely 30, chases down the prodigy to convince him to work at a nascent OpenAI as chief science officer and supercharge its LLM ambitions. Or, more accurately, make them possible in the first place \u2014 Sutskever is Wozniak to Altman\u2019s Jobs, but more so.<\/p>\n Soon a (last) supper follows with Altman, Elon Musk<\/a>, Greg Brockman and others \u2014 the prelude to a slow realization by Sutskever, and us, that the science Sutskever wants to develop to save the world is the capital Altman wants to use to build a warchest. We know the rest \u2014 OpenAI rushes out ChatGPT in November 2022, shocking the industry and even many of its own employees; Altman displays a growing accelerationism with the abetment of lead investor Microsoft (mixed with blog-y pronouncements of transforming and saving the world, and a weird word-cloud fondness for the word compute); and OpenAI transitions from a nonprofit to its opposite. The whole story culminates in Sutskever\u2019s notorious November Coup of 2023 in which Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and assorted OpenAI loyalists back Altman, engineering his return so that he\u2019s stronger than ever \u2014 a day clear then and doubly indicative now of capitalism\u2019s ultimate triumph and on which, Yom Kippur-style, our AI fate was inscribed and sealed.<\/p>\n Which brings us to late 2026 \u2014 right up to it, as the film collides with the last month of AI safety warnings<\/a>, which also make the screen with a postscript (one of about five) about AI researcher and whistleblower Jacob Coxon warning of a pox on all their houses (or, at least on his former employers Anthropic<\/a> and OpenAI) for a reckless speedplow over any semblance of safety. On cue, Coxon was taping Jon Stewart <\/a>a half mile downtown at the exact time the movie was playing, in what one commenter very reasonably called a \u201cmost serious and chilling episode\u201d of The Daily Show.<\/p>\n A slow-burn account that will not surprise those who have covered the meteoric ascent and Teflon resilience of Altman, Artificial still offers a rich and often entertaining primer on the becoming of OpenAI, integrity and caution time and again sacrificed on the holy altar of finance. (You can read The Hollywood Reporter\u2019s review of the film here<\/a>.) Not to mention a parable of modern Silicon Valley, the place where advanced science and obscene wealth converge in a way that has never happened in the history of humanity and can only, if every novel on either subject can be believed, will end splendiferously well. <\/p>\n Guadagnino took an interest in the subject because \u201cas much as AI belongs to a world of mathematics and computers, it is still generated by peoplle and exists in space of their interaction,\u201d as he noted from the NYFF stage. Screenwriter Simon Rich took an interest in the subject after being told by a childhood friend decades ago about what was possible with AI. That friend ended up going on to work in the industry, prompting Rich, a former Saturday Night Live and Pixar writer as well as a novelist and essayist, to pen this script. \u201cI\u2019m not particularly charismatic or good looking but as a last-ditch effort to warn mankind I wrote this movie. I hope to God a couple people pay attention,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Amazon initially backed the movie before, well, \u201cthe concept of a conflict of interest is a very important, let\u2019s say, elephant in the room here,\u201d as Guadagnino told <\/a>THR\u2019s David Canfield. In retrospect it\u2019s almost shocking the company would have even contemplated signing on to a movie so innately critical of a Valley vision in which noble use cases form but a thin camouflaging membrane over the bloody black heart of a human-trampling moneygrab \u2014 so much so that the question becomes not why Amazon abandoned the film but which Hollywood agent is responsible for the Houdinian feat of convincing them they should hop aboard in the first place, and why aren\u2019t they the ones ruling the world?<\/p>\n \n\tTo give you a sense of just how scabrous this film is, and just generally to level you up on how some of Silicon Valley\u2019s most powerful people are getting shown in what will surely be an Oscar mainstay and cultural lodestone this Hollywood season, here\u2019s a quick rundown: <\/p>\n Greg Brockman \u2014 In real life he\u2019s an AGI evangelist and Altman lock-stepper who\u2019s a jock-like presence that donates millions to a pro-AI Super PAC. In the movie he\u2019s all of those things but nerdier and more simpering. Cooper Hoffman, who plays him, said at NYFF he didn\u2019t read any books about Brockman, but let himself think about a phrase Garfield told him: that the man would leave his wife for Sam Altman.<\/p>\n Mira Murati \u2014 Long the most enigmatic of OpenAI figures \u2014 she tries to stop Altman but also sticks with him; she is at once Cassandra and complicit \u2014 the Albanian ex-Tesla engineer gets her due from Monica Barbaro<\/a> who gives the character just enough warmth to seem like a hero, until undertaking actions that make her seem like the opposite.<\/p>\n Sam Altman \u2014 Hinton in the film describes Altman as someone so toxically charismatic he would land on an island of cannibals and shortly after become their king. Andrew Garfield<\/a> portrays him as a completely dishonest personality who will always tell everybody how much he likes them to their face while screwing them behind their back. A flamboyant cipher to a sometimes-cartoonish degree (you can read his articulate descriptions of how he crafted the character here<\/a>) Garfield\u2019s Altman is going for a different kind of spiritual truth. \u201cOf course it will feel confronting [to Altman],\u201d Garfield said at the screening, \u201c[but I wanted] to a deep interrogation of who are giving our power, our autonomy, our data too.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tThe best gift Garfield could give Altman is going so hard on the caricature-y touches, allowing Altman to discredit the whole thing. He\u2019s already tried to do that, without having seen the movie. \u201cI don\u2019t think they\u2019re going for accuracy,\u201d Altman just said<\/a> to Vanity Fair, admittedly basing his assessment on the trailer. He and Garfield cannot even agree on whether they waved to each other when the film was shooting near the mogul\u2019s house. Altman says they did; Garfield said at the premiere that \u201cif that happened I must have blacked out because I don\u2019t remember it at all.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tYann LeCun \u2014 The other godfather of AI gets a cameo in which he shows up Sutskever by mockingly asking him from the audience if he\u2019s ever seen 2001. I don\u2019t know that this ever happened, but as an object lesson in Sutskever not being taken seriously by the AI establishment it serves its purpose. It feels like shade that LeCun never appears in the film again, though given the treatment some of the other tech personalities receive, he might want to send Luca a bouquet.<\/p>\n \n\tGuy on Bench \u2014 Jason Schwarzman plays an anonymous prophet of doom (and ex-techie) who shows up at an San Francisco park to describe to Sutskever all the ways the AI boom can go wrong, providing the movie with its from-the-headlines leitmotif and cinema more broadly its wildest hair since Forrest Gump.<\/p>\n Elon Musk \u2014 Ike Barinholtz<\/a> has Musk wandering in from another movie, or dimension, a ramble-y, arrogant but ultimately comically non-threatening figure. This will be noticeable and even triggering to anyone who sees Alex Gibney\u2019s Musk <\/a>or just followed the man\u2019s DOGE-based eviscerations of important aspects of the federal government. \u201cWhen you play someone as beloved, as universally admired\u2026\u201d Barinholtz began his intro at the festival, before saying he tried to capture Elon how he was viewed then, long before \u201cthe RNC with a chainsaw.\u201d Barenholtz\u2019s portrayal raises what\u2019s actually a key question in fact-based art: are we required to inject a modern understanding we couldn\u2019t know at the time?<\/p>\n \n\tTasha McAuley \u2014 Entrepreneur, Joseph Gordon-Levitt\u2019s wife and coup-joiner on the OpenAI board, she is played briefly by Zosia Mamet (though not identified by name).<\/p>\n \n\tGeoffrey Hinton \u2014 If there\u2019s one good thing about AI going so pop-cultural, it\u2019s that we get a full-blooded character representing one of the great scientific minds of our time, here depicted (accurately) as the conscience of an industry. If there\u2019s a second good thing, it\u2019s that we get Mark Rylance portraying such a conscience. <\/p>\n Dario Amodei \u2014 He is now known as the man who founded the breakaway Anthropic and, a showdown or two with the Pentagon aside, is running a company that could destroy the job market and the world as we know it (hey, his words). But back during his OpenAI era, he\u2019s part of Altman\u2019s gallery, if a very nerdy and definitely more idealistic member of same. Honestly on the scale of image-rehab to complete evisceration, Amodei is one of the few AI entrepreneurs to end up closer to the former in this film. A far cry, to say the least, from his recent depiction<\/a> on SNL or portrayal in Stewart\u2019s coverage.<\/p>\n \n\tIlya Sutskever \u2014 The story\u2019s unabashed hero, aided in real life by him all but disappearing after the failed coup (though he did raise $1 billion<\/a> for an AI safety company). Garfield\u2019s is the showier performance but Yura Borisov<\/a>\u2018s depiction as a man slowly realizing how he\u2019s been had is Richard-Gere-at-the-end-of-Primal-Fear-level stuff. \u201cI was just trying to put this [lost innocence] in the film so you can feel what I hope you feel,\u201d he said at the screening. The Jacob Coxons and other figures who continue Sutskever\u2019s legacy, not to mention the concerns that only become more urgent, make him feel less like a figure from ye old AI days of 2023 but one speaking to us over our shoulder as we scroll the headlines at the breakfast table today.<\/p>\n \n\tThe only downside to such a fiercely of-the-moment take is that said moment can change in the nearly three months until the film\u2019s Christmas release. Maybe by then Neon will need to include 20 postscripts, and submit to the Oscars\u2019 documentary category.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cAggressive technocapitalism wins, safety dies\u201d is a long name for a movie and a short logline for a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":922875,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[62,60477,1930,317620,200287,49,48,250,75,317621,15905,60229,191093,12507,278,2747,317622],"class_list":["post-922874","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-ai","tag-andrew-garfield","tag-anthropic","tag-artifical","tag-artifical-intelligence","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-elon-musk","tag-entertainment","tag-fact-based-dramas","tag-ike-barinholtz","tag-luca-guadagnino","tag-monica-barbaro","tag-neon","tag-openai","tag-sam-altman","tag-yura-borisov"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/922874","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=922874"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/922874\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/922875"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=922874"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=922874"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=922874"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}