{"id":93073,"date":"2025-08-24T07:42:13","date_gmt":"2025-08-24T07:42:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/93073\/"},"modified":"2025-08-24T07:42:13","modified_gmt":"2025-08-24T07:42:13","slug":"openai-chairman-says-ai-is-destroying-his-sense-of-who-he-is","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/93073\/","title":{"rendered":"OpenAI Chairman Says AI Is Destroying His Sense of Who He Is"},"content":{"rendered":"

For being poised to become the richest startup in history<\/a>, OpenAI’s architects seem\u00a0strikingly ambivalent about its work.<\/p>\n

The company’s CEO is constantly afraid<\/a> of the technology he’s unleashing on the world, a longstanding investor has been driven to what his peers say are signs of psychosis<\/a>, and even its chairman is panicking about losing his identity to the machine.<\/p>\n

Speaking on the podcast “Acquired<\/a>” earlier this week, the chair of OpenAI’s board, Bret Taylor, expressed his anxiety that AI chatbots like ChatGPT are redefining his relationship to technology, destroying \u2014 or at least making unrecognizable \u2014 the world of programming in which he built his career.<\/p>\n

“The thing I self-identify with\u00a0is just, like, being obviated by this technology,” Taylor said in the interview<\/a>. “So it\u2019s like, the reason why I think these tools are being embraced so quickly is they truly are like an Iron Man suit for all of us as individuals.”<\/p>\n

Though Taylor expressed some muted optimism about AI’s effects on “productivity,” his attitude toward the near future was decidedly troubled.<\/p>\n

“You\u2019re going to have this period of transition where it’s saying, like, ‘How I’ve come to identify my own worth, either as a person or as an employee, has been disrupted.’ That\u2019s very uncomfortable. And that transition isn\u2019t always easy,” the chairman declared.<\/p>\n

While it’s nice to know that multi-millionaires<\/a> like Taylor have feelings too, we should probably take his fearmongering with a grain of salt.<\/p>\n

For starters, GPT-5, OpenAI’s latest iteration of its ultra-popular chatbot, isn’t exactly taking humanity by storm. The model’s long-awaited release went over like a wet napkin<\/a> with users earlier this month, with software engineers and programmers particularly miffed<\/a> at the “updated” version’s coding abilities<\/a> compared to earlier iterations.<\/p>\n

Scaremongering is also a tried-and-true sales tactic for OpenAI more broadly. CEO Sam Altman is a trailblazer of the strategy, making comments about a theoretical superintelligence meant to intrigue investors while scaring lawmakers into compliance.<\/p>\n

In March of 2023, for example, Altman made an appearance on the “Lex Fridman Podcast<\/a>,” a popular interview show on tech and science. There, the CEO played coy about the software product he had spent years building.<\/p>\n

“I think it’s weird when people think it’s like a big dunk that I say, I’m a little bit afraid,” Altman said<\/a>. “And I think it’d be crazy not to be a little bit afraid, and I empathize with people who are a lot afraid.”<\/p>\n

That was mere weeks before OpenAI courted a further $300 million<\/a> in funding from various sources, amidst an ongoing campaign<\/a> to ensure the company has a seat at any table discussing AI regulation. In May 2023, Altman appeared before an unusually friendly<\/a> US Senate Committee to preach about the dangers of superintelligent AI<\/a> and call for its swift regulation, a move tech policy experts warned was paving the way for OpenAI to weaponize government regulation for its own gain.<\/p>\n

“It’s such an irony seeing a posture about the concern of harms by people who are rapidly releasing, into commercial use, the system responsible for those very harms,” tech policy researcher Sarah Myers West told the journal\u00a0Safe AI<\/a> at the time?<\/p>\n

Those comments could very well extend to Taylor, who recently founded a $4.5 billion AI startup<\/a>\u00a0called Sierra. His startup’s long-term survival basically hinges on whether it can entice companies like Casper Sleep<\/a>\u00a0or ADT<\/a> into outsourcing entire departments to the company \u2014 customer service, for example \u2014 essentially turning existing businesses into dependent clients<\/a> off which to feed.<\/p>\n

By ingratiating himself to the world, in other words, Taylor is not only buttering up future investors \u2014 but opening the door for yet another front of AI parasitism.<\/p>\n

More on OpenAI: OpenAI Seems Really Confused About Why People Use ChatGPT<\/a><\/p>\n

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