On Monday night at the Sydney Goldstein Theater on Hayes St., OpenAI CEO Sam Altman shared the stage with San Francisco Warriors Head Coach Steve Kerr at a talk billed as an intimate conversation called At the Table with moderator Manny Yekutiel. Altman and Kerr were ostensibly there to discuss their styles of leadership and the idea of innovation, but what proved far more interesting was the sharp contrast of their values.
“One thing that’s unusual about AI…is that it could go really wrong,” Altman said at one point, a line that was met with laughter from the audience. I was hoping it was awkward laughter, but I couldn’t tell. “There’s going to be lots of horrible AI in the world, and there’s going to be some bad people using it for bad things,” he added. “My hope is that there’s way more good AI that can counteract the bad.”
As he spoke, Altman sat with his hands folded, sometimes staring downward as if he’d been caught in the act of doing something bad.
Indeed, in many peoples’ eyes, the chief executive of OpenAI has done something bad: he has become the human avatar of an unfettered, profit-driven pursuit of general artificial intelligence without regard to the profound dangers it might pose to humanity. Throughout the conversation, Altman acknowledged the great harms AI may bring, but made himself out to be powerless to measure or limit them.
It’s hard to seem repentant for something you tell the world is out of your hands. In his public statements and appearances, Kerr has embraced responsibility, revealing a strong moral compass driving his work and life. For years, he has worked with Brady, a national gun violence prevention group, to stop the scourge of shootings. Kerr came to this advocacy in part because his father, who served as a professor in Beirut, was shot and killed in 1984. Kerr has also discussed the responsibility white people have to stop police from killing Black citizens. He’s been a consistent and vocal critic of President Donald Trump, whom Altman is working with on the Stargate Project and whom he praised in September for being “such a pro-business, pro-innovation President. It’s a very refreshing change.”
Where Kerr has consistently used his platform to stand up to Trump, Altman contributed $1 million of his own funds to the president’s inauguration. (This after briefly being the face of the anti-Trump resistance in Silicon Valley.) Kerr chose not to visit the White House in early 2018 when the Warriors won the 2017 NBA championship. (The Warriors instead toured the National Museum of African American History, an institution the president attacked in a second-term executive order for “divisive, race-centered ideology.”)
Altman is hardly alone among tech leaders who paid obeisance to the president, but sitting beside Kerr, who marched at the No Kings protest last month, only further laid bare the OpenAI CEO’s moral flexibility. That the city where this conversation took place is still bracing for an inevitable presidential about-face on federal troop deployment and continues to witness ICE kidnappings at Immigration Court was a reminder that the two men weren’t just on different sides of the issues, but occupy vastly separate moral universes.
In a moment that has already gone viral, Altman was served legal papers on stage. The OpenAI CEO looked bewildered or indignant as Yekutiel and someone who looked like he worked for the theater blocked the man who was apparently affiliated with the group StopAI, and escorted him off stage.
The subpoena moment made me think about Adam Reine, whose parents have sued OpenAI in San Francisco Superior court, just four blocks from where Altman was sitting. Their lawsuit argues that ChatGPT advised Adam on how to kill himself, and offered to assist with his suicide note. For the Reine family, I wondered, will the good that AI brings possibly outweigh the bad? And would Sam Altman even know the difference?
