From Parmy Olson’s Supremacy: AI, ChatGPT and the Race That Will Change the World loc 643:
To handle his anxiety, Altman got into meditation, sometimes sitting with his eyes closed and concentrating on just his breath for up to an hour at a time. Over time, he later said, he developed an increasingly diminished sense of self. “One thing I realized through meditation is that there is no self that I can identify with in any way at all,” he told the Art of Accomplishment podcast. “I’ve heard that of a lot of people spending a lot of time thinking about [powerful AI] get to that in a different way too.”
To be fair, I’ve read the transcript and he doesn’t describe himself as enlightened. But he does use what I believe are real meditation experiences to construct a public image of himself as spiritually refined: from the talk about “no self”, reports that “I feel incredibly joyful all of the time” through to how you “deeply feel” “nonduality” and distinguishing himself from the strung-out non-enlightened tech bros around him. So while he doesn’t say “I believe I have achieved enlightenment” I think he is quite explicitly saying “I am spiritually refined in a way you are not”, playing off the floating signifiers like “nonduality” and “no self” to leave the extent of that refinement an open question.
And yet this man with no self (‘he can find’) spends a lot of time and money preparing for doomsday. From loc 653 in the same book:
The idea of death seemed to terrify Altman. He was a self-described prepper and spent a great deal of time and money preparing for a catastrophic global event, like a synthetic virus being released into the world or being attacked by AI. “I try not to think about it too much,” he was quoted as telling a group of start-up founders in his New Yorker profile. “But I have guns, gold, potassium iodide, antibiotics, batteries, water, gas masks from the Israeli Defense Force, and a big patch of land in Big Sur I can fly to.”
The description of Altman’s relationship with Paul Graham reminded me of what I’ve read of how Macron cultivated the backing of elderly billionaires in France. The capacity to position yourself as a dutiful discipline to powerful men is a unique skill, even if Paul Graham is younger and less wealthy than Macron’s sponsors.
The reality is that, as Olson clearly conveys in an otherwise weirdly hagiographical book, Altman positioned himself at the centre of an innovation network, at exactly the right moment, with increasing returns as his social and financial capital grew. Like a big hungry spider gobbling up the choices morsels that got caught in his web. From loc 621:
His place at the top of YC meant he was better positioned than many other venture capitalists to win jackpots like that, getting an intimate view on hundreds of companies who’d already been carefully screened, and in the middle of one of the greatest bull market runs in history. Getting pitched by all those start-ups also helped him see into the future.
This is why his self-construction is so interesting to me. The obvious parallel is Musk who, as Dave Karpf once put it, possibly constitutes the most dramatic case of survivor bias in human history. If you dimly sense that your wealth and status accrue from the accumulating gains of being at the centre of the right network at the right term (relying in Musk’s case on government contracts and interventions to a degree unparalleled amongst the 21st century class of tech lords) then there’s a psychological and strategic need to construct an image for others (and yourself) as a visionary preoccupied with lofty purposes unlike the banal fixations of the others within your class.
#bigTech #billionaires #digitalElites #elonMusk #openAI #ParmyOlson #samAltman #Supremacy #techLords