Rewind: Ronan Farrow on Sam Altman’s ‘unconstrained’ relationship with the truth

Nilay Patel (0:01)

Hey everybody, it's Nilay. We're off today for the holiday, but we'll be back this Thursday with new episodes. In the meantime, we wanted to revisit a conversation from earlier this year I had with investigative journalist and New Yorker contributor Ronan Farrow about the in-depth feature on OpenAI CEO Sam Altman he co-authored with Andrew Marantz. I highly suggest you read that story if you haven't yet. It's fantastic and more relevant than ever. This episode was a big hit when we first ran it. Ronan is one of the best in the business when it comes to thorny, deep investigations. His piece in this conversation really grapples with Sam's controversial reputation for deception and the fallout that it causes. All of which still seems incredibly important today as OpenAI and others are responding to the alarming string of rogue AI incidents involving their own models. Against that backdrop, this conversation holds up remarkably well, and I think it has a lot to offer us in this current moment as calls for meaningful federal AI oversight have ground to a halt and it's on the industry to really police itself.

Okay, The New Yorker's Ronan Farrow on Sam Altman, AI Safety and whether we can trust the tech industry. Enjoy.

Ronan Farrow, you're an investigative reporter and contributor to The New Yorker. Welcome to Decoder.

Ronan Farrow (1:08)

Glad to be here. Thanks for having me.

Nilay Patel (1:10)

I am very excited to talk to you. You just wrote a big piece for The New Yorker. It's a profile of Sam Altman and with it, OpenAI. My read of it is all great features do.

With rigorous reporting validates a lot of feelings people have had about Sam Altman for a very long time. You've obviously published it. You've gotten reactions to it. How are you feeling about it right now?

Ronan Farrow (1:32)

I've been heartened actually by the extent to which it's broken through in a time where the attention economy is so kind of schizophrenic and shallow. This is a story that in my view affects all of us. And when I spend a year and a half of my life and my co-author Andrew Marantz also spent that time of his really trying to do something forensic and meticulous, it's always because I feel like there are bigger structural issues that affect people beyond the individual at the heart of the story, beyond the company at the heart of the story. Sam Altman against the backdrop of Silicon Valley hype culture, right? And startups that balloon to massive valuations based on promises that may or may not come to pass in the future, and an increasing embrace of a founder culture that thinks of as a future, not a bug, telling different groups different conflicting things. Even against that backdrop, Sam Altman is an extraordinary case where everyone in Silicon Valley who expects those things can't stop talking about this question of his trustworthiness and his honesty. And we knew already that he had been fired over some version of allegations of dishonesty or serial alleged lying.

But extraordinarily, despite the fact that there's been wonderful reporting, Keach Hagee has done great work on this, Karen Howe has done great work on this. There really wasn't definitive understanding of the actual alleged proof points and the reasons why those have stayed out of the public eye. Point number one is I feel heartened by the fact that some of those gaps in our public knowledge and even in the knowledge of Silicon Valley insiders have now been filled a little bit more.

Some of the reasons that they were gaps have been filled a little bit more. We report on cases where people inside this company really felt like things were covered up or deliberately not documented. One of the new things in this story is that a pivotal law firm investigation by Wilmer Hale, which is obviously a fancy credible big law firm that did investigations of Enron and Worldcom, which by the way were all voluminous, like hundreds of pages published. They did this investigation that was demanded by board members that had fired Altman as a condition of their departure when he got rid of them and he came back. And extraordinarily in the eyes of many legal experts I spoke to, and shockingly in the eyes of many people in this company, they kept it out of writing. All that ever emerged from that was an 800 WordPress release from OpenAI that described what happened as a breakdown in trust.

And we confirm that this was kept to oral briefings. There's cases we talk about where, for instance, a board member seemingly wants to vote against the conversion from OpenAI's original non-profit form into a for-profit entity, and it's recorded as an abstention. And there's a lawyer in the meeting saying, well, that could trigger too much scrutiny. And the person wants to vote against, and it gets recorded as an abstention to all appearances. There's factual dispute, OpenAI claims otherwise, as you might imagine. But these are all cases, essentially, where you have a company that by their own account holds our future in their hands, right? The safety stakes are so acute, they have not gone away. This is the reason this company was founded as a non-profit focused on safety. And where things were being obscured in a way that like credible people around this found less than professional. And you couple that with a backdrop where there's so little political appetite for meaningful regulation. And I think it's a very combustible situation. The point for me is not just that Sam Altman deserves these questions so acutely. It's that any of these guys in this field, and many of the key figures exhibit like, if not this particular idiosyncratic, alleged lying all the time trait, certainly like some degree of a race to the bottom mentality, right? Or the people who were safetyists have watered down those commitments and everyone is in a race posture. I think the point as we look at even recent leaks out of Anthropic is, there's a person who poses the question of who should have their finger on the button in this piece. The answer is, if we don't have meaningful oversight, I think we got to be asking serious questions and trying to surface as much information as we can about all of these guys. I've been heartened by what feels like a meaningful conversation about that or the beginnings of one.