The Social World

Tag: Sam Altman

  • Bill Gates and the rightward shift of the billionaires

    Bill Gates and the rightward shift of the billionaires

    To his fellow high priests of the church of climate change, Bill Gates has just committed the ultimate heresy. He has told us that we are not all going to die from scorching temperatures, despite in the past having said “we are setting ourselves up for a humanitarian and geopolitical disaster.” In a new essay posted on his personal website, he has attacked the “doomsday view” that “in a few decades, cataclysmic climate change will decimate civilization.” He writes: “Fortunately for all of us, this view is wrong. Although climate change will have serious consequences… it will not lead to humanity’s demise.”

    His rejection of catastrophism is no small matter. Next week, the world’s great and good will board their private jets and head off to the Brazilian city of Belém for COP30, an annual shindig that is very much based on the premise that the world is coming to an end unless we take drastic action. According to UN Secretary General António Guterres last month, climate change has pushed humanity “to the brink” – a variation on last year, when he told us we were at “breaking point.” Spewing out the superlatives has been an annual ritual since even before Al Gore told us in 2006 that we had ten years left to save the planet. The only variation is exactly how long we have left before we seal our fate, ranging from eight years (then-Prince Charles in 2009), to five years (the WWF in 2007 and again in 2024), three years (former UN climate chief Christiana Figueres in 2017) or two years (current UN climate chief Simon Stiell in 2024.) 

    As every doomsayer has discovered throughout history, it is one thing to gain attention with your grim prophecies before the hour at which you say they will happen, but it becomes a little harder once those dates have passed and we are all still living and breathing. Gates, for one, has realized that the hyperbole is starting to lose its effect. Anyone who wants to retain public attention on the issue will have to acknowledge that actually, no, we are not all going to die from climate change. Most won’t even notice.

    What the doom-mongers ever thought they would achieve was always puzzling. Telling people that they are all going to die is hardly the greatest way of motivating them. Set impossible deadlines for human societies to eliminate their greenhouse-gas emissions and you encourage them into apathy more than anything. You plant the idea in people’s heads: why not enjoy our last few years and go out in style? Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we fry!

    Of course, many young people indoctrinated into the doomsday cult by their teachers and professors had just the opposite response. More than half of all zoomers and millennials report that so-called eco-anxiety distresses their mental health; 52 percent of them say the looming threat of climate change makes them less likely to have children. Maybe this is why Generation Z is so antisocial – no time to party when you’ve gotta save the planet! Will Gates and his jet-set peers apologize for creating a generation of childless neurotics? Probably not. Better just to bury your reversal in a bland memo.

    Note the timing of Gates’s newfound wisdom. Since President Donald Trump was re-elected, it’s become politically and financially inconvenient to be so green and gloomy. “Drill, baby, drill,” commands the President, and poof goes corporate America’s insistence that we all must buy overpriced, dumb-looking electric vehicles.

    President Trump has said his favorite architectural style is that of Louis XIV – think gold, grand, a bit gaudy. Hence his gilded plans for the White House’s new ballroom. Like that French monarch, nicknamed the Sun King, Trump has the nation’s oligarchs revolving around him. None dare stray too far from his light, as the President has no qualms about picking winners and losers among the titans of industry. Musk, Zuck, Altman and Bezos figured this out quickly, and soon after the election began making journeys to Trump’s palace of Mar-a-Lago to pay tribute.

    Gates is a late entry to this popularity contest, and we’re not likely to see him riding shotgun in a golf cart with the President around the links. But his defection from the progressive orthodoxy bodes well: other billionaires will surely follow, and the ruling class may finally begin to respond to Americans’ needs rather than what that class thinks those needs should be.

    But it’s not just Trump who should be thanked for the billionaire red shift: New York’s incoming Mayor Zohran Mamdani deserves some share of the gratitude as well. No city has more billionaires or millionaires than New York. As Heather Mac Donald explains in our cover story, that economic boon may not survive Mamdani’s reign. Mayor Mamdani is committed to making the rich “pay their fair share,” whatever that means, and to fighting the 1 percent. There’s a word for this: extortion. Fortunately for the city’s many business leaders, plenty of low-tax, red-state promised lands across the country will welcome their exodus.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s November 10, 2025 World edition.

  • My son was murdered after whistleblowing on OpenAI

    My son was murdered after whistleblowing on OpenAI

    When Tucker Carlson sat down with OpenAI founder Sam Altman in an interview aired last week, the conversation took a dark and frosty turn when Carlson raised the death of a former OpenAI researcher. Suchir Balaji, who exposed the company’s systematic theft of copyrighted work, was found dead in his San Francisco apartment last November. Altman called it “suicide.” Clearly unconvinced, Carlson asserted that Balaji was “definitely murdered.” Altman was offended by his insinuation and described the death as a “great tragedy,” saying he was “really shaken” by it. But Balaji’s grieving mother, Poornima Rao, is very much in agreement with Carlson. 

    Balaji, 26, had become a key witness in lawsuits threatening to pull apart OpenAI’s facade, including the New York Times’s case over alleged copyright theft. His testimony would have contained accusations that the company built billion-dollar products by strip-mining the work of writers, artists and journalists without consent or payment. Had he spoken under oath and his evidence been accepted, the fallout for OpenAI could have been catastrophic. Lawsuits already in the works would have gained serious momentum. Damages could have reached the billions. Microsoft’s $13 billion bet on Altman’s company could have been thrown into crisis. A company cosplaying as the future of civilization could have been unmasked as a factory of stolen ideas.

    But before the young man could testify, he was found dead in his apartment. Police investigated and found no evidence of foul play, and the Chief Medical Examiner determined it was suicide, yet nothing about it sat right with those who knew him. There were no farewells, no notes, no trace of despair. His family commissioned a second autopsy and crime scene investigation, which told another story. Blood in two rooms. The gunshot’s trajectory was “atypical” for a suicide. There was evidence of another injury to the side of his head. And wires for the video cameras in his building appeared to have been cut. 

    His death came only weeks after the Florida-born researcher confided to his mother about the retaliation he faced inside OpenAI. She said he had been isolated, sidelined and quietly pushed toward the exit. He warned her that speaking up had meant career death. 

    Poornima Rao describes a deliberate campaign to marginalize him after he raised concerns about OpenAI’s methods. “He was not doing research during the last few months of his tenure.”

    She refuses to let his story end there. She does not, and never has, believed her son killed himself. 

    When asked what evidence led her to believe her son was murdered, Rao says there were “signs of struggle, injuries to the face, a head wound without any fall and ripped jeans.” She went further, stressing that “the gunshot angle was forward to backward and top down – the angle of an execution.” In other words, the new forensic details she commissioned paint a picture that contradicts the official storyline. The company strongly denies the theory.

    On September 17, she will stand in Congress, carrying both grief and conviction. Her mission is not to defend her son’s reputation, which remains untarnished, but to fight for laws that protect other whistleblowers. 

    “We were approached by Whistleblowers of America,” Rao says. “We expressed our desire to bring protection for whistleblowers. We are excited to be on Capitol Hill for the briefing of the legislature.” Her use of the word excited may sound strange in the shadow of such loss, but it signals resolve. She sees her son’s death as part of something larger. It is not only one family’s tragedy. It is about building safeguards so truth-tellers are not buried with their secrets.

    “This is the beginning of a long fight,” she explains. “We can request amendments as we learn. One change would be to retrofit the law to meet our needs.” By needs, she means more than symbolic protections. She’s talking about practical safeguards that whistleblowers can trust when the pressure mounts. 

    She’s also pragmatic. When asked whether she thinks her allegations will be taken seriously or if Congress is simply staging another show, her answer is steady. “This is the beginning of a long fight. This is not a hearing. It is a Congress session about lawmaking.” By stressing lawmaking, Rao underlines the difference between empty performance and binding change. Hearings can generate headlines, but laws reshape systems. 

    Rao is not naive. She knows the odds. OpenAI is worth $500 billion, backed by deep pockets and even deeper political clout. Altman recently attended a White House dinner where he lavished praise on President Trump with a tone that felt more like North Korea than Washington. That kind of coziness with power makes could make taking the company on even harder. But she’s focused and determined to get the justice she believes her son deserves. 

    When asked what that means, her answer is both personal and sweeping. “Justice for Suchir would be to classify his death as a homicide, hold everyone involved accountable, see the copyright lawsuit by the New York Times against OpenAI succeed, and have Sam Altman lose his position.”

    Her vision of justice cuts deep: it’s not enough to explain away one suspicious death, the entire structure that allowed it must be dismantled

  • Why do journalists go easy on Sam Altman?

    Why do journalists go easy on Sam Altman?

    As legacy journalism continues its downward slide – in influence, quality and revenue – I have two possibly dubious temptations. One is to cut my fellow old-timers some slack. After all, they’ve been crippled by Google’s and Facebook’s massive robbery of everything we write and publish, and it’s hard enough to survive by practicing the traditional scribbling and reporting trade. Why criticize the work of the remaining few publications that are still trying to eke out an honest existence in the grand tradition of serious investigation and clear-sighted exposure of wrongdoing and corruption? So they’ve dumbed down the content a little, so the online reader is constantly interrupted by advertising, so what?

    My other temptation is to give in to the digital age. Go with the flow. Circulate unfiltered provocation on the internet and hope for some fleeting fame or page views. Make a TikTok video, with irony of course, but also with a nod to the inevitable future. Duke it out with everybody on X and compete to create the best bons mots.

    Maybe I could start a Substack column, which nobody will edit or reject. After all, my hero I.F. Stone (1907-89), with his muckraking weekly newsletter, was a kind of Substack pioneer. But now comes the newer, seemingly more existential threat from artificial intelligence that gives me pause in my defeatist accommodation of the latest media realities.

    AI puts Google’s larcenous engineering to shame in its destruction of copyright – its utter disregard for authorship, originality or intellectual property. Two lawsuits against OpenAI – a class action by the Authors Guild and 17 authors, and another one by the New York Times – are all you really need to read to understand how dire the situation has become. If these lawsuits fail, it won’t just be fake books recommended for summer appearing in the Chicago Sun-Times; it might be fake but plausible-sounding cures for cancer that lead gullible citizens to destroy themselves in a quest for survival.

    However, the same danger applies to the legacy media: gullibility about these algorithm-dominated times, as well as greed, may lead publishers and editors to commit suicide while proclaiming their commitment to life. I saw this most distressingly in May in the Financial Times, an excellent newspaper that I pay for and read six days a week without any assistance from AI.

    In its usually estimable weekend edition, the editor, Roula Khalaf, devoted the paper’s “Lunch with the FT” column to Sam Altman, the founder and chief executive of OpenAI, which recently claimed it’s making $10 billion in “annual recurring revenue.”

    To call the interview fawning isn’t quite right, though there was some fawning going on. Perhaps clueless is more accurate, since Khalaf neglected to challenge, even politely, Altman’s extraordinarily high regard for his own talents and what he believes to be the virtues of his company.

    OpenAI’s leader is a terrific huckster and self-promoter, in a league with Trump and Musk

    When Khalaf arrived for lunch at Altman’s Napa Valley “farm,” was she really ignorant of the damage OpenAI has already done to schools and learning, among other things? “Since OpenAI released ChatGPT in November 2022, the world of higher education has been turned upside down,” wrote John J. Goyette in the Wall Street Journal in May. “Cheating is rampant. Students turn to generative artificial-intelligence chatbots to do their readings, complete their take-home exams and write their papers…

    “We’re still in the early stages of the AI era, but the future for higher education looks bleak. Early research suggests what educators know: AI assistance can boost students’ short-term performance, but it enervates long-term comprehension, especially after the digital crutches are taken away.”

    The same might be said of Khalaf’s short term comprehension. Evidently charmed by Altman’s “offer to cook a simple vegetarian meal instead of meeting at a restaurant of his choice,” the interviewer seemed to transmogrify into Altman’s customer, or perhaps potential investor, by repeating without any evident skepticism the party line on what will determine the winner of “the fierce race for AI supremacy: the pursuit of artificial general intelligence, when a machine can surpass the cognitive abilities of humans, not only absorbing knowledge but reasoning and learning on its own.” No wonder OpenAI is valued at around $300 billion for making tools that are being exploited for con artistry and fraud by students and teachers alike: its leader is a terrific huckster and self-promoter, in a league with Donald Trump and Elon Musk, who gets away with telling an admiring journalist that his is “the coolest, most important job maybe in history” at the head of an enterprise that is manufacturing programs with “genius-level intelligence” and driving a new “Renaissance.”

    Maybe, but Khalaf appeared more interested in Altman’s prowess in the kitchen: “I watch Altman season with cumin the yellow and orange carrots grown on the farm which are then roasted in the oven. With impressive determination, he chops an enormous amount of garlic, which he tosses into a pan with red chili peppers, walnuts, parsley and pecorino to make what looks like a Californian take on aglio e olio spaghetti.” I guess he is kind of special, what with his new husband and baby. He asked ChatGPT which crib to buy. Adorable! Not so adorable, perhaps, the uses of AI by the Israeli army to choose targets in Gaza and spy on Palestinians – another subject untouched by Khalaf.

    Khalaf does mention “questions about the liberal use of others’ intellectual property,” without mentioning the lawsuits against OpenAI but acknowledging “licensing deals with publishers, including the FT.”  And she notes “existential questions about the way we live” and “a future in which AI agents communicate with each other without instruction by humans,” which could lead to the extinction of the human race. But this is softball skepticism.

    AI is the current existential threat to everybody working at the Financial Times, where presumably OpenAI’s machines have already scraped Khalaf’s interview with Altman to help build their public-relations model. Unfortunately, the extinction of journalists and journalism won’t be prevented by humans who should know better kowtowing to men who think only about winning and making more money.

    Perhaps I am unfair to Altman. I wondered, when I read the interview: what does the “hyperactive” “chief disrupter” read when he’s not cooking up a storm? AI-generated recipes – or The Art of the Deal?

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s September 15, 2025 World edition.