Is Sam Altman a Sociopath?
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Sam Altman is a profoundly duplicitous person who’s willing to say whatever is necessary to acquire increasingly obscene amounts of wealth and power.
In 2023, the Washington Post *reported that “senior employees” at OpenAI describe Altman “as psychologically abusive,” with some company leaders saying that he is “highly toxic” to work with. *Gizmodo writes that “Altman was accused of pitting employees against each other and causing ‘chaos’ at the startup.”
Todor Markov, who left OpenAI to work for Anthropic (another villain in the race to build AGI), characterizes Altman as “a person of low integrity who had directly lied to employees” about non-disparagement agreements that barred “them from saying negative things about the company, or else risk having their vested equity taken away.”
Altman has repeatedly claimed that he does “not have a stake in OpenAI,” yet it turns out that he financially benefited from OpenAI’s Startup Fund, which he owned until last year.
A deposition just made public from former OpenAI employee and cofounder Ilya Sutskever includes an email memo that reads: “Sam exhibits a consistent pattern of lying, undermining his execs, and pitting his execs against one another.” When a lawyer asked Sutskever during the deposition, “What action did you think was appropriate?,” he replied: “Termination".
Gary Marcus notes that Altman just got caught “lying his ass off” once again — this time “to the American public.” You can read Marcus’ commentary here,
- He [Sam] claimed that “we do not have or want government guarantees for OpenAI datacenters.”
- And yet OpenAI had “explicitly asked the White House office of science and technology (OSTP) to consider Federal loan guarantees, just a week earlier.”
Even Altman’s sister, Annie Altman, has repeatedly accused Sam of abusive behavior. “I experienced sexual, physical, emotional, verbal, financial, and technological abuse from my biological siblings, mostly Sam Altman and some from Jack Altman,”
In my view, Altman is very likely a sociopath — someone who does not suffer the pangs of a conscience, which is why he’s able to lie, cheat, and harm people with such ease. He certainly has a lot of sociopathic traits, even joking on multiple occasions about killing everyone on Earth.
For example, in 2015, he told the VP of engineering at Airbnb: “I think AI will … most likely sort of lead to the end of the world, but in the meantime there will be great companies.” On another occasion, he said that “probably AI will kill us all.
Futurism reports, he [Sam] “now has the power to ‘crash the global economy” because of his constant lies about how amazing LLMs would be, resulting in a huge bubble 17 times the size of the dot-com bubble. Like many sociopathic billionaires, Altman’s greatest legacy will likely be the profound harms he caused people on his single-minded quest to — paraphrasing Graham — “become powerful.”