Sam Altman’s Pandora’s Box

Sam Altman’s OpenAI is a strange beast, with a Russian nesting doll structure containing a for-profit company inside a nonprofit organization.
Sam Altman’s OpenAI is a strange beast, with a Russian nesting doll structure containing a for-profit company inside a nonprofit organization. Photo: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
Baratunde Thurston
December 3, 2023

What do you get a 1-year-old for their birthday? A smash cake? Some learning blocks? A party that’s allegedly for the kids, but really for the parents who sneakily moved their wine threshold to midafternoon? What if that 1-year-old weren’t a human child, but instead a generative A.I. chatbot that’s already consumed terabytes of information and whose parent company has set off an arms race to plug large language models into nearly every aspect of the tech industry? Would you gift it more capabilities? Increased regulation? What about a new C.E.O. who’s actually the old C.E.O. in the fastest executive reinstatement in Silicon Valley history?