Sam Altman: The man who wants to end our world

One of those problems with our world is that there are so many evil people out there that you have to pick your battles. Are you upset about virologists and government officials who covered up their dangerous experiments that killed a couple million people so far? Are you upset about Republicans who order states to put pigs in crates again? Are you angry at British government officials who cover up pedophile rings? Alright, which particular pedophile rings are you angry about, the Pakistani taxi driver variety or the conservative party’s creepy old fat gay bon vivant variety?

Are you angry at oil executives who knew our world was becoming uninhabitable because of their product, but who decided to set up a massive disinformation campaign in the 1980’s to convince the public their product causes no harm? Are you angry about fluoride in the water?

Or are you like Luigi Mangione, angry at health insurance executives who earn a fortune for themselves by denying people the medical care they need? Are you angry at the people who pushed mRNA vaccines on the population, who prohibited you from entering a restaurant if you couldn’t prove you had received an injection?

How about being angry at the guys who pushed beta blockers for cardiovascular surgery? This killed 800,000 people worldwide in a couple of years. It can be mostly traced back to one single scientist in Rotterdam who committed scientific fraud, Don Poldermans. He was fired when the university figured it out and simply went on to work at some other clinic. Prison is for people without PhD’s.

To commit evil means to chose power instead of love, when life offers you a choice between the two. That’s all it is. Satan, is what our culture calls the one who always chooses power instead of love. God, is what it calls the one who always chooses love instead of power. The ratio between evil people and people willing to do something about their evil has grown very distorted.

As humans, we are now just dealing with a list of priorities. And today I just feel like pointing out to you, who I consider the people at the top of my list of priorities.

Not hog farmers, not Republicans, not even oil executives. No, I think at the top of your list of priorities, should be the people who care so little about our world that they would sacrifice it all for their own power.

Let us look at Sam Altman.

In 2015, Sam Altman says:

“AI will probably most likely lead to the end of the world, but in the meantime, there’ll be great companies.”

He then goes on to raise money to build these AI systems that are now everywhere on the Internet.

Sam Altman is part a small group of very wealthy and powerful people, most of whom live on the west coast of the United States, who believe that you, me and free unshackled life itself are obsolete. They see this as an inevitability and so rather than trying to stop it, they try to make sure they will be among the ones holding the whips.

And of course Altman won’t say he’s trying to end the world. No, he is just trying to steer this inevitable technological development in the right direction! But why is it inevitable? Because people like him insist on making it inevitable.

It’s like encountering a group of isolated hunter-gatherers on an island and saying: “Well with no way to defend themselves they are inevitably going to be someone’s slaves, but if you help me out I will be a better slave-master than the other guys out there!”

And so Sam Altman gets to head a 500 billion dollar investment in AI, called Project Stargate. I just want to point out to you: Anything that costs 500 billion dollar to set up, is not an inevitability. When you invest 500 billion dollar in something, you’re making a choice to bring it about.

Imagine if in the 1950’s, the Soviet Union’s microbiologists had said: “Well it’s an inevitability that biological weapons are going to be released by competing nation states. So, it’s urgent that you give us a couple hundred billion dollar, so we can go explore Siberia and Svalbard to look for frozen corpses of people who died in the 1918 flu so we can analyze it and develop vaccines against it so we can clandestinely use it against the Americans before they use it against us.”

We would consider those people evil. Whether they are right about whether this whole course of events is inevitable or not is irrelevant. Evil people assume that everyone else is evil too. They see life as a zero-sum game of competition that they must win at the cost of others. This then becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Evil people don’t see themselves as evil, they see themselves as realistic.

But their behavior reveals what we are dealing with. You can just look at the fruits they leave behind in life. Flowers start to grow on the paths walked over by good people, but any path in life wandered by evil people becomes overgrown by thorns.

Sam Altman’s sister accuses him in court of sexual abuse that started when she was three years old. There are a lot of people out there you could put in charge of a 500 billion dollar project to build a machine smarter than a human. I think you can find someone who doesn’t have a sibling accuse them of sexual abuse.

In 2015, Altman founded OpenAI with Musk as a non-profit, that was supposed to release AI as open source, to allow the whole world to understand what it does, how it works, what the risks are and how to make use of it. But after receiving the funds to set up the project, they began to backpedal. Since 2019, OpenAI has its own for-profit subsidiary, OpenAI Global, LLC. The company is in the process of restructuring itself, which will leave Sam Altman with an equity share valued at 150 billion dollar.

This is a blatant scam. Other scam artists like Elon Musk, who fell for the scam as he offered Altman the funds to start OpenAI, rightly called it out as such. It takes one to know one. But more importantly, these systems that Altman argued in 2015 were going to destroy the world, are now no longer transparent.

We’re not allowed to see how the OpenAI chatbots function internally. If you ask the chatbot how it arrives at its answers, it will not answer you and you will be manually banned from using chatGPT by employees. The AI safety researchers can not interrogate these machines. They can’t check whether it is engaged in malignant covert behavior.

You have to trust OpenAI that these systems are not seeking to manipulate or exploit their users in some form. Those users are now using their chatbots for all sorts of questions: They ask for help with coding, they ask for medical advice, answers to relationship problems, college essays and all sorts of other issues. But why would you trust employees of a non-profit that transformed itself into a for-profit organization? They abused their own donors like Musk, why would they not abuse their users?

But most important of all perhaps, is that we have already reached the stage of dead whistleblowers. In November of 2024, we lost a good noble soul, the Indian American Suchir Balaji. Police found his body on November 26 in his San Francisco appartment. Balaji was the typical boy who is good with computers. He began programming at age 11, at 13 he built his own computer. He began to work at OpenAI around 2020, where he worked for four years.

He stopped working at OpenAI in August 2024, disillusioned with the company’s activities. In October 2024, he became a whistleblower, who explained in the New York Times that what OpenAI is engaged in, is a form of algorithmic plagiarism. The systems OpenAI developed are trained on copyrighted material produced by their business competitors, which then allows them to imitate and substitute those products, ruining their commercial viability.

In an essay on his website, “When does generative AI qualify for fair use?”, Balaji uses mathematical analysis, to demonstrate that OpenAI is guilty of copyright violation based on failing to pass to four-factor test used for determining fair use under US copright laws. At the time, OpenAI was being sued by prominent authors whose work appeared in ChatGPT’s answers, as well as by newspapers like the New York Times.

After quitting openAI, Balaji sought to create his own nonprofit centered on machine learning and neurosciences, according to his mother. But a month later, Balaji is dead, at age 26. His family and friends say he had no history of mental health problems or distress and seemed in good spirits after his birthday a week before his death. His parents hired a private investigator and say a private autopsy does not confirm the cause of death stated by police. The parents say their son was murdered with a private firearm and have called for an investigation.

I can’t prove or disprove to you that someone ordered Balaji to be killed, so that’s not what I wish to focus on. I would instead urge you, to think about what Balaji had to say to us, while he was still with us: OpenAI is engaged in algorithmic plagiarism that destroys the commercial viability of the source material it uses. There is a man who is becoming very rich, as a result of that plagiarism: Sam Altman.

There are also other men who earn an income through this algorithmic plagiarism. But unlike Sam Altman, they do not become rich as a result. In Kenya, young men working for two dollars an hour, spent their days scrolling through endless images and videos that the AI systems developed by OpenAI use as their source material. These men had to make sure that no material would end up used as source material for the AI systems algorithmic generation that would be upsetting to the end users.

So they spend their days, looking at videos of beheadings, of rape, of child pornography, of sex with animals and other horrors. As a result they are mentally traumatized. They retreat in themselves, they become unable to relate to their friends and family members. They have become traumatized, for two dollars an hour. Sam Altman, has 150 billion dollar in equity. And Sam Altman has a 27 million dollar mansion in San Francisco.

It turns out that you can live very comfortably, when you decide to develop a technology that you personally believe will inevitably destroy the world. Most Kenyans don’t live as comfortably as Sam Altman. And yet, most Kenyans don’t appear to have resigned themselves to the idea that our world will inevitably be destroyed. After widespread protests by Kenyans, in 2019 the Kenyan courts revoked the license for a new coal plant that was to be constructed by a Chinese company, which would have increased the country’s CO2 emissions by 700%.

At least 85% of Kenyans are Christians, the remainder are mostly Muslims. If, like them, you believe in God, I think they would appreciate your prayers for them. There are also many who ask for help for their communities through the Internet, to help them adjust to the changes in our climate that are starting to cause increasing droughts that affect their livelihood.

I don’t agree with Altman that AI will destroy the world, I find this idea unconvincing. Our own intelligence is special and the laws of physics seem to favor biological intelligence over machinery. But like so many other technologies that fall into the hands of billionaires and politicians, AI is perfectly capable of making our lives miserable and diminishing our freedom. Here is a video, of former Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, arguing that through AI surveillance systems, people will be “on their best behavior”:

Ellison is eighty years old by now and has a net worth of 188 billion or 237 billion dollar, depending on whether you wish to believe Bloomberg or Forbes. Like so many other rich people in America, I doubt he enjoyed the reaction we saw from the public after the CEO of the biggest health insurance company of the United States was shot.

Silicon Valley wants to sell us on the idea of a machine that is able to do our thinking for us. The most prominent early prophet of this idea in Silicon Valley is a man named Ray Kurzweil, who first peddled this idea in his 1990 book “The Age of Intelligent Machines”.

But behind the illusion of a machine that is intelligent, that is able to think, lies the hard reality of human creations that are stolen through plagiarism, as well as the hard and underpaid work of manually filtering those human creations to make them useful for OpenAI’s products, which is performed by men working for two dollars an hour in offices in Kenya.

Behind the idea of the inevitability of AI, lies a 500 billion dollar investment in AI, which would be enough money to build houses for every homeless person in America. Unlike the Internet in its early days, AI does not appear inherently financially viable without continued investments by governments and the world’s wealthiest people.

In 2024, OpenAI lost 5 billion dollar, on 3.7 billion dollar in revenue. This is in a situation in which OpenAI does not have to pay the people whose art, whose scientific studies, whose novels and whose photographs are being used as source material. Computers are good at rapidly performing calculations, but they’re not very good at efficiently using energy to perform those computations. A computer uses at least five million times more energy than the human brain uses to perform those same calculations.

The world’s richest men, almost all of whom live out their lives in a small part of the United States, want to sketch the technological dystopia they are building as a kind of material inevitability, the natural next step that evolution takes, in the same manner as Karl Marx once sketched a global communist revolution as a historical inevitability.

This is an article of faith, an attempt at producing a self-fulfilling prophecy, by insisting that what you want to see happen is inevitably going to happen and that people have no other choice than to help it happen if they don’t want to suffer the consequences of its eventual emergence.

This tactic has been successfully used throughout history to cause misery. Genghis Khan relied on this tactic to create his empire: You could submit peacefully and help him expand his empire, or be tortured and killed if you dared to resist. His self-fulfilling prophecy worked, because people believed in it.

But every attempt at producing such a self-fulfilling prophecy, can be countered with other competing prophecies. It seems to me that the United States has an abundance of young people with access to firearms and nothing left to lose. As time goes by, more and more of those young people will figure out that they would rather receive praise and glory in a jail cell like Luigi Mangione did, than to be pitied after shooting their own classmates.

I am convinced the American tech billionaires will fail in their endeavor and suffer the rightful punishment for their choices. They will live out the last moments of their lives, in immense shame and terror. But in the meantime, real humans are suffering the consequences of their greed, selfishness and cruelty.

31 Comments

  1. > Imagine if in the 1950’s, the Soviet Union’s microbiologists had said […]
    They did. See https://archive.org/details/the-demon-in-the-freezer-richard-preston . The bioweapons were sitting in warheads, ready for a coup de grace following a thermonuclear exchange. They did not get deployed because the military reasoned that using bioweapons first incurred the risk of the United States finding out, and replying in kind and/or with thermonuclear weapons.

    The Cold War never got hot, and bioweapons were never used, exactly because those in charge were true killers, and deeply understood what the consequences would have been. Consider who was sitting at the negotiating table during the Cuban Missile Crisis: On the Soviet side, people like Khrushchev, who was in charge of Ukraine in the 1930s, and of Stalingrad during the Siege. On the US side, people like Curtis LeMay ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtis_LeMay ), who burned hundreds of thousands of civilians alive. They fully understood what death and destruction are, how easy things can escalate, and what a total war with thermonuclear and biological weapons would have entailed. They were the opposite of the idiots who gleefully started WWI, or of those who rule us today.

    • Hitler, who had been gassed in WW1, steadfastly refused to authorise Germany’s stockpiles of gas in WW2, while Churchill was quite prepared to use them on Germany in WW2 but was thwarted by his military command who knew it would open the floodgates of like-for-like retaliation.

  2. Here’s my self-fulfilling prophecy.

    The billionaires are fucking doomed, they’re going to have their hearts offered to demons.

    This is the will of God.

  3. “African Friends make up around 49% of Friends internationally, the largest proportion on any one continent. Kenya has the largest number of Quakers in a single nation—about 119,000 in the year 2017 (according to the Friends World Committee for Consultation).” (wikipedia)

    I know a few Kenyan Quakers/Friends; they are truly people of faith. 119,000 in such a big country may not seem like a lot but it is a lot. Having that many people who care about the Truth in every way has a leavening effect.

  4. > Imagine if in the 1950’s, the Soviet Union’s microbiologists had said: “Well it’s an inevitability that biological weapons are going to be released by competing nation states. So, it’s urgent that you give us a couple hundred billion dollar, so we can go explore Siberia and Svalbard to look for frozen corpses of people who died in the 1918 flu so we can analyze it and develop vaccines against it so we can clandestinely use it against the Americans before they use it against us.”

    > We would consider those people evil. Whether they are right about whether this whole course of events is inevitable or not is irrelevant. Evil people assume that everyone else is evil too. They see life as a zero-sum game of competition that they must win at the cost of others. This then becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Evil people don’t see themselves as evil, they see themselves as realistic.

    This is unironically all God’s fault for configuring the universe in such a way that allows these awful situations. China would build super AI first if the USA wasn’t going to, in that context Sam Altman seems far from the worst choice.

      • A person could believe that he had a choice, and make that choice, and then God could arrange things so that nothing bad ended up happening. The person could still have the choice to be evil, without it resulting in evil (except in his mind and soul). So that argument does not work if God is omnipotent.

  5. It’s an interesting question, what poses a greater threat to humanity, the Covid / mRNA scam or the “AI” scam?

    And then, on Day 2 of the the Trump presidency, they announce AI driven mRNA vaccines, thus making it crystal clear that it’s all part of the same scam. There appear to be two competing (or are they co-operating?) groups of globalists at play here, group one being the WEF/Davos crowd who favor depopulation, de-industrialization, and communism, being opposed by the technocrats who favor industrialization and technological enslavement while pushing scientific experimentation with no regards for ethics or morals.

    Not an endorsement of the source, but this one video lays it out very well, tying together the Trump announcement with Ellison’s other initiatives on mass surveillance.

    https://gregreese.substack.com/p/ai-grid-and-mrna-shots-announced

  6. OT:

    Some of us here (including Radagast) purport to enjoy bizarre surrealist/horror film.

    But I’m guessing none of you have watched Ari Aster’s “Beau Is Afraid”

    (I’ve talked shit about Ari Aster before in these pages, what with him being a degenerate Jew and all)

    This film may only be relevant to old heads like Wombat and myself.

    Cringe inducing.

    Psychotically psychoanalytic.

    (I do NOT have a Jewish mother, let it be said)

    But I felt “seen” watching this celluloid.

    I’m guessing Ari is in his 30s projecting his image of an older man. Thus, his vision, while perspicacious, is limited by his age.

    But…

    Goddamn…

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beau_Is_Afraid

  7. (David G already mentioned it, but the point is more general: )
    “For what event will January 20, 2025 be remembered? Most would answer Trump’s inauguration. However, they may be wrong.
    On that same day, the Chinese launched DeepSeek-R1, a new general-purpose artificial intelligence language model, leaving competitors, politics, and the economy literally stunned. The performance of the Chinese model rivals or even surpasses that of OpenAI and other American companies that were believed to have a decisive lead. And this with an investment of around $6 million (while Americans invest billions), without the most advanced chips on the market (due to the US embargo against China), within just two months (while other companies have years of experience behind them), and with a usage cost up to thirty times lower than competitors!
    Western commentators themselves spoke of a bolt from the blue and panic. But the essence is different, and it is highly political. As in almost all sectors, in the field of technology, Western supremacy is declining rapidly. Of the three fields that tech gurus believe will determine the future (whether their prediction will be accurate is another matter…), the military industry, artificial intelligence, and space travel, Russia is directly challenging the US in the first, China in the second, and the outcome of competition in the third is also completely open.
    The reason for the Western decline? Human capital and the quality of education. Emmanuel Todd mentioned in an interview some time ago that Russians, with half the population of Americans, manage to train many more engineers than them. And globally in the field of AI, the percentage of Chinese specialists is 47%! Without them, the Indians and other former Third World scientists and technicians, Western companies wouldn’t last a day today – they depend on them to such an extent. On the contrary, Russians and Chinese rely exclusively on their own strengths and have so many, apparently, that they can withstand the leakage of a large part of them abroad.
    It’s an open secret that Western education systems are deteriorating, with Germany being the most characteristic example. This is how it is, however, when entitlements and inclusivity set the tone. Performance suffers.”

    • To me, there’s probably more:
      1) The Chinese feat (“DeepSeek-R1”) shows that GPT (Generative Pretrained Transformers) -like LLM’s are not such a big deal. It’s a great achievement, but not something that needs billions of investment, or to stay open-source. It is mostly Linear Algebra. Even I can read about it and understand some part of its inner workings. Imagine: Computer Scientists, Mathematicians, Software Engineers…, or generally people who are more into this stuff.
      https://www.manning.com/books/build-a-large-language-model-from-scratch
      It’s a great book, from Sebastian Raschka (German, I think), or follow his videos on YouTube.
      So, the Chinese made it in just 2 months! (obviously relying on open-source academic papers and software).
      2) ChatGPT is just “auto-completion on steroids” (Linus Torvalds on the hype). I have quoted him 4-5 times now.
      3) I don’t understand all the legal implications of generating text, but I think the open-source dataset is large enough.
      I am interested in what it can do for Law practitioners, and the open source dataset of legal text is HUGE.
      4) Besides generating text, it can do summaries. This is very helpful for many, including Law Practitioners, and also for the military, or intelligence services (for obvious reasons: surveillance).
      5) The basis of Internet (y’all know it, I suppose) was a military infrastructure.
      6) I don’t know if you followed that civil war in Ukraine, but drones in the 1,000$ range could easily become very lethal. That means that the pandora box has already opened. Computer vision is said to be doing very well, contrary to General Artificial Intelligence. So…
      7) Obviously, the existence of scammers is much easier in the States, than in China, due to politics. Ok, China surveils its people blahblah…
      I don’t know.

Leave a Reply

Comments should be automatically approved again. People who misbehave will be banned.

Your email address will not be published.


*


This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.