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

Today on Decoder, I’m talking with Ronan Farrow, one of the biggest stars of investigative reporting working today. He broke the Harvey Weinstein story, among many, many others. And just last week, he and co-author Andrew Marantz published an incredible deep-dive feature in The New Yorker about OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, his trustworthiness, and the rise of OpenAI itself.

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

The head of OpenAI has a reputation for deception. The New Yorker’s Ronan Farrow on why that matters.

All that said, there is a lot swirling around Altman that’s fair game for rigorous reporting — the kind of reporting Ronan and Andrew set out to do. Thanks to the popularity of ChatGPT, Altman has emerged as the most visible figurehead of the AI industry, having turned a once nonprofit research lab into an almost trillion-dollar private company in just a few years. But the myth of Altman is deeply conflicted, equally defined both by his obvious dealmaking ability and his reported tendency to… well, lie to everyone around him.

The story is over 17,000 words long, and it contains arguably the definitive account of what happened in 2023 when the OpenAI board of directors very suddenly fired Altman over his alleged lying, only for him to be almost instantly rehired. It’s also a deep dive into Altman’s personal life, his investments, his courting of Middle Eastern money, and his own reflections on his past behavior and character traits that led one source to say he was “unconstrained by the truth.”

Ronan talked to Altman many times over the 18 months he spent reporting this piece. One of the new things in this story is a pivotal law firm investigation by WilmerHale. WilmerHale did this investigation that was demanded by board members who had fired Altman. And extraordinarily — in the eyes of many legal experts — they kept it out of writing. All that ever emerged from that was an 800-word press release from OpenAI that described what happened as a breakdown in trust. We confirmed that this was kept to oral briefings.

There are cases where, for instance, a board member seemingly wants to vote against the conversion from OpenAI’s original nonprofit form into a for-profit entity, and it’s recorded as an abstention. The safety stakes are so acute that they have not gone away. This is the reason this company was founded as a nonprofit focused on safety, and where things were being obscured in a way that credible people around this found it less than professional. I think it’s a very combustible situation.