Notebook: (2) Mr. Smith and Goliath

by Ann Kjellberg, editor

Landscape with precious commodity: a Microsoft data center in Washington State. A cloud-based supercomputer using technology from Nvidia that Microsoft opened in August to host its artificial intelligence capacity was in November declared the third fastest supercomputer in the world

Read Part One of this post here!

Meanwhile in artificial intelligence, the new technology that threatens to upend our way of life, industry leader OpenAI on March 8 reinstated recently ousted and restored CEO Sam Altman to its board, newly populated with industry leaders (as opposed to computer scientists and technology scholars), and announced that an investigation by the law firm WilmerHale, not publicly released, had exonerated him. With options like the mercurial Elon Musk and the robotic Mark Zuckerberg, folks seem relieved to reposit their trust in this well-spoken and civil individual, and yet here we are again with power over a black-box technology resting in one guy and beholden to a major corporate financial interest, the original nonprofit board’s pretentions at offering a more publicly-minded model now neatly dusted away. Elon Musk himself recently sued OpenAI, largely, apparently, out of pique, and yet within his complaint some observers acknowledged a trace of shared regret at the abandonment of a more humanistic vision for tech governance. Sam Altman on Monday assured podcaster Lex Fridman that “what we’d really like is for the board of OpenAI to answer to the world as a whole” and be an agent “for the public good,” but I guess we just have to trust him on that. Facebook and Google once made similar avowals, claiming, as Altman does in this interview, to doing us good by offering their product for free, which turned out in in their case to have been an illusion: we paid for these marvelous services with personal information that they have abundantly monetized. In the Lex Fridman podcast Sam Altman deflects questions about OpenAI’s intentions on that score.