The Cinema-ification of Sam Altman

There was a moment, after he staved off a boardroom-coup attempt just before Thanksgiving 2023, when Sam Altman played like a hero, repelling the dark forces of anti-progress. Behold the Great Conqueror, ushering in an era of prosperity when petty doomsday-minded advisors would stand in his way! There was also a moment, after he stepped in to take the Defense Department’s Anthropic deal in early March, when Sam Altman played like a villain, embracing the dark forces of surveillance. Behold the Archangel, swiping souls and privacy data in the name of government contracts! Whatever the full truth of either description (anyone paying attention that November a few years ago soon realized only Wall Street cheered his comeback) I’d argue Altman at this point in his pop-culture evolution has transcended both those designations and any spectral stops in-between. The OpenAI leader has now landed on something else, something that may or may not be problematic but can’t be avoided and indeed whose whole point lies in its unavoidability: pure cinema. I of course mean cinema in a very literal sense. Luca Guadagnino currently sits posting Artificial, the Amazon MGM dramatization of that 2023 episode, starring Andrew Garfield in the role of the spidery one. The film, backed (with no apparent irony) by the company of a previous ineffable tech character, arrives in theaters later this year and will supply Altman with the tech mogul’s must-have 21st-century accessory of a fleeting film festival discourse. But by cinema I also mean another, more Kurosawa-like sense, where “painting and literature, theater and music, come together” — where trying to assess Altman as good or bad, or even what he is at all, becomes secondary to the point that he is, and strangely seems to have always been. (Try to pinpoint the first time you heard of him; you’ll likely find it difficult.) Altman represents so many vibes and modes of expression that any moral judgment we might apply fades beneath the point that matters: he is here and very probably always will be, and we will forever be incapable of turning away. Simply calling out Altman as someone to cheer for or root against feels insufficient, even as some people do that (especially the latter one). Mainly he expresses these Kurosawan forms, a figure we look at so hard for so long we stop even asking whether we should.

The most immediate reason for this impression comes from a Ronan Farrow-Andrew Marantz New Yorker piece published Monday, in which an 18-month investigation led to the opus “Sam Altman May Control Our Future — Can He Be Trusted?” Over its 11,000 words, no answer followed (though it leaned toward no) precisely because an answer is beside this cinematic-character point: he will survive all attempts to take him down, even the article that maybe came to do that, because our mind-realtor perpetually subleases him space even in just thinking about that takedown. Altman pre-emptively tried to distract from the piece’s impact with a same-day airdrop of his own literature, a 13-page prescriptive document titled “Industrial Policy for the Intelligence Age: Ideas to Keep People First.” Some proposals landed as laughably naive and pandering (a “time-bound 32-hour work-week”?); some felt startlingly hypocritical (“develop and test coordinated playbooks to contain dangerous AI systems once they have been released into the world” from a company famous for doing so little testing before?) Yet the divided reception showed Altman’s filmic ambiguities.

In this prescription we had a CEO who “didn’t just talk about the future —  he tried to redesign it,” as the AI newsletter Analyst Uttam described. Or, alternatively, as Ars Technica deputy editor Nate Anderson wrote in response to the toss of the word salad, “I don’t — thankfully — have to follow every statement that Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, makes about the world. Many of these statements seem more like ‘hustles’ or ‘pitches’ than attempts to speak thoughtfully about the future. Even if they are genuine statements of belief, they often read like a teenager’s first sci-fi novel, written under the influence of weed and way too much Star Trek.” But the viability of his suggestions were beside the point for us and, most importantly, for him. What mattered was that people were people talking about it and not about the other reams of published text. The whole strategy had a Netflix limited-series feel; you can almost imagine the scene in the script where, wracked with indecision over how to handle the incoming shrapnel, Altman and his puffer-vested media-operatives convene to figure out how to deflect it: “Aha! A simultaneously timed social manifesto.” You’ve heard of artwashing? Now we’ve got policypaper-washing. To Altman’s right and speaking loudest at that streaming-series meeting: OpenAI’s chief global affairs officer Chris Lehane (he’d probably want Rob Lowe but I’m thinking Woody Harrelson). On the Zoom and further down-table, a host of agreeables sitting in the places where Ilya Sutskever and voices of opposition once sat. And at the head of the room Vito C himself, taking it all in and deciding this was the moment, finally, to switch the narrative from a techno-utopian huckster fantasy (Universal Basic Income) to a more upstanding techno-regulator Bernie Sanders fantasy (the “robot tax”). Actually the Coppola comparison feels right, but in the inverse: where the director’s lead character was a loyal and upstanding figure in a fictional bad world, Altman reads as a shifty and disloyal character in a good real one. But in neither case does it actually matter. No one watches The Godfather to draw conclusions about the protagonist’s moral value — we watch it because we can’t not. Cinema. If this idea seems abstract, conjure your own mental image of Altman. He’s probably on a stage, because often that’s where we see him. But think of his face. What does it look like? Pleading? Petulant? Reassuring? Cagey? Or somehow all and none of these modes, like the animation from the New Yorker piece in which designers deepfaked a dozen visages and had him considering and discarding them as masks. Even in the entertainment industry, Altman has reached the place that goes beyond evaluation to imagination. Back in the summer of 2024 Ari Emanuel famously called  the OpenAI leader a “conman” at the Aspen Ideas Festival. Altman would then follow with more than a year of overtures to Hollywood in which executives slowly warmed to him. No one captures this arc better than Bob Iger’s Disney, which went from suing a GenAI company to putting $1 billion in Altman’s pocket. Now he has abruptly ended Sora and that Disney deal and we can’t decide what to think of him. Altman can’t kill Hollywood if he’s not even trying to operate in it. And yet he lingers in the town’s collective nightmare, a pixelated specter hanging above us like Big Brother in Apple’s 1984 Super Bowl ad, somehow representing all the industry threats of GenAI that in fact will be carried out by many others. Ridley Scott directed that commercial, and he seems like the most apt auteur for this analogy. Will Altman become Matt Damon, sciencing the shit out of our problems? Or John Hurt, convulsively chest-birthing an alien? Or maybe —  a third possibility we consider less often — just Geena Davis driving off a cliff and bringing down only himself and his confidantes. Even now, with all he’s done and all we know, it remains legitimately hard to predict where in the canon the Altman narrative ends up. Will he become the most powerful and dangerous man on the planet, a rollup of Elon Musk and his DOGE/ latter-stage X and Mark Zuckerberg and his earlier disinfo-peddling Facebook, supercharged with a regimen of Bryan Johnson Blueprint chemicals?  Or will he become a symbol of fallen Silicon Valley hubris, a rollup of Elizabeth Holmes and Adam Neumann supercharged with Nick Bostrom Ted Talks? Somehow it all becomes murky. We just sit in this dark auditorium watching him up there on the screen, unable to even remember why we bought a ticket.

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