Nilay Patel asked why there is so much silence in Silicon Valley around Sam Altman, including over the widely circulated memos about him. Farrow contrasts his sources here, people with power and little exposure, with national-security whistleblowers who risk everything and talk anyway. The folding he describes came after Altman's firing.
…seemingly pushing like really hardcore dossiers that kind of amount to nothing. They're vaporous when you actually start to look at the underlying claims. The sad thing is that it really obscures the more evidence-based critiques here that I think really deserve urgent oversight and consideration.
…memos, and they're just out in Silicon Valley. Everyone calls them the Ilya memos. But there's even silence around that, right? They're passed around, but they're not discussed. Where do you think that comes from? Is it fear? Is it a desire to get angel investment? Where does that come from?
…Valley culture is just so kind of ruthlessly self-interested and ruthlessly business and growth-oriented. So, you know, I think this afflicts even like some of the people who were involved in firing Sam, where you saw in the days after, yes, one factor that led to him coming back and the firing of old board members was that he rallied investors who were confused to his cause. But another is that so many other people around it who had the concerns and voiced them urgently just folded like napkins and changed their tune the moment they saw the wind was blowing the other way and they wanted in on the profit train. It's pretty dark, honestly, from my standpoint as a reporter. Some
of those people are Mira Marathi, who for I believe 20 minutes was the new CEO of OpenAI. She was then replaced. It was a very complicated sort of dynamic. And obviously Sam came back. The other person is Ilya Sutzcover, who was one of the votes to remove Sam, and then he changed his mind, or at…
Well, to be clear, I'm not singling those two out. There's also, you know, there's other board members who were involved in the firing who also fell very silent after. I think it's like a wider collective problem. These are, in some cases, people who had the moral fiber to sound alarms and take…
Even though they think they're building digital god that will somehow either eliminate all labor or create more labor or something will happen.