Why Go With an Evil-Looking Orb?

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In the past year or so, since the public release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, people have been making their peace with the idea that an omnipotent AI might be on the horizon. Sam Altman, the company’s CEO, “believes that people need time to reckon with the idea that we may soon share Earth with a powerful new intelligence, before it remakes everything from work to human relationships,” my colleague Ross Andersen reported after the two had several conversations. “ChatGPT was a way of serving notice.”

But OpenAI isn’t Altman’s only project, and it’s not even his only project with ambitions to change the world. He is also a co-founder of a company called , which has the lofty