Elon Musk Scares Ari Emanuel About OpenAI and Sam Altman: “You’re a Dog for AI”

Speaking this weekend at the Aspen Ideas FestivalMedia mogul Ari Emanuel recalled a conversation he had with Elon Musk, the former head of his billion-dollar entertainment company, Endeavor.

The anecdote highlighted the enormous stakes involved in the race among companies to build ever-smarter neural networks.

Elon once said to me, and it scared me. He said, You know, Ari, your relationship with your dogs? Think of it this way: You're the AI ​​dog, Emanuel. told the audienceI don't want to be a dog.

Artificial intelligence experts like Geoffrey Hinton fear that Silicon Valley executives won't stop at AGI: humanity could eventually create artificial superintelligence (ASI).

This ASI would not only mimic human learning processes like current transformer-based neural networks such as OpenAI's GPT-4, but could potentially gain self-awareness in the process, relegating humanity to the second most advanced species on earth.

With so much riding on Altman's ability to make responsible decisions, Emanuel worries that his past behavior suggests he cannot be trusted to properly develop a revolutionary technology, especially given the growing number of critics.

“I think he’s a scammer,” Emanuel said. “Elon gave him a lot of money, it was supposed to be a nonprofit, now he’s making a lot of money. I don’t know why I would trust him. I don’t know why we would trust these people.” (According to legal documents, Musk contributed more than $44 million to OpenAI between 2016 and September 2020.)

Emanuel said Altman had not done enough to prove that the technology did not pose a long-term threat to society, especially since the company appears to prioritize commercialization over security.

You're telling me you've done the math and the good outweighs the bad, said Emanuel, whose media business could be affected by generative AI such as OpenAIs Sora. Really? I don't think so.

OpenAI did not respond to a request for comment.Fortunefor comment.

For his part, Altman, who has said in the past that offering shares was necessary in part to attract and retain talent, himself said a year ago that people should not trust any particular AI company or CEO without proof that the trust is deserved.

Could the future of AI mean a purposeless society?

The head of OpenAI, who is worth $2 billion according to BloombergHe survived a board mutiny in November, thanks in part to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, and returned more powerful than ever, with three of the four former conspirators against him leaving the company.

One of those former directors, Helen Toner, justified the coup in May by citing dishonest behavior, saying Altman withheld information, distorted facts and sometimes outright lied to the board.

Meanwhile, OpenAI scientists like Jan Leike have left the company after accusing Altman of breaking a key promise to fund his research. Leike and chief scientist Ilya Sutsk were supposed to design security protocols robust enough to ensure that AI could never overtake humans.

Altman himself is now combining his business responsibility as CEO with a new role as head of AI security within the company, raising concerns from a governance perspective.

Twitter founder Jack Dorsey has also sounded the alarm, warning that the damage to human behavior caused by the engagement-driven algorithms he helped create could be insignificant compared to artificial intelligence.

All of this gave Emanuel food for thought about the future of AI.

I don't want to stifle innovation, because I think we need AI, but we need to have the rails around it, Emanuel said in Aspen this weekend, where Altman was present. also speakWhat will society look like in this world where there is no more purpose?

Who is Ari Emanuel?

The younger brother of Rahm Emanuel, former chief of staff to President Barack Obama, Ari Emanuel is often thought of as a Hollywood super agent who represented stars like Martin Scorsese, but he's an entrepreneur in every sense of the word.

In 1995, the senior partner of Talent Reps International Creative Management founded Endeavor Agency, transforming it into a full-fledged media and entertainment empire that went public in April 2021.

His close friends and business associates include Hollywood star Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, UFC boss Dana White and Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who briefly served as a director on Endeavors' board.

Emmanuelplayed the hostThe powerful Greek tycoon was the victim of unflattering photos of Elon Musk alongside a slimmer Emanuel. The images sparked so much online ridicule that Musk reportedly started taking Wegovy just to lose weight.

Altman and Musk, on the other hand, are far from comfortable. Although he co-chaired OpenAI at its inception in 2015, Musk left the organization in 2018. Since then, a war of words and products has ensued, with the Tesla CEO attempting to sue OpenAI earlier this year.

Emanuel is widely praised by his Hollywood peers: “There's no CEO in the world like this guy,” The Rock said of Emanuel inJanuary.

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