The Story
This episode feels like listening in on two people trying to pin down a slippery center of gravity: Sam Altman as a person, as a CEO, and as the public face of an industry asking for extraordinary trust while often resisting scrutiny. Nilay Patel brings Ronan Farrow on to talk about Farrow’s sprawling New Yorker investigation into Altman and OpenAI, and the conversation quickly becomes less about a single executive and more about the culture that made him possible.
Farrow explains that after a year and a half of reporting, what struck him most was how widely Altman’s trustworthiness is questioned, even in a business culture already tolerant of exaggeration. The core portrait that emerges is of someone able to tell different groups what they want to hear, not necessarily with the self-conscious guilt of a schemer, but with an almost eerie ability to move through contradictions untroubled. Farrow suggests that this trait may have helped Altman build OpenAI into a juggernaut, even as it left damaged relationships and a wake of unease.
From there, the conversation circles the chaotic 2023 moment when OpenAI’s board abruptly fired Altman, only to see him return almost immediately. Farrow argues that the real significance of that episode was lost because the board bungled its explanation so badly. Instead of clearly laying out a pattern of concerns, it offered vague language about a “breakdown in trust,” creating an information vacuum that others filled with speculation. That vacuum, he says, let more sensational rumors eclipse the more grounded and troubling questions about governance, safety, and honesty inside a company claiming to shape humanity’s future.
Nilay keeps bringing the discussion back to product reality. For all the grand rhetoric around artificial general intelligence, he points out that many AI tools still don’t reliably do what they are supposed to do today. That tension—between promises of world-changing power and the messy limits of current systems—hangs over the entire exchange. Farrow notes that credible technologists themselves dispute Altman’s timelines and claims, which makes the salesmanship around AI feel both familiar and unusually consequential.
By the end, the discussion widens into politics, markets, and public resistance. Farrow is unsparing about Silicon Valley’s cowardice, especially the reluctance of powerful insiders to speak plainly when money is at stake. But he also sees signs that public skepticism is growing, that voters may yet force a reckoning, and that courts or market pressures could do what internal ethics have not. The episode closes without neat resolution, but with a clear sense that the fight over AI is no longer just about innovation. It is about who gets believed, who gets protected, and whether a society can impose limits on people convinced they are building the future.
Main Themes
The central theme is trust, and not in the soft, branding sense. Farrow and Patel are really asking what it means when an industry built on giant speculative promises is led by people who seem comfortable with contradiction. Altman becomes the sharpest example of a broader Silicon Valley habit: saying different things to different audiences, treating inconsistency as strategy, and trusting that speed and charisma will outrun accountability.
Closely tied to that is the theme of governance. The OpenAI board crisis is presented not as isolated drama but as evidence that even a company founded around safety can drift into opacity. If the people closest to the technology can’t or won’t document concerns clearly, then the public is left depending on leaks, vibes, and power struggles to understand what’s happening.
The episode also keeps returning to the gap between myth and material reality. AI leaders talk in civilizational terms, yet the products are uneven, the economics unstable, and the legal foundations shaky. That gap matters because the bigger the promises, the more pressure there is to ignore uncertainty and bulldoze through objections.
Underneath all of this is a question about democracy itself. Can elected officials, courts, local communities, or even markets restrain companies that increasingly behave as if they are beyond ordinary oversight? Farrow doesn’t sound especially optimistic about Silicon Valley reforming itself. But he does suggest that public skepticism, if it hardens into political pressure, might become the missing counterweight.
Full Transcript
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Support for the show comes from MongoDB. If you're a developer stuck fixing bottlenecks instead of building the next big thing, then you need MongoDB. MongoDB is the flexible, unified platform that gets out of your way. It's ACID compliant, enterprise ready, and built to ship AI apps fast. It's trusted by so many of the fortune 500 for a reason. Ask any developer. It's a great freaking database. Start building at MongoDB.com slash build. Hello and welcome to Decoder. I'm Nilay Patel, Editor-in-Chief of The Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other promises. Today I'm talking with Ronan Farrow, one of the biggest stars of investigative reporting working today. Ronan broke the Harvey Weinstein story, among many, many others. And just last week, he and co-author Andrew Marantz published an incredible deep dive feature in The New Yorker about OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, his trustworthiness, and the rise of OpenAI itself. One note before we go any further here. The New Yorker published that story, and Ronan and I had this conversation before the attacks on Sam Altman's home. So you won't hear us talk about them directly, but just to say it, I think violence of any kind is unacceptable. These attacks on Sam were unacceptable. And the kind of helplessness that people feel, which leads to this kind of violence, is also unacceptable. And it's worth more scrutiny from both the industry and our political leaders. I hope that's clear. All that said, there is a lot of swirl around Sam Altman that's fair game for rigorous reporting, the kind of reporting that Ronan set out to do. Thanks to the popularity of ChatGPT, Altman has emerged as the most visible figurehead of the AI industry, having turned a once nonprofit research lab into an almost trillion-dollar private company in just a few years. But the myth of Sam Altman is deeply conflicted, defined equally by both his obvious deal-making ability and the tendency, which Ronan reported, to, well, lie to everyone around him. Ronan and Andrew's story is over 17,000 words long, and it contains arguably the definitive account of what happened in 2023 when the OpenAI board of directors very suddenly fired Altman over his alleged lying, only for him to be almost immediately rehired. The story is also a deep dive into Altman's personal life, his investments, his courting of Middle Eastern money, and his own reflections on his past behavior and character traits that led one source to say that he was, quote, unconstained by truth. I really suggest you read the entire story. I suspect it'll be referenced for many years to come. Ronan talked to Altman many times over the 18 months he spent reporting the story. And so one of the main things I was curious about was whether Ronan sensed any change in Altman over that time. After all, a lot has happened in AI, in tech, and in the world over the past year and a half. You'll hear Ronan talk about that very directly. As well as a sense that people have become much more willing to talk about Altman's ability to stretch the truth. People are starting to wonder, out loud and on the record, whether the behavior of people like Sam Altman is concerning, not just for AI or tech, but for society's collective future. Before we start, a quick reminder that you can listen to this episode, or any episode of Decoder, completely ad-free by subscribing to The Verge. Just go to theverge.com slash subscribe. Okay, Ronan Farrow on Sam Altman, AI, and the truth. Here we go. Ronan Farrow, you're an investigative reporter and contributor to The New Yorker. Welcome to Decoder. Glad to be here. Thanks for having me. I am very excited to talk to you. You just wrote a big piece for The New Yorker. It's a profile of Sam Altman and sort of with it, OpenAI. My read of it is it, as all great features do, it, with rigorous reporting, validates a lot of feelings people have had about Sam Altman for a very long time. You've obviously published it. You've gotten reactions to it. How are you feeling about it right now? I've been heartened, actually, by the extent to which it's broken through in a time where the attention economy is so kind of schizophrenic and shallow. This is a story that, in my view, affects all of us. And when I spend a year and a half of my life and my co-author, Andrew Marantz, also spent that time of his, really trying to do something forensic and meticulous, it's always because I feel like there are bigger structural issues that affect people, you know, beyond the individual at the heart of the story, beyond the company at the heart of the story. Sam Altman, against the backdrop of Silicon Valley hype culture, right, and startups that balloon to massive valuations based on promises that may or may not come to pass in the future and an increasing embrace of a founder culture that thinks of as a feature, not a bug, telling different groups different conflicting things. Even against that backdrop, Sam Altman is an extraordinary case where everyone in Silicon Valley who expects those things can't stop talking about this question of his trustworthiness and his honesty. And, you know, we knew already that he had been fired over some version of allegations of dishonesty or serial alleged lying, but extraordinarily, despite the fact that there's been wonderful reporting, you know, Keach Hagee has done great work on this. Karen Howe has done great work on this. There really wasn't definitive understanding of the actual alleged proof points and the reasons why those have stayed out of the public eye. Point number one is I feel heartened by the fact that some of those gaps in our public knowledge and even in the knowledge of Silicon Valley insiders have now been filled a little bit more. Some of the reasons that they were gaps have been filled a little bit more. You know, we report on cases where people inside this company really felt like things were covered up or deliberately not documented. One of the new things in this story is that a pivotal law firm investigation by Wilmer Hale, you know, which is obviously a fancy, credible, big law firm that did investigations of Enron and WorldCom, which, by the way, were all voluminous, like hundreds of pages published. They did this investigation that was demanded by board members that had fired Altman as a condition of their departure when he got rid of them and he came back. And extraordinarily, in the eyes of many legal experts I spoke to, and shockingly in the eyes of many people in this company, they kept it out of writing. All that ever emerged from that was an 800 word press release from OpenAI that described what happened as a breakdown in trust. And we, you know, confirmed that this was kept to oral briefings. There's cases we talk about where, like, for instance, a board member seemingly wants to vote against the conversion from OpenAI's original nonprofit form into a for-profit entity, and it's recorded as an abstention. And there's like a lawyer in the meeting saying, well, that could trigger too much scrutiny. And it gets, the person wants to vote against and it gets recorded as an abstention to all appearances. You know, there's factual dispute. OpenAI claims otherwise, as you might imagine. But these are all cases, essentially, where you have a company that, by their own account, holds our future in their hands, right? The safety stakes are so acute. They have not gone away. This is the reason this company was founded as a nonprofit focused on safety. And where things were being obscured in a way that, like, credible people around this found less than professional. And you couple that with a backdrop where there's so little political appetite for meaningful regulation. And I think it's a very combustible situation. The point for me is not just that Sam Altman, you know, deserves these questions so acutely. It's that any of these guys in this field, and many of the key figures exhibit, like, if not this particular idiosyncratic alleged lying all the time trait, certainly like some degree of a race to the bottom mentality, right? Where the people who were safest have watered down those commitments and everyone is in a race posture. I think the point as we look at, like, even recent leaks out of Anthropic is, there's a person who poses the question of who should have their finger on the button in this piece. The answer is, like, if we don't have meaningful oversight, I think we got to be asking serious questions and trying to surface as much information as we can about all of these guys. So I've been heartened by what feels like a meaningful conversation about that, or the beginnings of one. The reason I asked it that way is, you worked on this for a year and a half. You talked to, I believe, The thesis of the story, and it's a description of the trait you're describing, it's that Sam Altman is unconstrained by the truth and that he has two traits that are almost never seen in the same person. The first is a strong desire to please people, to be liked in any given interaction, and the second is an almost sociopathic lack of concern for the consequences that may come from deceiving someone. I have to tell you, I read that sentence 500 times, and I tried to imagine always saying what people wanted to be liked and then not being upset when they felt lied to. And I could not make my emotional state understand how those things can exist in the same person. As you've talked to Sam a lot, you've talked to people that have experienced these traits. How does he do it? Yeah, you know, it's interesting on a human level because I do approach bodies of reporting like this with a real focus on humanizing whoever's at the heart of it and like seeking deep understanding, right, and empathy. When I kind of tried to approach this from a more human standpoint and say, hey, like, this would be devastating for me if so many people that I've worked with said I'm a pathological liar. How do you carry that weight? Like, how do you talk about that in therapy? What is the story you tell yourself about that? You know, I got some sort of, in my view, maybe, like West Coast platitudes about like, yeah, I like breathwork. But not a lot of the kind of bracing sense of deep self-confrontation that I think a lot of us would probably have if we were seeing this kind of feedback about our behavior and our treatment of people. And I think that that actually goes to the broader answer to the question, too. Sam asserts basically that this trait has caused problems, but also that it's part of what's empowered him to accelerate OpenAI's growth so much that, you know, he is able to unite and please, essentially, different groups of people. He's constantly convincing all of these conflicting constituencies that what they care about is what he cares about. And that can be a really useful skill for a founder. You know, I've talked to investors who then say, well, maybe it's a less useful skill for actually running a company because it sows so much discord. But on the Sam personal side, you know, I think the thing that I pick up on when I try to connect on a human level on this, the apparent lack of like deeper confrontation and reflection and like and self-accountability also informs that, whether you want to call it a superpower or a liability for a company preparing for an IPO. He is someone who, in the words of one former board member, there's this former board member named Sue Yoon, who's on the record in the piece saying that to the point of fecklessness is the phrase she uses. He really believes the shifting reality of his sales pitches or is able to convince himself of them. Or at least if he doesn't believe them, it is able to, you know, bluster through them without like meaningful self-doubt. I think the thing that you're talking about, where you or I might, as we're saying the thing and realizing that it conflicts with the other assurance we've made, kind of have a moment of freezing up or checking ourselves. I think that that doesn't happen with him. And, you know, there's a wider Silicon Valley hype culture and like founder culture that kind of embraces that. We need to take a quick break. We'll be right back. Support for this show comes from Doppel. Maybe that ping you just got is an urgent message from your CEO. Or maybe it's a deep fake trying to target your business. Doppel is the AI native social engineering defense platform fighting back against impersonation and manipulation. As attackers turn to AI to power increasingly sophisticated strikes, Doppel uses it to fight back. Their digital risk management dismantles attacker infrastructure, while human risk management builds team resilience through simulation and training. With automated takedowns, multi-channel coverage, and AI defenses that build intelligence with every fight, Doppel works relentlessly to protect people, brands, and trust. Doppel, outpacing what's next in social engineering. Learn more at Doppel.com. 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We have an evaluative function and we spend so much time just looking at the AI products and saying, do they work? And that feels missing from a lot of the conversation on AI as it is today. There's endless conversation about what it might be able to do, how dangerous it might be. And then you drill down and you say, does it actually do the thing it's supposed to do today? And in some cases, the answer is yes. But in many, many cases, the answer is no. And that feels like it connects to the hype culture you're describing. And also to the sense that, well, if you say it's going to do something and it doesn't and someone feels bad, that's fine because we're on to the next thing. Like that's in the past. And in AI in particular, Sam is so good at making the grand promises, right? Just this week, I think the same day as your story published, OpenAI released a policy document that said we have to rethink the social contract and have AI efficiency stipends from the government. And this is a grand promise about how some technology might shape the future of the world and how we live. And all of that relies on the technology working in exactly the way that maybe it's promised to work or it should work. Did you ever find Sam doubting AI turning into AGI or superintelligence or getting to the finish line? Because that's the thing that I wonder about the most. Is there any reflection about whether this core technology can do all of the things that they say it can do? It's exactly the right set of questions. There are credible technologists that we spoke to in this body of reporting. And obviously, Sam Altman is not one, right? He's a business person. Who say the way that Sam talks about the timeline for this tech is just way off. You know, there's blog posts going back a few years where Sam is saying, we've already reached the event horizon. AGI is basically here. Superintelligence is around the corner. We're going to be on other planets. We're going to be curing all forms of cancer. Like, truly, I'm not, you know, embellishing here. The cancer one is actually interesting. Sam is hyping up the person who theoretically cured their dog's cancer with ChatGPT. And that simply did not happen. They talked to ChatGPT and that helped them guide some researchers that actually did the work. But the one-to-one, this tool cured this dog, is not actually the story. I'm glad you raised that because I want to go on to this bigger point about, you know, when is both the potential and the risk of the technology really going to vest? But it's worth mentioning these, I think I should have had more concerns if I had known fully what the claims were and what the concerns were. Not all of them, opinions vary, and we quote a range of opinions. But there are significant ones who were acting on very partial info. The board that fired Sam was, in the words of one person who used to be on the board, you know, very JV. And they fumbled the ball hard. And, you know, we document the underlying complaints, and people can decide for themselves whether it accumulates into the kind of urgent concern they felt it was. But that argument and that information was not being presented. They received what some of them now acknowledge is just bad legal advice to describe it. You'll remember the quote, probably a lot of your listeners and viewers will remember the quote. You know, a lack of candor was what it was reduced to, and then they, like, essentially wouldn't take calls. They would not take calls. I'm sure you tried. Everyone I know tried. And it got to the point where, you know, as a journalist, you're not supposed to give your sources advice, but I was like, you know, this will go away if you don't start explaining yourself. And that's what happened. And so you had, you know, forget journalists, like Satya Nadella saying, like, what the hell happened? I can't get anyone to explain to me. And that's the company's major financial backer. And then you have like Satya calling Reid Hoffman and Reid calling around and saying, I don't know what the fuck happened. And they're like, understandably, in that void of information, looking for, you know, the traditional non-AI indicators that would justify such an urgent, sudden firing. Like, okay, was it sex crimes? Was it embezzlement? And the entire subtle but I think meaningful argument that this tech is different and that this kind of a steady accumulation of smaller betrayals actually could have meaningful stakes, both for this business and maybe for the world, that was really largely lost. And so, you know, capitalist incentives won out, but also the people who made it win out were not always operating with complete information. I want to just ask about the whatever everyone thought it was aspect for one moment. Because I certainly saw the news and I said, oh, something bad must have happened. You've done a lot of media reporting. Famously, you broke the Harvey Weinstein story. You spent a lot of time reporting on these claims that I think you decided were ultimately unfounded. That Altman had sexually assaulted minors or hired sex workers or even murdered an OpenAI whistleblower. Did you, I mean, you are the person who can report this stuff the most rigorously. Did you decide that came to nothing? Well, look, I'm not in the business of saying something has come to nothing. What I can say is I spent months looking at these claims and did not find corroboration for them. And it was striking to me that, you know, these guys, these companies who have so much power over our futures truly are spending a disproportionate amount of their time and resources in a childish mud fight. You know, it's one executive describes it as Shakespearean. It's like the amount of, you know, private investigator money, the opposition dossiers being compiled. It's relentless. And the unfortunate thing is that the kind of salacious stuff, which gets parroted by Sam's competitors as just assumed fact, right? There's this allegation that he, you know, pursues underage boys. And at many cocktail parties in Silicon Valley, you hear this. And like on the conference circuit, I've heard it repeated by like credible, prominent executives. Like everybody knows this is a fact. You know, I talk about where this comes from, right? The various vectors by which it's transmitted. Elon Musk and his associates 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. The other theme that really comes through in the story is almost a sense of fear that Sam has so many friends. He's invested in so many companies from his previous role as CEO of Y Combinator just to his personal investing. Some of which is in direct conflict with his role as CEO of OpenAI that there's silence around him. There's one thing that really struck me. You describe Ilyas Tsiskiver's memos. And they're just out in Silicon Valley and 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? I think it's a lot of cowardice. I'll be honest. You know, having reported on national security stories where the sources are, you know, whistleblowers who stand to lose everything and like face prosecution. And they still do the right thing and talk about things to create accountability. I've worked on, you know, the sex crimes related stories that you mentioned where sources are deeply traumatized and fear like a very personal kind of retribution. In many cases around this beat, you're dealing with people with their own profile and power, right? You know, they're like either famous people themselves or they're surrounded by famous people. They have robust business lives. And in my view, it is actually like very low exposure for them to talk about this stuff. And thankfully, like the needle is moving, as we talked about earlier, and people are now talking more. But for such a long time, people really just shut up about it because I think the Silicon 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 Moratti, 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 Ilyas Iskander, who was one of the votes to remove Sam. And then he changed his mind or at least said he changed his mind. And then he left to start his own company. Do you know what made him change his mind? Was it just money? Well, to be clear, I'm not singling those two out. There's also the, 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 radical action. And that is to be commended. And that's how you assure accountability. And that could have helped a lot of people who were affected by this technology. It could have helped an industry to remain more safety focused meaningfully. But, you know, dealing with whistleblowers a lot and people who try to prompt that accountability a lot. You see that it also, it takes the fiber of sticking it out and standing by your convictions. And this industry is truly full of people who just do not stand by their convictions. Even though they think they're building a digital god that will somehow either eliminate all labor or create more labor or something will happen. Well, that's the thing. So, it's the culture of not standing by your convictions and all ethical concerns falling by the wayside the moment there's any heat or anything that could threaten your own standing in the business. Is, you know, maybe all well and good to some extent for business as usual companies that are making whatever kind of widget. But these are also the same people who are saying this could literally kill us all. And, you know, again, you don't have to go to the Terminator, Skynet extreme. Like that is a set of risks that are already materializing. It is real. They are right to warn about that. But, you know, you'd have to have someone else armchair psychologize how those two things can live in the same people where they're sounding the urgent warnings. They're maybe like putting a toe in and trying to do something. And then they're just folding and falling silent. And that is precisely why you can have these kind of instances of things being kept out of writing and things being swept under the rug and no one talking about it this openly for years after the fact. We have to take a quick break. We'll be back in just a minute. Right now at The Home Depot, shop spring Black Friday savings and get up to 40% off plus up to $500 off select appliances from top brands like Samsung. Get a fridge with zero clearance hinges so the doors open fully even in tighter spaces in your kitchen. And laundry that saves you time like an all-in-one washer dryer that can run a full load in just 68 minutes. Shop spring Black Friday savings plus get free delivery on appliance purchases of $998 or more at The Home Depot. Offer valid April 9th through April 29th U.S. only. See store online for details. It's only getting every customer's order right. It's only a point of sale system connected by Spectrum fiber powered business internet helping you track hundreds of secure transactions. And it's all backed by 24-7 US-based customer support and local technicians. I still do believe in the basic math of democracy and of self-interested politicians. And there is more and more polling data emerging that a majority of Americans think that the concerns or questions or risks of AI currently outweigh the benefits. And so I think the flood of money into AI, it's within all of our—I’m sorry, into politics from AI—it's within all of our power to make that a source of a question mark with respect to politicians. You know, when Americans go to vote, they should be scrutinizing whether the people they vote for, especially if they are, you know, uncritical and anti-regulation, given all these concerns, you know, are bankrolled by big tech special interests. So I think, like, if people can read pieces like this and listen to podcasts like this and care enough to think critically about their decisions as voters, there is a real opportunity to generate a constituency in Washington of representatives who do keep an eye and do force oversight. That might be one of the most optimistic things I've ever heard anyone say about the current AI industry, and I appreciate it. I'm obsessed with the polling that you're talking about. There's a lot of it now. It's all pretty consistent. And it kind of looks like the more young people in particular are exposed to AI, the more distrustful and angry they are about it. That's kind of the valence of all the polling. And I look at that and I think, well, yeah, smart politicians would just run against that. They would just say, we're going to hold big tech accountable. And then I think about the past 20 years of politicians saying they're going to hold big tech accountable, and I'm struggling to find even one moment of big tech being held accountable. And the only thing that makes me think this might be different is, well, you actually have to build the data centers and you can vote against that and you can petition against that and you can protest against that. You know, I think there's a politician who just had their house shot at because they voted for a data center. The tension is reaching, I would call it, a fever pitch. You described the insularity of Silicon Valley, right? This is a closed ecosystem. It feels like they think they can run the world, right? They're putting a ton of money into politics and they are running up against the reality of people don't love the products, which doesn't give them a lot of cover, right? The more they use the products, the more upset they are. And the politicians are beginning to see there are real consequences to supporting the tech industry over the people they represent. You've talked to so many people. Do you think it is possible for the tech industry to learn the lesson that is right in front of them? You know, you say it feels like they think they can run the world without accountability. I don't even think that needs the feels like qualifier. I mean, you look at like the language Peter Thiel is using. It's explicit, right? And of course, that's an extreme example. And, you know, Sam Altman, though, he is like close with and informed by Thiel's ideology to some extent, is a very different kind of person who might sound, you know, different and more measured up to a point. But I do think, like, the wider ideology that you get from Thiel, which is basically like, we're done with democracy, we don't need it anymore. We have so much that we kind of just want to, like, build our own little bunkers. We're not dealing with the Carnegies anymore or the Rockefellers anymore where they're bad guys, but they're, you know, they feel they need to participate in a social contract and build things for people. There's a real nihilism that's set in. And I do think it's just been like a mutually reinforcing spiral in recent American history of moguls and private companies acquiring super governmental power while democratic institutions that might hold them accountable are hollowed out. And I do not feel optimistic about the idea that those guys might just wake up one day and think like, huh, actually, maybe we do need to participate in society and help build things for people. I mean, you look at, like, the little microcosmic example of the Giving Pledge, where, you know, there was a moment where it was seemly to be charitable. And that moment is now, like, past and even kind of ridiculed. That is a problem, the broader problem of lack of accountability that I think can only be solved extrinsically. That has to be voters mobilizing and, like, resurrecting the power of government oversight. And you're exactly right to say that the main vector through which people could maybe achieve that is, like, it's local. It's to do with where infrastructure is being built. You know, and you mentioned some of the, like, white hot tension around this that's leading to violence and threats. And obviously, like, nobody should be violent or threatening. But I and I'm also not here to make specific policy recommendations other than to just present, like, these are some of the policy steps that seem basic and are working elsewhere in the world, right? Or that have worked in other sectors. I'm not here to say which of those should be executed and in how. I do think something needs to happen and it needs to be external, not just trusting these companies. Because right now we have a situation where the companies that are developing the tech and are equipped best to understand the risks and, in fact, are the ones warning us of the risks, are also the ones with nothing but incentive to go fast and ignore those risks. And you just don't have anything to counterbalance that. So whatever form reforms might take in terms of specifics, something has to run up against that. And I do still return to that optimism that the people still matter. I generally buy argument. Let me just make the one tiny counter argument that I think I can articulate. The other thing that could happen outside of the ballot box is that the bubble pops, right? That not all these companies get to the finish line, that there isn't product market fit for consumer AI applications. And again, I don't quite see it yet, but I'm a consumer tech reviewer and maybe I just have higher standards than everybody else. There is product market fit in the business world, right? Having a bunch of AI agents write a bunch of software seems to be a real market for these tools. You can read the arguments from these companies saying we solved coding and that means we can solve anything. If we can make software, we can solve any problems. I think there are real limits to the things software can do. That's great in the business world. Software can't solve every problem in reality. But they got to get there. They got to finish the job. And maybe not everybody makes it to the finish line. And there is a crash and this bubble pops. And maybe OpenAI or Anthropic or XAR, one of these companies just, like, fails and all this investment goes away. OpenAI is right on the cusp of an IPO. There's a lot of doubts about Sam as a leader. Do you think they're going to make it to the finish line? I'm not going to prognosticate, but I think you raise an important point, which is market incentives do matter internally to Silicon Valley. And the precarity of the current maybe potentially allegedly bubble dynamics do stand to interrupt the, you know, again, potentially, according to critics, race to the bottom on safety. I would also add to that, if you look at historical precedents where there's a similarly seemingly impenetrable set of market incentives and potentially deleterious effects for the public, there is impact litigation. And you see that as an area of concern lately. Like Sam Altman is out there this week endorsing legislation that would shield AI companies from some of the types of liability that OpenAI has been exposed to, right, in wrongful death suits, for instance. Of course, there's a desire to have that shield from liability. I think that the courts can still be a meaningful mechanism. And it'll be really interesting to see how these suits shape up. You know, you already saw, for instance, the class action suit, actually, of which I and many, many other authors I know are members against Anthropic for their use of books that were under copyright. If there are, you know, smart legal minds and plaintiffs who care, we just have seen historically in cases from big tobacco to big energy that you can also get some guardrails and some incentives to slow down or be careful or protect people that way. It does feel like the entire cost structure of the AI industry hangs on a very, very charitable interpretation of fair use. Doesn't come up enough, right? The cost structures of these companies could spiral out of control if they have to pay you and everyone else whose work they've taken. But that it's inconvenient to think about, so we just don't think about it. Right next to that is all these products are now running at a loss. Like currently today, they're all running at a loss. They're burning more money than they can make. At some point, they have to flip the switch. Sam is a businessman, right? As you've mentioned several times, he's not a technologist. He's a business person. Do you think he's ready to flip the switch and say we're going to make a dollar? Because that, when I ask, do you think OpenAI is going to make it? It's they've got to make a dollar. And so far, Sam has made all of his dollars by asking other people for their money instead of having his companies make money. Well, that's a big lingering question, you know, for Silicon Valley, for investors, for the public. You see some statements and moves out of OpenAI that seem to evince a kind of panic about that. You know, shutting down SORA, shutting down some ancillary projects, trying to zero in on Instagram, they're at TheDecoderPod as well. They're a lot of fun. If you like Decoder, please share it with your friends and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Decoder is a production of The Verge, a part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. The show is produced by Kate Cox and Nick Stat, it's edited by Ursa Wright. Our editorial director is Kevin McShane. The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. We'll see you next time. You can't reason with the sun. Trust us, we've tried. This summer, it's time to put that angry ball of fire on mute. Columbia's OmniShade technology is engineered to protect you from the sun's harsh rays that can burn and damage your skin. The sun is relentless, but so is our gear. Level up your summer at Columbia.com to spend more time outside and less time slathering on aloe lotion. You're welcome, Columbia. Engineered for whatever. Hi, I'm Emily, your friend and jeweler at Shane Company, where fine jewelry is always crafted with care, no matter the price. Mother's Day, birthdays and graduations, weddings and anniversaries, the new job you got and even the one you didn't. 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