Sam Altman on AI, Power, and the Future of OpenAI — MIT Technology Review

The MIT Technology Review profile of Altman (published in context of GPT-4, March 2023) provided the most detailed third-party account of how he thinks about power, risk, and competitive dynamics in AI development. Journalist Will Douglas Heaven conducted extended interviews and produced a nuanced portrait: Altman as genuinely believing in the mission but also sophisticated about the commercial realities that fund it. The most valuable sections: his discussion of why he thinks the "we'll just stop when it gets dangerous" approach is naive (you can't know in advance where the danger line is), why he believes incremental deployment is the only way to discover real failure modes (lab evaluations miss things real-world deployment finds), and his account of the internal debates at OpenAI about capability vs. safety priorities. The MIT Tech Review profile also captured Altman's competitive anxiety in a way his own writing doesn't: he believes that if OpenAI doesn't build AGI, another organization less focused on safety will, and that the outcome for humanity depends on who gets there first. This "race dynamics make safety-focus more important, not less" argument is the core of his public case for OpenAI's approach. The profile's lasting contribution was identifying the contradiction at OpenAI's heart: a nonprofit mission, a for-profit structure, and a commercial imperative that doesn't always align with the first two.