Slippery Sam, Devious Dario, Honest Hassabis: Blowing Up Silicon Valley’s Cult of Personality
Keen On America
Sebastian Mallaby's Demis Hassabis Profile
They discuss Mallaby's book portraying Hassabis as a scientist-pragmatist balancing ethics and corporate realities.
“The media has its own agenda, completely separate from anything going on in the real world, creating the story themselves.” — Keith Teare
Last night, somebody hurled a Molotov cocktail at Sam Altman’s Pacific Heights mansion. I live a couple of hills over, but heard nothing. Meanwhile, the New Yorker hurled its own explosive cocktail at Sam, publishing a 15,000-word hit piece rhetorically entitled “Sam Altman May Control Our Future. Can He Be Trusted?” No, of course, he can’t be trusted. Not according to the New Yorker. Especially with something as precious as, gasp, our future.
Not everyone, however, is sold on this media cult of personality. In his That Was The Week editorial, Keith Teare tells the media to take their hands off Sam. I don’t disagree. Although I’m a bit skeptical of Keith’s attempt to demonize what he defines as a “devious” Dario Amodei. Whether it’s Altman, Amodei or Google’s AI honcho Demis Hassabis, all these guys are prisoners of their company’s structures and cultures. They are also victims of today’s anti-tech hysteria. It’s one thing to blow up Silicon Valley’s cartoonish cult of personality, it’s quite another to hurl bombs at these people’s homes. Enough with all the violence – verbal or otherwise. It never ends well.
Five Takeaways
• A Molotov Cocktail at Slippery Sam’s House: On Friday night, someone hurled a Molotov cocktail at Sam Altman’s Pacific Heights mansion, according to The New York Times. Andrew lives nearby and didn’t hear it. The week’s zeitgeist had already turned: a 15,000-word New Yorker hit piece by Ronan Farrow and Andrew Marantz, wall-to-wall coverage, Sam moving into Musk-like media-frenzy territory. Keith’s editorial: Hands Off Sam Altman. The personality-driven circus has caught fire. Quite literally.
• Anthropic’s Mythic Model Finds Decade-Old Vulnerabilities: The actual AI news this week, drowned out by the personality circus. Anthropic’s new “Mythic” model autonomously discovered security holes in software that had eluded human experts for years. Dario refused to release it openly until the patches were complete. Treasury Secretary Bessent commented on the implications for banks and government. The signal: AI is becoming systematically better than the best humans at specialist domains. Generalists can probably relax.
• Slippery Sam vs Devious Dario vs Honest Hassabis: Keith’s contrarian take: Altman is honest because he’s openly dishonest. Amodei is the devious one — a politically liberal narrative wrapped around a commercial juggernaut. Andrew’s third way is yesterday’s Mallaby interview: Demis Hassabis, the Spinozan one-faced scientist who would rather be at Princeton. But even Demis must have authorised the firing of Mustafa Suleiman. Everyone has a game plan, said Mike Tyson, until they get punched in the face.
• Post of the Week: Keith Replaces WordPress in Ten Minutes: Keith’s tweet: he’s run two curation sites — seriouslyphotography.com and seriouslybc.com — on WordPress for over a decade. Last Friday afternoon, he asked Anthropic’s tools to rewrite them. Ten minutes later, both sites were rebuilt from scratch, fully responsive, WordPress gone. Cost in the old world: tens of thousands of dollars and several months. The Matt Mullenweg vs Matthew Prince debate is settled by the actual technology while the principals are still arguing.
• The End of Ownership? Keith Goes Marxist: Pure capitalism, Keith argues, will produce so much abundance that scarcity ends and self-interested competition with it. “In the future there will be no ownership, or everything will be commonly owned.” Andrew calls it Marx with Tesla characteristics. Eric Ries’s forthcoming Incorruptible argues that Patagonia and Mondragon point a different way — structural ethics rather than abundance utopianism. Two visions of the post-AI economy. Both probably wrong. We’ll find out.
About the Guest
Sebastian Mallaby is the Paul A. Volcker senior fellow for international economics at the Council on Foreign Relations. A former Washington Post columnist and Economist contributing editor, he is the author of More Money Than God, The Man Who Knew (winner of the FT and McKinsey Business Book of the Year), The Power Law, and now The Infinity Machine: Demis Hassabis, DeepMind, and the Quest for Superintelligence.
References:
• The Infinity Machine: Demis Hassabis, DeepMind, and the Quest for Superintelligence by Sebastian Mallaby.
• Episode 2862: Truth Is Dead — Steven Rosenbaum on AI as a spectacularly good liar. Mallaby’s quiet counter-argument.
• Episode 2860: We Shape Our AI, Thereafter It Shapes Us — Keith Teare on agency in our agentic age. Hassabis thinks he can still steer.
About Keen On America
Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States — hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 2,800 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting.
Chapters:
- (00:31) - A Molotov cocktail at Sam Altman’s Pacific Heights house
- (02:41) - The New Yorker hit piece: Ronan Farrow, Andrew Marantz, 15,000 words
- (05:36) - Slippery Sam and the zeitgeist
- (07:39) - Brian Merchant: it’s open season for refusing AI
- (08:09) - Anthropic’s Mythic model finds decade-old vulnerabilities
- (10:46) - Why even release it? Dario’s narcissism
- (12:12) - Slippery Sam vs Devious Dario
- (14:11) - Hassabis as the third way
- (18:29) - The Mustafa Suleiman question
- (19:17) - Mike Tyson, Kant, Spinoza, and Hobbes
- (22:09) - Brian Merchant and the new Luddism
- (23:34) - Anthropic makes a new generation redundant every week
- (23:34) - Post of the week: Keith rebuilds his sites in 10 minutes
- (26:39) - Eric Ries on incorruptible companies
- (30:12) - Patagonia, Berkeley Bowl, Mondragon
- (35:43) - The end of ownership? Keith goes Marxist
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