Slippery Sam, Devious Dario, Honest Hassabis: Blowing Up Silicon Valley’s Cult of Personality

“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 — structur