Sam Altman enters the zeitgeist - High Leverage #5
What protestors tell us about the Overton Window
This month in AI
In a matter of days, Sam Altman’s world tour graced the most important halls of power across Europe.
Tuesday took him to the Élysée Palace for a meeting with President Macron, the following day saw an audience with Rishi Sunak in 10 Downing Street, then a photoshoot with Ursula von der Leyen, regulator-in-chief over at the European Commission. This had the makings more of a US president’s victory lap than a formerly niche Silicon Valley CEO.
I was lucky enough to see Sam speak at UCL while he was in London. The event itself was a let down, ruined by a poor moderator who asked multi paragraph long questions. More interesting than the event itself was the reaction to it. The queue for entry stretched outside UCL’s campus for a few blocks and was pushing 400-500 people – many annoyed ticket holders were turned away by stressed UCL events staff at the gates. A bunch of lively protesters were picketing the queue. I arrived 20 minutes early and was one of the last people to get a seat.
I struck up a conversation with one of the protestors while I was waiting outside. A first year PPE student who was also president of the UCL Effective Altruist society, he wasted no time and shot straight for my jugular. “What do you work in?”, he asked. I explained that I was a PM for an AI company. “oh, you work in AI – how can you morally justify that? Are you not worried about xrisk?”.
Both the reaction to the UCL event and Sam Altman’s gilded reception lead us to the same conclusion: AI has well and truly entered the public zeitgeist as a political issue of national importance. Even the Sun, the UK’s most read newspaper - more renowned for its coverage of half naked page 3 girls - is now debuting front page OpEds on AGI as an extinction risk (linked below). My prediction here is that just like with Covid, AI becomes a partisan battleground, with MPs compelled to pick sides.
June’s startup to watch 👀
Backed by YC and cofounded by two MIT PhDs, Stack.AI is an infrastructure layer for LLMs. This is the AI era’s everything idea - I’ve seen at least 5 YC companies doing the exact same thing - but StackAI seem to have the best product.
Top posts of the month
OpenAI’s plans according to Sam Altman
Before the public UCL event that I attended, Sam hosted an intimate roundtable with 20 founders and engineers. Raza Habib of Humanloop wrote up the high level takeaways into a non-offical OpenAI product roadmap.
OpenAI has since ordered it taken down, but long before it spread widely across HackerNews. Cue a Forbes article on the ensuing drama.
Learnings exploring the GPT/ LLM space, by Louis Coppey
Point Nine’s Louis Coppey heads over to the States to understand the LLM mania
Excellent as usual, this is one of the highest value Substacks I read
How Ramp builds product, by Lenny’s Newsletter
Great insights into how Ramp hit $100m ARR with just 5 PMs and 50 engineers
How Intercom navigated the AI paradigm shift, by Bessemer
A great analysis piece on one of the SaaS companies that has nailed AI features with Fin
Democracy is the solution to vetocracy
Sam Bowman, one of the most incisive thinkers about British politics, weighs in on our growth conundrum
If we get AI right, we will all capture the extraordinary benefit, by James W Phillips
And last but not least, the Sun OpEd on AGI risk
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