Sam Altman’s political ‘guru’ on the US election and democratic AI vs. autocratic AI

Reed Albergotti: What is in store for the next president of the United States on the AI front?

Chris Lehane: It really is how you strike and get to the right balance between ensuring that AI is deployed in a safe and responsible way, while also making sure that the country is poised to leverage its leadership role. For me, this ultimately all comes down to a simple construct: Whether democratic AI is going to prevail over autocratic AI.

This is a little bit strained at the technological level, but here’s a historical analogy: In 1944, the world gets together at Bretton Woods. There’s a conversation about how we can create a global financial system. Ultimately we decided to build that on the US dollar, with the idea that the dollar would help promote and advance “small d” democratic values around the world. There is a way of thinking about AI that is similar at this moment in time.

AI summits have taken place in London, Seoul, and elsewhere. Could that be where this Bretton Woods scenario plays out?

Yeah, you were asking what the next president is going to have to deal with. There’s no question that a manifestation of that could be bringing different aspects of the world together to talk about how we develop that “small d” democratic AI.

If you take a step back and look out at the world today, there are different circles to think about. First, it’s the US. And then it’s the Five Eyes [intelligence alliance] countries. Then there’s NATO countries and then countries we work with in Asia. There’s a next circle after that which you can almost think about as “swing states,” in parts of Africa, the Middle East and other parts of the world. And from a commercial diplomacy perspective, those countries are going to have to choose between the US and China in terms of who they align with.

Ultimately, you would want to have as many of these countries as possible building on democratic AI and not autocratic AI. Those are some of the really big calls that the next administration is going to have to make.

How have you been counseling Sam to deal with this? Does he talk to Trump? Is he talking to the Harris campaign?

I always respect the nature of personal conversations, although I do appreciate the question. But the way we think about this is really, as we engage with different governments and different candidates, we always do it around this organization’s purpose, and that is to build AI that’s going to benefit everybody.

Elon Musk is in a race with OpenAI and others. Do you have to worry about him in a different way if Trump wins, since they are close and he will have influence?

It’s like you’re asking a competitive sports team how they think about a particular game or particular contest. For us, it’s really focusing on what we do best, and that is really leading the way, or certainly being amongst the leaders in the actual innovation itself. Of course, doing that innovation in ways that are consistent with this company’s values and beliefs. If we do that, and we do it in a way where we’re responsibly engaging with external audiences, that’s what we can control. Everything else takes care of itself.

There is this world in which these AI models get to a certain size where you need the government in getting these things built to a certain scale. Will it be really important to have a good relationship with whoever is in the White House?

This stuff is like electricity. Even in this very unusual moment in our country politically, this technology does transcend those politics. So I think, under any scenario, you’re going to require a public-private partnership, and that’s particularly the case when it comes to brick and mortar infrastructure.

A pretty fair estimate is that you’re going to need 50 gigawatts of energy by 2030 to support the compute needs of this country, as it continues to lead the way. That’s an enormous amount of energy that no one company is going to be able to do. You’re going to have to work with the federal government. You probably have to work with state governments.

There are three potential policy levers. One is creating AI economic zones. These would be zones where you fast-track ways to bring energy online. We’ve talked about it in the same way that you created a national highway system in the 1950s under Eisenhower. We think about a national transmission line policy.

And then we think about how you preserve some of that compute for the public good, which could support states or those local parts of the country as incentives for them to participate in this.

The last piece: In the mid-90s I worked in the Clinton White House, which oversaw the passage of the 1996 Telecommunications Act. It began with thinking about the World Wide Web and regulating it like it was a TV or radio station. The Clinton administration and Republicans on the Hill came together and said we should have a real North Star here, and our North Star should be how do we make sure that the US becomes the global center of this new emerging economic force that is going to drive the economy of the future. I do think we’re going to need some version of that to ensure that this country’s innovation lead in this space is effectively realized.

You were here before the tech industry really cared about politics. You’re now seeing tech industry CEOs bending over backwards to not offend Trump. Is part of the reason that companies need all of this infrastructure, which is going to require public-private partnerships?

That’s really a function of tech being at the center of the US economy. It’s the center of culture. Tech issues are much more prominent in terms of how government thinks about it and how society thinks about it because it’s such a central socio-economic factor.

I’m not even sure it’s really accurate to call tech a sector. I mean, particularly with AI, it really just cuts through all aspects of society.

You’ve worked with some of the iconic CEOs in this industry. [AirBnB’s] Brian Chesky, [Coinbase’s] Brian Armstrong and others. Now, you’re working with Sam Altman. What makes him unique, other than not being named Brian?

I’ve been really lucky because I’ve gotten to work with several. All three of them have the ability to re-imagine where the world is going, but then meld that with incredibly strong values that they bring to the conversations and thinking and actions that will shape what the world is going to look like going forward.

How did you meet Sam and how did the relationship start?

I’m not one of those people in Silicon Valley these days who were Sam’s best friend for the last 20 years. I got to know Sam a bit when he was at Y Combinator, because AirBnB originally came out of YC. A couple of times I went over when I was running policy and comms for AirBnB and did talks to a particular YC class about how important those areas are and how they needed to start thinking about it in the early phase. This was all during the midst of the “sharing economy,” when companies and technologists and investors were just beginning to really understand that navigating public policy, understanding your brand, having a communication strategy, all of those things were interrelated to your success.

When OpenAI in November of 2022 had its literal overnight success, I reached out a couple times like, I’m sure, many other people, and offered some thoughts from the peanut gallery. And then, as things progressed, it eventually led to the conversations about coming in.

What were your words of wisdom to Sam back in 2022?

Something along the lines of: You’re going to be very much like a long-shot presidential candidate who wins the party’s nomination, in the sense that, overnight, you’re going to go from being someone folks who are not necessarily paying a lot of attention to, to people all of a sudden paying enormous attention to. And there’s always this version of you becoming famous, but not necessarily well known. And it is going to be incredibly important as you move forward to demonstrate those values that I know are inherent to him and that he had always talked about.

He was the first of the major players to come out and publicly say that it’s really important that this space be appropriately regulated, and testifying in Congress when you weren’t asked, weren’t required, weren’t under any obligation. I do think that was one of those real character reveals.

It’s interesting how the public has viewed that with a lot of cynicism, that all of that is self-interested or for show. And when the OpenAI board fired him, they said he had not been consistently candid with the board.

Who is the real Sam? He was involved with universal basic income early on. I remember expressing skepticism of UBI and he said yeah, but you’re expressing that based on the perspective of what you know today and not where the world is going. I remember him making the case that this is going to change how we think about growth and productivity, and that’s going to create enormous opportunities. And we really need to think about how everyone’s going to be able to participate in that. I remember really being struck by that conversation.

We’ve seen these high profile executive departures from OpenAI and there’s a lot of criticism that they’re leaving because Sam doesn’t care about safety or he’s dishonest. What’s the real story?

First, a year ago, this company had about 700 people. Today it has almost 2000 people. So that’s been one of the more unusual “exoduses” I’ve ever seen. If anything, the exodus has been in and not out.

Secondly, you go back a year ago, we had, roughly speaking, under a million weekly active users. I think today it’s like 250 million active users. The company has deployed in a responsible way any number of different product launches and tools. Each by itself would have been the seminal release for most companies in over a decade. I want to be humble here, but there is a scoreboard dimension to this.

I actually think it’s a feature, not a bug. If there was the type of press that exists today and today’s social media existed when Thomas Edison was building electricity and you had the Nikola Teslas of the world rolling around, my guess is the coverage would have been pretty similar. And the culture would have been similar. And the impact on society would have been similar.

I want to ask you about your recent New Yorker profile. I know everyone in Silicon Valley is obsessed with youth and plastic surgery, but they really seemed to be obsessed with your hair and teeth. What is that all about?

I sent it to my 18-year-old and when he read that thing — it took him a couple hours because 9,000 words is not exactly what the younger generation is reading these days — his only comment was in a text message. He called me “Baldy.”

That was his only takeaway?

I like the part when they describe me as, and I’m paraphrasing, someone who looks like the type of people that self-torture themselves by trying to stay in shape. I took that as how someone from the Upper West Side or Upper East would describe someone who’s in relatively good health because they have the benefit of living in California and being able to work out all the time.

So you liked that story?

Res ipsa loquitur. I’ll let you look that one up.

I need to look it up. I’m not as educated as you are.

Despite my hair and my teeth, proof points of a working class background.