Call 2023 the year of personal rule. The big ideas driving technology, and its impact on society today — from AI, to cryptocurrency, to quantum computing — represent years of collaborative, iterative research and development. But the events of the past year revealed how when tech innovation is driven by private investment, the individuals with the most money usually get exactly their way, to wild, unpredictable results. Looking back on the year in technology, the year’s biggest stories were driven by its biggest personalities, from Sam Altman’s messianic struggle at OpenAI, to Elon Musk’s ongoing, society-wide ideological project, to the lingering effects of Sam Bankman-Fried’s fraud machine, which single-handedly reshaped the national debate around cryptocurrency. Take AI first. The boardroom skullduggery that surrounded Sam Altman’s ouster, and then reinstatement, as CEO of OpenAI still remains murky, with the board’s statement that he was “not consistently candid in his communications” the only official public information. But the willingness of OpenAI’s biggest investor Microsoft to instantly back him, offering to bring him onboard for his own competing AI project until his return, shows exactly how important his presence is believed to be in Silicon Valley circles (not to mention the “I’m Spartacus”-like protests on his behalf from hundreds of OpenAI employees). Although the reason remains unclear, Altman’s firing inspired a round of argument and recrimination in the debate over AI safety (despite Emmett Shear, briefly the interim CEO at OpenAI after the firing, saying on X that “The board did not remove Sam over any specific disagreement on safety.”) One of the loudest voices, if not by default the loudest voice on the platform that he owns, decrying Altman on philosophical grounds was Elon Musk, who declared in the aftermath that “What matters is having directors who deeply understand AI and will stand up to Sam. Human civilization is at stake here.” Musk is a longtime AI “doomer,” or believer that a runaway, hyper-sophisticated AI system could pose a mortal threat to humanity — he once used an infamous thought experiment on the subject as a pickup line. By cramming the mysterious business and interpersonal considerations around Altman’s firing into the parameters of a grandiose existential drama, Musk revealed, as if he needed to again, the extent to which one man’s (very) idiosyncratic personality can shape the world of technology if his pocketbook is deep enough. Which is extremely apparent when it comes to Grok, Musk’s own competing chatbot to OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Musk had repeatedly expressed his desire for a “based” AI before launching Grok, which boasts a painfully forced, faux-“edgy” sense of humor and lacks the inconsistent guardrails around political speech that have led many of Musk’s fellow conservatives to claim bias in other AI systems. The pair of Altman and Musk, who have their own complicated history, make for an intriguing contrast: the former has repeatedly compared himself to the father of the nuclear bomb, J. Robert Oppenheimer, but stubbornly insists on governing his company and his AI products in accordance with modern liberal norms; the latter thinks AI should be aggressively policed for any trace of (totally theoretical) superhuman capability, but also that it should basically interact with you in the manner of a mediocre “South Park” ripoff. As multifaceted and overlapping as these two men’s personal preferences might be, sometimes how they impose themselves on the public is much simpler. For example, sometimes you just perpetrate an incredibly large financial fraud, and then you get caught, and it makes everyone in your industry look bad. Such was the lesson the world learned from Sam Bankman-Fried this year, as the spectacular collapse of FTX led to the bursting of crypto’s bubble and a renewed wave of political calls to rein in the technology. If Bankman-Fried, seemingly snickering all the way at the public and regulators alike, had simply made the personal choice not to do fraud, it’s possible the entire landscape would look different for cryptocurrency, and maybe the industry wouldn’t feel the need to spend tens of millions of dollars on super PACs to try and clear its name. It’s the most obvious and glaring reminder of how much these men’s (and yes, it must be noted, they are almost all men in the broader category of tech world-shapers) personal opinions and character inevitably drive the technological and societal landscape in a liberal market society — much like the Carnegies, Vanderbilts, et al who came before them. One caveat, however. They might not be able to move quite as fast, or break as many things, but individual personalities can matter a lot in government, too. Say, for example, if an individual regulator once wrote an extremely influential article, more or less founded her own school of legal thought along those lines, and then got appointed as the youngest ever chair of the Federal Trade Commission. Lina Khan has proceeded to cause headaches for various world-bestriding captains of industries ever since, including a major victory this week. In 2024 personal influence mattered a lot in the tech world, but given enough institutional support and the right social and legal context, the tech titans’ opposite numbers in Washington have proven themselves more than capable of occasionally making a decent showing themselves.
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