SAN FRANCISCO — "I don't think this will be an only good story," OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said after being asked a question about whether his company, valued around $1 trillion, might bring some bad into the world. In other words: yes. His defense was that people should think in millennia, not decades. "Maybe the socioeconomic contract has to change very dramatically," he said. "But that's all been happening for a long time. There was no such job as basketball coach 500 years ago, there was no such job as AI company CEO 50 years ago."
The basketball coach Altman referred to was Steve Kerr. The two were on stage together at the Sydney Goldstein Theater in Hayes Valley on Monday night for a conversation about "leadership, innovation, and San Francisco." After learning about the event earlier that day, I bought a ticket out of morbid curiosity. What myths is Altman interested in telling about himself and about his company, one actively making American life more expensive, degrading, and stupid? What possible connections could Kerr and Altman have? Most intriguingly, how would the most prominent member of the triumphalist AI set talk about a city he and his cohort have all but conquered?
As to the last question, we are at an interesting inflection point in the discourse around San Francisco, and before we get into what Altman and Kerr talked about, I think it's essential to frame it within the recent history of the city. The dominant post-2020 narrative, one with the weight of the world's most powerful companies behind it, is that San Francisco was on the verge of total collapse into a narcotized wasteland due to the pro-crime woke agenda that was allowed to govern until the AI boom swept in and saved the city. The supposed nadir was epitomized by the reign of reformist DA Chesa Boudin, whom a group of staggeringly wealthy people organized to recall from his position in 2022. They accomplished this by successfully selling a cynical vision of San Francisco, as a city given over to criminals and violent drug addicts because so-called leftist hardliners were more concerned with solving a half-millennium of structural racism than catering to the citizenry who mattered; namely, its rich people.
The Boudin recall should have been a canary for the nation, as it showed how the reactionary Silicon Valley elite would wield their power not just by holding a city hostage with the threat of their and their industry's departure but by using the tools at their disposal to create and articulate a different version of reality. (Two years after ousting Boudin, Elon Musk, David Sacks, and Marc Andreessen would throw their weight behind Donald Trump, and be rewarded handsomely.) In the meantime, cryptocurrency went bust and the companies that defined the second tech boom, like Facebook and Google, stopped hiring people. This, combined with the years-long and still-ongoing COVID hangover, led to a cooler San Francisco rental market for the first time since the housing bubble collapsed in 2008.
None of this was really the problem of the normal San Franciscan, who still got to spend their time in the most beautiful city in the country, perhaps with slightly cheaper rent and a bit of breathing room away from the biggest dorks and losers the region had to offer. Then OpenAI released ChatGPT, the AI industry went boom, Nvidia became the single pillar holding up the U.S. economy, the city elected Levi Strauss heir and tech-company fetishist Daniel Lurie as its mayor, and the third tech boom was suddenly and violently on.
Gone are the corporate fictions from the previous decade about making the world a better place, replaced by a brutal commitment to accumulation and hierarchy; less "Don't Be Evil," more dead-eyed commitment to escaping the permanent underclass by going founder mode 996. San Francisco's techno-political apparatus shares the unfeeling worldview of its newish class of robber barons and their labor force, a worldview that is in part the product of broad post-COVID shifts to the economy, culture, and how a huge cohort of young people see each other and the world (young people who are now working to build the future of AI). In practice, what that looks like is the infamous billboards decorating the freeway running into town all advertising one gross AI company or another, including one that advised readers to "STOP HIRING HUMANS." San Francisco is experiencing the nation's fastest rent surge, despite prices having remained pretty high even after the supposed collapse—almost as if the visibility of unhoused people was perhaps not the reliable economic indicator it was made out to be.
Anyway! The first person to speak on stage Monday was Lurie himself, and he was treated to raucous applause, in part because the Venn diagram of Lurieheads and people who'd pay to see Altman speak is a circle and because Lurie had just gotten credit for heading off a planned series of ICE raids in the Bay Area until Trump's aforementioned tech backers intervened. Lurie boasted that OpenAI had just "re-upped" the deal to keep its offices in the city, a curiously sports-adjacent construction that hints at how ultimately subservient the city is to its tech overlords. Then he left the stage, replaced by the night's two featured speakers and their interlocutor, the always-visible local figure and newly announced supervisor candidate Manny Yekutiel.
Immediately, someone leapt up out of the crowd and served Altman with a subpeona. The local group Stop AI, who have been regularly protesting against the industry, said they were trying to get Altman "to appear at our trial where we will be tried for non-violently blocking the front door of OpenAI on multiple occasions and blocking the road in front of their office." The crowd booed them, and Altman appeared not to move. Kerr was asked whether he was a ChatGPT user. "I actually used it for a medical question, and it was amazing," he said, comparing it to having 10 doctors at once. He then explained that the Warriors also use the service, though it's more the front office, who use it for figuring out which players to target in the draft or free agency. He also said his team uses it in player development. Any hint of the perversity of using an AI tool to develop a person was lost on the crowd.
Yekutiel asked Altman if he was a sports person, and he said no, though he'd gone to Warriors games and noticed how athletic everyone was. Kerr made what I thought was actually a pretty incisive point about how all sports are rapidly becoming more competitive and intense now, and he noted that his own industry was changing at the rate of technology. Unfortunately, he used Bjorn Borg and John McEnroe to make his point and Yekutiel asked him, "These are known people?" This set up the dynamic that was to hold for the night: Kerr expressed himself eloquently, though about subject matter that neither of his stage-mates could really understand; Yekutiel consumed as much conversational oxygen as he could; and Altman made the most convincing possible case against the idea that business leaders are necessarily charismatic, intelligent people.
I have seen many people speak publicly in my capacity as a journalist, and few of them were as ill-equipped for the job as Altman. Yekutiel would ask him a simple question, along the lines of, for example, What is the grand plan with OpenAI?, and Altman would either sit silently for like 10 full seconds or stammer his way through an answer, pausing halfway through sentences and rushing headlong through paragraphs. He rarely answered questions directly, even when they were simple.
There were several points in the conversation at which I would have expected the CEO of one of the world's most valuable companies to have canned answers for expected questions, but Altman was often obtuse to the point of mass confusion. When Yekutiel tried to engage with him on wealth inequality with a somewhat pointed question contrasting Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang's staggering net worth with millions of Americans getting kicked off SNAP benefits, Altman stumbled through a non-answer that showed he doesn't even think this is something he should have to pretend to take seriously. People in Huang's position, he suggested, should "pay it forward." He continued, "Not everyone who makes a ton of money goes on to do good things with it, but a lot of them do."
One such person who has made both a lot of money and also critical changes to the structure of his once capped-profit company so that he can make a lot more money is Sam Altman. Do you remember the OpenAI coup two years ago, when the company, at that time technically a subsidiary of a non-profit foundation dedicated to keeping guardrails on AI development and using its money to at least pretend to do good, fired Altman because he was trying to turn it into a normal tech company whose raison d'etre was to make money for its investors? Altman spoke obliquely about OpenAI's foundation, currently the fifth-largest in the world, and how one of its core missions was "AI resilience." In part that means safety, but also it means thinking about "the economic impacts and how we help the world manage through this transition."
Altman was not interested in allaying fears about his company. As he said in the quote atop this story, some bad stuff was probably going to happen, but that's OK, because some good stuff might also happen. That process will likely include some massive changes to relations between labor and capital that will result in millions of people's lives getting worse and their horizons of possibility dimming, but remember: The future will be a different place than the present, so who is to say what will happen? He made the case (sloppily) to root for the boot stamping on the human face forever because maybe the blood seeping out of the face will feed some yet-unseen plant life on the ground.
As for that ground, Altman and Kerr were asked why they liked living in San Francisco and what their vision for the city was. Kerr laid out a lovely answer about being in a beautiful place with creative energy and a vibrant political tradition, but also feeling dismay and a tinge of guilt at the staggering wealth inequality in the city. He wasn't happy with how inaccessible his own team's games were, which he contrasted with the vibe at Valkyries games. He correctly diagnosed that ticket prices were a function of the city's horrifying wealth disparities, but, he said, "The machine is so big that I don't think any of us can stop it."
"I wanted to live in San Francisco my whole life," Altman said. Why was San Francisco the tech capital of the world? Does it have anything to do with the intense concentration of privatized resources once controlled by the state? Would it maybe be intertwined with the region's infrastructure and political-economic history? Has anyone written a book about this? No, per Altman: "You can draw a straight line from the cultural freedom of San Francisco to the fact that so much technology was invented here."
To the extent that either man outlined any political vision it was on a single issue: housing, and specifically the need to build more of it by abolishing environmental reviews. Altman said he wasn't a single-issue voter, but he thought housing affordability would make a "huge positive impact on society." Correct, though to fail to see wealth inequality's central role in housing inaccessibility while looking only at the bureaucratic guardrails is to totally misunderstand the relationship between cause and effect. In a few answers, the point of San Francisco's radical political legacy was retconned into all having led up to this point, with all the abstracted-away civic character of San Francisco (except, credit where it's due, by Kerr) reduced to a quest to build thousands of new houses. A worthy goal, sure, though, again, a symptom of something millions of times larger and thornier.
At the end of the talk, everyone stood and clapped, energized by the conversation. I descended out into the beautiful night, out past the waiting swarm of Waymos, and onto the BART at 16th Street. A few days ago up the block, one such Waymo had just killed KitKat, the beloved bodega cat who people in the Mission had lovingly petted for years. The metaphor wasn't subtle, but tech has never been much for sublety.
Correction (10:19 a.m.): The original version of this article incorrectly listed Marc Benioff instead of Marc Andreessen among Donald Trump's Silicon Valley supporters.
