San Francisco police arrested an individual on Friday after they allegedly threw a Molotov cocktail at the home of OpenAI’s Sam Altman and made threats outside his company’s headquarters.
No injuries were reported, per OpenAI, which confirmed the incident in a statement, adding, “We deeply appreciate how quickly SFPD responded and the support from the city in helping keep our employees safe. The individual is in custody, and we’re assisting law enforcement with their investigation.”
Hours later, Altman himself confirmed the incident by way of a personal blog post seemingly sparked by both the shock of the Molotov incident and his headline-making week in the wake of a damning investigation by Ronan Farrow and Andrew Marantz in The New Yorker.
“Images have power, I hope. Normally we try to be pretty private, but in this case I am sharing a photo in the hopes that it might dissuade the next person from throwing a Molotov cocktail at our house, no matter what they think about me,” Altman wrote in opening the blog post, which featured a photo of husband Oliver Mulherin and their child. “The first person did it last night, at 3:45 am in the morning. Thankfully it bounced off the house and no one got hurt.”
“Words have power too,” Altman continued. “There was an incendiary article about me a few days ago. Someone said to me yesterday they thought it was coming at a time of great anxiety about AI and that it made things more dangerous for me. I brushed it aside. Now I am awake in the middle of the night and pissed, and thinking that I have underestimated the power of words and narratives. This seems like as good of a time as any to address a few things.”
Altman then turned his attention to “what I believe,” some personal reflections and more thoughts about the AI industry at large, including artificial general intelligence.
He covered a lot of ground in the post, writing up top that not all will “go well” as the AI industry continues to roll out it’s world-shifting tools. As such, “the fear and anxiety about AI is justified; we are in the process of witnessing the largest change to society in a long time, and perhaps ever. We have to get safety right, which is not just about aligning a model — we urgently need a society-wide response to be resilient to new threats. This includes things like new policy to help navigate through a difficult economic transition in order to get to a much better future.”
To get there, he writes that “AI has to be democratized; power cannot be concentrated,” and that it isn’t right for only a few AI labs to make “the most consequential decisions about the shape of our future.” Altman also acknowledges his issues with the OpenAI board — the founder was fired only to be re-hired following an investigation — and apologizes for his past behavior.
“I am not proud of handling myself badly in a conflict with our previous board that led to a huge mess for the company. I have made many other mistakes throughout the insane trajectory of OpenAI; I am a flawed person in the center of an exceptionally complex situation, trying to get a little better each year, always working for the mission. We knew going into this how huge the stakes of AI were, and that the personal disagreements between well-meaning people I cared about would be amplified greatly. But it’s another thing to live through these bitter conflicts and often to have to arbitrate them, and the costs have been serious. I am sorry to people I’ve hurt and wish I had learned more faster,” he writes.
That said, he is “extremely proud” of being able to now deliver on the company’s mission. “Against all odds, we figured out how to build very powerful AI, figured out how to amass enough capital to build the infrastructure to deliver it, figured out how to build a product company and business, figured out how to deliver reasonably safe and robust services at a massive scale, and much more. A lot of companies say they are going to change the world; we actually did.”
His full blog post can be found here.
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