In my quest to understand WTF IS HAPPENING and to clearly articulate the deep instinctual knowing I had in fall of 2022 upon the sudden and viral release of ChatGPT 3 that AI IS BAD, I’d like to present part two of my Why AI is Bad series: an overview of the main players in the current AI race for dominance, a brief explainer on how they’re all connected, and why they’re all dragging us through this hell (spoiler: money and power). Because if there’s one thing I understand more now than ever after researching for this series, is AI is truly like 7 companies stacked in a trench coat led by a bakers dozen of sociopaths.

Sam Altman has turned a lot of friends into enemies on his quest for power, influence, and fame as the 40-year-old CEO of OpenAI (hint: ChatGPT). Most of the original leaders, researchers, and builders of OpenAI’s early days have left, many of whom have started their own companies: most notably, Dario Amodei and his sister Daniela, who co-founded Anthropic, which is currently eating OpenAI’s lunch. Former co-founder, mentor, and confidant, Elon Musk, was so scorned by Altman he founded xAI (and Grok, yikes) in spite after their falling out. Another co-founder, OpenAI board member, and chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, along with then-CTO Mira Murati, staged an attempted coop led by the rest of the OpenAI board that lasted less than a week, ultimately resulting in more power for Sam, and the resignation of the board, Sutskever, Murati, and a host of other detractors.

And that’s just a bit about one of these guys. There is quite literally so much drama, that as I came up from my deep dive reading of Empire of AI by Karen Hao this afternoon, I was shocked to see rumors that Microsoft is considering suing OpenAI and Amazon being reported by major tech outlets. Microsoft is the biggest and most important investor in OpenAI and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella had a pivotal role in getting Altman reinstated during those 6 days when he was removed by the board as CEO of OpenAI.

Before I show you the creatures (men) in charge, let’s first establish the companies that are dominating the conversation: Google (you may hear Gemini or DeepMind as well), OpenAI (ChatGPT), Anthropic (Claude), Microsoft (plus Epstein friend, Bill Gates, is involved), Meta (Facebook), and Tesla/xAI/X (whatever Elon is doing).. There’s also NVIDIA (they have the computer chips this all runs off of), and of course Amazon, Oracle, Apple, and like hundreds of other companies in the mix, but I will mainly focus on these for now.

If we are to understand why AI is taking over (and subsequently why that’s bad), we need to understand the men behind this king-of-the-hill style power grab. It’s really hard to pinpoint the actual leader of the pack, so instead, we’ll start with the oldest:

Larry Ellison (you may recognize his name because he became a key stakeholder in the Tiktok forced sale and he’s been trying to consolidate media power by buying Paramount) is 81 YEARS OLD with a shit ton of filler in his face. He’s an American who dropped out of college (maybe the original college drop out tech bro??) and has had SIX wives. He founded Oracle Corporation in 1977, a tech company specializing in software and cloud computing infrastructure. He’s been a billionaire for over 40 years and has become an outspoken supporter and friend of Donald Trump, using this relationship to skirt anti-monopoly flags for his Paramount acquisition earlier this year (allegedly, allegedly). Larry Ellison invested nearly $1B in Tesla, Elon Musk’s infamous car/tech company (depending on the day).

Speaking of Elon: Elon Musk, 54 year old South African almost-trillionaire, came to the USA to finish his undergrad physics and economics degrees. He eventually founded a company called X.com (it’s different I checked), which was a sort of online bank situation that got acquired by PayPal, cementing him as a billionaire post-PayPal sale to eBay. I think we already know enough about him to realize that if he’s at the start of this story, it can’t be going anywhere good. And it’s my view he’s at the start of this: It’s been widely reported that at Elon’s 44th birthday party, he got into an argument about the future of AI with Larry Page, co-founder and then CEO of Google.

See, Google had recently acquired DeepMind (which eventually produced Gemini), a UK based AI startup researching how to make computers think like humans, for £400m the year before Elon’s party. Elon and Larry apparently were fighting about the “threat intelligent machines posed to humanity,” and Larry called Elon a “speciesist” because Larry thought robots taking over was inevitable and Elon was favoring humans too much (I WISH I WAS JOKING) and this literally ended their friendship. Billionaires can have messy bday parties too I guess.

Elon was so miffed about the possibility of Larry Page and Google leading the future of artificial intelligence (and I guess in his mind, the downfall of humanity), that he co-founded (and $$$$ funded) an AI startup with Sam Altman called OpenAI. Literally the point of this was that they didn’t want Google to control everything related to AI and they thought they could do it better than Larry Page and co. It was after an eventual falling out with Altman, that sparked him to create his own AI startup separate from OpenAI called xAI (he loves the letter x).

Sam Altman, a Stanford drop out, is apparently the most charming man on the planet to the powers that be (read: government and billionaires). He was part of the first cohort of Y Combinator founders, sold his first company a few years later for $43.M then quickly became Y Combinator President at age 28, making decisions about which startups in Sillicon Valley would be given the most exclusive access to funding, mentorship, and tech’s richest people.

He even explored running for governor of California, and decided instead to be the shepherd of “AGI”; he probably couldn’t sustain a campaign knowing he constantly says the most insane things: back in 2015 he famously said: "AI will probably, like, most likely sort of lead to the end of the world, but in the meantime there will be great companies created with serious machine learning." OH. SURE. As much as I’d love to recap his lore, I’d rather point you in the direction of the resources I consulted most: former WSJ journalist Karen Hao’s Empire of AI, this Corporate Gossip podcast episode, and Hysteria podcast’s deep dive segment “This F*cking Guy” about him which I embedded at the end of this article for your viewing displeasure.

My informed assessment: Sam Altman is a self-important, very scary pathological liar, who lies and exaggerates about even the most inconsequential things to feel some semblance of power. It’s weird, it’s confusing, and yet somehow he’s swindled everyone into giving him billions of dollars to fund this fantasy of “AGI” (Artificial General Intelligence, whose fans believe will allow computers to understand, learn, etc. better than humans can in the future). He even swept then-Senate Majority leader Chuck Schumer off his feet enough to influence Schumer’s AI Roadmap to focus on “harmful” AI scenarios, taken from Altman talking points, rather than regulating AI in real time as it exists right now. (Honestly, it’s elder abuse at this point to make these dinosaurs in Congress try to understand technology these days). His favorite way to manipulate people is to tout the impending doom and devastating impact to humanity if “we” don’t build AGI first before bad actors do. He seems to believe he is uniquely positioned to be at the helm as “we” usher in this new world of AI. After reading Empire of AI among everything else, I think Sam Altman is a marketing genius in the way that Donald Trump and Kris Jenner are marketing geniuses. sigh.

Did you know Peter Thiel, 58 y.o. billionaire, German and American co-founder of PayPal (1997) and current town-cryer about the AntiChrist, is one of Sam Altman’s closest friends and mentors? Thiel is a noted contrarian, Trumpist libertarian, and math prodigy, with a law degree who also founded Palantir in 2004 (yes, surveillance state Palantir) at the same time as he became Facebook’s first outside investor (because he was also Mark Zuckerberg’s mentor 😭). He famously doesn’t know if he thinks humanity should persist, he’s not a big fan of democracy, and preaches the only way to build a company is to build a monopoly because “competition is for losers”. He’s actually one of the scariest people on this list (if not the scariest).

Sam Altman’s current biggest rival and former colleague/frenemy originally joined OpenAI in 2016, with a growing interest in AI safety that started at his previous role at Google. He quickly made a name for himself, helping to pioneer success of GPT-2 (an early non-public version of a model that eventually evolved to power ChatGPT), and that led to OpenAI letting him spearhead the creation of GPT-3. GPT-3 performance was a 10-fold increase over it’s previous version, cementing Amodei’s internal and external starpower, and catapulting the company into the version of OpenAI we know today. If we remember back to what I said about Altman, you can already see how this ends - he and Altman continued to clash. With growing dissatisfaction about the lack of AI safety measures at OpenAI, led IMO by Altman’s insatiable need to be first, Amodei, his sister Daniela (then VP of Policy and Safety), and a number of senior OpenAI leaders left in December 2020 to start rival AI company, Anthropic. Amodei and Altman continue to be at odds, so much so that they refused to hold hands for a photo in February 2026, an idea led by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, at an AI Summit (see picture below LOL COME ON GROW UP).

I could go on, but for now I’ll leave you with a few more honorable petty mentions:

In short, colonization of the mind. Why? To create the first trillionaires. No longer is it enough to just be a billionaire. Capitalists have competed on every frontier and have now figured out a way to capture a market they hadn’t been able to before: literally our minds. Don’t believe me? Listen to Sam Altman call intelligence a “utility” this week. Additionally, the summary at the top of my google search, “goal of AI revolution,” says: “the core goal of the AI revolution is to fundamentally enhance human productivity, efficiency, and capability by automating complex, cognitive, and routine tasks.”

It’s my view that the subtext of “enhancing human productivity, efficiency, and capability” is to squeeze ever more money out of us lowly plebeians to continue to funnel up to the tech oligarchs and their swaths of investors. On a conspiracy-adjacent level, I don’t believe these people in charge either A) see us as human or B) see themselves at human, or maybe both. They’ve created this god-like feeling of power and are so hungry for more they will stop at nothing to get it, even if it means the destruction of life as we know it.

Don’t forget to subscribe for your weekend cultural digest update, Culture over Coffee, to be in your inbox Sunday morning. Feel free to forward this to a friend, or just tell a friend! I’d love to help more people understand the the heck is going on!