25 November, 2023

Behind the headlines

Joel Saget/Getty

An Oppenheimer of our times

Sam Altman possesses, in his own words, “an absolutely delusional level of self-confidence”, says Elizabeth Weil in New York Magazine. The OpenAI CEO, 38, grew up the oldest of four siblings in a middle-class midwestern household, and “started fixing the family VCR at age three”. After selling his first tech company when he was 26 for $43.4m – miserable by Silicon Valley standards – he got into the venture capital world and “grew extremely rich”. “He bought a prepper house in Big Sur and stocked it with guns and gold. He raced in his McLarens.”

Altman might be “the Oppenheimer of our age”. He has long been drawing parallels between himself and the father of the atomic bomb, noting in interviews that they share a birthday, and discussing how AI, like nuclear weapons, poses an “existential risk”. According to tech writer Jathan Sadowski, Altman “sees himself as this world-bestriding Übermensch, as a superhuman in a really Nietzschean kind of way. He will at once create the thing that destroys us and save us from it.”

😱🤑 The internal battle at OpenAI – Altman was fired as CEO last Friday, then rehired when employees threatened to resign – was a fight between “two duelling visions” of AI, says Kevin Roose in The New York Times. The board members who spearheaded the sacking think the technology could destroy humanity if mishandled, and therefore needs to be sheltered from market forces. Their replacements, including former US Treasury Secretary and ultra-capitalist Larry Summers, believe AI “could usher in a new era of prosperity”. The result was clear: the capitalists won.

Heroes and villains

Anne Boyer: taking a stand

Hero

Anne Boyer, the (ex) poetry editor of The New York Times Magazine, who has resigned in protest over her paper’s coverage of “the Israeli state’s US-backed war against the people of Gaza”. If this resignation “leaves a hole in the news the size of poetry”, she says, “then that is the true shape of the present”. It’s a good line, says the Telegraph’s Michael Deacon, though at this stage it’s not yet clear “what effect Ms Boyer’s resignation as a magazine poetry editor will have on the conflict in Gaza”.

Heroes

Grammar aficionados in the Hampshire village of Twyford, who have won a year-long fight to a get an apostrophe reinstated on road furniture. A sign put up in November 2022 rebranded St Mary’s Terrace as “St Marys Terrace” to make it easier to read, but, after a hearing held by Winchester city council, the original, apostrophe-featuring sign was rescued from the local rubbish dump.

Villains

Government drivers, who seem to be a bit slapdash behind the wheel. Ministerial cars, which ferry around high-level politicians, were involved in 129 road accidents between January 2017 and October 2023. They included a head-on collision between a Jaguar and an “unspecified animal” in 2022, which incurred almost £3,000 worth of damage.

Villains

Spain’s olive thieves, who are stopping at nothing to get their hands on the “green gold”. Three years of drought and heatwaves have sent the price of olive oil soaring, leading to a spate of robberies across the Mediterranean. Over the past year, Spain – the world’s biggest producer – has seen hundreds of thefts in Andalusia alone. Some farmers are hanging their trees with GPS devices, so they can track branches chopped off by chainsaw-wielding gangs.

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Property

THE FLAT This three-bedroom apartment is on the first floor of a striking modernist building near Chalk Farm. Wide windows allow light to pour in, and hand-stained parquet flooring flows throughout. The custom-made kitchen contains a combination of red cabinetry and oak veneer cupboards, and in the bathroom a square, Japanese-style tub sits on a blue-tiled floor. Hampstead Heath is nearby, and Kentish Town Station is a ten-minute walk. £950,000.

Comment

An American TikToker enthusing over Osama bin Laden’s justification for 9/11

Teens, TikTok and the Gaza crisis

I’m a sixth-former at one of Britain’s largest comprehensives, says Pooja Bhalla in The Spectator, and I “know no one who supports Israel over Palestine”. If that sounds shocking, consider that almost no one in my generation would ever buy or read a newspaper; even the idea of watching TV news seems “alien”. By far the number one source of news for teenagers is TikTok, where there are effectively “no checks and balances” to make sure what we see is fair and accurate. And every single TikTok I’ve seen about the war has been pro-Palestine. If this material were assembled in a newspaper, it would look like “hardcore propaganda”.

“Palestinians are willing to die for this land because they are native to it,” says one confused video. “If Israelis were native to it, they wouldn’t bomb it.” “If you’re not pro-Palestine,” declares a girl in another video, “we’re not friends.” There is a constant refrain that the war is “racism” – the “Black Lives Matter mindset applied to geopolitics”. It’s framed as “white power (bad) vs diversity (good)”. When I ask friends why they support Palestine, they refer to videos of violence against children in Gaza. What about the Israeli babies killed on 7 October? Or Hamas’s genocidal ambition to kill all Israeli Jews? Few care; others “mistrust the story” as “more lies spun by the old ‘official’ media”. The BBC and Sky News do their best to produce TikTok-friendly snippets of proper news. But they can’t compete with “short, opinion-filled ‘hot takes’ from teens in their bedrooms”.

💬🤬 Some of the Israel-Gaza content on social media is truly grim, says Rory Stewart on The Rest is Politics. There have been 46,000 posts with the hashtag #HitlerWasRight, and 10,000 with #DeathToMuslims. Anti-Semitic abuse is up 919%; Islamophobic abuse up 422%. The Guardian has even had to remove from its website a statement by Osama bin Laden justifying the 9/11 attacks, because people were sharing it so much.

Zeitgeist

A more colourful time. Silver Screen Collection/Getty

When people say the past was less gloomy than the present, they’re absolutely right, says Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry on Substack. “Colour has been literally draining away from our lives.” A Science Museum study of 7,000 everyday objects in its collection found that 15% were black, grey or white in 1800, compared to almost half today. In 1952, three out of four cars sold were red, green or blue, whereas today the same proportion are either black, white or grey. Films are now generally “darker and less colourful”; interior design is “completely drab”, full of monochrome rather than the vivid tones of the 1960s and 1970s. “Beige Supremacy is everywhere.”

Life

Bunter and his wife, the Duchess of Beaufort. Dave Benett/Getty

Weed with Peter Sellers and rounders with Liz Hurley

Harry Beaufort is fabulously indiscreet, says Laura Pullman in The Sunday Times. In his new memoir, the 12th Duke of Beaufort admits that he “couldn’t resist blabbing” after a one-night stand with Jerry Hall in the 1980s. When word got back to the Texan model, she reportedly quipped: “If that boy’s cock was as big as his mouth, he’d be one hell of a lay.” Beaufort – “Bunter” to his pals – describes playing rounders with Elizabeth Hurley (who galloped around “like an attractive but demented gym mistress”) and recalls a teenage Prince Harry throwing a “succession” of fully-clothed girls into a pool at a birthday party. He’s a friend of the King’s, but says Prince Andrew is just full of “very bland stories about ‘Mother’”.

Life got “marginally more serious” for Bunter when his father died in 2017, leaving him with £315m and the 52,000-acre Badminton estate in Gloucestershire. But the 71-year-old still fronts a rock band (the Listening Device) and “prefers Ibiza raves to country hunts”. He’s partial to marijuana – which he first tried courtesy of Peter Sellers when he was a teenager – and a bit of ecstasy. He has told his children Bobby and Bella to take drugs in moderation, but the two thirty-somethings hardly touch the stuff. “It’s a terrible, terrible disappointment,” he admits. “They’re not caners by any stretch of the imagination.”

The Unlikely Duke by Harry Beaufort is available here.

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Quirk of history

This video of 1920s American stunt pilot Gladys Ingle fixing the landing gear of a small biplane in midair has racked up 1.4 million views on X (formerly Twitter). “She was a badass”, says one commenter. Another is more pragmatic: “Not a job I would ever want.” Watch the full clip here.

Weather

Quoted

“To achieve greatness, two things are needed: a plan and not quite enough time.”