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Now It’s Clear Why Amazon Didn’t Want to Release ‘Artificial’: It’s Withering AF
“Aggressive technocapitalism wins, safety dies” is a long name for a movie and a short logline for a film, yet the phrase might accurately be used for both when it comes to Artificial.Luca Guadagnino brought his latest and by far most-topical movie to a world-premiere at the 64th New York Film Festival Monday evening, the first stop of what has already seemed like an unusually long journey. Ditched by Amazon MGM Studios after its parent company’s $50 billion investment in OpenAI, the film, as it turns out, would be non-grata at a large tech firm even if it never signed on for that 5 percent equity stake in Sam Altman‘s company. Persistently bleak under the rays of the California sun, Artificial (now under the aegis of Anora studio Neon) is the movie of the moment — the origin story of our current AI quagmire at the literal, psychological and pretty much every other level.Or as NYFF programming chief Dennis Lim said before the screening:“We are already in a threshold period. We need to understand how we got here, and the film you’re about to see shows us that way.”The movie is notably faithful, at times dutifully chronological and nearly always horror-movie bracing on the subject of the rise of capitalist AI, as Ilya Sutskever, an idealistic and socially unpolished Russian immigrant, shows up at the office door of Geoffrey Hinton, a godfather of AI, at the University of Toronto in 2003. There he will learn under the well-intentioned eventual Nobel Prize winner, soon following him to Google and its Bay Area halo. As observers of the space well know, Sutskever ends up meeting Sam Altman at a 2014 conference, where the Y Combinator financier, already well established in Silicon Valley at barely 30, chases down the prodigy to convince him to work at a nascent OpenAI as chief science officer and supercharge its LLM ambitions. Or, more accurately, make them possible in the first place — Sutskever is Wozniak to Altman’s Jobs, but more so.Soon a (last) supper follows with Altman, Elon Musk, Greg Brockman and others — the prelude to a slow realization by Sutskever, and us, that the science Sutskever wants to develop to save the world is the capital Altman wants to use to build a warchest. We know the rest — OpenAI rushes out ChatGPT in November 2022, shocking the industry and even many of its own employees; Altman displays a growing accelerationism with the abetment of lead investor Microsoft (mixed with blog-y pronouncements of transforming and saving the world, and a weird word-cloud fondness for the word compute); and OpenAI transitions from a nonprofit to its opposite. The whole story culminates in Sutskever’s notorious November Coup of 2023 in which Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and assorted OpenAI loyalists back Altman, engineering his return so that he’s stronger than ever — a day clear then and doubly indicative now of capitalism’s ultimate triumph and on which, Yom Kippur-style, our AI fate was inscribed and sealed.Which brings us to late 2026 — right up to it, as the film collides with the last month of AI safety warnings, which also make the screen with a postscript (one of about five) about AI researcher and whistleblower Jacob Coxon warning of a pox on all their houses (or, at least on his former employers Anthropic and OpenAI) for a reckless speedplow over any semblance of safety. On cue, Coxon was taping Jon Stewart a half mile downtown at the exact time the movie was playing, in what one commenter very reasonably called a “most serious and chilling episode” of The Daily Show.A slow-burn account that will not surprise those who have covered the meteoric ascent and Teflon resilience of Altman, Artificial still offers a rich and often entertaining primer on the becoming of OpenAI, integrity and caution time and again sacrificed on the holy altar of finance. (You can read The Hollywood Reporter’s review of the film here.) Not to mention a parable of modern Silicon Valley, the place where advanced science and obscene wealth converge in a way that has never happened in the history of humanity and can only, if every novel on either subject can be believed, will end splendiferously well. Guadagnino took an interest in the subject because “as much as AI belongs to a world of mathematics and computers, it is still generated by peoplle and exists in space of their interaction,” as he noted from the NYFF stage. Screenwriter Simon Rich took an interest in the subject after being told by a childhood friend decades ago about what was possible with AI. That friend ended up going on to work in the industry, prompting Rich, a former Saturday Night Live and Pixar writer as well as a novelist and essayist, to pen this script. “I’m not particularly charismatic or good looking but as a last-ditch effort to warn mankind I wrote this movie. I hope to God a couple people pay attention,” he said.Amazon initially backed the movie before, well, “the concept of a conflict of interest is a very important, let’s say, elephant in the
