Andrew Garfield and Yura Borisov star in Artificial, the OpenAI drama
Finally, the corporate soap opera we all pretended to understand is getting a movie. Neon is bringing the OpenAI boardroom meltdown to the big screen, featuring Andrew Garfield as Sam Altman and Yura Borisov as Ilya Sutskever. Can it get any messier?
The plot centers on the collapse of the partnership between Sam Altman, the face of OpenAI’s relentless drive for mass-market AI, and Ilya Sutskever, the scientist who suddenly got a case of existential dread regarding his own creation. The drama peaked in November 2023, when the OpenAI board effectively fired Altman, claiming he lacked transparency. Sutskever was a key architect of this boardroom ambush, though he later realized that trying to wrestle the CEO chair away from a man backed by Microsoft and Satya Nadella was perhaps not his most tactical career move.
Chaos ensued as Greg Brockman walked out, employees threatened a mass exodus, and Satya Nadella essentially put his hand on the scales, resulting in Altman’s return just five days later. Sutskever eventually exited to found Safe Superintelligence, leaving the rest of us to wonder if the whole thing was just a very expensive rehearsal for a movie script. The cast also features Monica Barbaro as Mira Murati, Mark Rylance as Geoffrey Hinton, and Ike Barinholtz as Elon Musk, all under the direction of Luca Guadagnino.
It’s truly inspiring to see a multi-billion dollar tech disaster get the Hollywood treatment before the actual technology even reaches a point where it can consistently count fingers on a human hand. The fact that Amazon MGM dropped the project right after partnering with OpenAI is just the chef’s kiss of corporate optics. Either this film will be a masterpiece of modern paranoia, or it will be the most expensive promotional puff piece for a company that can’t decide if it wants to save the world or just sell it.
Source: Neon
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