Skeptic Society Magazine

Tag: Silicon Valley’s biggest companies

  • The Money Always Wins – The Atlantic

    The Money Always Wins – The Atlantic

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    It’s been four full days since Sam Altman’s shocking dismissal from OpenAI, and we still have no idea where he’s going to land. There are suggestions that Altman, one of the most powerful figures in AI, could return to the company if the board changes significantly—talks are reportedly under way. But there is also an offer on the table from Microsoft to start a new AI research group there, which would be a cruelly ironic outcome for OpenAI, which was founded as a nonprofit with the goal of drawing talent away from Silicon Valley’s biggest companies and developing AI safely.

    How Altman got to this moment is telling. In the days after his firing, he managed to prove that he is far more than a figurehead, winning over a majority of OpenAI employees (including Ilya Sutskever, the company’s chief scientist and the reported architect of his dismissal—it’s, uh, complicated) and some of the tech industry’s biggest luminaries. A number of OpenAI’s most powerful investors rallied around him. Altman may no longer run his own company, but, for now, he is emboldened. On Twitter this weekend, legions of OpenAI employees signaled their loyalty to him “I am Spartacus!”–style; Altman responded with a flurry of heart emojis. Getting unexpectedly fired in front of a global audience is assuredly stressful, but one gets the sense that it also amounted to a huge ego flex for the 38-year-old tech executive. You can see it in the weekend’s most indelible image: a selfie tweeted by Altman on Sunday as he visited OpenAI’s San Francisco offices to continue negotiations, lips pursed in mock disgust, a visitor’s lanyard clutched in his hand. “First and last time i ever wear one of these,” he wrote.” Altman was having fun. He was winning.

    This is the triumph of a Bay Area operator and dealmaker over OpenAI’s charter, which purports to place the betterment of humanity above profit and personality. It’s a similar story for Microsoft and its CEO, Satya Nadella, who have invested billions in OpenAI and were reportedly blindsided by Altman’s firing. Quickly, the company used its investment in OpenAI, much of which is reportedly in the form of computing power instead of cash, as leverage to reopen negotiations. Those talks may fizzle, and Nadella may indeed bring Altman and former OpenAI President Greg Brockman over to Microsoft; if other OpenAI staffers flood in, as has been speculated, it would be akin to Microsoft acquiring Silicon Valley’s most sought-after company for little more than the price of its employees’ salaries. It’s a win-win situation for the tech giant: Regardless of what happens to OpenAI, the company will keep the access it currently has to OpenAI’s data and intellectual property, or it could subsume the company altogether. The immediate endgame seems similarly comfortable for Altman. He returns to his company with more power than ever before, or he continues his work with Microsoft’s full backing. Either way, he won’t be wearing the guest pass again.

    Read: OpenAI’s chief scientist made a tragic miscalculation

    So although there is still much we don’t know about this saga and how it might end, one thing feels abundantly clear: The money always wins.

    As my colleague Karen Hao and I reported over the weekend, the central tension coursing through OpenAI in the past year was whether the company should commercialize, raise money, and grow to further its ambitions of building an artificial general intelligence—a technology so powerful that it could outperform humans in most tasks—or whether it ought to focus its efforts on the safety of its potentially dangerous innovations. Altman represented the former faction, and his aggressive business decisions appear to have been a key factor in his dismissal.

    After the shock of Altman’s firing subsided, I noticed a sense of admiration from some industry observers toward OpenAI’s board. Yes, the decision to sack the CEO was brazen and badly messaged, and the implications for the company and its investments may have been poorly thought out. But it was principled, an indication that OpenAI’s nonprofit corporate structure was working exactly as intended to protect the fate of the company’s technology from the whims of one leader. “Somebody finally held the tech bros accountable!” a tech executive texted me on Saturday morning. A former social-media executive proposed a tantalizing counterfactual to me: What if Facebook had been able to fire CEO Mark Zuckerberg before the turmoil of the 2016 election? What would the world look like now?

    Altman may have been a true believer in OpenAI’s charter. But he’s also a true believer in scale and profit. His tenure as CEO was partly an argument that, in order to change the world with your technology, you need the money to build it and the ability to get others to invest in it. If Sutskever was the visionary of OpenAI, Altman was seemingly the person who could sell it to people. And it is Altman who reportedly leveraged his business relationships to put immense pressure on OpenAI’s board. He didn’t call OpenAI’s bluff over the weekend: Instead, he demonstrated what the company might look like without its multibillion-dollar corporate investments and without its money man. According to Bloomberg, that future included some investors potentially writing down the value of their OpenAI holdings to nothing.

    Read: Inside the chaos at OpenAI

    Now Altman and his team could be going to Microsoft to develop new artificial-intelligence tools, unimpeded by a charter. A cynical person might argue that, there, he would no longer need to maintain the pretense of answering first to humanity—as an employee of one of the world’s biggest technology companies, his primary obligation would be fiduciary. He would answer to Nadella and to shareholders. But no matter how noble Altman’s intentions are, any moral leanings he might have ultimately mean very little to the money, which, regardless of where he lands, will continue to flow toward Microsoft and toward whatever products Altman and his team build. As of this afternoon, Microsoft was worth $1 trillion more than Google.

    Silicon Valley is peerless when it comes to mythologizing its ideas men (and yes, they tend to be men.). In the industry’s telling, technologies and their founders succeed in a meritocratic fashion, based on the genius of the idea and the skill of its execution. OpenAI’s self-mythologizing went a step further, positioning itself almost in opposition to its own industry—a company so committed to an ideology and a purity of product that it would self-immolate to protect itself and others. Over the weekend, this ideology crashed against the rocks of a capitalist reality. As is always true in Silicon Valley, a great idea can get you only so far. It’s the money that gets you over the finish line.



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  • We Finally Have Proof That the Internet Is Worse

    We Finally Have Proof That the Internet Is Worse

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    Living online means never quite understanding what’s happening to you at a given moment. Why these search results? Why this product recommendation? There is a feeling—often warranted, sometimes conspiracy-minded—that we are constantly manipulated by platforms and websites.

    So-called dark patterns, deceptive bits of web design that can trick people into certain choices online, make it harder to unsubscribe from a scammy or unwanted newsletter; they nudge us into purchases. Algorithms optimized for engagement shape what we see on social media and can goad us into participation by showing us things that are likely to provoke strong emotional responses. But although we know that all of this is happening in aggregate, it’s hard to know specifically how large technology companies exert their influence over our lives.

    This week, Wired published a story by the former FTC attorney Megan Gray that illustrates the dynamic in a nutshell. The op-ed argued that Google alters user searches to include more lucrative keywords. For example, Google is said to surreptitiously replace a query for “children’s clothing” with “NIKOLAI-brand kidswear” on the back end in order to direct users to lucrative shopping links on the results page. It’s an alarming allegation, and Ned Adriance, a spokesperson for Google, told me that it’s “flat-out false.” Gray, who is also a former vice president of the Google Search competitor DuckDuckGo, had seemingly misinterpreted a chart that was briefly presented during the company’s ongoing U.S. et al v. Google trial, in which the company is defending itself against charges that it violated federal antitrust law. (That chart, according to Adriance, represents a “phrase match” feature that the company uses for its ads product; “Google does not delete queries and replace them with ones that monetize better as the opinion piece suggests, and the organic results you see in Search are not affected by our ads systems,” he said.)

    Gray told me, “I stand by my larger point—the Google Search team and Google ad team worked together to secretly boost commercial queries, which triggered more ads and thus revenue. Google isn’t contesting this, as far as I know.” In a statement, Chelsea Russo, another Google spokesperson, reiterated that the company’s products do not work this way and cited testimony from Google VP Jerry Dischler that “the organic team does not take data from the ads team in order to affect its ranking and affect its result.” Wired did not respond to a request for comment.

    It’s hard to know what to make of these competing statements. Gray’s specific facts may be wrong, but the broader concerns about Google’s business—that it makes monetization decisions that could lead the product to feel less useful or enjoyable—form the heart of the government’s case against the company. None of this is easy to untangle in plain English — in fact, that’s the whole point of the trial. For most of us, evidence about Big Tech’s products tends to be anecdotal or fuzzy—more vibes-based than factual. Google may not be altering billions of queries in the manner that the Wired story suggests, but the company is constantly tweaking and ranking what we see, while injecting ads and proprietary widgets into our feed, thereby altering our experience. And so we end up saying that Google Search is less useful now or that shopping on Amazon has gotten worse. These tools are so embedded in our lives that we feel acutely that something is off, even if we can’t put our finger on the technical problem.

    Read: What happened to Wirecutter?

    That’s changing. In the past month, thanks to a series of antitrust actions on behalf of the federal government, hard evidence of the ways that Silicon Valley’s biggest companies are wielding their influence is trickling out. Google’s trial is under way, and while the tech giant is trying to keep testimony locked down, the past four weeks have helped illustrate—via internal company documents and slide decks like the one cited by Wired—how Google has used its war chest to broker deals and dominate the search market. Perhaps the specifics of Gray’s essay were off, but we have learned, for instance, how company executives considered adjusting Google’s products to lead to more “monetizable queries.” And just last week, the Federal Trade Commission filed a lawsuit against Amazon alleging anticompetitive practices. (Amazon has called the suit “misguided.”)

    Filings related to that suit have delivered a staggering revelation concerning a secretive Amazon algorithm code-named Project Nessie. The particulars of Nessie were heavily redacted in the public complaint, but this week The Wall Street Journal revealed details of the program. According to the unredacted complaint, a copy of which I have also viewed, Nessie—which is no longer in use—monitored industry prices of specific goods to determine whether competitors were algorithmically matching Amazon’s prices. In the event that competitors were, Nessie would exploit this by systematically raising prices on goods across Amazon, encouraging its competitors to follow suit. Amazon, via the algorithm, knew that it would be able to charge more on its own site, because it didn’t have to worry about being undercut elsewhere, thereby making the broader online shopping experience worse for everyone. An Amazon spokesperson told the Journal that the FTC is mischaracterizing the tool, and suggested that Nessie was a way to monitor competitor pricing and keep price-matching algorithms from dropping prices to unsustainable levels (the company did not respond to my request for comment).

    In the FTC’s telling, Project Nessie demonstrates the sheer scope of Amazon’s power in online markets. The project arguably amounted to a form of unilateral price fixing, where Amazon essentially goaded its competitors into acting like cartel members without even knowing they’d done so—all while raising prices on consumers. It’s an astonishing form of influence, powered by behind-the-scenes technology.

    The government will need to prove whether this type of algorithmic influence is illegal. But even putting legality aside, Project Nessie is a sterling example of the way that Big Tech has supercharged capitalistic tendencies and manipulated markets in unnatural and opaque ways. It demonstrates the muscle that a company can throw around when it has consolidated its position in a given sector. The complaint alleges that Amazon’s reach and logistics capabilities force third-party sellers to offer products on Amazon and for lower prices than other retailers. Once it captured a significant share of the retail market, Amazon was allegedly able to use algorithmic tools such as Nessie to drive prices up for specific products, boosting revenues and manipulating competitors.

    Read: The tragedy of Google Search

    Reading about Project Nessie, I was surprised to feel a sense of relief. In recent years, customer-satisfaction ratings have dipped among Amazon shoppers who have cited delivery disruptions, an explosion of third-party sellers, and poor-quality products as reasons for frustration. In my own life and among friends and relatives, there has been a growing feeling that shopping on the platform has become a slog, with fewer deals and far more junk to sift through. Again, these feelings tend to occupy vibe territory: Amazon’s bigness seems stifling or grating in ways that aren’t always easy to explain. But Nessie offers a partial explanation for this frustration, as do revelations about Google’s various product adjustments. We have the sense that we’re being manipulated because, well, we are. It’s a bit like feeling vaguely sick, going to the doctor, and receiving a blood-test result confirming that, yes, the malaise you experienced is actually an iron deficiency. It is the catharsis of, at long last, receiving a diagnosis.

    This is the true power of the surge in anti-monopoly litigation. (According to experts in the field, September was “the most extraordinary month they have ever seen in antitrust.”) Whether or not any of these lawsuits results in corporate breakups or lasting change, they are, effectively, an MRI of our sprawling digital economy—a forensic look at what these larger-than-life technology companies are really doing, and how they are exerting their influence and causing damage. It is confirmation that what so many of us have felt—that the platforms dictating our online experiences are behaving unnaturally and manipulatively—is not merely a paranoid delusion, but the effect of an asymmetrical relationship between the giants of scale and us, the users.

    In recent years, it’s been harder to love the internet, a miracle of connectivity that feels ever more bloated, stagnant, commercialized, and junkified. We are just now starting to understand the specifics of this transformation—the true influence of Silicon Valley’s vise grip on our lives. It turns out that the slow rot we might feel isn’t just in our heads, after all.

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