Honestly, Lord bless Sam Altman for doing this interview. And whoever he has now fired.

Last week, Sam joined Tucker Carlson on his show. And I mean, right from the jump, it is evident that he walked straight into the Lion’s Den, which is to say Elon’s den, as apparently Tucker and Elon, who publicly hates Sam, are homies.

Anyway.

The interview is going viral in large part because Tucker grilled Sam on the death of Suchir Balaji, an OpenAI researcher and whistleblower. But really, that (admittedly very entertaining) five-minute section was a sidebar in a larger and more fascinating conversation about to what degree ChatGPT — and AI in general — should abide by Christian (or at least American, or at least Western) principles.

In one corner, you have Tucker, who has previously said he was mauled by a “demon” or “something unseen” that left bleeding claw marks on his sides while he slept, an experience that left him “seized with this very intense desire to read the Bible.”

Point being: Tucker is a pretty hardcore Christian now (*nervous laughter*), with a somewhat (maybe we could call it) rigid view of how the world should be. Right and wrong is black and white. It’s literally written down, in the Bible, what we, as humans, should do.

So from that vantage point, he’s incredibly skeptical of ChatGPT. Here you have this app, which has a “kind of autonomy or a spirit within it,” that some 700 million people every week are turning to for answers, like a kind of religion. It influences human behavior, it changes our assumptions about the world and each other, and “The Graphs” (lol) suggest it will have more power, concentrated among elites in Silicon Valley, than people. Given all that — just like other religions — AI should have transparent moral frameworks, Tucker said. A kind of catechism.

“The beauty of a religion is it admits it’s a religion and it tells you what it stands for. The unsettling part of this technology, and not just your company but others, is that I don’t know what it stands for — but it does stand for something,” Tucker told Sam. “And unless it admits that and tells us what it stands for, then it guides us in a kind of stealthy way toward a conclusion we might not even know we’re reaching.”

In the other corner, you have Sam, a self-described “tech nerd” who definitely doesn’t view ChatGPT as a divine entity, but rather a “big computer” producing words that correspond to very advanced math. He said in this interview that he’s Jewish, but I suspect that Sam, given his rigorous meditation practice and just the way he speaks, also sees the world with a certain degree of non-dualism. (Here’s a “Non-Definitive Non-Guide to Non-Duality” by the writer Sasha Chapin for more context on the idea.) But basically, non-dualists believe that the artificial boundaries we assign to reality (like right versus wrong) are, well, artificial. And those boundaries, which fuel a sense of separation from other beings (Such and Such is Bad), actually perpetuate, you know, “bad” stuff. Wars. Hatred. Etc.

Point being: Sam does not want ChatGPT to constitute a moral authority. He wants it to be a tool that adults can use — with guardrails that don’t overly trump their autonomy.

Where Tucker would have ChatGPT’s “catechism” basically be the Bible, what it actually has is a “model spec,” a transparent accounting of how it works. (More on that later.)

Where Tucker sees a potential radical concentration of unchecked power, Sam sees AI actually distributing power (knowledge, science, companies) quite broadly among many pockets of people with differing views. Where differing views are okay.

And honestly, I find myself going back and forth on who to root for. Like tolerance for different worldviews sounds nice in this climate. But. Would I feel less creeped out walking around SF today if the people in charge seemed to coalesce around a moral vision?

(Yeah.)

HUMANITY’S PREFERENCES

“So what are your spiritual views?” Tucker asked Sam just three minutes into what would be a very long 56 minutes. (For Sam.)

“Um. I’m Jewish and I would say I have a fairly traditional view of the world that way.”

“So you’re religious. You believe in God?”

“I’m not a literalist on the Bible, but I’m not someone who says ‘I’m culturally Jewish.’ If you ask me, I would just say I’m Jewish.”

“But do you believe in God? Do you believe that there is a force larger than people that created people, created the earth, set down a specific order for living, that there’s an absolute morality attached that comes from that God?”

“I think probably like most other people, I’m somewhat confused on this, but I believe there is something bigger going on than can be explained by physics, yes,” Sam said.

(Why not just say yes? Lol.)

“So you think the earth and the people were created by something, it wasn’t just like a spontaneous accident.”

“It does not feel like a spontaneous accident, yeah. I don’t think I have the answer. I don’t think I know exactly what happened, but I think there is a mystery beyond my comprehension here going on.”

“Have you ever felt communication from that force or from any force beyond people? Beyond the material?”

“No, not really.”

In fairness to Sam, not everyone has the good fortune to be attacked by demons in their sleep. But Tucker was quite unsatisfied. It didn’t seem, to him, that Sam was appealing to a higher power. And in that case, what was governing ChatGPT?