Ronan Farrow here. Andrew Marantz and I spent 18 months on this investigation. Happy to answer questions about the reporting.
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Thank you for coming on HN and offering to answer questions.[a]<p>This is a <i>fantastic</i> piece, very timely, evidently well-researched, and also well-written. Judging by the little that I know, it's accurate. Thank you for doing the work and sharing it with the world.<p>OpenAI may be in a more tenuous competitive position than many people realize. Recent anecdotal evidence suggests the company has lost its lead in the AI race to Anthropic.[b]<p>Many people here, on HN, who develop software prefer Claude, because they think it's a better product.[c]<p>Is your understanding of OpenAI's current competitive position similar?<p>---<p>[a] You may want to provide proof online that you are who you say you are: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Internet%2C_nobody_knows_you're_a_dog" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Internet%2C_nobody_know...</a><p>[b] <a href="https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2026-04-01/openais-shocking-fall-from-grace-as-investors-race-to-anthropic" rel="nofollow">https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2026-04-01/openais-sh...</a><p>[c] For example, there are 2x more stories mentioning Claude than ChatGPT on HN over the past year. Compare <a href="https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastYear&page=0&prefix=true&query=openai&sort=byPopularity&type=story" rel="nofollow">https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastYear&page=0&prefix=tru...</a> to <a href="https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastYear&page=0&prefix=true&query=chatgpt&sort=byPopularity&type=story" rel="nofollow">https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastYear&page=0&prefix=tru...</a>
Thank you for this, very much appreciate the thoughtful response.<p>The piece captures some of the anxieties within OpenAI right now about their competitive position. This obviously ebbs and flows but of late there has been much focus on Anthropic's relative position. We of course mention the allegations of "circular deals" and concerns about partners taking on debt.
Thank you. Yes, I saw that. The company's always been surrounded by endless talk about insane hype, speculative bubbles, and financial engineering. I wasn't asking so much about that.<p>I was asking more about your informed view on how OpenAI's technology, products, and roadmap are perceived, particularly by customers and partners, in comparison to those of competitors.<p>If you have an opinion about that, everyone here would love to hear about it.
It's worth noting Codex has 2x more stories than Claude <a href="https://hn.algolia.com/?query=codex" rel="nofollow">https://hn.algolia.com/?query=codex</a>
Many of us prefer OpenAI's Codex, because we think it's a better product.<p>No comment on the CEO: I just find the product superior in everything but UI/UX and conversation. It's better at quality code.
Who is “us”? It does seem that some scientists prefer Codex for its math capabilities but when it comes to general frontend and backend construction, Claude Code is just as good and possibly made better with its extensive Skills library.<p>Both codex and Claude code fail when it comes to extremely sophisticated programming for distributed systems
I'm in that camp -- I have the max-tier subscription to pretty much all the services, and for now Codex seems to win. Primarily because 1) long horizon development tasks are much more reliable with codex, and 2) OpenAI is far more generous with the token limits.<p>Gemini seems to be the worst of the three, and some open-weight models are not too bad (like Kimi k2.5). Cursor is still pretty good, and copilot just really really sucks.
Us = me and say /r/codex or wherever Codex users are. I've tried both, liked both, but in my projects one clearly produces better results, more maintainable code and does a better job of debugging and refactoring.
That's interesting, I actively use both and usually find it to be a toss up which one performs better at a given task. I generally find Claude to be better with complex tool calls and Codex to be better at reviewing code, but otherwise don't see a significant difference.
He’s replying on this twitter thread - perhaps someone with an account can ask there and link his comment here?<p><a href="https://xcancel.com/RonanFarrow/status/2041127882429206532#m" rel="nofollow">https://xcancel.com/RonanFarrow/status/2041127882429206532#m</a>
> You may want to provide proof online that you are who you say you are<p>Unfortunately it probably doesn't even matter here on HN considering how brigaded down this story is predictably getting.<p>But yeah, it was a fantastic piece.
It wasn't getting "brigaded down" - it set off a software penalty called the flamewar detector. I turned that off as soon as I saw it.
Fair request, here you go: <a href="https://x.com/RonanFarrow/status/2041203911697068112" rel="nofollow">https://x.com/RonanFarrow/status/2041203911697068112</a>
The statements around the sexual abuse allegations seemed to be the most puzzling to me - his sister’s allegations and claims of underage partners because he has a tendency to hook up with younger partners. It does seem like this piece gives him a pretty clean bill of health in that matter - I guess would you be able to talk about how you investigated?<p>Did you do any extra investigations into Annie’s allegations? It feels to me like the unstated conclusion is recovered memory can’t be trusted, which is a popular understanding but a very wrong one put out by the now defunct and discredited False Memory Syndrome Foundation. It was founded by the parents of the psychologist who coined DARVO, directly in reaction to her accusing them of abuse.<p>Dissociation is real (I have a dissociative disorder, and abuse I “recovered” but did not remember for much of my adolescence and early adulthood has been corroborated by third parties) and many CSA survivors have severe memory problems that often don’t come to a head until adulthood. I know you didn’t dismiss her claim, but the way the public tends to think about recovered memories is shaped primarily by that awful organization.
Hi Ronan appreciate you being here. what would help you and others continue to do journalism like this? (including commenting on HN?)
In depth reporting is great. This is a really tricky topic to cover over the course of 18 months. A year and a half ago OpenAI was ascendant, now it's -at best- stalling and, more likely, trending toward irrelevant.
Great reporting.<p>Altman describes his shifting views as genuine good faith evolution of thinking. Do you believe he has a clear North Star behind all this that’s not centered on himself?
The piece is an interrogation of this very question, at great length and with some nuance. I think what it does most usefully is scrutinize an array of different answers to the question.<p>My own impression after many hours of conversation is that he is identifying something of a true north star when he frames this around "winning." There are people in the story who talk about him emphasizing a desire for power (as opposed to, say, wealth). I think he probably also believes, to some extent, the story he tells that equates winning, and his gaining power, with a superabundant utopian future for all.<p>However, I think critics correctly highlight a tension between his statements about centering humanity writ large and his tilt into relentless accelerationism.
(Other people's) money.
Hi Ronan,<p>I would love to read your piece and pay you and new Yorker for it, but I am not interested in paying a subscription. If I could press a button and pay a reasonable one time license such as $3 or $5 for just this article, or better yet a few cents per paragraph as they load in, I wouldn't hesitate.<p>However I'm not going to pay for yet another subscription to access one article I'm interested in.<p>I'm sure you can't do anything about this, but I just wanted you to know.<p>You deserve to be compensated for great journalism. In this case, unfortunately, I won't read it and you won't earn income from me.
You could buy a physical copy (and this isn't meant to sound sarcastic).
Or just switch your browser to Reader Mode and it's free.
I’ve often thought about a model like this and would love to see a few news outlets run it as a pilot and see how it stacks up.
You could hit up a public library...
Looking online it looks like the newsstand price of an issue is around $10 (which I'd assume is heavily ad subsidized, if anyone is still buying print ads?) which is an interesting data point for a pricing model. (Of course, I looked online because I have no idea where I'd find a newsstand around here - the nearest newsstand that show up on google maps has reviews that say "It's just snacks and scratch tickets." and "three newspapers and no magazines" - I may have to stop by just to see what three newspapers they have :-)
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I have the feeling that if you write an article in that style, the subject of the story becomes the hero even if you insert a couple of negatives. In the same manner that Michael Corleone becomes the hero of The Godfather.<p>I'm not pleased with the headline and the general framing that AI works. The plagiarism and IP theft aspects are entirely omitted. The widespread disillusion with AI is omitted.<p>On the positive side, the Kushner ad Abu Dhabi involvements (and threats from Kushner) deserve a wider audience.<p>My personal opinion is that "who should control AI" is the wrong question. In the current state, it is an IP laundering device and I wonder why publications fall silent on this. For example, the NYT has abandoned their crown witness Suchir Balaji who literally perished for his convictions (murder or not).
I wonder if Sam might abandon the ship soon. Other co-founders already did.<p>The main reason is that he gets all the downsides without the upsides. I know $5B is a lot but, for a 700B company, it isn't.<p>If OpenAI was a regular for-profit, he would have been worth >$100B already.<p>This is probably <i>one</i> of the significant factors why other co-founders left too. It's just a lot of headaches with low reward.
<a href="https://archive.ph/hOYMn" rel="nofollow">https://archive.ph/hOYMn</a>
OpenAI is like #3 or #4 of the AI companies right now in terms of power, and last place in the court of public opinion.<p>I’d be more concerned about Anthropic both being in the good graces of the public and having access to all of our computers indirectly with Claude Code.
OpenAI has ~30x the userbase of Anthropic.
makes sense if you think the point of journalism is just to take everyone down a notch instead of... um... informing the public of bad actors<p>"the local drug-dealing pimp is so passe, we need to investigate the most upstanding members of the community <i>just to be sure</i>" is a frankly insane strategy
Gobsmacking details about Altmans' time as Y Combinator president, in case anyone's wondering.<p>Fantastic reporting.
As is always the case with incredibly precise and rigorously fact-checked reporting like this, where every word is chosen carefully (the initial closing meeting for this one was nearly eight hours long, with full deliberation about each sentence), there is more out there on that subject than is explicitly on the page.
It's really interesting reading about how these folks view LLMs. Yeah, they're transformative, but I don't know that we're going to be eating ramen in a Neo-Tokyo street bar anytime soon. So much "A.G.I" mentioned in the article.
No one person control our future. Stop there.
Some people have far, far more power over our lives than others. More than they deserve, frankly.
Yeah, but one person can fuck a lot of shit up.
Hi @ronanfarrow — I have only had one interaction with Sam Altman in person, and I was advised to keep it to myself. I know this crowd may not care, but Altman is absolutely terrified of Black people — not in any contextual sense, but in a visceral, instinctive way. For someone who, as you put it, "controls our future," this should matter.<p>FYI: I am by far not the only one to have experienced this and it 100% impacts hiring and other decisions at OpenAI.
This anecdote is so absurd it sounds like satire. This is the guy with the $23M mansion?<p>> Amodei’s notes describe escalating tense encounters, including one, months later, in which Altman summoned him and his sister, Daniela, who worked in safety and policy at the company, to tell them that he had it on “good authority” from a senior executive that they had been plotting a coup. Daniela, the notes continue, “lost it,” and brought in that executive, who denied having said anything. As one person briefed on the exchange recalled, Altman then denied having made the claim. “I didn’t even say that,” he said. “You just said that,” Daniela replied.
He's a liar and untrustworthy. Based on their public statements, that's a big part of why the board fired him.<p>Of course, (despite the fact that Altman previously publicly stated that it was very important that the board can fire him) he got himself unfired very quickly.
Archive link: <a href="https://archive.is/2026.04.06-100412/https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/04/13/sam-altman-may-control-our-future-can-he-be-trusted" rel="nofollow">https://archive.is/2026.04.06-100412/https://www.newyorker.c...</a>
One thing that stands out when reading profiles like this is the number of positive and negative descriptions of the subject that agree. For example, there seems to be little dispute that Altman will happily say something that he knows/believes isn't true, there's just a lot of people who are willing to forgive any lies if the lies are in service of something they themselves agree with.
The New Yorker is owned by Conde Nast just as Reddit. Conde Nast has a deal with OpenAI:<p><a href="https://www.reuters.com/technology/openai-signs-deal-with-cond-nast-2024-08-20/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reuters.com/technology/openai-signs-deal-with-co...</a><p>This is a damage control piece, and you see that the most stinging comments here get downvoted.
A new Ronan Farrow piece is a rare gift (and Marantz is no slouch). Can't wait to read this in the physical magazine when it arrives!
This article is just another typical New Yorker fluff piece that tries to look deep but misses the actual point.<p>The biggest flaw is that it spends way too much time on high-school level drama and "he-said-she-said" gossip about Sam Altman’s personal life instead of focusing on the actual technical and corporate capture of OpenAI.<p>The author treats the "nonprofit mission" like some holy quest that was "betrayed," when anyone with a brain in tech saw the Microsoft deal as the moment the original vision died. Instead of a hard-hitting look at how compute-monopolies are actually forming (MSFT AMZN NVDA and circular debt dealing inflating the AI bubble that could crash the economy), we get 5,000 words of hand-wringing over whether Sam is a "nice guy" or a "liar."<p>Who cares???????<p>The board failed because they had no real leverage against billions of dollars, not because they didn't write enough Slack messages. It's a long-winded way of saying "Silicon Valley has internal politics," which isn't news to anyone here.
Amazing that this article and an actual comment from Ronan Farrow is this far down the list while...Scientists Figured Out How Eels Reproduce (2022) has 6 times the points.
This thread set off a software penalty called the flamewar detector.* I turned that off as soon as I saw it.<p>(* This was predictable from the title, because the question in it was inevitably going to trigger an avalanche of crap replies. Normally we'd change the title to something less baity, and indeed the article is so substantive that it deserves a considerably better one. But I'm not going to change it in this case, since the story has connections to YC - about that see <a href="https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20moderate%20%22less%2C%20not%20more%22&sort=byDate&type=comment" rel="nofollow">https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...</a>.)
Am I the only one that feels like Claude is clearly winning code generation, and Gemini in general LLM?<p>I just don’t feel like OpenAI has a legitimate shot at winning any of the AI battles.<p>Therefore, I feel like “Sam Altman may control our future” is a far stretch.
Well I just canceled my Claude Pro subscription because of the mysterious limits that I don't experience with codex, even after paying for "extra usage". If Anthropic can't figure out their capacity problems they are in trouble.
how is gemini winning in general llm. what is general llm .
Of course he cannot be trusted. Anyone whose motivation is based on greed is by nature untrustworthy.
Even if your motivation is some utopian vision of the future, you should not be trusted. Utopia is a thought experiment in a philosophy of living taken too far, not something to be reached for earnestly.
Why is the story so downranked? Folks at HackerNews have something to do with it ?
It off the flamewar detector, a,k.a. the overheated discussion detector. I've turned that off now - this is obviously a serious article.
HN generally downvotes and/or flags anything that paints ycombinator in a bad light. As Altman was president of yc from 2014 to 2019 that could be why this is getting downvoted.<p>Articles critical of Airbnb, one of yc's biggest wins, also get flagged and taken down.
I'm not sure whether you meant this about moderator interventions or not, but our actual practice is the opposite:<p><a href="https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20moderate%20%22less%2C%20not%20more%22&sort=byDate&type=comment" rel="nofollow">https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...</a><p>As those comments explain, this has been the #1 rule of HN moderation from the beginning. See also <a href="https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20pg%20chair&sort=byDate&type=comment" rel="nofollow">https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...</a>.
Na, it will be Dario instead of Sam, Id say? :-))
If you are asking if a single human can be trusted with such a responsibility, the answer is, by default, no.
Ask Condé Nast if he can be trusted..<p><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/s/VWJVBNzc2u" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/s/VWJVBNzc2u</a>
Can Sam "The board can fire me, I think that's important." Altman be trusted?<p>If for no other reason, given what happened when the board fired him... no. I'd say not.
Watch Altman's reaction in Tucker Carlson interview to the question about (alleged) murder of OpenAI researcher Suchir Balaji.<p>The overall response and particularly the body language speaks a lot.
Seems this got buried from the front page very quickly
It set off the flamewar detector. I've turned that off now.<p>I only saw this thread by chance and almost didn't look, because the title made the piece sound like a flamebait blog post. Fortunately I saw newyorker.com beside the title and looked more closely.
There is dwindling space for sincere independent accountability reporting on big tech like this to a) be created, since it's incredibly resource-intensive and so many resources flow from Silicon Valley, and b) actually reach people, since more platforms are now owned or otherwise influenced by interested parties.<p>Thank you for looking. Please do spread this kind of reporting in your communities, and subscribe to investigative outlets when you can.
This was an excellent piece with many new pieces of information in it. Thanks to you and your coauthor for getting it released.
You can see the vote history here[1]. It's always hard to know exactly why something gets buried. I was a little sad to see the story down-ranked when I saw that you were here in the comments.<p>But the discussion is generally pretty low quality with these sort of posts. People react without having read the story, or with whatever was on their mind already, or are insubstantive, or simply low effort. I don't think you'll lose k-factor not having a bigger post here.<p>Sometimes if you talk to the mods, they'll let you know their perspective. I generally find they're correct that people are much better at contributing/disseminating new knowledge to the world on more technical topics here.<p>[1]: <a href="https://news.social-protocols.org/stats?id=47659135" rel="nofollow">https://news.social-protocols.org/stats?id=47659135</a>
Yes, I was surprised that it was downranked when I saw that too. Then I realized it had set off the flamewar detector and it was a simple matter to turn it off. I'm glad we got to this in time, because sometimes we don't, and this was an important case not to miss.
But isn't that circular? If the ranking algorithm used by the mods tends to devalue articles like this because they don't trust the user base to comment intelligently, doesn't that alter the culture of this site to make that more true?
I'm not sure what big_toast meant, but we do trust the user base to comment intelligently (which sometimes works and sometimes not), and we don't devalue articles like this.<p>We do tend to devalue <i>titles</i> like this, or more likely change them to something more substantive (preferably using a representative phrase from the article body), but I'm worried that if I did that here we would get howls of protest, since YC is part of the story.
Disclaimer: I have no association with any AI company and have never met Altman or any of the other top AI scientists.<p>The real question is: can <i>anyone</i> be trusted if the fever dreams of super-intelligence come true? Go ahead and replace Sam Altman with someone else - will it make a difference? Any other CEO is going to be under the same overwhelming pressure to make a profit somehow. I think the OpenAI story is messier because it was founded for supposedly altruistic reasons, and then changed.<p>Methinks many of Altman's detractors protesteth too much. He's doing his job as it is defined (make OpenAI profitable.) Nothing of substance in this article seemed to make him exceptionally "sociopathic" compared to any other tech CEO. It goes with the territory.<p>What depressed me most is that <i>trillions</i> of dollars are being raised for building what will undoubtedly be used as a weapon. My guess is the ROI on that money is going to be extremely bad for the most part (AI will make some people insanely rich, but it is hard to see how the big investors will get a return.) Could you imagine if the world shared the same vision for energy infrastructure (so we could also stop fighting wars over control of fossil fuels and spewing CO2?) A man can dream...
Excellent work. I’ll have to wait until we get the print version delivered to finish as I’m not signed into the new Yorker on my phone.<p>I’ve always been a huge fan of Ronan Farrow’s journalism and willingness to speak truth to power. I think he’s pulling at exactly the right thread here, and it’s very important to counteract Altman’s reputation laundering given that we run a very real risk of him weaseling his way into the taxpayer’s wallet under the current administration.
For those curious about how sama got to where he got and stayed on top for so long, I recommend you read the book: The Sociopath Next Door by Martha Stout.<p>I am fairly confident when I say this -- sama is a sociopath. I don't know how anyone with solid intuition could even come to any other conclusion than the guy is deeply weird and off-putting.<p>Some concepts from the book:<p>> Core trait: The defining characteristic is the absence of conscience, meaning they feel no guilt, shame, or remorse.<p>> Identification: Sociopaths can be charming and appear normal, but they often lie, cheat, and manipulate to get what they want.<p>> The Rule of Threes: One lie is a mistake, two is a concern, but three lies or broken promises is a pattern of a liar.<p>> Trust your instincts over a person's social role (e.g., doctor, leader, parent)<p>Check and check.<p>OpenAI is too important to trust sama with. He needs to go. In fact, AI should be considered a public good, not a commodity pay-as-you-go intelligence service.
I suspect there's some other category, which isn't really a sociopath and isn't really a not-sociopath, which we don't have a good definition for.<p>We only say a lot of CEOs are sociopaths because they're in that third category we haven't named, where they're very good at manipulating people, but also can feel conscience, guilt, remorse, etc, perhaps just muted or easier to justify against.<p>E.g. if you think you're doing something for the betterment of mankind, it doesn't really matter if you lie to some board members some year during the multi-decade pursuit.
This whole situation goes to show that yesterday's conspiracy theorists are today's realists. What's happening to USA's leadership and as a country and what's happening with with their top companies is really scary for the rest of us. If this trend continues we're all definitely gonna end up in a kleptocracy.
> Lehane—whose reported motto, after Mike Tyson, is “Everyone has a game plan until you punch them in the mouth”<p>lol do you think these guys have ever been hit? Let alone in the face. They’d probably be less eager to mouth off as much as they do if so.
Hybris.
Looks like Betteridge's law of headlines applies here too.
Betteridge's law of headlines is an adage that states: "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word "NO."
> The day that Altman was fired, he flew back to his twenty-seven-million-dollar mansion in San Francisco, which has panoramic views of the bay and once featured a cantilevered infinity pool, and set up what he called a “sort of government-in-exile.” Conway, the Airbnb co-founder Brian Chesky, and the famously aggressive crisis-communications manager Chris Lehane joined, sometimes for hours a day, by video and phone. Some members of Altman’s executive team camped out in the hallways of the house. Lawyers set up in a home office next to his bedroom. During bouts of insomnia, Altman would wander by them in his pajamas. When we spoke with Altman recently, he described the aftermath of his firing as “just this weird fugue.”<p>These sociopaths are so good at giving away nothing. He managed to engender sympathy instead of saying "I'm not gonna talk about anything that happened then".<p>Also very weird how many of these people are so deeply-linked that they'll drop everything they're doing just to get this guy back in power? Terrifying cabal.
Seeing Sam Altman slowly degrade into the realization that he is in fact not as smart as others in this space has been fascinating to watch. He used to speak with enthusiasm and confidence and now he’s like a scared little boy who got in way too deep.<p>The last person that this happened to was Sam Bankman Fried as investors and regular folk finally realized he was full of complete shit and could only talk the game for so long until the truth emerged.
Well, no, obviously not. Not one bit.
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...</a>
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It is, at best, incredibly hard to accumulate that much wealth without doing shady things. Microsoft's monopolistic practices in the 90s for example. The only person I can think of that ever cracked a billion without their money coming through dirty means was, funny enough, JK Rowling who has her own set of issues separate from the value she got out of Harry Potter.
I feel the "always have been" meme might be a suitable insert here.
>
Why are all billionaires (especially tech) such villains?<p>Not all billionaires are villians. But it is long-known in organizational psychology that dark triad [1] traits are very "helpful" if one wants to climb career ladders fast.<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_triad" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_triad</a>
I'm not 100% sure if it's strictly necessary to be a villain in order to become and remain a billionaire, but it seems like it could be and even if it's not it surely helps.
Money often changes people's attitude in a fashion similar to chronic substance abuse. Plus, there's a insular and detached bubble effect that grows around them.<p>Also, there's the psychopathic and narcissistic tendencies of greedier people and the false "virtue" "greed is good" that is contrary to the values espoused by Adam Smith.<p>We need standard income tax brackets of 90% after $20M/y and 99% after $100M/y.
Can anybody tho?
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Short answer: No. Long answer: Hell, no.
He is cooked. Only a matter of time before the whole thing blows up.
Once a scammer, always a scammer.
Betteridge strikes again
>"Sam Altman may control our future"<p>TLDR but just the heading is already ugly. No single person no matter how nice they're should be able to control our future. Power corrupts, what fucking trust. We are supposed to be democratic society (well looking at what is going on around this is becoming laughable)
Harvey Dent…
No
1. No.<p>2. You cannot "control" superintelligent AI.
No.
No. Why is this a question?
"could", "may", "might" - these words do so much heavy lifting in "journalism". Almost always it's an invitation to worry and be miserable.