My first piece in TIME

A timeline of the accusations made against OpenAI and its CEO

Recent weeks have not been kind to OpenAI. The release of the company’s latest model, GPT-4o, has been somewhat overshadowed by a series of accusations levelled at both the company and its CEO, Sam Altman.

Accusations range from prioritizing product development over safety to using the likeness of actor Scarlett Johansson’s voice without her consent.

My colleague Tharin Pillay and I co-wrote a piece for TIME, which includes a timeline of each accusation and OpenAI’s response.

This was a week of many firsts for me. My first week at TIME, and in London. It’s also the first time I’ve co-written something since dreaded university group assignments. This was completely different, mostly because Tharin is a brilliant writer (his Substack here). Anyway, go read our story.

As I mentioned, it’s the end of my first week at TIME. I’m here thanks to the Tarbell Fellowship, a programme for early career journalists interested in emerging tech. Over the next few months, I’ll work on 2024’s TIME 100/AI list. It’s a dream project, truly. With any luck, I’ll also publish more stories like the one above, so if you are not subscribed already, I think you should.

For a publication that’s over 100 years old, TIME feels surprisingly young. I imagined there’d be a fair number of grey-haired men in suits reminiscing over the days before things went “digital”. But it feels more like a youthful tech company, with a team of mostly twenty-to-thirty-something-year-olds pinging each other over Slack.

I’ll have more to say soon, but for now, I think London is great. Things work here. This was immediately apparent when disembarking from a plane, scanning through passport control, and boarding a train, which took less than an hour.

Compared to my only points of reference—São Paulo, Buenos Aires and Mexico City— London feels significantly calmer. I think that’s partly due to the narrow streets forcing cars to go slow and the abundant green spaces. That doesn’t mean the city is lifeless—it’s just not as chaotic.

However, the fact that I’ve worn a jersey and jacket in early summer does worry me. I suspect winter will be rough.

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Things I’ve read

The Researcher Trying to Glimpse the Future of AI - Will Henshall for TIME*

Imagine if the world’s response to climate change relied solely on speculative predictions from pundits and CEOs, rather than the rigorous—though still imperfect—models of climate science. "Two degrees of warming will arrive soon-ish but will change the world less than we all think," one might say. "Two degrees of warming is not just around the corner. This is going to take a long time," another could counter. 

This is more or less the world we’re in with artificial intelligence, with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman saying that AI systems that can do any task a human can will be developed in the “reasonably close-ish future,”  while Yann LeCun, Chief AI Scientist at Facebook, argues that human-level AI systems are “going to take a long time.”

*I had the privilege of speaking with Will this week. He’s very cool.

How I write (podcast)

If you’re an aspiring journalist or writer, I cannot recommend this series of podcasts enough. Host David Perrel interviews top writers on their process. Every episode I’ve listened to is great, but if you’re unsure where to begin, I’d recommend this episode with Tim Urban. Urban runs the Wait But Why blog. Incidentally, it was his essay on AI that got me interested in the technology way back in 2015.

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