“Aggressive Technocapitalism Wins, Security Dies” is a long name for a film and a short logline for a film, but the phrase could accurately be used for both when it comes to Artificial.
Luca Guadagnino had the world premiere of his latest and by far most topical film Monday evening at the 64th New York Film Festival, the first stop on what already seems like an unusually long journey. Dropped by Amazon MGM Studios after its parent company’s $50 billion investment in OpenAI, the film, ultimately, wouldn’t be free at a major tech company even if it had never signed on for that 5% stake in Sam Altman’s company. Always dark under the rays of the Californian sun, Artificial (now under the umbrella of Anora studio Neon) is the movie of the moment – the origin story of our current AI quagmire literally, psychologically, and on almost every other level.
Or as NYFF head of programming Dennis Lim said before the screening:
“We are already in a threshold period. We need to understand how we got here, and the film you are about to see shows us that.”
The film is notably faithful, sometimes dutifully chronological and almost always a horror film on the subject of the rise of capitalist AI, as Ilya Sutskever, an idealistic and socially crude Russian immigrant, shows up at the office door of Geoffrey Hinton, a godfather of AI, at the University of Toronto in 2003. There, he will learn from the well-meaning future Nobel laureate, who will soon follow him to Google and his halo in the Bay Area. As space observers know well, Sutskever ended up meeting Sam Altman at a conference in 2014, where the Y Combinator financier, already well established in Silicon Valley at barely 30 years old, tracked down the prodigy to convince him to work at a nascent OpenAI as scientific director and boost his LLM ambitions. Or, more precisely, making them possible in the first place – Sutskever is Wozniak to Altman’s Jobs, but more.
Soon, a (final) dinner ensues with Altman, Elon Musk, Greg Brockman and others – the prelude to a slow realization by Sutskever, and by us, that the science Sutskever wants to develop to save the world is the capital Altman wants to use to build a war chest. We know the rest: OpenAI rushes into ChatGPT in November 2022, shocking the industry and even many of its own employees; Altman displays a growing accelerationism with the support of major investor Microsoft (mixed with blog statements about transforming and saving the world, and a strange fondness for the word calculus); and OpenAI is changing from a non-profit organization to its opposite. The whole story culminates with Sutskever’s famous November 2023 coup, in which Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and a number of OpenAI loyalists support Altman, staging his comeback to be stronger than ever – a clear day then and doubly revelatory now of the ultimate triumph of capitalism and on which, like Yom Kippur, our AI destiny was inscribed and sealed.
Which brings us to the end of 2026 – until then, as the film collides with the final month of AI safety warnings, which also make the screen with a postscript (one of about five) about AI researcher and whistleblower Jacob Coxon warning of a pox in all their homes (or, at least his former employers Anthropic and OpenAI) for a reckless snowplow on any semblance of safety. On cue, Coxon recorded Jon Stewart half a mile from downtown at the exact moment the film was being shown, in what one commentator quite reasonably called “the most serious and frightening episode” of The daily show.
A slow-burn tale that will come as no surprise to those who have covered Altman’s meteoric rise and resilience of Teflon, Artificial always offers a rich and often entertaining introduction to the future of OpenAI, the integrity and prudence often sacrificed on the sacred altar of finance. (you can read The Hollywood Reporter film review here.) Not to mention a parable of modern Silicon Valley, the place where advanced science and obscene wealth converge in a way that has never happened in human history and which cannot, if every novel on either subject is to be believed, end beautifully.
Guadagnino became interested in the topic because “even though AI belongs to the world of mathematics and computers, it is still generated by people and exists in the space of their interaction,” as he noted from the NYFF stage. Screenwriter Simon Rich became interested in the subject after being informed decades ago by a childhood friend of what was possible with AI. This friend ended up working in the industry, which prompted Rich, a former Saturday evening live and Pixar writer as well as novelist and essayist, to write this screenplay. “I’m not particularly charismatic or handsome, but it was in a last ditch effort to warn humanity that I wrote this film. I hope a few people will pay attention to it,” he said.
Amazon initially supported the film before, well, “the concept of conflict of interest is, let’s say, a very important elephant in the room here,” as Guadagnino said. THR David Canfield. In retrospect, it’s almost shocking that the company even considered signing on to a film so inherently critical of a vision of Valley in which noble use cases form only a thin membrane of camouflage over the black, bloody heart of a money-stomping human grab – so much so that the question is no longer why Amazon dropped the film, but which Hollywood agent is responsible for the Houdinian feat of convincing them they should get on board in the first place, and why don’t they do it? they those who rule the world?
To give you an idea of just how sleazy this film is, and more generally to explain how some of the most powerful people in Silicon Valley are shown in what will surely be an Oscar mainstay and cultural touchstone this Hollywood season, here’s a quick overview:
Greg Brockman – In real life, he’s an AGI evangelist and Altman lock-stepper who has a sportsman-like presence who donates millions to a pro-AI Super PAC. In the film, he represents all of these things, but nerdier and more simpering. Cooper Hoffman, who plays him, told the NYFF that he hadn’t read any books about Brockman, but was left thinking about a line Garfield said to him: that the man would leave his wife for Sam Altman.
Mira Murati — Long the most enigmatic figure at OpenAI — she tries to stop Altman but also stays with him; she’s both Cassandra and accomplice – the Albanian ex-Tesla engineer gets her due from Monica Barbaro who gives the character just enough warmth to seem like a hero, even to the point of taking actions that make her seem otherwise.
Sam Altman — Hinton in the film portrays Altman as someone so charismatic and toxic that he would land on an island of cannibals and soon after become their king. Andrew Garfield portrays him as a completely dishonest personality who will always tell everyone how much he loves them to their face while kissing them behind their backs. A flamboyant figure to a sometimes cartoonish degree (you can read his articulate descriptions of how he created the character here), Garfield’s Altman aims for a different kind of spiritual truth. “Of course it will feel like confronting (Altman),” Garfield said at the screening, “(but I wanted) a deep questioning about who gives us our power, our autonomy, our data too.”
The best gift Garfield could give Altman is to go so far into the caricatured touches, allowing Altman to discredit the whole thing. He already tried to do it, without having seen the film. “I don’t think they’re looking for precision,” Altman just told Vanity fair, certainly basing his assessment on the trailer. He and Garfield can’t even agree on whether they waved at each other while filming the movie near the mogul’s house. Altman says yes; Garfield said at the premiere that “if that happened, I must have passed out because I don’t remember it at all.”
Yann LeCun — The Other Godfather of AI makes an appearance in which he appears Sutskever mockingly asking the audience if they have seen him before 2001. I don’t know if this has ever happened, but as an object lesson in how Sutskever isn’t taken seriously by the AI establishment, it serves its purpose. It appears LeCun will never appear in the film again, although given the treatment some of the other tech personalities receive, he might want to send Luca a bouquet.
Guy on the bench — Jason Schwarzman plays an anonymous prophet of doom (and former techie) who shows up in a San Francisco park to describe to Sutskever all the ways the AI boom can go wrong, providing the film with its headline-grabbing leitmotif and cinema more broadly its wildest hair since Forrest Gump.
Elon Musk — Ike Barinholtz brings Musk from another film, or another dimension, a scrappy, arrogant but ultimately comically non-threatening character. This will be noticeable and even triggering for anyone who sees Alex Gibney’s message. Musk or simply followed the DOGE-based human eviscerations of important aspects of the federal government. “When you play someone so beloved and universally admired…” Barinholtz began his introduction to the festival, before saying he tried to capture Elon as he was perceived. SOlong before “the chainsaw RNC”. Barenholtz’s portrait raises what is actually a key question in factual art: Are we obligated to inject a modern understanding that we could not have known at the time?
Tasha McAuley — Entrepreneur, wife of Joseph Gordon-Levitt and putschist on the board of directors of OpenAI, she is briefly played by Zosia Mamet (although not identified by name).
Geoffrey Hinton — If there’s one good thing about AI becoming so pop-cultural, it’s that we’re getting a die-hard character representing one of the great scientific minds of our time, described here (accurately) as the conscience of an industry. If there’s a second good thing, it’s this…
Gn entert
