Sam Altman: The Unelected Secretary-General of Human Intention
Sam Altman: The Accidental Emperor of the Algorithmic Age
By our jaded foreign correspondent, still recovering from a blockchain conference hangover
GENEVA—If you had asked the world’s diplomats a decade ago which American twentysomething would end up holding a veto over their national sovereignty, they might have muttered “Zuckerberg” between gritted teeth. Yet here we are in 2024, and the name that makes finance ministers wake up screaming is Sam Altman—an affable 38-year-old who looks like the understudy for “Most Likely to Be Mistaken for an Intern” in his own company photo.
Altman’s OpenAI has metastasized from a San Francisco nonprofit into a geopolitical centrifuge, spinning every continent into the same dizzy orbit. When Brussels drafts AI regulation, it now asks itself not “What would Jesus do?” but “What will Sam shrug at?” The European Parliament’s 700-page AI Act is essentially a 400-euro-an-hour love letter begging him to please, please label his chatbots before they unionize the entire knowledge economy. Meanwhile, China’s regulators—never shy about disappearing a CEO—have merely invited Altman for tea, presumably to find out whether ChatGPT can be trained to love the Party more than it loves Reddit karma.
The Global South watches this pas de deux with the weary amusement of a bartender observing two drunks argue over the last olive. Kenya’s gig-work economy already runs on AI prompts; Bangladeshi call-center agents now fine-tune LLMs for pennies so that Scandinavian teenagers can auto-generate love poetry. Altman’s promise of universal basic compute is treated with the same skepticism reserved for IMF structural-adjustment breakfasts: grateful for the calories, terrified of the fine print.
In Latin America, presidents calculate electoral risk in tokens. When Chile’s central bank asked OpenAI for a sovereign AI sandbox, Altman reportedly replied, “Sure, we’ll just need your entire national corpus of Spanish.” Translation: hand over your culture and we’ll rent it back to you by the syllable. The continent that spent centuries exporting silver and bananas now ships out conversational data—another raw material mined by gringo algocrats.
Altman’s recent world tour—part rock-star stadium, part congressional perp walk—revealed the absurd choreography of modern power. In New Delhi he praised India’s “demographic dividend” while quietly lobbying against data-localization laws that might dent OpenAI’s cloud budget. In Lagos he posed for selfies with start-up founders whose apps will be steamrolled the moment GPT-5 drops. The itinerary looked suspiciously like the old British East India playbook: compliment the locals, sample the street food, secure the extraction rights.
Yet the joke’s on the extractors too. Every government scrambling to build a “sovereign AI” is essentially reconstructing the Tower of Babel with GPUs. France pledges 500 million euros for “French GPT” because apparently even existential risk must speak la belle langue. The British scheme, charmingly branded “BritGPT,” aims to replicate Silicon Valley magic using nothing but rainy optimism and whatever chips haven’t been snatched by crypto bros. One by one, nations discover that training a frontier model requires the energy output of a small Balkan state and the patience of a Tibetan monk—resources notably absent in the departmental budget.
Altman, meanwhile, keeps apologizing for the “disruption” with the practiced remorse of a man who has already cashed the exit round. His Senate testimonies are masterclasses in strategic humility: “Yes, senator, AI could end the world, but imagine the productivity gains!” Congress, still dazzled by the prospect of automated donors, nods along like a pensioner offered free tech support.
The cruel punchline is that nobody—least of all Altman—actually knows where the off-ramp is. The doomsday button and the snooze alarm are the same device. Every global summit ends with a group photo and a communiqué promising “alignment,” a word that now means “whatever keeps the headlines survivable until Friday.”
So we drift toward a planet where national identity is measured in parameter size, and citizenship is just another prompt engineering hack. The passports of the future will be stamped with model versions: “Welcome to Customs, please state your token limit.” Sam Altman didn’t set out to become the unelected secretary-general of human intention; he merely built the fastest photocopier of collective thought and discovered, too late, that the copies want to vote.
In the end, the international order may conclude that the only thing worse than being disrupted by Sam Altman is needing him to stay. Until then, the flags keep lowering, the data keeps flowing, and the dark joke writes itself—one autocomplete at a time.
