The latest entry in the tech founder takedown genre is Artificial, a $40 million feature film being made by Amazon MGM Studios for Prime Video about the sudden and shocking firing of OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman one sleepless Thanksgiving weekend in 2023.
For five days and nights, the tech world remained glued to X for blow-by-blow coverage from a cadre of scrappy reporters. It was a nail-biter. But by the time everyone returned to work after the long holiday weekend, all was as it had been. Altman had been rehired and memes of him playing his UNO reverse card were pretty much gone.
AI casting call
A comedic thriller, here is what is known about the casting thus far.
Toplining is The Amazing Spiderman’s Andrew Garfield who is set to play Altman. No stranger to corporate meltdown dramas, Garfield, played Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin in The Social Network and television evangelist Jim Bakker in Jessica Chastain’s Eyes of Tammy Faye.
His real-life girlfriend Monica Barbaro has been cast as OpenAI’s CTO Mira Murati who was one of the board members who voted to fire Altman. Following his ousting, she took the helm as Interim CEO for three days, then left to form her own AI unicorn, Thinking Machines, which is now valued at $10 billion with backing from Andreessen Horowitz. Barbaro has received widespread acclaim for her portrayal of Joan Baez in Timothée Chalamet’s Dylan biopic, A Complete Unknown.
Oscar-nominated Anora actor Yura Borisov is set to play OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, who led the board revolt against Altman and had one of the more bizarre story arcs, which included bringing Altman back after Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella offered to hire all OpenAI employees who were quitting in protest to Altman’s firing. Nadella was heralded as a hero and Altman cryptically tweeted the acronym ILYA as I love you always. It was high drama with a lot of Easter eggs. Sutskever later left OpenAI to found his own AI unicorn, Safe Superintelligence Inc., which is also backed by Andreessen Horowitz. Other investors include Sequoia Capital, Ron Conway’s SV Angel, Yuri Milner’s DST Global and Nat Friedman’s NFDG, as confirmed by SSI on X. Bloomberg reported his startup has been fundraising at a $30 billion valuation.
Snowden and Super Pumped: Battle for Uber star Joseph Gordon-Levitt may or may not be under consideration for Artificial, but perhaps should be as he happens to be married to Tasha McCauley, another former OpenAI board member who was part of the coup to fire Altman over safety issues. Gordon-Levitt has long been vocal about his concerns over data privacy and AI’s role in Hollywood, which would make him well-suited to play Twitch co-founder Emmett Shear, who also served briefly as OpenAI’s Interim CEO. Pure speculation mixed with wishful thinking. Gordon-Levitt is currently working on an untitled AI thriller with Anne Hathaway who starred in another tech founder takedown docudrama with Jared Leto in AppleTV’s WeCrashed, a miniseries about the rise and fall of WeWork co-founders Adam and Rebekah Neumann.
Italian filmmaker Luca Guadagnino, who directed Zendaya’s Challengers, is in talks to direct Artificial. Shooting is expected to take place in San Francisco and Italy.
Corporate meltdown dramas have been making for gripping cinema in recent years. To get in the mood for Artificial, worth a watch are Hulu’s The Dropout, a miniseries about the rise and fall of the Theranos co-founders; AMC’s BlackBerry, a feature film about the first smartphone; and AppleTV’s Tetris, a thriller about one game developer’s determination to license Tetris from the Soviet Union in the 1980s for Nintendo Game Boy.
All about AI drama
What makes the making of Artificial for Prime Video so meta, is that Amazon was one of the founding investors of OpenAI alongside Sam Altman, Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Reid Hoffman and others who jointly pledged $1 billion in 2015 to fund the nonprofit foundation to ensure that artificial general intelligence (AGI) benefits all of humanity.
Yet rather than funding subsequent rounds of OpenAI, Amazon dropped out and gave $8 billion to Anthropic instead, a ChatGPT competitor founded by OpenAI alumni to create a safer and more private AI. Today Anthropic is reported to be valued at $61.5 billion, while OpenAI is far larger, with an estimated 1 billion users and $300 billion valuation. However, it hasn’t been able to go public yet because it’s still a nonprofit.
To further complicate things, Amazon partners with OpenAI on AWS’s Bedrock offering which provides customers access to a variety of foundation models. So likely Amazon’s feelings about OpenAI are somewhat mixed.
That said, Puck got an early read of the script and reported that Altman and Elon Musk will probably hate their portrayals. So stay tuned, the real AI drama has just begun.
