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🧵 IN THE WINTER OF 2022, a few months after ChatGPT began to scramble everything, I was part of a small group of staffers who met with Sam Altman at the White House. A few reflections on that meeting, and what it tells us about this most recent hype/panic cycle 🧵🧵🧵

The meeting, held in an ornate conference room on the fourth floor of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, lasted a little over an hour. Altman politely shook everyone’s hand before we settled around the wooden table.

One scene from the meeting was particularly memorable: Altman had promised publicly that his technology would become the most powerful in the history of the world. But for several minutes, we watched in awkward silence as his assistant fidgeted with the HDMI cable, unable to project onto

the screen the “demo” of the new model the CEO was there to show us. I found this very funny. So did many of my colleagues, who giggled quietly. Unfortunately, the humor seemed lost on the CEO, who betrayed no visible emotion during the meeting.