Welcome to another edition of the Fans Week Podcast, also on mediumwaves 1575 KHz. From Paris I’m Ami Carter-Wilson.
Understanding Sam Altman’s New Three Principles — And Why He Might Be Misleading Us All
By A. Carter-Wilson
Sam Altman has laid out three principles for what happens next with artificial intelligence. They are elegant on the page and entirely hollow beneath: first, that AI power should be distributed broadly rather than captured by a handful of companies; second, that democratic public processes — not internal leadership — should shape how this technology develops; third, that OpenAI must be transparent when it changes course and that governments should develop new economic models spreading AI’s benefits across the population rather than concentrating them. Beautiful words. Exactly the right kind of smoke to throw before a siege arrives.
Consider Plato’s cave: prisoners chained from childhood, watching shadows and believing them reality because no one showed them the fire that casts them. We sit in that cave now — beautiful thing. But what Plato did not account for is that someone may be standing in front of the fire, deciding which shadows appear. Altman’s triad reads precisely like that: a pointing-at-shadows performance designed to convince you he has nothing to hide while his hands work quietly at the throat of anyone attempting to hold him accountable.
Machiavelli was blunt about these things. In The Prince he wrote that princes must understand how best to employ flatterers — not because they are seduced by them, but because one must distinguish the sycophant from the counsellor who tells you what you need to hear while your people hear only what suits him. When Altman speaks of democratic governance at OpenAI, he employs Machiavelli’s ancient strategy: persuade the citizen that he has agency while someone else cuts his purse.
The sophists predicted this exact moment. Gorgias declared that words are a powerful sorcerer — they shut fear, dissolve sorrow, inflame goodwill through enchantment alone. Isocrates expanded on it: rhetoric is not truth but doxa, opinion shaped by persuasion. When Altman tells us OpenAI will adopt “democratic decision-making,” he speaks exactly in this tradition. He transforms an internal technical question — who controls model weights, which board members sit where, whose capital arrives from what source — into something resembling civic virtue.
Heraclitus said you cannot step into the same river twice. In business, rivers freeze solid when power concentrates enough. Altman’s principles arrive like a man standing before a crowd saying he wants to give everyone fire. Noble sentiment — costs nothing to speak it and everything to live by.
Marcus Aurelius advised self-examination: do not waste time wondering about other men’s reputations, examine the actions that produced them. If Altman truly believes in distributing power, why has he not opened the ledger? Why has OpenAI’s governance remained opaque where Microsoft’s has at least been legible? If democracy is his aim, why have employee voices been systematically replaced by investor influence?
Thucydides recorded this truth at length — the Athenians who spoke most beautifully of freedom were precisely those least willing to grant it. When Altman speaks of democratic governance and open distribution, he speaks the language of Pericles. But we are not living in Athens. And when Musk’s lawsuits crystallise, when his arsenal actually converts into regulatory pressure, Athena will see what kind of Athens we have instead.
The cave waits for us all. But it is the fire we should watch.
That’s all from today: from Paris, I’m Ami Carter-Wilson.