OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has spoken out against a growing habit of discussing AI models in religious terms. He says the trend makes him uneasy and that it creates real risk. His own history of describing AI makes the remarks more complicated than they first appear.
This edition looks at what Altman said, why the timing matters, and how his new position fits with years of his own sky-high rhetoric.
What Altman actually said
Altman said it makes him "very uncomfortable" when people "ascribe religious force or a surrender of human judgment to AI models." He described this as a "real safety issue."
Amazon Web Services no longer asks government agencies to sign nondisclosure agreements (NDAs) when it seeks approval for new data centers. AWS CEO Matt Garman disclosed the change in a single line of a longer blog post defending the industry, which faces growing local opposition across the United States.
The line is short, but it addresses one of the main sources of public anger.
Why NDAs matter
Opposition to data centers is not only about water or power bills. Much of it is about secrecy. Environmental activist Erin Brockovich recently said the most common complaint she hears is a lack of transparency. She described a familiar sequence: "projects announced after permits are already secured, developers who don't return calls, local officials who signed NDAs before their neighbors knew a project was being considered."
For years, the main job of an AI research cluster was training models. That job is getting broader. Once teams use reinforcement learning (RL) and start testing agents, the same infrastructure has to run code that models produce, call tools, read and write storage and connect to other services. Pure training never raised the question of where that code should run and what it should be allowed to reach. Agent work does.
IBM Research is working through that question with CoreWeave, the GPU cloud provider. Brian Belgodere, a senior technical staff member at IBM, described the collaboration in an interview with theCUBE Research's Dave Vellante and John Furrier at the Fully Connected event. The interview was broadcast on theCUBE, the livestreaming studio of SiliconANGLE Media. theCUBE is a paid media partner for the event, and CoreWeave sponsored its coverage. SiliconANGLE says sponsors have no editorial control over its content.
David Robinson, one of OpenAI's longest-serving employees, has resigned. In an essay in The Atlantic, he argues that the company's "culture is broken." He knows how this looks. Robinson calls himself "something of a cliché": another insider at a leading AI lab who leaves with a public warning.
His background is what gives the warning weight. Robinson says he led the writing of the safety reports that came with OpenAI's major product launches. After three and a half years, he describes himself as "among the longest-tenured employees at the company." Business Insider first reported his departure.
Meta wants hobbyists to help figure out what AI hardware should look like. The company has announced Muse Gadgets, an open-source project that gives tinkerers the tools to build their own devices and connect them to Muse, Meta's AI agent.
This is a different approach from the usual polished product launch. Meta is not betting on one device. It is giving builders the plumbing and seeing what they make.
What is in the kit
Muse Gadgets has two main software parts:
1. Firmware for ESP32 boards. ESP32 is a family of cheap, low-power microcontrollers that is popular with makers for small connected projects. Meta's firmware lets these boards act as hardware endpoints for Muse.
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