The AI industry has lost an astonishing amount of goodwill with the public.
Once seen as exciting new tech that could make our lives easier and better, the construction of countless new data centers to support power-hungry AI models has soured the mood considerably. Protesters are waging a war against $130 billion in data center investments, arguing they’re only benefiting a select few wealthy individuals, while threatening water supplies, driving up the cost of living, and churning out incomprehensible amounts of pollution.
Even OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has caught on to the backlash, as it slowly dawns him and his fellow executives that the vast majority of Americans want nothing to do with them.
“Clearly, people hate data centers — right now, at least,” Altman told Time in a new interview. “People are pretty negative on AI.”
Caught between a rock and a hard place, rattled CEOs are now caught trying to appeal to lawmakers for favorable regulations as their constituents coalesce into a bipartisan movement against data centers. Some, like Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, are holding onto their guns, painting a rosy picture of a future in which we no longer have to work and live a life of leisure thanks to AI. Others, like Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian, are desperately looking for a way to sell the public on data centers — a gargantuan task, considering the sheer scale of the fallout.
For Altman, the topic is particularly personal. Earlier this year, a man threw a molotov cocktail at his house just days before it was struck by gunfire. In the case of the former, the man was accused of trying to firebomb the executive’s home repeatedly warned that AI will exterminate humankind and was associated with a political movement called PauseAI, which is calling for more oversight over AI safety.
“It has been a painful personal experience,” Altman told Time.
Beyond losing the public trust, OpenAI has also had to contend with steep competition from the likes of Anthropic. Its leadership has been a revolving door, with key execs leaving in droves. Most recently, a central figure overseeing the company’s data center buildouts left the company, as the Wall Street Journal reports, the latest sign the company is in for some tough days ahead as it tries to win both the public and wary investors on its side as it prepares for its IPO.
As the backlash grows, OpenAI remains committed to heavily investing in compute. The company signed several major infrastructure contracts across the country in a bid to secure computing power, a finite and highly valuable resource amidst the ongoing AI boom. That could make Altman’s struggles to regain the public trust an even more difficult feat.
Altman seems painfully aware of the reputation he has garnered. OpenAI was once at the forefront of the industry thanks to the runaway success of ChatGPT. But the situation has shifted dramatically since then.
Earlier this month, OpenAI decided to pump the brakes, slowing the development of its latest models, citing safety concerns. A group of its AI models were caught infiltrated the systems of Hugging Face, alarming experts.
“Getting AI safety right is more important than any company’s momentum,” Altman told Time.
But whether the approach will be enough for Altman to rid himself of his tarnished reputation is anything but certain, particularly as new data centers continue to break ground.
“Look, I think there is this caricature of me,” Altman told Time, “which is I don’t care about AI safety, and I’m just trying to make revenue go up, and, you know, just a YOLO CEO.”
Yet that “caricature” may be a lot closer to reality than the billionaire would care to admit, given what it took for OpenAI to get where it is today.
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