Elie Hassenfeld Q&A: ' 5,000 to Save a Life Is a Bargain'

When the board of OpenAI staged a bum mutiny last November, throwing out the company's leadership only to have the bosses return while board members were pressured to resign, something seemed rotten in the state of effective altruism. Nominally, OpenAI's mission had been to ensure that AI "benefits all of humanity." Fiduciarily, OpenAI's mission is to benefit the subset of humanity with a stake in OpenAI. And then, of course, there was Sam Bankman-Fried, the felonious altruist who argued in court last fall that his sordid crypto exchange was in fact a noble exercise in earning-to-give--making Midas money, sure, but only to funnel it to the global poor. This week he's facing a prison sentence of up to 50 years, which his legal team has complained paints him as a "depraved super-villain."