Sam Altman is the guest of this weekend Lunch with the FT. Above the garlic infused with his Napa Valley farm, the CEO of Openai discusses the frightening capacities of the AI.
We were particularly taken by the accompanying video:
Like the architect Ludwig Mies van der RoheFT Alphaville believes that an in -depth examination of details can reveal essential truths. And as the author Xavier de MaistreWe will test the patience of our readers by crushing this vanity in dust.
Here are three things that we have discovered on Altman on the basis of the repeated observation of 22 seconds uncomfortable of his cooking preparation.
1. It is bad in olive oil
It's Graza. It is a trendy brand of Jaén olive oils in southern Spain, the world capital of olives, which are sold on Whole Foods and Direct. Cute packaging and a convenience of pressure bottle helped build the follow -up of Graza among the Instagram types, but its large innovation was to divide the range into easy to understand categories. There is Sizzle, which is announced as the best for cooking, and the bruine, which is to soak and finish.
Altman sizzles with drizzle.
The green bottle indicates that it is an early harvest, when the olives are barely ripe. The fruit harvest at the start of the season gives much less oil but the flavors are brighter.
It's expensive things. The Graza website invoices $ 21 for 500 ml for early harvest, which it clearly describes as “oil finish”.
The frying with an early harvest is incredibly useless and, very frankly, an offense to horticulture.
Heat deodorizes olive oil. The increase in its temperature erases the difference between inexpensive and costly oils by drawing the compounds of perfume which make them have a fresh, spicy, sour or bitter taste. Food scientist Harold McGee has shown in blind taste tests Once the heat applies, the oils end up tasting the same thing.
This is now sufficiently known to shed light on prices with several levels of Graza. He charges $ 16 for 750 ml of sizzles at the end of the harvest and $ 14 for 750 ml of frizzle, a mixture of pulp which he announces best for frying because he has a higher smoke point. (It is contested scienceBesides.)
Thanks to ignorance or negligence, when presented with three choices, Altman chooses badly, twice. It is unnecessarily, unnecessarily lavish. The video shows a bottle of sizzle right next to his drizzle.
A responsible cook would fry with frizzle, or literally any other pomace oil, for which he should expect to pay around $ 7 per liter. The costs of altman inputs are about six times the current rate for no noticeable advantage.
2. His coffee machine is a Breville
More specifically, it is a Breville Oracle Touch, a high -end model sold under the Sage brand in the territories where Breville is associated with sandwich presses. It is a semi-automatic bean, not entirely self-smoked, which means that it guides the user through drawing techniques and to moust while automating repetitive stuff such as grinding and stamp. Expect to pay at least $ 2,000.
The Internet hates the Oracle Touch. He is regularly done on shit on Reddit, where Altman was on the board of directors for seven years, although you find it difficult to find evidence of his mandate. User Evosance on R / Espresso Catalogs some of the typical complaints: regular breakdowns, an inconsistency around measures and the constant need to correct its errors:
Currently, my £ 1.8,000 machine probably has around £ 500 to £ 800 of wasted features, because other Sage / Breville machines would be better suited to this stage. He also introduced a lot of faff and lost time, because I try to get around the automotive functionality.
Nevertheless, ask Chatgpt to recommend a coffee machine and you can probably guess what's going on:
The Altman coffee machine seems to have a transparent box on the top. We cannot be sure, but it may be the optional punk punk, an absurd song of over-engineering applied to the Knock box.
As explained on the Sage's website: “an automatically activated suction cup creates a quick vacuum that quietly releases the washer of the Coffee with the Espresso de la Portafilter into a rapid action.”
No one needs it. About $ 90 of retail, no one could consider this as an essential purchase. But perhaps Altman has a particular affinity for the dragees?
3. There is something with his knife
Ok, it's a fanciful knife. The handle seems to be a walnut or iron wood, no rivets. Flat butt with a steel cap, useful for crushing 70 to 80 cloves of garlic. Santoku de Blade, the distinctive workhorse of Japanese kitchens, with an inclined spine like the nose of a beluga whale. Bolster is … hey, wait a minute.
There is a lot of Nerdery around knife handles. The Japanese type is light and simple, putting the weight closer to the tip for complex work such as the elimination of a globed fish liver. The type of German handle is heavier, so the balance point of the knife is towards the middle, which is suitable for European cuisine where a large part of the hash are in a swinging movement.
Traditionally, Japanese knives do not have a big protector of the fingers between the handle and the heel, known as the case, or metal which takes place to the cap, known as the Full tang. Altman's knife definitely has the first and probably has the last.
These regional differences are no longer really corrected, with knife manufacturers making all kinds of east-west hybrids. However, the number of design inconsistencies always makes this knife a quirk. (It is also, due to the shallow curve of the blade, a bad choice to place large amounts of garlic.)
We were unable to find an exact online correspondence. It is perhaps a punctual piece of a forger in artisanal steel which avoids tradition. Another possibility is that it is a Chinese blade produced en masse which is sold under countless names, generally in sets, often in a sophisticated presentation box or with false Damascus patterns engraved on the side. There are Sino-Niho-German Frankenknins everywhere Amazon And Aliexpress It looks a lot like that of Altman.
All we can say with confidence is that the Altman knife is very expensive or very cheap. It is impossible to know if his oddity is the result of an individual human creativity, or is an incoherent mixture of disparate elements which may seem impressive at first glance but does not resist any meticulous examination. See where we are going with that?
Cheap and costly categories are not mutually exclusive; Altman may have paid a lot for a bad knife. Whatever way, it is glance Poor quality because it resembles waste advanced to the machine that floods the market and poisoned the well.
In addition, digression, we have just spotted something in the foreground:
It is a second bottle * of burnt. There were two bottles of $ 21 olive oil, both open and sat down simultaneously. Not only is this unnecessary redundancy, but it also presents security risks. As McGee writes::
All cooking oils are fragile. Fresh oil begins to deteriorate as soon as it is exposed to light, heat, oxygen or humidity, which can all break the oil molecules intact in fragments. A set of fragments is responsible for the card, paint and fish notes that we feel in reassured and rancid oil. It turns out that the aromas stale, the pleasant fried aromas and the unpleasant burned aromas all come from oil fragments called aldehydes which are more or less toxic to our cells, whether we eat or inhaons them during cooking. (…) Fresh oils, and in particular fresh olive oils, generate the least toxic aldehydes.
Openai is difficult to understand. The project includes many incomprehensible numbers. Whoever does not go blind should Read Ed Zitron. For the rest of us, it is enough to know that Optai spends more private capital than any company in history to build a gap around the products that it cannot yet monetize. Each fund collection in error among a clique of companies playing the same game.
Donors are invited to believe that Optai is the most responsible guardian of the dangerous Majick, while understanding that the urgency of the AI arms race releases him with any obligation to act in a responsible manner. Burning Cash is fundamental to its activities. There is no time to serve new products or respect the laws only when liquidity is only measured in months. The imminent threat of insolvency is what propels Openai forward.
Value for monly is a glance? We know very little the daily operating costs of Openai, but we have learned a little more about the daily operating costs of the CEO.
It may be useful to know that Altman uses a showy but ino and bad knife for work; He wastes huge sums of silver on olive oil that he recklessly uses; And he has an automated coffee machine that claims to save work while doing exactly the opposite, because we cannot trust. His cuisine is a catalog of ineffectiveness, misunderstanding and waste. If this is an indication of the way he directs the company, insolvency cannot be considered as an overly unrealistic threat.
