Ari Goldschmidt:

“The Problem Is Sam Altman”: OpenAI Insiders Don’t Trust CEO

The same day that OpenAI released policy recommendations to ensure that AI benefits humanity, The New Yorker dropped a massive investigation into whether CEO Sam Altman can be trusted to actually follow through on OpenAI’s biggest promises.

Parsing the publications side by side can be disorienting.

On the one hand, OpenAI said it plans to push for policies to “keep people first” as AI starts “outperforming the smartest humans even when they are assisted by AI.”

On the other hand, The New Yorker interviewed more than 100 people familiar with how Altman conducts business. The publication also reviewed internal memos and interviewed Altman more than 12 times. The resulting story provides a lengthy counterpoint explaining why the public may struggle to trust OpenAI’s CEO.

Overall, insiders painted Altman as a people-pleaser who tells others what they want to hear while questing for power in an alleged bid to always put himself first. 

One board member said Altman has “two traits that are almost never seen in the same person. The first is a strong desire to please people… The second is almost a sociopathic lack of concern for the consequences that may come from deceiving someone.”

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Davis Wilson:

AWS Teams Working Around the Clock To Keep Middle East Services Up After Drone Strikes, CEO Says

The Iran war poses ongoing challenges for cloud provider Amazon Web Services, its chief, Matt Garman, said on Tuesday.

The Amazon division said in early March that drone strikes had damaged its data centers in Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates.

“It’s a really difficult situation, and we’re working incredibly hard,” Garman told CNBC’s Kate Rooney at the HumanX conference in San Francisco on Tuesday. “In fact, we have teams, 24/7, working to make sure that we can keep our infrastructure up for our customers in that region.”

Dozens of AWS services in Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates continue to be unavailable, according to the company’s status page.

Last week, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ Navy announced that it had targeted Amazon data center infrastructure in Bahrain. Amazon declined to comment at the time.

Amazon Web Services is the world’s top supplier of cloud infrastructure that companies can rely on to run websites and applications.

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Enrique Abeyta:

Big Batteries Are the Newest Answer to Big Tech’s Big Energy Needs

In a deal with Xcel and Form Energy, Google’s forthcoming Minnesota data center will feature the world’s largest storage battery by capacity. The 300-megawatt iron-air battery will be able to store 30 gigawatt-hours of energy, enough to power 3,000 average U.S. homes for an entire year. 

Many of these iron-air batteries will be set inside shipping containers that will be linked together to store power. According to Form, the combined cells could take up a space as big as roughly 110 football fields, end zones included, depending on where it’s sited. (It doesn’t need to be adjacent to the data center.)

The idea is that with the Big Tech firm bankrolling the massive battery and adding additional capacity to the grid, it will, in theory, allow the utility to power a new data center in the state without raising residential rates. 

“Battery storage is so much cheaper than it was just two years ago,” said Allison Feeney, a research analyst at Wood Mackenzie, an energy consultancy. “Batteries will be in demand from data centers, especially in the next five or so years, when the natural gas supply chain is relatively maxed out. There’s not really any other alternatives.”

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