David Murphy
30 posts
This week, in Elon Musk's lawsuit against Sam Altman and OpenAI, the jury saw video of a sworn deposition from Mira Murati, OpenAI's former CTO. Elaborating on her comments in our latest @NewYorker story, she alleged that Altman was not always truthful, gave different executives conflicting information, and pitted them against each other. Texts between Murati and Altman were also entered as evidence.
Over the course of an 18-month investigation, we traced the yearslong history of these claims from Altman's colleagues, and looked at what this tells us about integrity in AI leadership, and how it affects all of us.
Here's some of what we found. And read the full story here: newyorker.com/magazine/2026/…
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David Murphy retweetledi
@CoriHyland @CinemaShogun Already has sponsors, just like every other journalist does (including the ones I listed who were contracted by companies like CNN, NBC, etc). Thanks for the reach, take the L, and have a blessed day!
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WOW 😂
Candace Owens is having a MELTDOWN over my post about her merch.
Despite having me blocked her and her team reads through all of my posts.
I’m sure you can find their burners in my comments.
And as you can see she’s LYING as always.
Never once did I call for her merch to be “boycotted” or whatever other nonsense she’s muttering off about today.
I simply asked questions.
Like why does Candace plaster pictures of her face on everything she owns.
But because she’s a raging narcissist my post triggered her so now she’s making up conspiracy theories about my post.
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David Murphy retweetledi
@RonanFarrow @NewYorker Sing us a song, like ur daddy...
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David Murphy retweetledi
Yesterday, a federal judge barred Elon Musk's lawyers from arguing that AI could threaten humanity in his lawsuit against OpenAI.
OpenAI was founded as a nonprofit focused on developing AI safely. But our recent @NewYorker investigation documented how some researchers at the company have raised concerns about safety being sidelined.
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@RonanFarrow @NewYorker Elon? You mean Iron Man? Really? Elon is not the man I would look to for a sincere argument about AI safety. I have no doubt there are reasonable worries and reasonable critics of AI hype, AI doom and AI investment insanity, but Elon is not one of them.
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@RonanFarrow @NewYorker Too bad they haven’t been hacked, exploited or lost a loved one to suicide to comprehend how it’s a threat to humanity.
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@RonanFarrow @NewYorker I was with you, until you said: "Deepfakes are being used to swing elections," and posted a clip from this link. If you are sourcing this as a representation of AI swinging elections, your research is garbage.
twitch.tv/trumpvsbiden20…
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@RonanFarrow @NewYorker Your reporting and hopefully continued reporting on this issue is so much more necessary than I think anyone realizes. Please keep going
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@RonanFarrow @NewYorker We need more investigative journalists, like you, who are not afraid of speaking truth to power. The Ai paradigm is definitely precarious, and your elucidatory efforts are greatly appreciated. Grazie!
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@RonanFarrow @NewYorker Another great read. Thanks for reporting
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David Murphy retweetledi
(🧵1/10) With renewed attention on my recent @NewYorker reporting about Sam Altman and OpenAI, it's worth revisiting a piece I wrote for the magazine about another tech billionaire who has accumulated unusual leverage over the US government—and whose hand many readers have lately seen at work in their feeds.
For that story, I spent months interviewing more than thirty of Elon Musk's current and former colleagues, along with current and former officials at NASA, the Department of Defense, the FAA, the Department of Transportation, and OSHA. Many of their observations have only grown more relevant since.
Read the full investigation here: newyorker.com/magazine/2023/…
And a thread on a few of its findings below.
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David Murphy retweetledi
(8/10) The piece documents Musk's use of his platform against individual critics.
After Yoel Roth, Twitter's head of trust and safety when Elon acquired the site, resigned, Musk posted an excerpt from Roth's doctoral dissertation and suggested Roth supported children's access to adult content—the opposite of what Roth had actually argued. The post drew nearly seventeen thousand quote tweets and retweets.
"The moment that it went from being a moderation conversation to being a Pizzagate conversation, the risk level changed," Roth told me.
He and his husband fled their home. As they were packing the car, the Daily Mail published an article that gave readers what amounted to a map to their address. They ultimately had to sell the house.
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David Murphy retweetledi
(7/10) Officials told me that Musk's disproportionate wealth and influence allowed him either to flout their regulation efforts or to strong-arm them, across multiple industries.
Musk spent four months in 2025 leading DOGE, an effort to restructure and cut staff at many of the same federal agencies he had previously clashed with.
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When Sam Altman was reinstated at OpenAI after an outside law firm investigation, no report about what was found was ever released. That’s because none was written.
More in my full @NewYorker investigation: newyorker.com/magazine/2026/…
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David Murphy retweetledi
Wow, Palantir has gone full Nazi.
Palantir@PalantirTech
Because we get asked a lot. The Technological Republic, in brief. 1. Silicon Valley owes a moral debt to the country that made its rise possible. The engineering elite of Silicon Valley has an affirmative obligation to participate in the defense of the nation. 2. We must rebel against the tyranny of the apps. Is the iPhone our greatest creative if not crowning achievement as a civilization? The object has changed our lives, but it may also now be limiting and constraining our sense of the possible. 3. Free email is not enough. The decadence of a culture or civilization, and indeed its ruling class, will be forgiven only if that culture is capable of delivering economic growth and security for the public. 4. The limits of soft power, of soaring rhetoric alone, have been exposed. The ability of free and democratic societies to prevail requires something more than moral appeal. It requires hard power, and hard power in this century will be built on software. 5. The question is not whether A.I. weapons will be built; it is who will build them and for what purpose. Our adversaries will not pause to indulge in theatrical debates about the merits of developing technologies with critical military and national security applications. They will proceed. 6. National service should be a universal duty. We should, as a society, seriously consider moving away from an all-volunteer force and only fight the next war if everyone shares in the risk and the cost. 7. If a U.S. Marine asks for a better rifle, we should build it; and the same goes for software. We should as a country be capable of continuing a debate about the appropriateness of military action abroad while remaining unflinching in our commitment to those we have asked to step into harm’s way. 8. Public servants need not be our priests. Any business that compensated its employees in the way that the federal government compensates public servants would struggle to survive. 9. We should show far more grace towards those who have subjected themselves to public life. The eradication of any space for forgiveness—a jettisoning of any tolerance for the complexities and contradictions of the human psyche—may leave us with a cast of characters at the helm we will grow to regret. 10. The psychologization of modern politics is leading us astray. Those who look to the political arena to nourish their soul and sense of self, who rely too heavily on their internal life finding expression in people they may never meet, will be left disappointed. 11. Our society has grown too eager to hasten, and is often gleeful at, the demise of its enemies. The vanquishing of an opponent is a moment to pause, not rejoice. 12. The atomic age is ending. One age of deterrence, the atomic age, is ending, and a new era of deterrence built on A.I. is set to begin. 13. No other country in the history of the world has advanced progressive values more than this one. The United States is far from perfect. But it is easy to forget how much more opportunity exists in this country for those who are not hereditary elites than in any other nation on the planet. 14. American power has made possible an extraordinarily long peace. Too many have forgotten or perhaps take for granted that nearly a century of some version of peace has prevailed in the world without a great power military conflict. At least three generations — billions of people and their children and now grandchildren — have never known a world war. 15. The postwar neutering of Germany and Japan must be undone. The defanging of Germany was an overcorrection for which Europe is now paying a heavy price. A similar and highly theatrical commitment to Japanese pacifism will, if maintained, also threaten to shift the balance of power in Asia. 16. We should applaud those who attempt to build where the market has failed to act. The culture almost snickers at Musk’s interest in grand narrative, as if billionaires ought to simply stay in their lane of enriching themselves . . . . Any curiosity or genuine interest in the value of what he has created is essentially dismissed, or perhaps lurks from beneath a thinly veiled scorn. 17. Silicon Valley must play a role in addressing violent crime. Many politicians across the United States have essentially shrugged when it comes to violent crime, abandoning any serious efforts to address the problem or take on any risk with their constituencies or donors in coming up with solutions and experiments in what should be a desperate bid to save lives. 18. The ruthless exposure of the private lives of public figures drives far too much talent away from government service. The public arena—and the shallow and petty assaults against those who dare to do something other than enrich themselves—has become so unforgiving that the republic is left with a significant roster of ineffectual, empty vessels whose ambition one would forgive if there were any genuine belief structure lurking within. 19. The caution in public life that we unwittingly encourage is corrosive. Those who say nothing wrong often say nothing much at all. 20. The pervasive intolerance of religious belief in certain circles must be resisted. The elite’s intolerance of religious belief is perhaps one of the most telling signs that its political project constitutes a less open intellectual movement than many within it would claim. 21. Some cultures have produced vital advances; others remain dysfunctional and regressive. All cultures are now equal. Criticism and value judgments are forbidden. Yet this new dogma glosses over the fact that certain cultures and indeed subcultures . . . have produced wonders. Others have proven middling, and worse, regressive and harmful. 22. We must resist the shallow temptation of a vacant and hollow pluralism. We, in America and more broadly the West, have for the past half century resisted defining national cultures in the name of inclusivity. But inclusion into what? Excerpts from the #1 New York Times Bestseller The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West, by Alexander C. Karp & Nicholas W. Zamiska techrepublicbook.com
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@ShadowofEzra RONAN FARROW, the left-wing activist? Yeah, sure, believe him.
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A former employee at OpenAI is blowing the whistle on Sam Altman, claiming he is building portals and summoning aliens using artificial intelligence.
The portals are reportedly located in the United States and China, with a new one added in the Middle East.
"We're building portals from which we're genuinely summoning aliens."
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David Murphy retweetledi
OpenAI’s Sam Altman wants to “de-escalate” the rhetoric around A.I. But if you tell people that your product will upend their way of life, take their jobs, and possibly threaten humanity, they might believe you. newyorker.com/culture/infini…
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