Artificial satirizes Sam Altman while following real OpenAI events

At the New York Film Festival premiere of Artificial, director Luca Guadagnino described his interest in people who want to “play God.” The satirical biopic follows OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s rise to power and brief ouster, drawing closely on real events, according to The Verge’s Hayden Field.

Andrew Garfield plays Altman as controlling and power-hungry. The film also depicts OpenAI cofounder Ilya Sutskever as an idealist, president Greg Brockman as loyal to Altman, and CTO Mira Murati as a brilliant outsider. Elon Musk and AI researcher Geoffrey Hinton also appear as characters. The Verge describes the portrayals as exaggerated and satirical.

The story is organized around milestones, including Sutskever’s meeting with Hinton in the early 2000s, the researchers joining Google in March 2013, and an OpenAI system beating a human champion at Dota 2 in 2017. It also touches on concerns about any one person or company controlling superintelligent AI, and portrays Altman as seeking that power.

The review says the film sticks remarkably close to documented events, while noting fictionalized scenes. One example is a bunker beneath Altman’s California home; Field says the real Altman does not have one there, “that we know of.” The source article excerpt ends as the film reaches Altman’s firing, so it does not describe the rest of that sequence.