Something Closer to Religion

I was reading Karen Hao's book Empire of AI over the weekend and ran across a small reminder of how Sam Altman thinks of himself and the "mission" of OpenAI. This is an excerpt from Altman's personal blog from 2013:

"The most successful founders do not set out to create companies. They are on a mission to create something closer to a religion, and at some point it turns out that forming a company is the easiest way to do so."

If the advertisements for the generative AI products twisting their data-hungry tendrils into our devices and increasingly our psyches have sounded like evangelism to you, and if the language around Altman himself and OpenAI has veered toward messianic, there might be a good reason for that. Becoming an object of worship seems to be baked into Altman's definition of success.