Sam Altman is the guest for this weekend’s Lunch with the FT. Over pasta-infused garlic in his Napa Valley farmhouse, the OpenAI CEO discusses AI’s fearsome capabilities.
We were particularly taken by the accompanying video:
Like architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, FT Alphaville believes that close examination of details can reveal essential truths. And like the author Xavier de Maistre, we’re going to test our readers’ patience by grinding that conceit into dust.
Here are three things we found out about Altman based on repeated watching of 17 uncomfortable seconds of his cooking prep.
1. He’s bad at olive oil
That’s Graza. It’s a trendy brand of olive oils from Jaén in southern Spain, the world’s olive-growing capital, that are sold through Whole Foods and direct. Cute packaging and squeeze-bottle convenience have helped build Graza’s following among Instagram types, but its big innovation was to split the range into easy-to-understand categories. There’s Sizzle, which is advertised as being best for cooking, and Drizzle, which is for dipping and finishing.
Altman sizzles with Drizzle.
The green bottle indicates it’s early harvest, when the olives are barely ripe. Harvesting fruit at the start of the season yields much less oil but the flavours are brighter.
It’s expensive stuff. Graza’s website charges $21 for 500ml for early harvest, which it labels very clearly as “finishing oil’.
Frying with early harvest is insanely wasteful and, quite frankly, an offence to horticulture.
Heat deodorises olive oil. Raising its temperature obliterates the difference between cheap and expensive oils by driving out the fragrance compounds that make them taste fresh, spicy, sour, or bitter. The food scientist Harold McGee has shown in blind taste tests that once heat’s applied, oils all end up tasting the same.
This is now sufficiently well known to inform Graza’s tiered pricing. It charges $16 for 750ml of late-harvest Sizzle and $14 for 750ml of Frizzle, a pulp blend it advertises as best for frying because it has a higher smoke point. (This is contested science, btw.)
Through ignorance or carelessness, when presented with three choices, Altman chooses badly, twice. It’s pointlessly, needlessly profligate. The video shows a bottle of Sizzle right next to his Drizzle.
A responsible cook would be frying in Frizzle, or literally any other pomace oil, for which they should expect to pay about $7 a litre. Altman’s input costs are around six times the going rate for no discernible benefit.
2. His coffee machine’s a Breville
More specifically, it’s an Breville Oracle Touch, a top-of-the-range model sold under the brand name Sage in territories where Breville is associated with sandwich presses. It’s a semi-automatic, not fully-automated bean-to-cup, meaning it walks the user through pulling and frothing techniques while automating repetitive stuff like grinding and tamping. Expect to pay at least $2,000.
The internet hates the Oracle Touch. It gets shitbagged regularly on Reddit, where Altman was on the board for seven years, though you’d be hard pressed to find any evidence of his tenure. User Evostance on r/espresso catalogues some of the typical complaints: regular breakdowns, inconsistency around measures, and the constant need to correct its mistakes:
Right now, my £1.8k machine probably has about £500-800 of wasted features since other Sage/Breville machines would be better suited at this point. It’s also introduced a lot of faff and wasted time, as I’m trying to work around the auto functionality.
Nevertheless, ask ChatGPT to recommend a coffee machine and you can probably guess what happens:
Altman’s coffee machine seems to have a transparent box on top. We can’t be sure, but it’s possibly the optional Puck Sucker, an absurd bit of over-engineering as applied to the knock-box.
As explained on the Sage website: “An automatically activated suction cup creates a rapid vacuum which quietly releases the espresso coffee puck from the portafilter in one swift action.”
No one needs this. At around $90 retail, no one could think this as an essential purchase. But maybe Altman has particular affinity for suckers?
3. There’s something off with his knife
OK, that’s one fancy-looking knife. Handle appears to be a walnut or ironwood, no rivets. Flat butt with a steel cap, useful for crushing 70 to 80 garlic cloves. Blade’s santoku, the distinctive workhorse of Japanese kitchens, with a bowed spine like the nose of a beluga whale. Bolster’s… hey, wait a minute.
There’s a lot of nerdery around knife handles. The Japanese type is light and simple, putting the weight nearer the tip for intricate work such as removing a pufferfish liver. The German type of handle is heavier, so the knife’s balance point is towards the middle, which suits a European kitchen where a lot of the chopping will be in a rocking motion.
Traditionally, Japanese knives don’t have a chunky finger protector between the handle and the heel, known as a bolster, or metal that runs all the way to the cap, known as full tang. Altman’s knife definitely has the former and probably has the latter.
These regional differences aren’t really fixed any more, with knife makers doing all sorts of east-west hybrids. Nevertheless, the number of design inconsistencies still makes this knife an oddity. (It’s also, because of the blade’s shallow curve, a poor choice for mincing large amounts of garlic.)
We couldn’t find an exact match online. Maybe it’s a one-off piece by an artisan steel forger who shuns tradition. Another possibility is that it’s a Chinese mass-produced blade that’s sold under countless names, usually in sets, often in a fancy presentation box or with fake Damascus patterns etched on the side. There are Sino-Niho-Germanic Frankenknives all over Amazon and AliExpress that look a lot like Altman’s.
All we can say with confidence is that Altman’s knife is either very expensive or very cheap. It’s impossible to know whether its oddness is the result of individual human creativity, or is an incoherent mash-up of disparate elements that may look impressive at first glance but doesn’t stand up to any kind of scrutiny. See where we’re going with this?
Cheap and expensive are not mutually-exclusive categories; Altman might have paid a lot for a bad knife. Whichever way, it looks poor quality because it resembles the machine-milled rubbish that has been flooding the market and poisoning the well.
Also, digression, we’ve just spotted something in the foreground:
It’s a *second bottle* of Drizzle. He was two bottles of $21 olive oil, both open and going stale simultaneously. Not only is that wasteful redundancy, it also introduces safety risks. As McGee writes:
All cooking oils are fragile. Fresh oil begins to deteriorate as soon as it’s exposed to light, heat, oxygen or moisture, all of which can break intact oil molecules into fragments. One set of fragments is responsible for the hints of cardboard, paint and fish that we smell in stale, rancid oil. It turns out that stale aromas, pleasant fried aromas and unpleasant scorched aromas all come from oil fragments called aldehydes that are more or less toxic to our cells, whether we eat them or inhale them during cooking. […] Fresh oils, and in particular fresh olive oils, generate the fewest toxic aldehydes.
OpenAI’s difficult to understand. The project involves a lot of incomprehensibly big numbers. Anyone who doesn’t go billions blind should read Ed Zitron. For the rest of us, it’s enough to know that OpenAI is spending more private capital than any company in history to build a moat around products it can’t yet monetise. Each fundraising weaponises sunk-cost fallacy among a clique of companies that play the same game.
Backers are asked to believe that OpenAI is the most responsible guardian of The Dangerous Majick, while also understanding that the urgency of AI’s arms race frees it from all obligation to act responsibly. Burning cash is foundational to its business. There’s no time to sandbox new products or abide by laws when liquidity is only ever measured in months. The looming threat of insolvency is what propels OpenAI forward.
Does value-for-money get a look in? We know very little about OpenAI’s day-to-day operating costs, but we’ve learned a little more about the day-to-day operating costs of the CEO.
Maybe it’s useful to know that Altman uses a knife that’s showy but incohesive and wrong for the job; he wastes huge amounts of money on olive oil that he uses recklessly; and he has an automated coffee machine that claims to save labour while doing the exact opposite because it can’t be trusted. His kitchen is a catalogue of inefficiency, incomprehension, and waste. If that’s any indication of how he runs the company, insolvency cannot be considered too unrealistic a threat.
#learned #Sam #Altman #scoping #kitchen