Luca Guadagnino's film about Sam Altman and OpenAI, 'Artificial,' premiered at the New York Film Festival, offering a campy comedy reimagining the company's origin story. The film stars Andrew Garfield as Altman and Yura Borisov as Ilya Sutskever, and it takes an unambiguous stance: that Altman is an amoral manipulator who might be dead inside.
A Stylish but Blunt Satire
The film is described as a stylish and blunt satire, more of an op-ed than a movie, with little insight into what makes Altman and the tech elite tick. It also has little to say about the world that has welcomed them. This perspective may explain why Amazon MGM Studios pulled out of distributing the film in June, as Jeff Bezos's company has a $50bn investment in OpenAI.
The story begins in 2003, when a young math prodigy named Ilya Sutskever visits Prof Geoff Hinton (Mark Rylance), known as the godfather of AI, hoping for a job. Hinton serenely asks, "Have you ever considered the link between knowledge and patience?"
The Rise of OpenAI
Nine years later, Sutskever and Hinton's technology is starting to work "much the way your mind does," able to differentiate between cats and dogs, but Sutskever grows impatient with Hinton's conservative ambitions. Elon Musk (Ike Barinholtz) introduces Sutskever to Sam Altman, who has just sold his Loopt app for $40m.
The film's dramatic tension rests in the opposing poles of thought represented by Sutskever, a delusional optimist, and the self-motivated hubris of Altman. As OpenAI's self-learning technology begins to outsmart humans at video games, cracks appear in their partnership. Garfield is brilliantly slimy, nailing Altman's evolution from demon twink to a narcissistic grifter with a victim complex, climaxing with him being fired as CEO and rehired five days later. "They're being very mean to me," he pouts after his board airs concerns over ethics.
A Tonal Jumble
Artificial is the most outwardly comedic Guadagnino film to date, with a script by New Yorker essayist Simon Rich. The humor can be frustratingly broad, and Barinholtz often seems to be impersonating Mike Myers doing Musk on Saturday Night Live. Garfield plays Altman, who is an out gay man, as more effete than he actually is. At other times, the script is satisfyingly savage; after being questioned over safety concerns by Mira Murati (Monica Barbaro), Altman snaps, "I didn't invent teen suicide, Mira."
The film features clangingly obvious visual metaphors, such as a random shot of an unhoused person wearing VR goggles, or a simulator-like sequence of a car accelerating over a foggy Golden Gate Bridge. The score by Damon Albarn includes one original composition with lyrics like, "In a corrupt world, we'll sing the saddest song."
Artificial is screening at the New York Film Festival and will be released in the US on 25 December, in Australia on 21 January, and in the UK on 27 January.
