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like New York Times He wrote in his review of Going to infinityLewis’ book about disgraced cryptocurrency founder Sam Bankman Fried, the author always “makes sure to give you an unsung hero to root for.” Hollywood has often found this to be a successful recipe for film adaptation. Apostate Baseball General Manager In Moneyball, for example, Brad Pitt later played the character in The Big Short, while Christian Bale, Ryan Gosling, Steve Carell, and Pitt played it again, among others. “Even Lewis’s first book, Liar Poker“,” which chronicles all sorts of bad behavior on Wall Street, “is about a young man named Michael Lewis,” as the Times notes, in which this underdog hero leaves the “silly money game” of finance to become a famous journalist and author.

Altman, an influential and controversial Silicon Valley billionaire, transformed the economy by launching ChatGPT and unleashing the AI ​​revolution in November 2022. Within just a few months, he His board of directors fired him To lose confidence in them, before joining again within one period Dramatic weekend. Along the way, it was He filed a lawsuit against his former founder, Elon Musk He became an executive because of the hype and concerns surrounding the AI ​​story. He could be the perfect Michael Lewis, as Lewis recounted The important part How he met with Altman to discuss Bankman-Fried.

Challenge

The two shared dinner while Louis searched Going to infinitybecause Lewis had sought out Altman to discuss the Sam Bankman-Fried case, since the FTX founder had bought a 20% stake in OpenAI competitor Anthropic using client funds. “But it turns out he had a bit of an agenda,” Lewis told Sofi’s. Liz Thomaschief investment strategist and host The important part. “And his agenda was that he had all these people who wanted to write his autobiography, and he didn’t really want to write his autobiography, but he thought if he could pick just one of them, it would get everyone off his back. So he wanted to talk to me about some of these people.”

Lewis, who is known for his skepticism regarding financial and technological hype, responded with a question that gets to the heart of the current AI craze. “I said, ‘Well, if your machine is so smart, why don’t you have your machine write the resume?’ Lewis recalls suggesting that Altman dump all of his Slack channels, emails, and personal data into the form to allow him to tell his story.

Altman’s response was surprisingly frank: “He said it would be a really bad book.” When pressed when artificial intelligence He was To be able to perform such a feat, Altman estimated “maybe a few years.” This led to a unique challenge between the author and the tech mogul.

When Lewis and Altman agreed, at some point in the future, that ChatGPT was finally smart enough to write a good book, Lewis said he wanted to “challenge him to a contest. I’ll come back and we’ll pour it all in. We’ll let him write his book, but I’ll write my book alongside his. And we’ll just compare whose book is better.”

There are several books about Altman and OpenAI already in print, including Keach Hagey’s optimist And Karen Howe Artificial intelligence empire. Columbia law professor Tim Wu I reviewed both of these for New York Timeswriting “Hey ChatGPT, which one of these is the real Sam Altman?He added that the journalists’ works provided complementary portraits of the “notorious” co-founder of OpenAI, saying that both books suggested that Altman had created a real-life version of the ethical thought experiment, the “paperclip problem.” The idea is that an AI, tasked only with making as many paper clips as possible, will turn everything around it into a giant paper clip manufacturing facility. They look like good books, in other words.

Could 2026 be a turning point for artificial intelligence?

There was broader tension between Lewis and panelist Tom Lee, head of research at Fundstrat, which was discussed during the event. According to Lee, the same metrics that seem like “bad news” actually confirm a huge jump in economic efficiency. “Employment in technology has shrunk in the past three years since the introduction of ChatGPT,” Li noted, noting that for the first time, the unemployment rate among college graduates is now higher than the unemployment rate among non-college students of the same age.

While this contraction in the workforce is painful for workers, Lee said it is the textbook definition of technological success. “This is the productivity of the economy,” he told me. “This is how you measure productivity, which is that you produce more output with fewer people.” “This is proof that AI is productive.” The current swoon in the markets also applies, he added, pointing to a period of volatility in which software stocks fell “significantly.”

Lee attributes this repricing to a fundamental shift in how companies spend their money. Companies are “spending less on software,” creating a “marginal story” where “agent AI or AI products are starting to replace traditional software” — more evidence of how productive AI is. Lee predicted that 2026 will mark the era in which the market sees “the other side of the AI ​​rewards,” a shift that “creates winners and losers” rather than arbitrarily raising all boats.

Lewis said he agrees that the AI ​​boom reminds him of the dot-com bubble in some ways because of the dynamic of winners and losers. “There will be some things that you were really happy to buy that are still going up. There will be things that will fall.” Another big similarity, he said, is that people “confuse technology with corporate profits. Just because technology is transformative doesn’t mean people will make a lot of money from it, or that everyone will make a lot of money from it.”

Will artificial intelligence take your job?

For now, Lewis said he’s not sweating the competition. He admitted to testing artificial intelligence while writing for Going to infinityHe asks her to write a book about Sam Bankman Fried to see what she can produce. The results were not impressive. “All he knew was what was on the Internet… He didn’t go out and interview people. He didn’t see, smell, taste or all of that,” Lewis explained. He said he doesn’t see artificial intelligence taking over its specific function anytime soon. “Honestly, I don’t feel there is a threat from AI yet.”

Lewis pointed out that the hype caused by artificial intelligence is very unusual and disturbing. He noted that many AI CEOs alternate between two doomsday predictions. “People in GoogleThe people at OpenAI will say quite happily, at the same time, out of one side of their mouth they’ll say, you know,[AI]might kill us all, so we need to be really careful, we need to think it through, but no one seems to be doing anything about it…and on the other side of their mouth, they’ll say, in 18 months, it’ll be able to do everything a human does, but better.

The second prediction is worth taking seriously, Lewis said. “If in 18 months it can do everything a human being can do, but better, what will happen to this country?” Lewis pointed to the anger that helped elect President Donald Trump, and over affordability and the economy, as a real problem far from being solved. “We have literally been living with the politics of anger for a long time. The anger will go through the roof” if AI takes over that number of jobs in just a year and a half.

Lee offered a philosophical perspective, reiterating some of his recent research into the disorder and the strange tale of the “flash freeze,” as well as luck I mentioned previously In January. Lee told the Professor J Markets podcast in January that the third great labor shortage era in US economic history began in 2018 and will last until 2035, and demonstrated an invention “Fast-frozen foods in the 1920s In parallel with artificial intelligence.

Fundstrat research suggests that agriculture rose from 30% to 40% of the workforce before the flash freeze to 2% to 5% afterward, but enough jobs were created to account for this decline in employment. “So, 95% of the farmers have been replaced,” Lee told Lewis and Thomas. “It created time and innovation, meaning the economy boomed, even though an economist would have told you in 1930 that we were going to have another depression.”

He added that there was a less successful transition in the 1990s, “with China taking over manufacturing.” Lee noted that it “destroyed” entire states. “People call it the distributional consequences, but the planning for that was poor because they didn’t think about how to find new work for these people. So I think, as Michael said, it’s very important that we think about the distributional consequences of what’s happening.”

Lewis was fascinated by Lee’s research, which included revealing that an early version of Goldman Sachs had been a venture capitalist in the invention of flash freezing by Charles Bird’s Eye, who had studied as an ornithologist (and also an ornithologist). Taxidermist, fur trader, trapper, and fish lobbyist). He explained to me that Birdseye was studying birds when an Inuit tribe in Alaska served him the fish, and he was shocked at how fresh the fish tasted, because it had been frozen on ice. “His name is Charles Birds Eye, and he studied birds,” Lewis said, shaking his head.

Lee notes that he has been doing deep research on such topics since he began his career on the research team at Salomon Brothers, the same (now-defunct) Wall Street firm where Lewis began his career, as documented in Liar Poker. “I had no idea you were at Salomon Brothers,” Lewis said. “Salomon Brothers had the smartest people in the research department. They were the smartest people I ever met.”

He answered me: “Yes, I read your book, but I was not the master of the universe.”