- OpenAI, the firm behind artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT, has experienced turmoil with the sudden firing of co-founder Sam Altman and his subsequent move to Microsoft.
- The majority of OpenAI's staff have signed a letter threatening to resign if Altman is not brought back, but the reasons for his dismissal are still unclear.
- The situation reflects a larger battle in Silicon Valley between those who believe AI poses an existential risk and those who see its potential for progress.
- Microsoft, as OpenAI's largest shareholder, has a deep relationship with the company and has now hired Altman and a group of OpenAI employees to lead a new AI research team.
- The disagreement between the "doomers" and "boomers" regarding AI regulation is also reflected in Microsoft's position, as they have called for regulation while also releasing AI products.
- The firing of Altman and the chaos within OpenAI leaves the company in a difficult position, with uncertainty about its future direction and the pace of technology releases.
- The incident will have repercussions in the field of AI and will lead to increased scrutiny of the governance of AI companies.

- The Babbage podcast will feature Fei-Fei Li, a computer scientist who discusses her research on building machines that can see and its connection to OpenAI's chat GPT.
- Canada plans to maintain its target of welcoming 485,000 new permanent residents in 2024 and 500,000 in 2025, but public opinion on immigration is shifting.
- Polls show that support for fewer immigrants in Canada has risen from 34% to 53% in just six months.
- The housing crisis and economic anxiety are contributing to the change in sentiment towards immigration.
- Politicians in Canada are not using anti-immigration sentiment for their own gain, but criticism is focused on the government's failure to properly manage immigration and prioritize skilled workers.
- The government is not reducing the number of immigrants but is focusing on better applying criteria to address the issues causing opposition to increased immigration.
- The new immigration minister emphasizes the importance of immigration for sustaining Canada's social programs and economy.
- Despite some unease, more than half of Canadians still believe immigration is a good thing.
- Propaganda in literature has been used by governments and ideological groups, with some authors willingly supporting the state's agenda and others having their works co-opted for propaganda purposes.

- Rudyard Kipling was recruited by British intelligence during WWI to write fiction that undermined nationalism in India.
- Kipling rewrote private letters from Indian soldiers fighting with the British to erase pro-Indian or revolutionary sentiment.
- These fictional letters were published in newspapers in America and Britain.
- Boris Pasternak's "Dr. Zhivago" was secretly published by the CIA in Russian and circulated behind the Iron Curtain to undermine Soviet censorship.
- John Steinbeck wrote "The Moon is Down" as a form of propaganda during WWII to inspire people in occupied countries to revolt against the Nazis.
- The book had a significant influence and was covertly circulated in Norway, Denmark, and France.
- Propaganda can have both positive and negative effects on literature, and it is important to look beyond the surface to understand its true meaning.

- OpenAI has faced turmoil with the firing of co-founder Sam Altman, leading to a threat of resignation from the majority of staff.
- The situation reflects a larger battle in Silicon Valley over the risks and potential of AI.
- Microsoft, OpenAI's largest shareholder, has hired Altman and a group of employees to lead a new AI research team.
- The disagreement over AI regulation is also reflected in Microsoft's position.
- The firing of Altman leaves OpenAI uncertain about its future direction.
- Canada plans to maintain its target of welcoming new permanent residents, but public opinion on immigration is shifting.
- Support for fewer immigrants in Canada has risen in recent months due to the housing crisis and economic anxiety.
- Politicians in Canada are criticized for the government's failure to properly manage immigration.
- Despite some unease, more than half of Canadians still believe immigration is a good thing.
- Propaganda has been used in literature by governments and ideological groups, with authors supporting or having their works co-opted for propaganda purposes.

Also on the daily podcast: Canada’s immigration worries and propaganda books

Hello and welcome to The Intelligence from The Economist.

Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world.

Canada has a reputation for being very welcoming when it comes to immigrants.

It has a low birth rate and it needs workers to support its retirees.

So why is sentiment around immigration now souring?

And the least insidious form of state propaganda is the stuff that you can just tell is propaganda.

When you can't, well that's when it's effective.

We run through a list of books that many don't realize were in fact written at the behest of governments.

Things move quickly in the tech world, but rarely this quick.

Open AI has had a tumultuous past few days.

It all began on Friday with the sudden sacking of Sam Altman, the co-founder and boss of the firm that created some of the most well-known artificial intelligence tools, including ChatGPT.

Then, yesterday, it was announced that Mr Altman and a group of employees from OpenAI would be joining Microsoft, the company's biggest shareholder.

In a revolt, the vast majority of OpenAI's 770 staff have now signed a letter threatening to resign if the board fails to bring back Mr Altman.

Although it's still unclear why the company's board lost confidence in him in the first place.

There are rumours that he was moving too quickly to expand OpenAI's commercial offerings without adequately considering the safety implications.

But Mr Altman has in fact publicly worried about the risks of unchecked AI.

I think if this technology goes wrong, it can go quite wrong.

We want to work with the government to prevent that from happening.

But we try to be very clear-eyed about what the downside case is and the work that we have to do to mitigate that.

And not just for open AI, but for the industry more broadly.

This move represents a larger fight that is happening in Silicon Valley.

Shailesh Chitnis is a global business correspondent.

On 1 side, you have what we call doomers.

This group believes that left unchecked, AI poses an existential risk to the world.

And on the other side, you have boomers who play down this threat and say that AI actually has the ability to turbocharge human progress and should actually be allowed to progress.

It's a fight between 2 camps, and Sam Altman managed to traddle both these.

Who is he and how did he become such an important figure in AI?

So ever since the release of ChatGPT a year ago, Sam Altman has been the human face of generative AI.

But if you look back, Sam Altman actually has a much longer history in Silicon Valley.

He was the head of Y Combinator, which is a hugely influential accelerator out of the Bay Area.

And he's a very well-connected investor in those circles.

But specifically with OpenAI, the company he co-founded with a lot of other entrepreneurs, including Elon Musk from Tesla.

And he's been 1 of the driving forces behind the popularity of generative AI that we see it.

Certainly he's not the only 1, and there's been a slew of developers, smart scientists, founders who've been working on it.

But if you were to ask kind of the common person, his would be the name that would be most associated with this revolution.

And now Microsoft have snatched him up pretty quickly.

So Microsoft has a deep relationship with OpenAI.

It has poured more than $10 billion into OpenAI since 2019.

But crucially, the company does not have any board seats.

And this is an artifact of the weird corporate structure that OpenAI has, which is essentially a non-profit entity that owns the for-profit entity.

Now, because of this, the company found out only a few minutes ahead reportedly that Sam Alton is being fired.

Then, they followed a weekend of pretty hectic negotiations where first, it seemed like Satya Nadella, who's the boss of Microsoft, was playing mediator to try and get Sam Altman back into the company.

But since those talks broke down, Microsoft reported that Sam Altman, as well as a lot of other employees from OpenAI, would be joining Microsoft to lead a new advanced AI research team.

And so from Microsoft's perspective, this is a win-win because they retain their relationship with OpenAI in terms of licensing their products.

And they have access to Altman as well as a slew of researchers and engineers that they would have liked to snap up anyway.

Okay, Shailesh, you said earlier that we've got the doomers and the boomers.

Who are these groups and where does Microsoft fit in?

So the Doomers are a group of people that believe that we should be very mindful at the pace at which AI is progressing.

The group believes that left unchecked, AI could pose an existential risk to humanity.

So, we need to be very careful in terms of how we proceed.

On the other side are what we'd called about boomers who think that these risks are overblown and AI should proceed as with any technology and we'll work on how we regulate it as we move ahead.

Microsoft seemed to kind of straddle both these things because of their relationship with OpenAI.

Microsoft was part of a lot of calls to regulate AI, whether it was through the U.S.

At the same time, they have also been at the forefront of releasing many different products using chat GPT, integrating OpenAI's slew of products into its quote unquote co-pilot core.

So essentially, I think Microsoft was on both sides of this debate.

But if Microsoft is investing billions of dollars into the space, that sounds to me like they'd fall on the boomer side of things, no?

That's true, but there's also a commercial angle that we need to think about here.

The doomers tend to be a lot more established players.

They've been at this a lot longer than some of the newer players.

And because of that, they have a turf to protect.

Now the boomers, they are typically your scrappy startups, or even if they are well-funded startups, they're still trying to catch up.

And because of this, there's also a difference in how they approach the technology.

So boomers tend to prefer open source software.

And doomers, because they are early innovators, their software tends to be more closed source or proprietary.

If you look at the early innovators, OpenAI, it had almost 100 million users in the first 2 months since Jadgpt was released.

It's also got more than $10 billion from Microsoft and reportedly its total investment is close to 13 billion with a valuation of almost 29 billion.

So if you think about it from that perspective, there's very good reason for the Doomers to ask for regulation that actually makes it harder for the new entrants to come into the space.

These regulations could be on the basis of safety, But what it would do is it would actually protect their investments and it would make it much harder for new companies to break it into this ground because they need to satisfy some more onerous regulations.

So Shailesh, Sam Altman really embodies this Boomer-Doomer conundrum.

I think that's a very good question and the short answer is we don't know.

We don't have any official reason from the board for his ouster.

There have been a lot of reports, there have been a lot of inferences that have come out, but the official reason for him leaving OpenAI or him being forced out of OpenAI is not very clear to us at this point.

And we've now got this open letter from hundreds of staff at OpenAI threatening to jump ship in protest.

So there's no doubt that OpenAI, the firm, is in chaos.

Greg Brockman, who is the chair of the board and 1 of the co-founders of OpenAI, he also quit in protest and is going along with Sam Altman to Microsoft.

And so there's no doubt that OpenAI faces a pretty tricky and tumultuous few months ahead.

1 investor called Sam Altman the only irreplaceable person in the company, which actually underscores the importance that he brought, which is not just as a public face, but even in terms of his interest in moving the product forward, pushing for a lot of product releases.

And so from that perspective, I think it's going to be interesting in terms of looking at the pace of technology releases that come out of OpenAI post-Sam Altman.

And then where does this leave AI more broadly?

OpenAI is hugely influential and what's happened over the weekend is going to have repercussions in the rest of the field.

But at the same time, I think the technology and the movement of the technology is going to go ahead without any interruption because I think now there are many more players in this field and they're going to be a lot more.

So what it will do is it will kind of shine a light on governance mechanism in these firms that have essentially grown up so quickly in the past few years and investors as well as governments will be looking a lot more closely at these companies because they wield a huge influence.

And so the governance of these companies is also going to be looked at a lot more closely.

Shailesh, thank you so much for joining us.

If you could listen to us talk about AI all day, we have more for you.

On tomorrow's episode of Babbage, our science and tech podcast, we hear from Fei-Fei Li.

She's a computer scientist who obsessed over how to build a machine that can see its world.

She explains how her research laid the critical groundwork for the technology behind OpenAI's chat GPT.

And she and our host Alok discuss what to do about the societal challenges in the new age of AI.

To listen, you'll need to be a subscriber to Economist Podcast Plus or to our print and digital editions.

You can find out more by following the link in the show notes.

Known for its mountains, prairies and vast wilderness.

In big part because it is among the least densely populated countries in the world.

Paying for infrastructure and government services across such an enormous country becomes a problem at a certain point, when there aren't enough workers paying taxes.

To that end, Canada has stepped on the gas when it comes to immigration, inviting hundreds of thousands of newcomers every year.

I'm pleased to share that Canada intends to maintain its target of welcoming 485,000 new permanent residents in 2024 and 500,000 in 2025.

Immigration is a lynchpin for the Great White North, supporting population and economic growth.

Canada's population growth last year was at the highest rate since 1957, ranking it among the fastest growing countries in the world.

But increasingly, polling shows that Canadians are losing faith in the idea that this is a net positive for the country.

There has been for a long, long time, a consensus that immigration is a very good thing for Canada.

It is beginning to look like that consensus is fraying.

Rob Russo writes about Canada for The Economist.

It's probably due to some economic hardship that's common across G7, G20 countries.

Anxiety about interest rates, anxiety about affordability, primarily housing affordability.

Now that doesn't mean that it's coming undone entirely.

It does mean, however, that there is increased support for limiting immigration, if not stopping immigration altogether, which is something that hasn't been seen in Canada in decades.

There's a Nick Nanos poll that shows from March to September, support for the sentiment of having fewer immigrants in Canada rose from 34 to 53% in just 6 months.

That's over half of those polled say that they want fewer immigrants in Canada.

And Veronix, led by a fellow named Keith Newman, who's been tracking a sentiment towards immigration for 30 years, and it's a larger sample, doesn't quite have it at that half point, but it does have dropping support for more immigration.

And he says it's worrisome and it's something that the government needs to pay attention to.

Now we've talked a lot on the show before about Europeans growing increasingly hostile to migration, But what do you attribute this shift to in Canada, especially in such a short period of time?

Now, we've got to give people a sense of how much immigration is happening in Canada.

Next year, it's going to be close to a half a million people who are coming in legitimately as permanent residents.

That doesn't include students who are about 700,000 and people who are here as temporary residents.

All of that puts Canada as the number 1 G7 country when it comes to immigration on a per capita basis.

Think of about 1 in 4 people being foreign-born in Canada as opposed to 14% in the UK or in the United States.

And we've got a housing crisis here in Canada.

Housing affordability is off the charts, particularly again compared to our G20, our G7 colleagues and allies.

And so when people are anxious, what happens?

They blame the newcomers who are coming in.

The government is trying to draw a straight line, though, between those newcomers and increased housing.

I think the trouble that the government is having making this argument is that they haven't been bringing in enough of those skilled workers and they've been bringing in a lot of lower skilled workers that business loves because they don't have to pay them as much but it doesn't really help us with our productivity problem here in Canada.

We're lagging behind our allies in productivity nor does it help us with the housing problem that's causing that anxiety in the first place.

And you mentioned in comparison to other countries, but in these other countries, we're seeing politicians wield anti-immigration sentiment for their own gain.

We're not and that's something that Canadians I think should be justly proud of.

We have a country where 1 in 4 is foreign born and a lot of people like me are second generation immigrants, fresh memories of immigrant parents.

So if you were to try to crack down on immigration in any kind of harsh way, if we were to see the kind of anti-immigrant rhetoric that you see in places in Europe, that would be anathema to politicians.

It's noteworthy that every political party that is represented in Parliament is led by somebody who in effect supports more robust immigration figures.

What they are criticizing the government on is in their failure to abide by what is a point system in Canada where we attribute points to immigrants based on their skills and the higher number of points they have, the more likely they are to get in.

That's opposition leaders like Conservative leader Pierre Poitieff.

Justin Trudeau has messed it up so badly that many immigrants are now saying they were better off in their country of origin.

There's actually an internet phenomenon now where immigrants are warning potential newcomers of how unaffordable and dangerous life is in Canada after 8 years of Justin Trudeau.

About 25% of visitors to food banks are now new Canadians who are having trouble making ends meet.

And that is something that didn't happen before.

But you've got to be careful to note that in that attack by Mr.

Poirier, the conservative leader, he's not saying to reduce the number of immigrants here.

Rob, is this shift in public opinion about immigration influencing government policy at all?

There were some people who were expecting the government to actually reduce the numbers of people who are coming in over the next few years.

What they're saying is they're going to do a better job applying criteria so that more skilled workers get in to deal with some of the problems that are causing this uptick against increased immigration.

The new immigration minister, Mark Miller, also raises a very important point.

Almost all the population growth in Canada is due to immigration.

We have a very low birth rate, like a lot of other Western countries, and he's saying we will not be able to sustain Canada's generous social programs unless we bring in more people to work.

Our worker to retiree ratio has dropped from 7 to 1 since I was born 50 years ago to nearly 3 to 1 now.

If we don't welcome more newcomers, that number will approach 2 to 1 in decades ahead and that will put our infrastructure and key programs like our health care and our education at risk.

Now, despite some increased unease with immigration in Canada, it does remain a popular policy, with more than half of Canadians believing that immigration is a good thing.

The test for Canada will be to get it right in terms of bringing in those who can help with its economy, with its housing problems, and I would be very, very surprised if any political leader who has any chance of forming a government ever came out against immigration in Canada.

Orya, thank you so much for coming on the show.

All art is propaganda, but not all propaganda is art, wrote George Orwell in 1940.

Not many would argue with the second part of that claim.

Just think of the dreadful ramblings of Mein Kampf.

But the first seems only true if you're using a very broad definition of propaganda.

Caitlin Talbot is a social media editor at The Economist.

Great works of art rarely set out to serve the purposes of a government.

But some authors do offer their pens to the state.

Governments and ideological groups have been known to commission fiction that disguises political spin.

Others write books that are then co-opted and used as propaganda.

During the Cold War, Western intelligence agencies subsidized very good authors.

The CIA set up literary magazines in France, Japan, and Africa.

British intelligence asked authors to write fiction that would buttress empire.

A surprising number of books, some by very good authors, are works of propaganda in 1 way or another.

Rudyard Kipling's role as a propagandist for the British Empire is often forgotten, but the story behind The Eyes of Asia is particularly devious.

During the First World War, British intelligence recruited the author to write fiction that would undermine nationalism in India.

Kipling was sent the private letters of Indian soldiers fighting with the British in France and he was asked to rewrite them to erase any pro-Indian or revolutionary sentiment.

These were published in newspapers in America and Britain, not under Kipling's name, but as if they were written from real soldiers on the front and not fiction, which is what they really were.

But then Kipling packaged them together in 1917 as the Eyes of Asia as fiction.

Writing to British Intelligence, he said that he'd somewhat amplified the spirit that he thought he saw behind the letters.

In fact, he sanitized them and inserted these admiring descriptions of Britain.

British intelligence, of course they approved.

Dr Zhivago is an interesting case because Boris Pasternak didn't write it as propaganda.

During the Cold War, the CIA sought to undermine censorship within the Soviet Union.

And 1 way that they did this was by covertly circulating books that the Soviet Union had banned.

They circulated Tolstoy and Nabokov, but they had 1 author they particularly loved, and that was Boris Pasternak.

Zhivago, and they actually wrote about it in a memo in 1958.

Zhivago has great propaganda value for its thought-provoking nature and circumstances of its publication.

The circumstances that they're talking about is the fact that this book was suppressed by Soviet publishing houses and magazines.

They told Boris Pasternak that it was vicious and it didn't accept socialism and that it had too much religious fervor.

The CIA, upon hearing about this, spied a bit of an opportunity.

To make Soviet citizens wonder what is wrong with their government, when a fine literary work by the man acknowledged to be the greatest living Russian writer is not even available in his own country.

The CIA secretly published the book in Russian and circulated it behind the Iron Curtain.

The effort they hoped would draw enough attention to the book that Boris Pasternak might win the Nobel Prize.

Prostenak of the Nobel Prize for Literature, which subsequently he decided to refuse.

Sadly, he did not live long enough to see Dr.

Zhivago become a blockbuster film in 1965.

This is Dr Zhivago, winner of 6 Academy Awards.

So rather than be approached or co-opted, John Steinbeck took matters into his own hands.

During the Second World War, 2 days after France signed an armistice with the Nazis, he wrote to President Franklin Roosevelt saying that the US should create immediate, controlled, considered methods of propaganda.

He felt that literature could be 1 way to inspire people in occupied countries in Europe to revolt or sabotage the Nazis in some way, and he felt so strongly about this in fact that he wrote The Moon is Down for exactly that reason.

The Moon is Down is set in an unnamed European country that has been invaded by a fascist power.

Steinbeck himself suggested that this fictional land had something like Norway's severity, Denmark's cunning and France's reason.

The occupiers, led by a character named Colonel Lancer, struggle to subdue an uprising of local people.

The mystery that has disturbed rulers all over the world, how the people know.

It disturbs the invaders now, how news runs through censorships, how the truth of things fights free of control.

Members of the resistance in Norway, Denmark and France translated this novel and covertly circulated it within their countries.

And the book did have a lot of influence, so much so that Norway's king, after the war, gave Steinbeck the country's Freedom Cross.

So propaganda has left its covert mark on many great novels.

These books show its power to do good as well as bad, but I think they show us that sometimes we need to look beyond the cover of a book, the presentation of a book, or even the words of a book to know its real meaning.

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Sam Altman’s sudden sacking reveals a deep divide in Silicon Valley (1)