Artificial puts the five days that broke OpenAI on screen this Christmas
Amazon MGM ordered the film, rushed it into production, spent a reported $40 million and showed it to test audiences who came away impressed. Amazon had by then committed $50 billion to OpenAI . Simon Rich built the script around the five days in November 2023 when OpenAI’s board removed Altman and then reinstated him, while Microsoft circled and the staff threatened to walk out as one.
In June, with the thing all but finished, Amazon put it back on the market and said another studio would serve it better. What they were passing on, according to people who sat through those screenings, is a film with very little warmth for Altman or for Elon Musk . Andrew Garfield ‘s Sam Altman walks past a wall of assault rifles in a blue-lit bunker and tells us the future is inevitable. Other voices crowd in around him. A machine has been built to solve the world’s problems. Pandora’s box is already open. Countries will fall, industries are going to collapse. Luca Guadagnino has not delivered a tech biopic with Artificial. He has delivered something closer to a ghost story about the men who built ChatGPT. Nobody at the studio drew the line between those facts. Nobody needed to. Netflix, A24 and Focus each passed before Neon bought it.