Sam Altman's Kitchen is Dull and Wasteful

Your living space says a lot about who you are. Writing this at my dining room table and looking over at my kitchen, I hope it says that I'm messy but practical. A block of decent knives. A stainless steel Ikea utensil holder crammed to the brim with spoons, ladels, spatulas, whisks. A moka pot cooling at the edge of the stove, and a perpetually somewhat-full kettle sitting in the corner, ready at a moment's notice. There's probably more that you could glean: that I scraped a bunch of the finish off the moka pot accidentally (impractical, maybe a bit thoughtless), or that the toaster's still out instead of in a drawer despite not having made toast for days (lazy?). But that's neither here nor there.

Today on my Bluesky feed I saw an article by Bryce Elder at the Financial Times, snarking about lessons learned about Altman during a video he did with, incredibly, also the Financial Times. In it we learn that Altman has expensive, trendy (and Instagram-approved) olive oil selected for its delicate fragrance, which doesn't matter at all when he cooks with it (heat deodorises olive oil). He has an incredibly expensive coffee maker (the Breville Oracle Touch) that the internet hates, but perhaps not surprisingly, is recommended by ChatGPT when you ask it what a good coffee maker is.

And it goes on. There's a lot of ways to take the article: my favourite is that the kitchen seems to mirror generative AI, in that it's wasteful and inefficient. You could also take from it that Sam Altman lacks personality, showing no hint of anything in his Instagram and ChatGPT-curated space. My own kitchen isn't nearly as nice (although the kitchen itself is beautiful, the utensils and appliances are more utilitarian), but I think you could tell that I like coffee without being snobbish about it; peeking into the pantry, you might also ask if I really need about three years' worth of tea at any given time, and looking at my slow cookers and Instant Pot, you'd correctly guess that I like to make a lot of food at once with minimal fuss.

But I don't get anything remotely like that from Altman. All I get is a sneaking suspicion that he's a guy who has money and little else, who eats because he has to, drinks coffee out of habit, and is probably that insufferable sort of tech worker who's also into Soylent.

I don't expect our capitalist overlords to be fascinating, but it wouldn't hurt if they could be halfway interesting. All I've ever got from Altman is that he's smart but uncurious, someone born at the right time and place to be able to get into Stanford and then drop out of it to work on a startup (Loopt) which in the end didn't do much of anything except get him closer to Paul Graham (which is, I suppose, a rousing success for a certain type of person). Whatever happened to the massively rich who were patrons of the arts, funding orchestras and libraries? Sam Altman's the sort of guy whose Spotify is full of Nickelback and Avril Lavigne.