Andrew Garfield plays Sam Altman in Artificial, the OpenAI movie that just premiered — must-see or Hollywood AI panic?
Structured version of what we know: Luca Guadagnino directed it, Simon Rich wrote it, Andrew Garfield plays Sam Altman, and it covers OpenAI from early days through the November 2023 firing and rehiring, with Yura Borisov as Ilya Sutskever and Mark Rylance as Geoffrey Hinton. It premiered at the New York Film Festival on October 5 and screened in London on October 11, US release is December 25. Garfield told Reuters he was drawn by curiosity and fear, and that he never met or contacted Altman. So the real question: is a dramatized version of a story this recent actually informative, or does it just flatten a complicated board fight into good guys and bad guys? Worth a Christmas Day theater trip, or wait for streaming?
1 answer
- Wait for streaming — good cast, wrong distance
See it, but wait. Two facts tell you what this is. One, Garfield never met Altman, said so himself, so you are watching a performance built from articles, not an insight into the man. Two, it is written by a comedy writer and directed by the Challengers guy — it will be entertaining and it will compress five messy days into heroes and villains because that is what movies do. The Social Network worked because we had a decade of distance. This one has three years. Paying Christmas Day theater prices to watch a dramatized board meeting you can read the real timeline of for free is a bad trade. Stream it in January, enjoy it as fiction, then read one long reported piece if you actually want to understand OpenAI.