‘Artificial’ Is a Hugely Entertaining Movie About Despair for the Future

When Ilia first meets Altman, there’s not even the faintest clang of an alarm bell. At that point, Altman, as portrayed by Garfield, is just a skinny, eccentric and possibly vaguely charming guy who’d just happened to make a pile of dough off a tech startup he’d founded, which he later parlayed into various lucrative investments. With Musk and others, he’d already started OpenAI, a nonprofit at the time, with the intent of keeping the development of AI technology in the hands of the people. It’s 2015, and he invites Ilya to a private event in Menlo Park called, somewhat ominously, A Dinner for the Future. The dinner is really just a noisy roundtable of badly dressed tech whizzes drinking shots and shoveling expensive food into their gobs. But somehow, in the midst of all this frat-boy revelry, Ilya is able to outline his vision for the future, one in which AI will have solved numerous human problems, including eradicating not only cancer but also loneliness and unhappiness. By now we can see that Altman, the man presiding over the table, is a wily, evil elf. Somehow, though, Ilya trusts him and leaves Hinton and Google for OpenAI, and the chain of sterling intentions that he’s taken such care in forging begins to tarnish.