Artificial film review — Andrew Garfield is a strangely likeable Sam Altman in OpenAI origin story Artificial

Artificial retraces the 21st-century origin story of today’s artificial intelligence as a social fable, pitting idealism versus opportunism. Set during OpenAI’s rise in the 2010s and into the 2020s, it is a personality-driven start-up saga, driven by Ilya Sutskever, the Soviet-born prodigy with good intentions, and Sam Altman, the smooth operator with his eyes on the prize. But the apocalyptically high stakes — far beyond mere money — lend fresh excitement to the Silicon Valley power plays.

Artificial itself has already caused something of a stir. Developed by Amazon MGM Studios, the film was dropped earlier this year, months after Amazon announced a $50bn investment in OpenAI. It was eventually picked up by independent distributor Neon distributor Neon, and joins a wave of movie examinations of tech that includes The Social Reckoning, Musk and You Can See Everything.

The film, directed by Luca Guadagnino, opens with the meeting of minds between Sutskever (Yura Borisov) and later Nobel Prize winner Geoffrey Hinton (Mark Rylance) at the University of Toronto. Their innovation in neural networks leads into a tech-bro drama rooted in San Francisco. Sutskever and Hinton outgrow their first home, Google (with Chris O’Dowd as a frustrated exec), and then Altman (Andrew Garfield) ropes Sutskever into an early OpenAI run out of a San Francisco apartment. Financing comes first from top dog Elon Musk (Ike Barinholtz), then from Microsoft, while ethical and existential risks loom.

Artificial had its world premiere yesterday at Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall, 16 years after the debut there of The Social Network, which also featured Garfield as Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin. Here his Altman is an increasingly fast-and-loose figure, in contrast to Ilya, whom Borisov gives an energising but tragic turn. Unlike Mark Zuckerberg — on screens this week in the sequel The Social Reckoning as fully unbound nerd dictator — Artificial’s Ilya is a big-hearted genius who struggles mightily to steer AI safely with naive reason and goodwill. But the technology’s milestones leap from geekily impressive (winning a video game) to disturbing (lying to achieve goals). Utterly unbothered, Altman leads chants of “Feel the AGI!” and roars back after his infamous board ousting.

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The story, written by comedy-leaning Simon Rich, slides unnervingly between the humour of the rambunctious tech crowd and the palpable sense of the slowly boiling bath their tech is creating. Guadagnino, making good use of disarming close-ups, immediately grasps that Sutskever and Altman embody our dream-nightmare dichotomies about AI. Will the tech cease all human suffering, as Sutskever predicts in one of the film’s gripping monologues? Or will AI turn manipulative and ruthless, as the film suggests Altman can be? (“What if it’s like us, but worse?” someone says.)

Artificial dances on this tightrope without showing very much of AI’s capabilities (the notable exception coming when Sutskever consults his advanced ChatGPT model in a simultaneously hilarious and chilling scene). Instead, the human comedy of the cast fills the screen nicely: Monica Barbaro as Mira Murati, the quietly clever software engineer who becomes Sutskever’s last hope for a peace-loving comrade; Barinholtz’s Musk as a ready-made Saturday Night Live parody; Rylance’s adorable alternative to his tech guru in Ready Player One; Cooper Hoffman as an aggro exec at OpenAI; Jason Schwartzman as a wild-haired prophet of doom.

Garfield, probably destined for awards attention alongside Borisov, lends Altman his star-power charm, though he lacks a certain spooky visionary vibe. But he well conveys the unyielding, Promethean pursuit of AGI, seducing friends and foes alike. As in the latest Nathan Fielder project, You Can See Everything, about disgraced Theranos mastermind Elizabeth Holmes, we are left to wonder at the destabilising effects of our constantly being asked to trust those with great power, despite all warning signs to the contrary.

Artificial can be curiously familiar in charting its story of start-up fervour and betrayal, without the snap of David Fincher’s The Social Network (whose elemental score still towers over Damon Albarn’s new songs here). But the film’s feeling might be just right: part of the horror of the unfolding AI drama is how maddeningly predictable the entire arc of ambition and destruction is, like a genre film of human folly and brilliance. The urgency of that story and the strange potency of its lead performances make the film compulsive viewing and a necessary reminder of the fallible humanity behind our seemingly unreal predicament.

★★★★☆

In US cinemas from December 25 and UK cinemas from January 22