Luca Guadagnino has chosen one of the most toxic and cinematic episodes in recent tech history: the OpenAI chaos of November 2023. Artificial, starring Andrew Garfield as Sam Altman, follows the sudden firing and equally rapid return of OpenAI’s CEO, turning a boardroom crisis into a drama about power in the age of artificial intelligence.

A company changing the world, an internal war, a charismatic figure at the center and an industry pretending to talk about the future while fighting ferociously over the present: the The Social Network of the AI era.

Artificial: Andrew Garfield becomes Sam Altman

On November 17, 2023, OpenAI officially announced Sam Altman’s departure as CEO and from the board, appointing Mira Murati as interim CEO. In its statement, the board said it no longer had confidence in his ability to lead the company, accusing him of not being “consistently candid” in his communications with the board.

Five days later, the reversal arrived: Altman returned as CEO, with a new initial board chaired by Bret Taylor, alongside Larry Summers and Adam D’Angelo. In the meantime, almost the entire OpenAI staff, more than 700 employees, had threatened to leave the company if Altman was not reinstated.

The film is written by Simon Rich, a writer already associated with American comedy, and will also feature a score produced by Damon Albarn, a name that immediately moves the project beyond a simple biopic about a tech executive. The cast also includes Yura Borisov as Ilya Sutskever, Cooper Hoffman as Greg Brockman and Ike Barinholtz in a satirical version of Elon Musk.

For Luca Guadagnino, the real film is the war to control AI

The interesting element of Artificial is that Luca Guadagnino is not simply staging a corporate crisis. He is entering the precise point where Hollywood now looks at artificial intelligence: no longer as a futuristic gadget, but as a machine of power, reputation, money and fear.

The comparison with The Social Network works because that film was not really about Facebook as a website, but about the messy birth of an empire. Here the material is even more explosive: OpenAI was not selling a social network, but the very idea of a technology capable of reshaping work, information, creativity and control.

If the film really keeps the satirical tone suggested by early reports, Artificial could become the first major Hollywood film able to tell the story of AI without robots, spaceships or apocalypses, but through the typical sociopathy of Silicon Valley: extremely rich, extremely brilliant and frightened people locked in rooms where the command of the future is being decided.