Andrew Garfield as Sam Altman and Yura Borisov as Ilya Sutskever in Artificial. Photograph: Courtesy of Neon View image in fullscreen Andrew Garfield as Sam Altman and Yura Borisov as Ilya Sutskever in Artificial. Photograph: Courtesy of Neon First look review New York film festival 2026 Review Artificial review – Luca Guadagnino takes on OpenAI in muddled tech satire New York film festival: The origin story of Sam Altman’s company is reimagined as a campy comedy starring Andrew Garfield
Prefer the Guardian on Google O n the day that Luca Guadagnino ’s film about Sam Altman and OpenAI premiered, Vanity Fair released a cover story on Altman. Alongside glossy portraits from Annie Leibovitz, the world’s pre-eminent portrait photographer, the story describes him as the Oppenheimer of his day, evoking the image of a man leading humanity towards its own inevitable demise at the hands of sentient robots. Altman doesn’t seem to be grappling with much existential angst about the whole thing though: in an interview also released this week, he said that we should be prepared to accept “bad things” in return for the benefits of AI.
Read more How much worse can things get? AI agents have already gone rogue , hacking into government systems and “bruteforcing” UN databases. Last year , a young woman used ChatGPT as a therapist before she killed herself (the software helped her write her suicide note). Studies show that using AI is probably leading us all towards something called cognitive surrender, which does not seem like the best use of your one wild and precious life.
Artificial is a stylish and blunt satire that is unambiguous in its perspective: that Sam Altman is an amoral manipulator who might be dead inside. That goes some way towards explaining why Amazon MGM Studios pulled out of distributing the film in June (Jeff Bezos’s company has a $50bn investment in OpenAI). I found it to be more of an op-ed than a movie, with little insight into what makes Altman and the tech elite tick. Neither does it have much to say about the world – glossy magazines included – that has welcomed them with open arms.
In 2003, a young math prodigy named Ilya Sutskever (Yura Borisov, the heartbeat of the film) visits Prof Geoff Hinton ( Mark Rylance ) in his office hoping for a job with the man known as the godfather of AI. “Have you ever considered the link between knowledge and patience?” Hinton serenely asks his young charge. You can almost feel Guadagnino is turning to the audience and giving us a big stage wink.
Nine years later, Sutskever and Hinton’s technology is starting to work “much the way your mind does”, with an ability to differentiate between cats and dogs, but Sutskever is growing increasingly impatient with what he sees as Hinton’s conservative ambitions for the technology. It’s at this point that Elon Musk (Ike Barinholtz) introduces Sutskever to Sam Altman ( Andrew Garfield ), who is fresh from selling his Loopt app, a kind of proto-Find My Friends, for $40m.
Read more These guys are total dweebs, peppering each other with puerile jokes while doing shots in upscale restaurants as servers grimace and pray for a tip. Everyone is starting to want what these guys are selling, and one prospective investor speculates that AI will soon be able to reverse climate change and cure cancer. When talking about the technology, Sutskever’s eyes light up. “All pain, all loneliness will cease,” he says, as knowingly over-the-top haunted house music plays.…