I can't be the only one that entered this thinking that God finally put the controversy to this GoF pattern to rest.

I was hoping God smote the Philistines for trying to use distributed, global, mutable state. :(

This article is a strawman arguing against a purist extreme and how it cannot work while denying real oligopolies already exist: Amazon, Walmart, Google, Apple, Microsoft, Samsung, and Alibaba. AI/ML isn't a panacea, but it will gradually be applied to automate, commodify, and replace human labor pervasively seemingly with minimal limitations. The future will be a further expansion of power law-like distribution of wealth to a few trillionaires while the middle- and lower-classes remain taxed, indebted, and impoverished.

There is a scifi trope where a arch villain has a world universe ending plan of collapsing or releasing some unimaginable power and by being in nominal control or in the center of the explosion they will acquire that power.

Altman seems to be the classic human in the middle of a storm and thinks he'll be in control.

Because he is CEO of a corporation.

That's fiction though. Reality is different, more ambiguous, and concealing profits on value through diffuse taxes extracted from the many (and all of the sacrifices they make to pay for them) for the benefit of a few.

He's in an influential leadership spot with the potential to change the course of human history for the better in some ways and maybe for the worse for others, but the nature of each will vary depending on sometimes unknowable side-effects of decisions made in the course of the execution of this venture. Consider the predicament of early nuclear physicists and nuclear engineers around the time of the Manhattan Project.