A detailed account of Sam Altmans rise from a curious child in St. Louis to the co-founder of OpenAI, exploring his ambitious journey in Silicon Valley, his leadership struggles and his unyielding belief in AIs potential. Illustrations.
A detailed account of Sam Altman's rise from a curious child in St. Louis to the co-founder of OpenAI, exploring his ambitious journey in Silicon Valley, his leadership struggles, and his unyielding belief in AI's potential. Illustrations.
On November 30, 2022, OpenAI released ChatGPT, a chatbot that captivated the world with its uncanny ability to hold humanlike conversations. Not even a year later, on November 17, 2023, Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, was summarily fired on a video call by the companys board. The firing made headlines around the globe: OpenAI is the leader in the race to build AGIartificial general intelligence, or AI that can think like a human beingand Altman is the most prominent figure in the field. Yet it was mere days before Altman was back running the company he had co-founded, with most of the directors who voted to fire him themselves removed from the board.The OptimistWall Street JournalHagey conducted more than 250 interviews, with Altmans family, friends, teachers, mentors, co-founders, colleagues, investors, and portfolio companies, in addition to spending hours with Altman himself. The person who emerges in her portrait is a brilliant dealmaker with a love of risk, who believes in technological progress with an almost religious convictionyet who sometimes moves too fast for the people around him. With both the promise and peril of AI increasing by the day, Hagey delivers a nuanced, balanced, revelatory account of the individual who is leading us into what he himself has called the intelligence age.Altman is a figure out of Isaac Asimov or Neal Stephenson. Or he is the author himself: if it feels as though we have all collectively stepped into a science fiction short story, it is Altman who is writing it.
