In the north end of San Francisco stands a house on a hill. The property is walled off from the street by vine-draped concrete, and its amenities include a wellness center and a James Bond-style garage with a car turntable. It’s the place where tech’s biggest power players gather to catch a glimpse of the future. And this damp February night was no different.
Twenty crypto enthusiasts poured into the great room of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s home. Altman was presenting an update from Worldcoin, his embattled identity-verification startup. The company hopes to create a registry of everyone in the world by scanning their eyeballs with a silver, melon-size orb. Altman imagines that billions will eventually use these unique digital identities to collect universal basic income.
On a table, one of Worldcoin’s chrome devices had been taken apart for display, its mechanical guts splayed out alongside the hors d’oeuvres. Investors and friends gazed into another orb’s telephoto lens. Click. They were in the system.
When Worldcoin came out of stealth two years ago, critics tore it apart as a dystopian nightmare. “The human body is not a ticket-punch,” the whistleblower Edward Snowden tweeted. That evening, as the company got investors and friends up to speed on an impending launch, Altman was admittedly feeling uncertain. But, “you do at some point need to start having contact with reality,” he told Insider.
What reality is for Altman, though, is a fantasy (or nightmare) for others. In the past few years, the 38-year-old has become the frontrunner in the race to create an all-knowing artificial intelligence. When OpenAI launched as a research nonprofit in 2015 with Altman and Elon Musk among its founders, it sought “to advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return.” But to save us from AI, they first had to build it.
Altman, who had previously been the president of Y Combinator, a program that funds new startups, seemed a particularly trustworthy guardian. He’s plunged his personal wealth into companies working on unlimited clean energy and therapies meant to delay the worst effects of aging. In March, when the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank left many startups worried about meeting payroll, Altman loaned cash to some that needed it. “In a world of people who are very cutthroat and transactional and mercenary, he is one of the true missionaries,” said Rewind AI’s chief executive, Dan Siroker, who raised money from Altman. If Musk is the edgelord of Silicon Valley, Altman is the idealist.
In the past few years, Altman’s reach and power have only increased. He’s on the board of seven companies, including a psychedelic-drug startup and a pair of nuclear power labs. The success of OpenAI’s chatbot, ChatGPT, has triggered a media blitz, with Altman being named one of Time’s 100 Most Influential People.
Yet some have begun to cast a wary eye on the tech visionary. In 2019, OpenAI created a separate “capped-profit” entity, arguing that it needed to attract capital to further its mission. The company started selling its learning models to other businesses, a move Musk now calls a betrayal of its founding principles. (Musk resigned in 2018 and just announced he’s starting his own rival company.) People have criticized OpenAI for its refusal to share its training data with the research community, arguing that an outside audit would ensure its models work as expected and without bias. Others, including numerous employees who’ve defected, wonder whether rushing its technology to market to make a profit is ethical given the potential for gross misuse. Even Altman acknowledges there’s a huge possibility of disaster. “I think it’d be crazy not to be a little bit afraid, and I empathize with people who are a lot afraid,” he told the podcaster Lex Fridman.
But in a recent video call with Insider, Altman seemed coolheaded, even as the world whipped itself into a frenzy debating whether OpenAI would usher in the next industrial revolution or the apocalypse. “I think we can have a much, much better world,” said Altman, wearing a black T-shirt, his hair tousled. “I think there’s a few things that need to happen for it. And I like feeling useful.” Some of his critics see his unflappable confidence as hubris. When Kara Swisher compared Altman to Icarus in a recent interview, Altman confessed that he was indeed “messing around with something we don’t fully understand.” Still, he is resolute that fear should not hinder human progress.
“It’s Sam’s world,” said Ric Burton, a prominent tech developer, “and we’re all living in it.”
Which prompts the question: Is it a world we want?
Altman is the Kevin Bacon of Silicon Valley. He’s played chess with the billionaire Peter Thiel, officiated the St. Barts wedding of the investor Keith Rabois, swapped amateur piloting tips with the Stripe cofounder John Collison, and dated Lachy Groom, a prominent solo venture capitalist who continues to go in on nine-figure deals with Altman.
In 2017, when Rahul Vohra, the founder and chief executive of the buzzy email app Superhuman, learned Google planned to turn off a service that would have caused his app to go dark, Vohra panicked, emailing his investors to ask what could be done. Altman shot back that he happened to be at a party with Google CEO Sundar Pichai: “i’ll see what i can do.” The next day, a Google executive reached out to fix the situation, with apologies.
It’s no surprise that Altman’s living room has become a veritable petri dish for new technologies and companies. He’s constantly hosting, “trying to pull smart people together,” according to the Worldcoin cofounder Max Novendstern. On any given weekend, Altman is flying groups of friends and colleagues to Napa and Tulum or having pizza dinners at his San Francisco home, where conversational topics range from cancer research to nuclear war (pre-pandemic he hosted big holiday parties in Embarcadero warehouses). Altman says even OpenAI was born out of a series of dinners.
“He’s kind of like this impresario-like archetype,” said Novendstern, who has since left Worldcoin.
All the networking seems to have paid off. Altman, who according to PitchBook, has made more than 400 investments in nine years, regularly partakes in nature walks or weekend calls with the founders he’s anointed. “There’s a difference,” Altman said, “between being the person in the arena sweating every detail versus the person that, you know, you take a couple of calls a week and you try to help as much as you can.”
Altman has long had a soft spot for implausible projects. In 2016, he put out a call for founders willing to take on challenges “where there is doubt that the technology can be built at all.” He’s backed companies developing everything from the world’s fastest commercial airliner to brain implants. Altman’s costliest side quest yet is nuclear-fusion energy. The science has eluded researchers for decades, and so he’s channeled $375 million into the fusion company Helion to try to bring it to market sooner. “Sam’s number one question is, ‘How can we do this faster?'” David Kirtley, a cofounder and chief executive, said.
In 2019, Jeeshan Chowdhury was a doctor looking to create a company that would administer psychedelics in rehab centers to help treat addiction. Knowing that few investors would come within a hundred yards of a project like that, he nearly abandoned the idea. Then, he talked to Altman.
“He was like, you should start a company, and I’m like, that’s great, Sam, but these are Schedule 1 drugs, and I’m a brown immigrant in America,” Chowdhury said. Altman promised to write him a check, and Chowdhury eventually took the leap, founding the firm, Journey Colab, which enters clinical trials later this year.
Worldcoin itself combines three audacious feats into a single venture: distributing basic income, popularizing a digital currency, and logging billions of eyeball scans in a database. In 2019, Altman pitched the idea to Alex Blania, then a 25-year-old physics researcher at Caltech, over cappuccinos as his house. The plan was still only a rough sketch, Blania told Insider, but that didn’t seem to matter to his host. “He makes everything seem so easy,” Blania said. “You would talk about the impossible, and afterwards you’re like, well, what if we just do that? Let’s just do it. Why not?” He dropped out to join Worldcoin as a cofounder and took over as chief executive in 2021.
The platonic ideal of an Altman project — what Novendstern called a “charismatic idea” — has a few key classifications, according to Novendstern: “It has profound moral implications; it would be on the short list of the most important things humanity achieved at scale. It’s weird — you know, something that sounds a little sci-fi, almost like a practical joke. Thirdly, it’s very simple. Like you could write it on a fortune cookie. And you know, finally that, if it works, it’s a trillion-dollar outcome.”
It’s Sam’s world, and we’re all living in it.Ric Burton
Zooming out, Altman has created a harmonious ecosystem; when one entity creates a problem, he introduces another one to solve it. When he recognized that automation would leave millions without jobs, Altman started a nonprofit arm at Y Combinator to research universal basic income. When he saw that distribution of those funds would run into problems with scammers trying to double-dip, he invented an orb that could identify people. Smart machines obviously require massive amounts of computing power and electricity. So Altman funded a company seeking to provide virtually unlimited clean, cheap energy. As for the threat that superintelligence will surpass human capabilities? Altman has supported human-enhancement startups that promise to help mere mortals stay in the game. For skeptics, it starts to look as if he’s betting the future of humanity on a fragile system of interdependent moonshots.
Altman insists this web is more of a coincidence than a master plan. “I mean, I hate to dissuade you ’cause it sounds so compelling, but in the spirit of accuracy, I have to try to dissuade you,” he told Insider. “My philosophy as an investor has always been, like, these are things that I think are going to be important to the world and also things that are just interesting to me personally. And that’s what I want to support.”
Though those who know Altman say he doesn’t bet on just anything. The venture capitalist Vinod Khosla likened him to a learning model that takes in large amounts of data to make decisions.
“It’s one thing to fantasize,” said Masha Bucher, a venture capitalist who’s backed Worldcoin, “and it’s another thing to know that something is going to happen.”
As a teenager, Altman dreamed of working at Google and so he went to Stanford, like its founders.
One night, his classmate Blake Ross, the wunderkind cocreator of the Firefox web browser, knocked on Altman’s door to see how he was doing with their computer-science assignment. The software program was giving Altman an error message that confused him. “Thirty minutes later, drop by Sam’s room again, it’s a crime scene,” Ross wrote in an email to Insider. “He’s dismembered the compiler itself. Kid’s knee-deep in a swamp of low-level code — like rewiring your espresso machine because the leaf on your latte isn’t arboreally sound.” Altman had found a bug in the assignment.
He was brilliant, but it was his “incredible curiosity” that impressed people like Sebastian Thrun, the founder of Google’s moonshot factory who knew Altman as an undergraduate researcher at Stanford’s AI lab. “He always wanted to understand everything at a very deep level,” Thrun told Insider in an email.
After his sophomore year, Altman dropped out to work on an app called Loopt. At about that time, Paul Graham announced he was starting Y Combinator. Altman applied and got in.
Those close to him say he found his Jedi master in Graham. They were both the rare programmers who could navigate the entire tech stack, leaping from nuclear energy to quantum computing and back again. “There’s usually earthquakes when they talk,” said Ron Conway, an angel investor some call the godfather of Silicon Valley, who has known the pair for decades.
Loopt moved into an office down the hall from a fledgling startup called YouTube. “Yeah, I don’t think that’s going to work,” Altman told Rick Pernikoff, a childhood friend who was his Loopt cofounder. “That’s the one time he’s ever been wrong,” Pernikoff told Insider with a laugh.
In the end, it was Loopt that failed to live up to expectations. It sold to an online bank for $43 million, a pittance by some standards because it only doubled what investors had put in. Even as Loopt fizzled, Altman’s profile soared. In 2014, Graham picked Altman, then 28, to take over the accelerator. “To me, it was the most obvious thing of all time,” said Aaron Levie, the cofounder and chief executive of Box, a $3.9 billion cloud-software vendor. Altman, he said, was “almost like the moral authority of the entrepreneurial zeitgeist.”
Altman led a period of hypergrowth for Y Combinator, which went from investing in a dozen startups in each batch to hundreds. His personal ambitions widened too. He led the accelerator to raise a venture fund, taught a class at Stanford, and spun up a research lab to study, among other things, the practical and moral aspects of universal basic income, kicking in $10 million of his own money.
In 2015, that research lab bore a nonprofit: OpenAI.
In Altman’s empire of innovation, OpenAI is the crown jewel. It’s the one company that enables all others with its ability to help people work smarter and faster.
The company’s flagship products are large language models, which are, in simplest terms, systems that can learn from processing huge amounts of data and respond to basic prompts. Its latest model, GPT-4, which people can interact with via a chatbot, can “see” image inputs, reason with uncanny accuracy, and ace most professional exams. The ultimate goal of the company, according to Altman, is to create artificial general intelligence, an amorphous term the company defines as “AI systems that are generally smarter than humans.”
“The good case is just so unbelievably good that you sound like a really crazy person to start talking about it,” Altman told an audience at a StrictlyVC event in January. “And the bad case — and I think this is really important to say — is lights out for all of us.”
For a CEO, Altman is unusually frank about the risks of his pursuits. The development of machines that can get smarter on their own, he once wrote, presents “probably the greatest threat to the continued existence of humanity.” To this day, he warns that AI poses a massive threat through “accidental misuse.” There is a surrealness to his candor — like if an oil executive had been first to spell out the dangers of climate change.
Business partners said this kind of radical transparency is fundamental to how Altman works. “This is Sam’s intellectual honesty,” said Khosla, whose namesake venture firm was OpenAI’s first institutional backer. “And so it makes it much easier to trust the process.”
From the start, OpenAI’s versatile approach to AI was a major departure from other companies’ previous efforts, which created narrow algorithms to be used for specific tasks. At times, even OpenAI’s researchers appeared alarmed by their progress. In 2019, the company decided to release a limited model of GPT-2, citing concerns that a larger language model could be used “to generate deceptive, biased, or abusive language.” In 2022, they reversed course, allowing anyone with a login to access the company’s GPT-3.5-enabled chatbot, ChatGPT, which reached 100 million monthly active users in January.
Today, Altman argues that rolling out the product as it develops is a crucial part of understanding and shaping its capabilities. “There is a limit to what we can learn in a lab,” he said. Tim O’Reilly, a tech industry analyst who knows Altman, says the CEO has “a strong streak of, what we used to say, ‘fail forward fast’ — you know, get stuff out there and let the market figure it out.”
The argument for opening up these systems, proponents say, is that it avoids concentrating the power they will wield. If you believe we’re on the cusp of the next industrial revolution, then giving access to a wider circle ensures they can share in its benefits, Jim Fan, an Nvidia research scientist who once interned at OpenAI, told Insider. That’s not to say it’s free. With the launch of GPT-3, OpenAI released its first commercial offering: a tool that lets developers bake the model into their own products. There are apps for wordsmithing emails, replying to customers, and surfing the web, all using OpenAI’s models.
But many have wondered whether OpenAI’s headfirst approach is appropriate for products with such profound implications. “People tend to underestimate just how historically disruptive and wild things could get,” said Holden Karnofsky, the chief executive of Open Philanthropy, a foundation that funded OpenAI from 2017 to 2020. Karnofsky, who sat on OpenAI’s board during that period, explained that such drastic change “could be dangerous to all of humanity.”
Even those who believe the apocalyptic stakes are overstated point to short-term risks already starting to play out. One former OpenAI employee, who spoke with Insider under the condition of anonymity to avoid professional repercussions, said they worried that the company wasn’t making it sufficiently clear to ChatGPT users that by interacting with the consumer product, they’re effectively giving the model free training. “You’re helping the model replace you at your job,” the former employee said. “You’re essentially feeding the beast.” On Tuesday, OpenAI posted on its blog that it’d allow users to make their chat history private.
Meanwhile, the Center for Humane Technology warns us of audio and video deep fakes; the discovery of novel toxins, cyberweapons; synthetic relationships; and a so-called trust collapse resulting from the proliferation of misinformation. Deploying these systems before the public is ready, they wrote in a recent memo, represents an “acute and direct threat to the United States and other democracies.”
In March, over a thousand executives, academics, and AI experts signed an open letter calling for a temporary moratorium on the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4, citing both short-term and long-term hazards.
“If I believed that you could slow things down, that might actually be a good idea,” said Anders Sandberg, a senior research fellow at Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute, which largely concerns itself with AI risk. “But people will not slow down. The box is kind of open.”
Altman acknowledges the downsides. “I have no doubt there are going to be other people that develop these technologies and use them in ways that I really don’t like,” he said, adding: “I do worry, of course. I mean, I worry about it a lot.”
I don’t want a front-row seat to watch the world implode.A former OpenAI employee
But some say he’s failed to create an environment in which employees feel safe enough to voice their concerns about their product’s dangers.
The former OpenAI employee said that when anyone would speak up internally, the prevailing mentality was: “If we listened to you, we’d never get product out.” Eliezer Yudkowsky, the AI world’s chief doomsayer, echoed these claims on a recent podcast: “I have various friends who report like, yes, if you talk to researchers at OpenAI in private, they’re very worried and say that they cannot be that worried in public.”
Altman told Insider, “We debate our approach frequently and carefully.”
For some, though, the question of whether OpenAI could be trusted to keep humanity’s best interests in mind became too much. Eleven employees, many of whom were affiliated with the AI-risk-obsessed effective-altruism movement, defected to start their own AI company, Anthropic, in 2021. Despite launching its own rival chatbot in March, Anthropic claims to distinguish itself from competitors like OpenAI by creating “safer, steerable, and more reliable models.” (It remains to be seen whether the company, which aims to raise $5 billion over the next four years, will be able to resist the same market pressures its founders argue corrupted OpenAI.)
As the former OpenAI employee put it: “I don’t want a front-row seat to watch the world implode.”
In the plot of one of Sam Altman’s favorite short stories about AI, called “The Gentle Seduction,” a man named Jack and a nameless woman fall in love. Jack, a technologist with a heart condition, tells the woman about his vision for a future in which technology eliminates all of humanity’s problems, including death. The woman, an ecologist, is initially repulsed by this unnatural prospect. But after he dies and she declines with age, the woman reluctantly accepts technological advances one by one: nanomachines that cure her ailments, a headset that merges her mind with machine intelligence, a robot body that allows her to travel the galaxies. She eventually becomes a supreme immortal being, at one with the universe. She looks back across millennia to her dead lover and realizes he was the mastermind behind it all: Predicting her innate resistance to progress, Jack made sure she had time to adapt to each advance in “small bite-size steps.”
It’s not hard to find traces of Jack in Altman. Like the character, Altman believes that humanity will soon reach a point where it can achieve more technological progress in the next hundred years than we’ve achieved in all of human history. He imagines a future in which we might explore the farthest reaches of the universe and outsmart everything from climate change to Earth-destroying asteroids. He even purchased a spot on the waiting list for the company Nectome, which, if successful, promises to upload his brain to the cloud so it might one day be revived in a simulation.
Like many of his Silicon Valley peers, Altman seems fixated on delaying death. One friend told Insider that urgency grew when Altman’s father died in 2018. “I don’t think anyone can lose your dad young and wish he didn’t have more time with him,” Altman told Insider. He called the idea that he wanted to live forever a “caricature,” though his investment in Nectome’s metaverse for the undead would suggest otherwise. Altman’s goal, he says, is not to attain immortality but “to give people another 10 years of healthy, vigorous life.”
Altman appears to have mastered the art of biohacking in his own life, following a disciplined diet and exercise plan to maximize his productivity. He is apparently prone to what his mother called “cyberchondria” in a 2016 New Yorker interview, referring to Altman’s obsession with researching his maladies on the internet. But the difference between Altman and your average self-optimization tech bro is that his health experiments could shape human evolution.
Altman, who’s said he’s excited to have “a lot of kids,” backed one company hoping to allow two men to conceive a child and another that offers polygenic embryo screening. In 2020, Altman read about an experiment in which scientists replaced the blood plasma of elderly mice with a cocktail of saltwater and albumin, a protein made by the liver, that seemed to reverse some of the signs of aging. He urged Joe Betts-Lacroix, who had been a part-time partner at Y Combinator, to start a company, Retro Biosciences, based on this approach. Altman brought $180 million to the table, accounting for the entirety of the company’s latest funding round.
For Altman, spirituality and science seem to go hand-in-hand. A practiced meditator, Altman has tweeted about the “absolute equivalence of brahman and atman,” referring to the Hindu concept of nondualism that suggests the universe and the individual self are one and the same. If “there is no self, then I think you think differently about what it means to die or not,” he told the journalist Laurie Segall in 2020. “Or like, if the thing in the computer is you or not.”
A few years ago, according to one investor friend, Altman began to talk about “the light of consciousness.” It’s a phrase that’s grown popular within the “longtermist” contingent of Silicon Valley, including Elon Musk and Jack Dorsey. It’s rooted in the idea that the human race could be snuffed out by any number of existential threats. To keep the lights on, longtermists believe there’s an urgent need to advance space travel, biotechnology, and human-friendly artificial intelligence.
Altman has written about the influence Nick Bostrom, the founder of Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute and the “father” of longtermist thought, has had on him and his work. On his blog, Altman called Bostrom’s book, “Superintelligence” — which includes Bostrom’s famous thought experiment about an all-powerful AI that accidentally transforms all matter, including humans, into paperclips — “the best thing I’ve seen” on the topic of AI risk. OpenAI even poached employees from the Future of Humanity Institute, according to Anders Sandberg, a senior research fellow at the Institute.
While Altman says he does not identify with the longtermist movement, he shares many of its apocalyptic fixations. “My problem is that when my friends get drunk they talk about the ways the world will end,” Altman told The New Yorker in 2016. He went on to describe his prepper lifestyle, which included a stash of “guns, gold, potassium iodide, antibiotics, batteries, water, gas masks from the Israeli Defense Force, and a big patch of land in Big Sur I can fly to” in the case of a lethal synthetic virus or nuclear war. The coronavirus pandemic brought to life some of Altman’s worst fears. For the first few weeks of lockdown, he told Insider, he holed up at home, disinfecting the groceries until his partner complained one night that their food smelled like a swimming pool. “He says we vastly underestimate risk in society,” the investor friend explained.
He’s leery, but not overly fearful of the singularity, an event in which technology advances to a stage where it spins out of humanity’s supervision. In a 2017 blog post, Altman wrote the merging of human and machine might help our species avoid an all-out power struggle. He even mused, during a recent appearance on Lex Fridman’s podcast, that life as we know it might already be contained within a computer system. “I’m certainly willing to believe that consciousness is somehow the fundamental substrate and we’re all just in the dream, or the simulation, or whatever.”
Altman told Insider that his thinking had evolved since those posts. “I am now very much in the AI-will-be-a-tool camp, though I do think future humans and human society will be extremely different and we have a chance to be thoughtful about how to design that future.”
In their paper “Eugenics and the Promise of Utopia through Artificial General Intelligence,” the computer scientist Timnit Gebru and the philosopher Émile P. Torres wrote that Altman and others’ attempts to bring about AGI “and build something akin to a god” were “inherently unsafe.” They say Altman is one of the key figures adopting a new set of ideologies they call Tescreal (transhumanism, extropianism, singularitanism, cosmism, rationalism, effective altruism, and longtermism). The movement is marked by consolidation of power and discriminatory views. Gebru and Torres urge Altman and others “to abandon this goal in lieu of building well-defined, well-scoped systems that prioritize people’s safety.”
Altman seems unfazed by such critiques.
“Only those who knew caution without fear … made it through,” reads a line he tweeted from “The Gentle Seduction.” “Only humanity had survived.”
Sam Altman may have won over Silicon Valley, but now he has the more difficult task of selling the rest of the world on his visions of techno-utopia. Altman, whose mother recently told The Wall Street Journal that he hadn’t been to a grocery store in four or five years, has been the first to acknowledge his shortcomings when it comes to relating to the general public.
When Insider asked him to try to articulate exactly how an average American could expect to see their life change as a result of the technology he’s building, he offered only a few generalities: Education will change, productivity will increase, and science will develop faster than ever. Pushed for specifics, Altman became evasive. “It’s a huge mistake to understate what’s going to happen,” he said. “I think it’s also a mistake to overstate what we know is going to happen.”
He’ll have plenty of chances to refine his messaging. After years of developing his projects largely out of sight, he’s begun taking his show on the road. In January, he traveled to Washington to allay lawmakers’ fears about AI. This spring, he’s made himself unusually available for on-air interviews and magazine profiles. And this summer, he’ll embark on a worldwide listening tour to hear from developers and users of OpenAI’s product.
If it’s all starting to sound a bit like a political campaign, that may not be a coincidence. In 2017, Altman casually explored the idea of running for governor of California. That same year, he published a political manifesto called The United Slate, emphasizing “prosperity through technology,” “economic fairness,” and “personal liberty.” Where the government lacks vision and efficacy — in developing housing, UBI, or infrastructure, for example — Altman believes tech can help fill the gap. His original pitch for Worldcoin, according to Novendstern, called the concept “an experiment in non-state redistribution.”
While any ambitions to run for office seem to have faded, Altman has found other ways to exert political influence. He’s acted as one of tech’s most visible emissaries to Washington, taking meetings with cabinet members and lawmakers. He’s mingled with heads of state and government agencies at the Bilderberg meeting, an off-the-record peacebuilding summit that’s so secretive its critics have likened it to a “shadow world government.” He hopes technology will become a central issue in elections. He said the fact it hadn’t already was “really screwed up.”
That doesn’t mean he endorses the kind of technocracy being pushed for by some in his cohort, like Musk paying $44 billion to take over the “digital town square” and Thiel promoting the “network state” movement that proposes autonomous cities as an alternative to centralized democracies.
“I don’t think OpenAI or any other tech company should be making some of the decisions that we are currently on a trajectory to be making,” Altman told Insider. “Something like this should be a government project, and in a different time in US history it would’ve been.” (In its early days, OpenAI tried, unsuccessfully, to get government funding.) Altman expressed his hope that global policymakers would “immediately” introduce an equivalent to the International Atomic Energy Agency, an oversight body for the nuclear field, to monitor efforts to train powerful AI.
Altman’s own political leanings are nebulous, to say the least. “If you ask me any specific issue, I’ll tell you exactly what I believe,” he said. “But I think it’s very strange that we reduce the sort of 25 or 30 really important issues that people have an opinion on to a single axis that you have to plot yourself on and that you have to take your positions as a package deal. That’s never made sense to me.”
I don’t think OpenAI or any other tech company should be making some of the decisions that we are currently on a trajectory to be making.Sam Altman
He’s donated generously to Democratic candidates and PACs, and he even attended a protest at San Francisco International Airport against Donald Trump’s travel ban on several majority-Muslim countries. Yet he also owns guns, is suspicious of educational institutions, and often speaks about the importance of personal responsibility. (When asked about guns, Altman told Insider he’d been “happy to have one both times my home was broken into while I was there.”) In a 2021 New York Times article, Altman identified himself as a fan of Slate Star Codex, a blog and online hub for the “rationalist” community, which believes in evaluating decision-making without regard for fairness or feelings. In the interview, Altman endorsed the belief that policing of racist and sexist language by the “internet mob” made it more difficult for entrepreneurs to innovate.
The OpenAI CEO recently told Lex Fridman that he’s a big believer in, “Lift up the floor and don’t worry about the ceiling,” elaborating to Insider that our future abundance should entitle everyone to, at the very least, a middle-class life. (Those at the ceiling will be taken care of: The early investors at the Worldcoin party were part of a small group of insiders set to own 20% of a new global cryptocurrency upon its launch.)
Regardless, Altman’s reputation in the Valley remains as a bleeding-heart liberal. In April, Musk once again presented himself as Altman’s foil, introducing plans for a chatbot called “TruthGPT,” the anti-woke version of ChatGPT.
Shortly before announcing his AI endeavor, Musk was also one of the thousand-plus signatories of the open letter calling for a pause on AI development. “Such decisions must not be delegated to unelected tech leaders,” the letter said.
Altman laughed when Insider read the line back to him: “I think that’s a quote from me. I really believe that. I think it’s super important. I don’t think governing by open letter is particularly good either.”
At a point when Silicon Valley couldn’t seem to find inspiration beyond delivery apps, dog filters, and electric scooters, Altman arrived as the starry-eyed prophet, heralding a new era of progress that — he believes — is akin to the discovery of fire or the invention of the wheel. The angel investor Ron Conway has described ChatGPT as “very arguably the most significant invention of our times.” “We’ve been through the PC era,” Conway said. “The Google search era. The social-media era. The Amazon era. But this, this tops them all.”
Altman is an avid poker player (and a good one at that), but not everyone wants their day-to-day lives gambled with. Already the prospect of so much disruption has started to throw society into an existential crisis, with people wondering who these changes will truly benefit and who will become collateral damage. Distinguishing between what is real and what is fake, and deciding which parts of our lives we’re unwilling to give up to machines, has become as commonly discussed as the weather.
Still, the Altman idolization is at its peak: the splashy news profiles, the endorsements from luminaries like Bill Gates, and the 1.6 million Twitter followers that hang on his every word. Altman is no longer just a Silicon Valley poster boy — he’s a household name. His ascent has taken on the tenor of a Greek myth. Is it overblown hype? The product of sycophants trying to win the favor of the most powerful man in the Valley? A heroic narrative projected onto a man who never asked for it? Khosla, the venture capitalist, warns that the good times will eventually come to an end. “When everyone loves you, reporters all call you, it’s time to be cautious,” he said.
Over the years, a story has made the rounds about Altman wherein the pilot of a private jet became incapacitated and the OpenAI CEO took the controls and got everyone safely to the ground. When asked about this, Altman told Insider in an email: “i can guess what that’s about; these stories grow crazily inflated over the years of getting re-told! the truth on that one is boring at best.”
But as Altman is likely realizing, once his stories — and technologies — leave his hands, it’s a matter of time before they spin into something unrecognizable.
Melia Russell is a senior correspondent at Insider covering startups and venture capital. She can be reached via the encrypted messaging app Signal at +1 603-913-3085 and email at mrussell@insider.com.
Julia Black is a senior correspondent for Insider and writes features and investigations about the people and companies shaping our culture. Her email is jblack@insider.com.
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