I first met Sam Altman in the summer of 2019, days after Microsoft agreed to invest $1 billion in his 3-year-old startup, OpenAI. At his suggestion, we had dinner at a small, decidedly modern restaurant not far from his home in San Francisco. Halfway through the meal, he held up his iPhone so I could see the contract he had spent the past several months negotiating with one of the world’s largest tech companies. It said Microsoft’s billion-dollar investment would help OpenAI build what was calle
The company’s logo appears on a reception desk at the headquarters of OpenAI in San Francisco on March 13, 2023.
As people realize that this technology is also a way of spreading falsehoods or even persuading people to do things they should not do, some critics are accusing Altman of reckless behavior.This past week, more than a thousand AI experts and tech leaders called on OpenAI and other companies to pause their work on systems such as ChatGPT, saying they present “profound risks to society and humanity.
That means he is often criticized from all directions. But those closest to him believe this is as it should be. “If you’re equally upsetting both extreme sides, then you’re doing something right,” said OpenAI’s president, Greg Brockman. But if he’s wrong, there’s an escape hatch: In its contracts with investors such as Microsoft, OpenAI’s board reserves the right to shut the technology down at any time.The warning, sent with the driving directions, was “Watch out for cows.”
He was not exactly sure what problems it will solve, but he argued that ChatGPT showed the first signs of what is possible. Then, with his next breath, he worried that the same technology could cause serious harm if it wound up in the hands of some authoritarian government. The question is whether the two sides of Altman are ultimately compatible: Does it make sense to ride that curve if it could end in disaster? Altman is certainly determined to see how it all plays out.
In the early 2000s, Altman, a 17-year-old student at John Burroughs, set out to change the school’s culture, individually persuading teachers to post “Safe Space” signs on their classroom doors as a statement in support of gay students such as him. He came out during his senior year and said the St. Louis of his teenage years was not an easy place to be gay.
“He has a natural ability to talk people into things,” Graham said. “If it isn’t inborn, it was at least fully developed before he was 20. I first met Sam when he was 19, and I remember thinking at the time: ‘So this is what Bill Gates must have been like.’” After selling Loopt for a modest return, he joined Y Combinator as a part-time partner. Three years later, Graham stepped down as president of the firm and, to the surprise of many across Silicon Valley, tapped Altman, then 28, as his successor.
Altman believed, according to his younger brother Max, that he was one of the few people who could meaningfully change the world through AI research, as opposed to the many people who could do so through politics. A few years later, Altman texted his brothers again, saying he planned to raise an additional $10 billion — or, as he put it, “10 bills.” By this past January, he had done this, too, signing another contract with Microsoft.
Scott believes that Altman will ultimately be discussed in the same breath as Gates, Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg. The selfie — snapped by Altman at a party his company was hosting — shows how close he is to this way of thinking. But he has his own views on the dangers of AI.
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