Sam Altman

The Optimist: Sam Altman, OpenAI, and the Race to Invent the Future

by Keach Hagey  · 19 May 2025  · 439pp  · 125,379 words

YOU AT?” CHAPTER 7FROM “WEAK” TO “COOL” CHAPTER 8THE DOUCHEBAG BADGE PART III 2012–2019 CHAPTER 9“A RIDE ON A ROCKET” CHAPTER 10“SAM ALTMAN FOR PRESIDENT” CHAPTER 11“A MANHATTAN PROJECT FOR AI” CHAPTER 12ALTRUISTS CHAPTER 13PIVOTING TO PROFIT PART IV 2019–2024 CHAPTER 14PRODUCTS CHAPTER 15CHATGPT CHAPTER 16THE

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Wolf.13 By junior year, Jerry had a “mission beige” 1966 Pontiac Tempest that he kept immaculately clean, inside and out. Many years later, Sam Altman would also adore cars—much, much faster ones. As Jerry headed for high school graduation in 1969, St. Louis was roiling with racial discontent, particularly

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000 to study “the possibility of setting up a community-based corporation to produce solar energy products.” His pitch had elements that would become classic (Sam) Altmanisms: it was built around the hope of attaining federal grant money, delivered in a tone of authority, professed to be free from profit motives,

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wrote, adding that “artificial general intelligence might work, and if it does, it will be the biggest development in technology ever.”32 CHAPTER 10 “SAM ALTMAN FOR PRESIDENT” MURMURS RAN THROUGH the crowd of startup founders huddled over their bowls of chili as the skinny young man in a T-shirt

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yet fundamentally benevolent—which, though few realize it, is an essential quality in early stage investing,” Graham wrote in his announcement blog post cheekily titled “Sam Altman for President.” “Sam is one of the smartest people I know, and understands startups better than perhaps anyone I know, including myself.”1 He

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ex-girlfriend on Fox Island in Washington State, telling her about vast changes in technology and society that the future holds. She was terrified. “Sam Altman appears to have learned the same lesson,” Stiegler said. Stiegler reasons that humanity can only “step across one small threshold at a time” on

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a significant step toward OpenAI having the resources to realize the long-simmering futuristic visions of Alan Kay, the Extropians, sci-fi writers, and now Sam Altman. The statement also resurrected Kay’s quote: “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.” But the price OpenAI would ultimately

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’s exclusive cloud provider.28 For all its false starts, OpenAI knew that it needed dollars more than it needed algorithms, and for that, Sam Altman was the man for the moment. PART IV 2019–2024 CHAPTER 14 PRODUCTS FROM THE BEGINNING, there were fights about safety. A year after

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so much as a comment for nearly two years. “I experienced sexual, physical, emotional, verbal, financial and technological abuse from my biological siblings, mostly Sam Altman and some from Jack Altman,” she wrote on Twitter.13 She did not give details, but asked for others who were abused by these “perpetrators

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about federal election law violations, Schmidt eventually had to have the campaign’s general counsel call the brothers. “As it turns out, it’s Sam Altman paying for it,” Schmidt said. (Matt Krisiloff said Altman was no longer paying for research by the time they were engaged with Phillips but refused

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code-named “Strawberry” but later renamed o1—Sutskever was barely in the announcement, his name one of dozens cited on the paper. As for Sam Altman: once Congress’s darling, he was now its whipping boy. In the same Senate chamber where Senator Richard Blumenthal had praised Altman the previous year

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happened without the instincts and support of Wall Street Journal editor in chief Emma Tucker, who had the original idea that the Journal should profile Sam Altman during our first editorial meeting after the release of ChatGPT. Nor would it have happened without my co-author on that story, Berber Jin,

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for Fastest-Growing User Base,” Reuters, February 2, 2023. 5.Sam Altman, “How to Be Successful,” Sam Altman blog, January 24, 2019. 6.OpenAI, “OpenAI Charter,” OpenAI, April 9, 2018. 7.Sam Altman, “Machine Intelligence: Part 1,” Sam Altman blog, February 25, 2015. 8.Ryan Tracy, “ChatGPT’s Sam Altman Warns Congress That AI Can ‘Go Quite Wrong,’ ” The

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. 9.Max Chafkin, The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley’s Pursuit of Power (New York: Penguin Press, 2021), 120. 10.Sam Altman, “Board Members,” Sam Altman blog, November 11, 2014. 11.Lex Fridman, “Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI,” Lex Fridman Podcast, March 18, 2024. 12.Berber

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true thing do you believe that few people agree with you on? Absolute equivalence of brahman and atman,” X, December 26, 2022. 16.Lex Fridman, “Sam Altman: OpenAI CEO on GPT-4, ChatGPT, and the Future of AI,” Lex Fridman Podcast, March 25, 2023. CHAPTER 1CHICAGO 1.Tim Frakes, “Harold Washington

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15, 2024. 7.Douglas Martin, “Gale Cincotta, 72, Opponent of Biased Banking Policies,” The New York Times, August 17, 2001. 8.The Breman Museum, “Sam Altman,” Esther and Herbert Taylor Oral History Collection, December 3, 2002. 9.Altman v. Massell Realty Co., 167 Ga. 828 (1929). 10.Ibid. 11.“Interco Incorporated

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2004. 2.Melisa Russel, Julie Black, “He’s Played Chess with Peter Thiel, Sparred with Elon Musk and Once, Supposedly, Stopped a Plane Crash: Inside Sam Altman’s World, Where Truth Is Stranger Than Fiction,” Business Insider, April 27, 2023. 3.Marcia Savage, Amanda Stripe, “Under Surveillance—Location-Based Wireless Technology Raises

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Privacy Concerns for Solution Providers,” Computer Reseller News, December 4, 2000. 4.Reid Hoffman, “Uncut Interview with Sam Altman on Masters of Scale,” Y Combinator blog, July 26, 2017. 5.Y Combinator, “Frequently Asked Questions,” accessed June 15, 2024. 6.Jennifer Liu, “Students

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Funding from Sequoia Capital,” YouTube Official Blog, November 7, 2005. CHAPTER 6“WHERE YOU AT?” 1.Liz Gannes, “Y Combinator’s New Head Startup Whisperer Sam Altman Is Quite a Talker,” Re/code, March 18, 2014. 2.Ibid. 3.Ibid. 4.Tamara Chuang, “Cell Phones Change Social Networks,” The Orange County

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the Internet, April 23, 2009. 16.Sharma and Vascallero, “Phones.” 17.“New Digs,” Loopt company blog, accessed June 15, 2024. 18.Hoffman, “Uncut Interview with Sam Altman.” CHAPTER 7FROM “WEAK” TO “COOL” 1.Fred Vogelstein, “The Untold Story: How the iPhone Blew Up the Wireless Industry,” Wired, January 9, 2008. 2.

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Russel, “Y Combinator and Mithril Invest in Helion, a Nuclear Fusion Startup,” TechCrunch, August 1, 2014. 11.David Perell, “I Interviewed the Man Behind ChatGPT: Sam Altman,” YouTube video, 21:24, uploaded November 27, 2024. 12.Stross, Launchpad, 28. 13.Steven Levy, “YC Has Gone Supernova,” Wired, June 28, 2017. 14

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Twilley, “Artificial Intelligence Goes to the Arcade,” The New Yorker, February 25, 2015. 31.Metz, Genius Makers, 116. 32.Sam Altman, “AI,” Sam Altman blog, February 19, 2014. CHAPTER 10“SAM ALTMAN FOR PRESIDENT” 1.Paul Graham, “Sam Altman for President,” Y Combinator blog, February 21, 2014. 2.Ibid. 3.Friend, “Manifest Destiny.” 4.Mark Boslet, “Paul

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‘Ultra Rich,’ Survey Finds,” Los Angeles Times, November 25, 2014. 7.Sam Altman, “Growth and Government,” Sam Altman blog, March 4, 2013. 8.Sam Altman, “New RFS—Breakthrough Technologies,” Sam Altman blog, March 19, 2014. 9.Sam Altman, “AI,” Sam Altman blog, February 19, 2014. 10.Friend, “Manifest Destiny.” 11.Sam Altman, “The New Deal,” Y Combinator blog, April 22, 2014. 12.Max

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—But This Teenager Is Hot Property in Silicon Valley,” The Sydney Morning Herald, June 21, 2012. 13.Lattice Team, “Career Advice from Sam Altman,” Lattice blog, October 27, 2016. 14.Sam Altman, “The YC Board of Overseers,” Y Combinator blog, June 3, 2013. 15.Rohin Dhar, “The Big Winner from Y Combinator’s

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games until someone loses an I: futureoflife.org/misc/AI,” Twitter, January 15, 2015. 6.Sam Altman, “Machine Intelligence, Part 1,” Sam Altman blog, February 25, 2015. 7.Sam Altman, “Machine Intelligence, Part 2,” Sam Altman blog, March 2015. 8.Sam Altman, “How to Be Successful,” Sam Altman blog, January 24, 2019. 9.Elon Musk s. Samuel Altman, CGC-24-612746, S

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. 11.Brockman, “#define CTP OpenAI,” ibid. 12.Carl Tahsian, “At Dynamicland, The Building Is the Computer,” September 18, 2019. 13.Sophie Bearman, “OpenAI’s Sam Altman,” Life in Seven Songs podcast. 14.Metz, Genius Makers, 288. 15.Annie Altman, “My Denied Appeal Letter for Early College Graduation,” Medium, March 30, 2015

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17, 2016. 18.Nitasha Tiku, “Meet the Techies Trying to Create the Turbo Tax of Voting,” BuzzFeed News, September 8, 2016. 19.Sam Altman, “What I Heard from Trump Supporters,” Sam Altman blog, February 21, 2017. 20.Douglas MacMillan, Keach Hagey, Deepa Seetharaman, “Tech Luminary Peter Thiel Parts Ways with Silicon Valley,” The

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Wall Street Journal, February 15, 2018. 21.Chafkin, The Contrarian, 200. 22.Tess Townsend, “Sam Altman Wants to See a Techie Run for California Governor and Challenge Trump,” Vox, April 14, 2017. 23.Willie Brown, “The Man President Trump Fears Most

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US District Court Northern District of California, November 14, 2024. 11.Interview by authors for the article: Deepa Seetharaman, Keach Hagey, Berber Jin, Kate Linebaugh, “Sam Altman’s Knack for Dodging Bullets—with a Little Help from His Bigshot Friends,” The Wall Street Journal, December 24, 2023. 12.Musk v. Altman. 13

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.Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, John Schulman, Sam Altman, Wojciech Zaremba, “OpenAI and Elon Musk,” OpenAI blog, March 5, 2024. 14.OpenAI, “OpenAI Supporters,” February 20, 2018. 15.Kylie Robison, Michal Lev-Ram,

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months after Dad died, when I was 24 and could have stayed on her work one for two more years,” Twitter, August 24, 2024. 19.Sam Altman, [“Sam Altman Speaks Out About What Happened at OpenAI”], What Now? with Trevor Noah, December 7, 2023. 20.Keach Hagey, “Deal or No Deal, The Shadow

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Altman,” Bloomberg, November 30, 2023. 26.Becky Petersen, “Shivon Zilis, Musk Associate, Leaves Board,” The Information, March 23, 2023. 27.Seetharaman, Hagey, Jin, Linebaugh, “Sam Altman’s Knack for Dodging Bullets.” 28.OpenAI, “Microsoft Invests in and Partners with OpenAI to Support Us Building Beneficial AGI,” OpenAI blog, July 22, 2019

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Altman, “How I Started Escorting,” Medium, March 27, 2024. 9.Weil, “Oppenheimer of Our Age.” 10.Annie Altman, “How I Started Escorting.” 11.Sam Altman, “Please Fund More Science,” Sam Altman blog, March 30, 2020. 12.Greg Brockman, Mira Murati, Peter Welinder, OpenAI, “OpenAI API,” OpenAI blog, June 11, 2020. 13.Tom Simonite,

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, and Transparency, 2021. 15.Emily Bobrow, “Timnit Gebru Is Calling Attention to the Pitfall of AI,” The Wall Street Journal, February 24, 2023. 16.Sam Altman @sama, “I am a stochastic parrot and so r u,” Twitter, December 4, 2022. CHAPTER 15CHATGPT 1.Tom Simonite, “It Began as an AI-Fueled

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Dungeon Game. It Got Much Darker,” Wired, May 5, 2021. 2.Ibid. 3.Sam Altman, “Moore’s Law for Everything,” Sam Altman, March 16, 2021. 4.Ibid. 5.Richard Nieva, “Sam Altman’s Eyeball-Scanning Crypto Project Worldcoin Is Having an Identity Crisis,” Forbes, August 10, 2023. 6.Chafkin, 138.

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7.Antonio Regalado, “A Startup Pitching a Mind-Uploading Service That Is ‘100 Percent Fatal,’ ” MIT Technology Review, March 13, 2018. 8.Antonio Regalado, “Sam Altman Invested $180 Million into a Company Trying to Delay Death,” MIT Technology Review, March 8, 2023. 9.Haje Jan Kamps, “Helion Secures $2.2B to

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Commercialize Fusion Energy,” TechCrunch, November 5, 2021. 10.Friend, “Manifest Destiny.” 11.Katherine Long, Hugh Langley, “OpenAI CEO Sam Altman Went on an 18-Month, $85-Million Real Estate Shopping Spree—Including a Previously Unknown Hawaii Estate,” Business Insider, November 30, 2023. 12.Samson Zhang

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, “Donahue,” Postulate, July 20, 2021. 13.Annie Altman, @anniealtman108, “I experienced sexual, physical, emotional, verbal, financial, and technological abuse from my biological siblings, mostly Sam Altman and some from Jack Altman,” X, November 13, 2021. 14.Annie Altman, “How I Started Escorting.” 15.Annie Altman, @anniealtman108, “If the multiverse is real

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2022. 3.Berber Jin, Deepa Seetharaman, “Elon Musk Creates New Artificial Intelligence Company X.AI,” The Wall Street Journal, April 14, 2023. 4.Elizabeth Weil, “Sam Altman Is the Oppenheimer of Our Age,” New York, September 25, 2023. 5.Andrew Imbrie, Owen J. Daniels, Helen Toner, “Decoding Intentions, Artificial Intelligence and Costly

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, and the rest of the OpenAI team, deserve better,” X, November 17, 2023. 12.Keach Hagey, Deepa Seetharaman, Berber Jin, “Behind the Scenes of Sam Altman’s Showdown at OpenAI,” The Wall Street Journal, November 22, 2023. 13.Greg Brockman, “We are so back!” X, November 22, 2023. CHAPTER 17PROMETHEUS UNBOUND

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Woodward, War (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2024), 180. 4.Tim Alberta, “Dean Philips Has a Warning for Democrats,” The Atlantic, October 27, 2023. 5.Sam Altman, “this is interesting, and I think close to what the majority of voters actually want: a reasonable, centrist candidate running on 1) a message of

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Keeping AI Safe. Its Offices Are Crumbling,” The Washington Post, March 6, 2024. 14.Gareth Vipers, Sam Schechner, Deepa Seetharaman, “Elon Musk Sues OpenAI, Sam Altman, Saying They Abandoned Founding Mission,” The Wall Street Journal, March 1, 2024. 15.Ilya Sutskever, “In the future, it will be obvious that the sole

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EPILOGUE 1.Natasha Mascarenhas, “Alt Capital Raises $150 Million Fund, Extending Altman Brothers’ Funding Spree,” The Information, February 1, 2024. 2.Sarah Needleman, “OpenAI CEO Sam Altman Denies Sexual Abuse Claims Made by Sister,” The Wall Street Journal, January 8, 2025. 3.University of Toronto, “University of Toronto Press Conference—Professor Geoffrey

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), US District Court, Northern District of California, November 15, 2024. 9.Marco Quiroz-Gutierrez, “Elon Musk Is Ratcheting Up His Attacks on His Old Partner Sam Altman, Calling Him ‘Swindly Sam’ and OpenAI a ‘Market-Paralyzing Gorgon,” Fortune, December 3, 2024. 10.David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform

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the World (New York: Penguin Books, 2011). 11.Sam Altman, “The Intelligence Age,” ia.samaltman.com, September 23, 2024. INDEX Page numbers listed correspond to the print edition of this book. You can use your

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, 111 SAFE (Simple Agreement for Future Equity) convertible notes, 94–95 Safe Superintelligence Inc. (SSI), 309 Saga Ventures, 311 Salkin, Phil, 24 “Sam Altman for President,” 150 “Sam Altman Is the Oppenheimer of Our Age,” 281–82 Samuels, Lawrence, 40, 42 San Francisco Effective Altruism Global conference in San Francisco, 210 Mission District

Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI

by Karen Hao  · 19 May 2025  · 660pp  · 179,531 words

ACM 9, no. 1 (January 1966): 36–45, doi.org/10.1145/365153.365168. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “Successful people create companies”: Sam Altman, “Successful People,” Sam Altman (blog), March 7, 2013, blog.samaltman.com/successful-people. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Prologue: A Run for the Throne “How can I

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altman-inside-crisis.html. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Altman, still confused: Trevor Noah, host, What Now? with Trevor Noah, season 1, episode 5, “Sam Altman Speaks Out about What Happened at OpenAI,” Spotify Podcasts, December 7, 2023, open.spotify.com/show/122imavATqSE7eCyXIcqZL. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT The public

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-altman-board. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Riled up by Sutskever’s: Keach Hagey, Deepa Seetharaman, and Berber Jin, “Behind the Scenes of Sam Altman’s Showdown at OpenAI,” Wall Street Journal, November 22, 2023, wsj.com/tech/ai/altman-firing-openai-520a3a8c. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT The

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next day, Saturday: Kate Clark, Natasha Mascarenhas, and Anissa Gardizy, “If Sam Altman Returns to OpenAI, Board Will Go,” The Information, November 18, 2023, theinformation.com/articles/altman-decision-looms-as-sequoia-tiger-negotiate-behind-scenes. GO TO

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from screenshots. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Anna Brockman, Greg’s wife: Deepa Seetharaman, Berber Jin, and Keach Hagey, “OpenAI Investors Keep Pushing for Sam Altman’s Return,” Wall Street Journal, November 21, 2023, wsj.com/tech/openai-employees-threaten-to-quit-unless-board-resigns-bbd5cc86. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN

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Amir Efrati, Anissa Gardizy, and Erin Woo, “Altman Agrees to Internal Investigation upon Return to OpenAI,” The Information, November 21, 2023, theinformation.com/articles/breaking-sam-altman-to-return-as-openai-ceo. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT He tweeted it with: Greg Brockman (@gdb), “we are so back,” Twitter (now X

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“raises an uncomfortable”: Olson and Silverman, “ChatGPT’s $8 Trillion Birthday Gift.” GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT In a September 2024 blog post: Sam Altman, “The Intelligence Age,” Sam Altman (blog), September 23, 2024, ia.samaltman.com. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Chapter 1: Divine Right Everyone else had arrived: Cade Metz

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4, ChatGPT, and the Future of AI,” March 25, 2023, lexfridman.com/podcast. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “The thing that sticks”: Sam Altman, “How to Be Successful,” Sam Altman (blog), January 24, 2019, blog.samaltman.com/how-to-be-successful. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Later, at a recurring AI: Author

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Bloomberg, September 5, 2018, bloomberg.com/features/2018-rich-new-zealand-doomsday-preppers. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “probably the greatest threat”: Sam Altman, “Machine Intelligence, Part 1,” Sam Altman (blog), February 25, 2015, blog.samaltman.com/machine-intelligence-part-1. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “Been thinking a lot”: All email

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Fundraising Survival Guide,” Paul Graham (blog), accessed November 21, 2024, paulgraham.com/fundraising.html. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “Sam is extremely good”: Friend, “Sam Altman’s Manifest Destiny.” GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Jerry, the son of a: “Megan O’Neill Is Wed to Jerold D. Altman,” New York

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GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT He would grow so panicked: Joe Hudson and Brett Kistler, hosts, The Art of Accomplishment Podcast, podcast, episode 39, “Sam Altman—Leading with Crippling Anxiety, Discovering Meditation, and Building Intelligence with Self-Awareness,” January 14, 2022, artofaccomplishment.com/podcast. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT After

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Bolt of fundraising”: Author interview with Geoff Ralston, March 2024. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Twice during his time running Loopt: Seetharaman et al., “Sam Altman’s Knack for Dodging Bullets.” GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Jobs had been worth: Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs (Simon & Schuster, 2011), 104. GO

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TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT He’d collect luxury: Katie Notopoulos, “Sam Altman Is Seen Driving a Car That Can Cost $5 Million. Everyone Is Thanking Him for Helping Them Pass Their Tests,” Business Insider, July 12, 2024

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, businessinsider.com/sam-altman-koenigsegg-regera-expensive-sports-car-video-openai-musk-2024-7. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Of particular importance: Elizabeth Dwoskin, Marc Fisher, and Nitasha

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with Steve”: Paul Graham, “Five Founders,” Paul Graham (blog), April 2009, paulgraham.com/5founders.html. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT When Graham asked: Friend, “Sam Altman’s Manifest Destiny.” GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Their bond was once described: Dwoskin et al., “ ‘King of the Cannibals.’ ” GO TO NOTE REFERENCE

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He’d built eighteen pounds: Dwoskin et al., “ ‘King of the Cannibals.’ ” GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT In 2016, it was Ashton: Friend, “Sam Altman’s Manifest Destiny.” GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Three years later: A photo of Schumer’s visit to the Pioneer Building, March 8, 2019

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OpenAI,” Greg Brockman (blog), January 9, 2017, blog.gregbrockman.com/define-cto-openai [inactive]. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Altman would later extol: Sam Altman, “Greg,” Sam Altman (blog), March 7, 2017, blog.samaltman.com/greg. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “AGI might be far away”: Author interview with Pieter Abbeel,

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(blog), accessed August 25, 2024, openai.com/charter. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT That summer, as the Dota: Jin and Hagey, “The Contradictions of Sam Altman.” GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “Microsoft Research and OpenAI are”: Author interview with Xuedong Huang, July 2023. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT To

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Behind OpenAI’s Bid to Save the World,” MIT Technology Review, February 17, 2020, technologyreview.com/2020/02/17/844721/ai-openai-moonshot-elon-musk-sam-altman-greg-brockman-messy-secretive-reality. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Hours later, Musk replied: Elon Musk (@elonmusk), “OpenAI should be more open imo,”

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19 sec., youtu.be/4SlNgM4PjvQ. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “And we will, over time”: Tyler Cowen, host, Conversations with Tyler, podcast, episode 61, “Sam Altman on Loving Community, Hating Coworking, and the Hunt for Talent,” Mercatus Center Podcasts, February 27, 2019. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “Sam was the

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/article/microsoft-has-over-a-million-paying-github-copilot-users-ceo-nadella. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “If you could wave”: “Advice to Entrepreneurs | Sam Altman & Jack Altman,” posted August 1, 2019, by Khosla Ventures, YouTube, 30 min., 10 sec., youtu.be/NAaRhXQCt9o. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT The

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Group Completes Largest US Study on Basic Income,” Bloomberg, July 22, 2024, bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-07-22/ubi-study-backed-by-openai-s-sam-altman-bolsters-support-for-basic-income. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT In July 2024, OpenResearch: OpenResearch, “Key Findings: Spending,” OpenResearch (blog), July 21, 2024,

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openresearchlab.org/findings/key-findings-spending. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Tools for Humanity’s main product: Huet and Tan, “Sam Altman Wants to Scan Your Eyeball.” GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT An extensive investigation: Eileen Guo and Adi Renaldi, “Deception, Exploited Workers, and Cash Handouts

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/a-startup-is-pitching-a-mind-uploading-service-that-is-100-percent-fatal. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “destroy the planet”: “Office Hours with Sam Altman,” posted January 11, 2017, by Y Combinator, YouTube, 24 min., 34 sec., youtu.be/45BvnJgwYjk. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “more than an

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investment”: “StrictlyVC in Conversation with Sam Altman, Part One,” posted on January 16, 2023, by Connie Loizos, YouTube, 20 min., 32 sec., youtu.be/57OU18cogJI. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT To

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articles/what-percent-are-you-1456922287. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “Where I grew up”: Tyler Cowen, host, Conversations with Tyler, podcast, episode 61, “Sam Altman on Loving Community, Hating Coworking, and the Hunt for Talent,” Mercatus Center Podcasts, February 27, 2019. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Core to the

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/03/1069311/inside-story-oral-history-how-chatgpt-built-openai. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “one order of magnitude less”: “StrictlyVC in Conversation with Sam Altman, Part Two,” posted on January 17, 2023, by Connie Loizos, YouTube, 38 min., 58 sec., youtu.be/bjkD1Om4uw. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

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-says. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT AGI will solve climate change: This claim is one that Altman has used many times, including in Sam Altman, “The Intelligence Age,” Sam Altman (blog), September 23, 2024, ia.samaltman.com. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT While the last claim: Author interview with Sasha Luccioni,

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-Unscripted-The-Impact-of-Generative-Artificial-Intelligence-on-Entertainment-Industry-Jobs-pages-1.pdf. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Altman was attending: Kang, “How Sam Altman Stormed Washington.” GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT The same narrative Altman: Karen Hao, “The New AI Panic,” The Atlantic, October 11, 2023, theatlantic.

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The white paper’s ideas: Hao, “The New AI Panic.” GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “If we don’t know”: “Watch: OpenAI CEO Sam Altman Testifies.” GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “it’s because they trained it”: Interview with Myers West, September 2023. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

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10/ai-chuck-schumer-forum-legislation/675540. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT A Schumer spokesperson would later: Cat Zakrzewski, “Meet the Woman Who Transformed Sam Altman into the Avatar of AI,” Washington Post, January 9, 2024, washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/01/09/openai-anna-makanju-ai-regulation. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE

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: OpenAI, “Introducing Superalignment,” Open AI (blog), July 5, 2023, openai.com/index/introducing-superalignment. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “i was hoping that”: Sam Altman (@sama), “i was hoping that the oppenheimer movie would inspire a generation of kids to be physicists but it really missed the mark on that

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-agreed-that-a-for-profit-was-the-next-step-for-openai-to-advance-the-mission. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT In the announcement, Altman: Sam Altman, “Quora,” Sam Altman (blog), April 21, 2017, blog.samaltman.com/quora. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT In her most popular: Helen Toner, “Leaning into EA

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therapy notes. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Sam has also spoken publicly: Trevor Noah, host, What Now? with Trevor Noah, season 1, episode 5, “Sam Altman Speaks Out About What Happened at OpenAI,” Spotify Podcasts, December 7, 2023, open.spotify.com/show/122imavATqSE7eCyXIcqZL. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT In May

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NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “I experienced sexual”: Annie Altman (@anniealtman108), “I experienced sexual, physical, emotional, verbal, financial, and technological abuse from my biological siblings, mostly Sam Altman and some from Jack Altman. (2/3),” Twitter (now X), November 13, 2021, x.com/anniealtman108/status/1459696444802142213. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “Sexual

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-messy-secretive-reality; Karen Hao and Charlie Warzel, “Inside the Chaos at OpenAI,” The Atlantic, November 19, 2023, theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2023/11/sam-altman-open-ai-chatgpt-chaos/676050. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “current employee here”: All quotes from emails are from the screenshots that the person

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Jeffrey Dastin and Krystal Hu, “OpenAI Researchers Warned Board of AI Breakthrough Ahead of CEO Ouster, Sources Say,” Reuters, November 23, 2023, reuters.com/technology/sam-altmans-ouster-openai-was-precipitated-by-letter-board-about-ai-breakthrough-2023-11-22. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT The algorithm had been a brainchild

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-business-of-chips-and-ai-89ab3db0. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Altman would later say: Lex Fridman, host, Lex Fridman Podcast, podcast, episode 419, “Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI,” March 18, 2024, lexfridman.com/podcast. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT The

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: Kelsey Piper, “Leaked OpenAI Documents Reveal Aggressive Tactics Toward Former Employees,” Vox, May 22, 2024, vox.com/future-perfect/351132/openai-vested-equity-nda-sam-altman-documents-employees. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “The situation is, I think”: All quotes from an audio recording of the meeting, May 23, 2024

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GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Chapter 18: A Formula for Empire Altman once remarked onstage: Tyler Cowen, host, Conversations with Tyler, podcast, episode 61, “Sam Altman on Loving Community, Hating Coworking, and the Hunt for Talent,” Mercatus Center Podcasts, February 27, 2019. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “The most successful

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AI,” OpenAI (blog), October 2, 2024, openai.com/index/scale-the-benefits-of-ai. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT The post was titled: Sam Altman, “The Intelligence Age,” Sam Altman (blog), September 23, 2024, ia.samaltman.com. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT During an all-hands, Murati: Audio recording of the meeting

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December 27, 2024, openai.com/index/why-our-structure-must-evolve-to-advance-our-mission. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “We are now confident”: Sam Altman, “Reflections,” Sam Altman (blog), January 5, 2025, blog.samaltman.com/reflections. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Epilogue: How the Empire Falls In 2021, I came across

Supremacy: AI, ChatGPT, and the Race That Will Change the World

by Parmy Olson  · 284pp  · 96,087 words

company has grabbed the ideas of others—which is why, when you boil everything down, our AI future has been written by just two men: Sam Altman and Demis Hassabis. One is a scrawny but placid entrepreneur in his late thirties who wears sneakers to the office. The other is a former

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’s welfare and future caught in a battle for corporate supremacy. This was how it happened. ACT 1 THE DREAM CHAPTER 1 High School Hero Sam Altman knew he ought to keep his mouth shut. In the conservative stronghold of St. Louis, Missouri, people didn’t talk about whether they were gay

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them to design new ones and play them with his younger brother and sister. But the real fun was yet to come. A decade before Sam Altman found AOL chat rooms in the 1990s, Hassabis was diving headfirst into an even more rudimentary kind of technology, made up of chunky pixels on

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was relentless. Hassabis would later say that games were like a gym for the mind and chess was the ultimate workout. Just as poker taught Sam Altman about psychology and business, chess taught Hassabis how to strategize by starting with the end in mind. You visualized a goal and worked backward. But

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as Hassabis chased another impossibly ambitious goal, this time surpassing expectations to build what looked like the world’s most advanced artificial intelligence systems—until Sam Altman came along. CHAPTER 3 Save the Humans On a hot summer’s day in 2006, Altman was lying on the floor of his studio apartment

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mission with their staff as proxies, they were avoiding direct confrontation in the most British way possible. Suleyman wanted to build AGI in the way Sam Altman eventually would, by sending it out into the world to be immediately useful. It was better to gather feedback from the real world and improve

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would collide with the innovators and the corporate monopolies who were battling to control AGI, becoming an unpredictable hazard for the technology. They would push Sam Altman out of OpenAI, for instance, and paradoxically boost the commercial efforts of companies, painting an apocalyptic picture of AI’s power that ended up making

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a future that could look like either heaven or hell, Bostrom sparked a prevailing wisdom that would eventually drive the Silicon Valley AI builders like Sam Altman to race to build AGI before Demis Hassabis did in London: they had to build AGI first because only they could do so safely. If

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, reinforcement learning. Sutskever was OpenAI’s chief scientist and, like his cofounders, a deep believer in the possibilities of AGI. But Hassabis still bristled at Sam Altman’s audacity in hiring people who knew of DeepMind’s secrets, and anxieties crept up on him late at night. Hassabis would typically come home

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was a profitable endeavor. Only that could explain why he agreed to work on that with one of the best-connected entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley: Sam Altman, the guy who turned “millions” into “billions” on slide decks, the guy who’d stuffed Y Combinator with futuristic start-ups, and the guy whose

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, according to someone who was close to that work. After consulting with legal experts, DeepMind decided it would not go down the same route that Sam Altman initially had by becoming a nonprofit organization. Instead, its founders contrived a completely new legal structure they called a global interest company or GIC. The

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before hitting the iceberg. Still, that didn’t stop an AI scientist named Timnit Gebru from trying. In December 2015, at the NeurIPS conference where Sam Altman and Elon Musk announced they were creating AI “for the benefit of humanity,” Gebru looked around at the thousands of other attendees and shuddered. Almost

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the true-to-life gender imbalances they were introducing into their software. Clearly AI had problems that should have been dealt with yesterday, so when Sam Altman announced OpenAI in 2015, Gebru was livid. She started writing an open letter about how wasteful it was for a few egocentric billionaires like Musk

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the face of it, more impressive than moving some black and white stones around on a board. A mini cold war was also brewing between Sam Altman and Demis Hassabis, and OpenAI’s convivial board member Reid Hoffman was looking for ways to get the two of them to “smoke the peace

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Models and Their Implications.” The release barely seemed to register among the leadership of DeepMind over in the UK. Though Demis Hassabis quietly resented what Sam Altman was doing, he didn’t give much credence to OpenAI’s strategy of focusing on language. He saw that as just one of many routes

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rewards of the large investments—instead of donations—that would come their way. Over the next few years, Microsoft would pour even more capital into Sam Altman’s firm, giving OpenAI staff a chance to sell shares and become millionaires. Many of its researchers didn’t believe their mission had been compromised

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technology before testing them properly. Amodei’s concerns were shared by Demis Hassabis in London. Around the time OpenAI was preparing to release GPT-3, Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, and Ilya Sutskever had dinner with the founders of DeepMind as part of the ongoing effort to smooth relations between the two rival

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just a walkout over safety or the commercialization of AI, though. Even among the most hardcore worriers of AI, there was opportunism. Amodei had watched Sam Altman broker a huge, $1 billion investment from Microsoft firsthand and could sense that there was likely more capital where that came from. He was right

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as a public benefit corporation, the legal business structure Ben & Jerry’s used to put social and environmental concerns on the same level as shareholders. Sam Altman now had another rival to contend with besides DeepMind and one that had a more dangerous insight into OpenAI’s secret sauce. Just as Amodei

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Google. But these well-meaning governance structures weren’t sustainable when you were operating inside of a global titan with a bottom line to protect. Sam Altman would learn this the hard way, and that reality hit Suleyman too. He didn’t want to force the panelists scrutinizing DeepMind’s health division

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extremist material and conspiracy theories. The web’s cloak of anonymity gave people the freedom to talk about taboo subjects, just as it had given Sam Altman a much-needed safe haven on AOL to talk to other people who were gay. But many people also used it to malign others and

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in newspapers and websites, more than one thousand citations from other researchers, while “stochastic parrot” became a catchphrase for the limits of large language models. Sam Altman would later tweet, “I am a stochastic parrot and so r u” days after the release of ChatGPT. Much as Altman may have been mocking

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models to code wasn’t just keeping its new partner happy. It was making its models smarter too. Somasegar asked Nadella what he thought about Sam Altman. “He cares about solving global problems,” Nadella replied. The range of topics that Altman talked about with Nadella was “off the charts” Somasegar remembers, and

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, governments and policymakers were paying more attention to a well-financed group of louder voices: the AI doomers. CHAPTER 14 A Vague Sense of Doom Sam Altman had set off several different races when he launched ChatGPT. The first was obvious: Who would bring the best large language model to market first

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human race in the future, didn’t that also mean it was powerful enough to boost your business now? And it seemed like the more Sam Altman talked about the threat of OpenAI’s technology—telling Congress, for instance, that tools like ChatGPT could “cause significant harm to the world”—the more

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the drum about these and other real-world side effects from generative AI. But instead of tackling those issues and moving to become more transparent, Sam Altman was trying to shape government policy. In May 2023, he went before a Senate committee to talk about the dangers of AI and how it

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AI in the next ten to fifty years, and more of the general public believe in the once-fringe ideas that drove Demis Hassabis and Sam Altman. Thanks to their persistence and rivalry, it is no longer science fiction. But AGI’s blurry definition has also made it easier to obscure the

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easy for AGI’s builders to ignore the contradiction of building something that had a chance of wiping out humans. And it meant that when Sam Altman spoke about distributing $100 trillion to the world, he did not have to explain how he would do so. As he hobnobbed with global leaders

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their quests turned into a heated rivalry. Demis Hassabis believed that AGI could help us better understand the universe and drive forward scientific discovery, while Sam Altman thought it could create an abundance of wealth that would raise everyone’s living standards. How their Holy Grail would transpire was undefinable. They didn

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and OpenAI to stay independent and assign boards of trustees to govern the direction of AI? That would have come with its own risks, as Sam Altman would later discover. Suleyman, who fought hard to extricate his company from DeepMind, has argued in interviews that large companies can be more trustworthy than

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rooted in the designs of a handful of people and the systemic forces they operated in. When the question arises of whether we can trust Sam Altman and Demis Hassabis, along with Microsoft and Google, to build our AI future, the answer is that we have little choice in the matter. Both

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cited with words such as “says,” “remembers,” or “recalls,” these are direct interviews that I conducted with those individuals, and they include Demis Hassabis and Sam Altman. Many others whom I spoke to are referred to as former employees or individuals familiar with the matter, and who remain anonymous for reasons often

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that I could not include in the story due to constraints on space, but that were valuable in giving me context on the lives of Sam Altman and Demis Hassabis and their work and the field of AI, as well as experts who helped me understand and translate the workings of machine

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, Wall Street Journal, and Forbes also greatly informed my research. I exploited my love of running to listen to countless hours of podcast interviews with Sam Altman, Demis Hassabis, Ilya Sutskever, Greg Brockman, and many other individuals who were involved in the creation of OpenAI and DeepMind, or who witnessed the evolution

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phone, but it was worth it. Chapter 1: High School Hero Altman, Sam. “Machine Intelligence, Part 1.” blog.samaltman.com, February 25, 2015. Cannon, Craig. “Sam Altman.” Y Combinator (podcast), November 8, 2018. “First Look: Loopt Provides More Incentives to Try Location-based Services with Loopt Star.” Robert Scoble’s YouTube channel

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, June 1, 2010. Friend, Tad. “Sam Altman’s Manifest Destiny.” New Yorker, October 3, 2016. Graham, Paul. “How to Start a Startup.” paulgraham.com, March 2005. Graham, Paul. “How Y Combinator Started

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of the Giants (podcast), Vox Media, August 2, 2023. Internet Archive for the now defunct website, http://www.loopt.com/. Lessin, Jessica. “This Is How Sam Altman Works the Press and Congress. I Know from Experience.” The Information, June 7, 2023. Mitchell, Melanie. Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans. New York

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channel, March 19, 2019. Regalado, Antonio. “A Startup Is Pitching a Mind-Uploading Service that Is ‘100 Percent Fatal.’” MIT Technology Review, March 13, 2018. “Sam Altman—Leading with Crippling Anxiety, Discovering Meditation, and Building Intelligence with Self-Awareness.” The Art of Accomplishment (podcast), January 15, 2022. Stiegler, Marc. The Gentle Seduction

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, 2023. Suleyman, Mustafa, with Michael Bhaskar. The Coming Wave. New York: Crown, 2023. Chapter 6: The Mission Albergotti, Reed. “The Secret History of Elon Musk, Sam Altman, and OpenAI.” Semafor, March 24, 2023. Birhane, Abeba, Pratyusha Kalluri, Dallas Card, William Agnew, Ravit Dotan, and Michelle Bao. “The Values Encoded in Machine Learning

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. Dowd, Maureen. “Elon Musk’s Billion-Dollar Crusade to Stop the A.I. Apocalypse.” Vanity Fair, March 26, 2017. Elon Musk vs Sam Altman [2024] CGC-24-612746. Friend, Tad. “Sam Altman’s Manifest Destiny.” New Yorker, October 3, 2016. Galef, Jesse. “Elon Musk Donates $10M to Our Research Program.” futureoflife.org, January 22

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17, 2020. Hao, Karen, and Charlie Warzel. “Inside the Chaos at OpenAI.” The Atlantic, November 19, 2023. Jin, Berber, and Keach Hagey. “The Contradictions of Sam Altman, AI Crusader.” Wall Street Journal, March 31, 2023. Kraft, Amy. “Microsoft Shuts Down AI Chatbot after It Turned into a Nazi.” CBS News, March 25

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Placed on Leave after Employees Complained about Bullying and Humiliation for Years. Then Google Made Him a VP.” Business Insider, August 7, 2021. Friend, Tad. “Sam Altman’s Manifest Destiny.” New Yorker, October 3, 2016. Hodson, Hal. “Revealed: Google AI Has Access to Huge Haul of NHS Patient Data.” New Scientist, April

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, February 16, 2024. Chapter 13: Hello, ChatGPT “AlphaFold: The Making of a Scientific Breakthrough.” Google DeepMind’s YouTube channel, November 30, 2020. Andersen, Ross. “Does Sam Altman Know What He’s Creating?” The Atlantic, July 24, 2023. Grant, Nico. “Google Calls in Help from Larry Page and Sergey Brin for A.I

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Applications.” www.medium.com, August 5, 2023. Roose, Kevin. “Bing’s A.I. Chat: ‘I Want to Be Alive.’” New York Times, February 16, 2023. “Sam Altman on the A.I. Revolution, Trillionaires and the Future of Political Power.” The Ezra Klein Show (podcast), June 11, 2021. Weise, Karen, Cade Metz, Nico

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Experiments: An Open Letter.” Future of Life Institute, www .futureoflife.org, March 22, 2023. Perrigo, Billy. “OpenAI Could Quit Europe Over New AI Rules, CEO Sam Altman Warns.” Time, May 25, 2023. Piantadosi, Steven (@spiantado). “Yes, ChatGPT is amazing and impressive. No, @OpenAI has not come close to addressing the problem of

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Technology.” www.romney.senate.gov, September 19, 2023. Roose, Kevin. “Inside the White-Hot Center of A.I. Doomerism.” New York Times, July 11, 2023. “Sam Altman: ‘I Trust Answers Generated by ChatGPT Least than Anybody Else on Earth.’” Business Today’s YouTube channel, June 8, 2023. Singer, Peter. The Life You

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, 2023. Roose, Kevin. “Inside the White-Hot Center of A.I. Doomerism.” New York Times, July 11, 2023. Sigalos, MacKenzie, and Ryan Browne. “OpenAI’s Sam Altman Says Human-level AI Is Coming but Will Change World Much Less Than We Think.” CNBC, January 16, 2024. Victor, Jon, and Amir Efrati. “OpenAI

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Made an AI Breakthrough before Altman Firing, Stoking Excitement and Concern.” The Information, November 22, 2023. Walker, Bernadette. “Inside OpenAI’s Shock Firing of Sam Altman.” Bloomberg, November 20, 2023. Zuckerberg, Mark. “Some Updates on Our AI Efforts.” Video posted January 18, 2024 on Facebook. https://www.facebook.com/zuck/posts

On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything

by Nate Silver  · 12 Aug 2024  · 848pp  · 227,015 words

the chapter ends with a bang. Chapter ∞, Termination, is the first of a two-part conclusion. I’ll introduce you to another Sam, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, and others behind the development of ChatGPT and other large language models. Unlike the government-run Manhattan Project, the charge into the frontiers of AI

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major investor in the AI company Anthropic. There’s a not-so-remote chance that he could have been in a position like that of Sam Altman, heading up a market-leading firm. (As of early 2024, many AI nerds regard Anthropic’s model Claude as the worthiest competitor to OpenAI’s

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the other are all those activities that generate expression, requiring the individual to lay himself on the line and place himself in jeopardy. —Erving Goffman Sam Altman always knew where the action was. “You know how a dog will run around a room sniffing anything interesting? Sam does that with technology, just

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know how to answer the question—were uncannily humanlike. So at the very moment in late 2022 that Sam Bankman-Fried’s empire was collapsing, Sam Altman’s was soaring to new heights. Inside OpenAI, the recognition of the miracle had come sooner[*8]—with the development of GPT-3 if not

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at a locals casino six hundred times an hour because you’ve become hopelessly addicted, you don’t have much agency at all. What if Sam Altman’s dreams of an AI that alleviates global poverty don’t come true? Instead Hyper-Commodified Casino Capitalism imagines us stuck in a TRS 8

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Failure in Silicon Valley, Kindle ed. (New York: Harper, 2016), 104–5. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT his company Loopt: Liz Games, “Loopt’s Sam Altman on Why He Sold to Green Dot for $43.4M,” AllThingsD, March 9, 2012, allthingsd.com/20120309/green-dot-buys-location-app-loopt-for-43

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Graham, “Five Founders,” April 2009, paulgraham.com/5founders.html. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT later handpicked Altman: Paul Graham, “Sam Altman for President,” Y Combinator, February 21, 2014, ycombinator.com/blog/sam-altman-for-president. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT he was fired: Elizabeth Dwoskin and Nitasha Tiku, “Altman’s Polarizing Past

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Hints at OpenAI Board’s Reason for Firing Him,” The Washington Post, November 22, 2023, washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/11/22/sam-altman-fired-y-combinator-paul-graham. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “Technology happens because”: Cade Metz, “The ChatGPT King Isn’t Worried, but He Knows

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You Might Be,” The New York Times, March 31, 2023, sec. Technology, nytimes.com/2023/03/31/technology/sam-altman-open-ai-chatgpt.html. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT that Altman knew: Per email to Nate Silver, January 19, 2024. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE

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IN TEXT taking a shot: Sam Altman (@sama), “i’ve been stopping myself from sending my EA tweetstorm for a week but idk how much more self-restraint i have,” Twitter, November

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—a commonsensical moral sentiment, but one that goes strongly against Singer’s notion of impartiality. Tad Friend, “Sam Altman’s Manifest Destiny,” The New Yorker, October 3, 2016, newyorker.com/magazine/2016/10/10/sam-altmans-manifest-destiny. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT like Emmett Shear: When I asked Shear if he had

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TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Post describes him: Nitasha Tiku, “OpenAI Leaders Warned of Abusive Behavior before Sam Altman’s Ouster,” The Washington Post, December 8, 2023, washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/12/08/open-ai-sam-altman-complaints. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT companies like OpenAI and Anthropic: “Google Brain Drain: Where are

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Oremus, “CEO Behind ChatGPT Warns Congress AI Could Cause ‘Harm to the World,’ ” The Washington Post, May 17, 2023, washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/05/16/sam-altman-open-ai-congress-hearing. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “Attention Is All”: Ashish Vaswani et al., “Attention Is All You Need,” arXiv, August 1

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, June 19, 2022, forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/NBgpPaz5vYe3tH4ga/on-deference-and-yudkowsky-s-ai-risk-estimates. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT he posed for: Sam Altman (@sama), Twitter, February 24, 2023, twitter.com/sama/status/1628974165335379973. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “any final goal”: Nick Bostrom, Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies

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nominally: Alnoor Ebrahim, “OpenAI Is a Nonprofit-Corporate Hybrid: A Management Expert Explains How This Model Works—And How It Fueled the Tumult Around CEO Sam Altman’s Short-Lived Ouster,” The Conversation, November 30, 2023, http://theconversation.com/openai-is-a-nonprofit-corporate-hybrid-a-management-expert-explains-how-this-model

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-works-and-how-it-fueled-the-tumult-around-ceo-sam-altmans-short-lived-ouster-218340. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT like fast food: Nate Silver, “The McDonald’s Theory of Why Everyone Thinks the Economy

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IN TEXT benevolently seen to it: Le Guin, Always Coming Home, 438. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Altman reportedly wants: wsj.com/tech/ai/sam-altman-seeks-trillions-of-dollars-to-reshape-business-of-chips-and-ai-89ab3db0. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT the broader population: This paragraph was shaped

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, 199 AI (artificial intelligence) accelerationists, 31, 250, 411–13, 455–56, 477, 539n adaptability and, 236n agency and, 469–70 alignment and, 441–42, 478 Sam Altman and, 406 analogies for, 446, 541n bias and, 440n breakthrough in, 414–15 commercial applications, 452–53 culture wars and, 273 decels, 477 defined, 478

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“move fast and break things,” 250, 270, 419, 490 Mowshowitz, Zvi, 370 Murray, John, 174, 177, 208 Musk, Elon AI existential risk and, 406n, 416 Sam Altman and, 406 autism and, 282, 284 competitiveness and, 25–26 cryptocurrency and, 314–15 cults of personality and, 31 culture wars and, 29 effective altruism

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(sports betting), 499 Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act (UIGEA), 13 update (Bayes’ theorem), 499 Upriver, 20–21, 500 Urban, Tim, 273 Urschel, John, 231 utilitarianism Sam Altman and, 408 defined, 500 effective altruism and, 359–61, 362–63, 378, 533n futurism and, 379 hedonistic, 363n overfitting/underfitting and, 362–65, 368 rule

The Launch Pad: Inside Y Combinator, Silicon Valley's Most Exclusive School for Startups

by Randall Stross  · 4 Sep 2013  · 332pp  · 97,325 words

?” “We basically believe in the power of memory, nostalgia. We could go into lots of physical products—” a Kalvin begins. Another YC partner jumps in. Sam Altman is an alumnus from Y Combinator’s inaugural batch, summer 2005, and holds a day job as the chief executive of Loopt, the company that

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wish to compare the reliability of different wireless carriers’ service. The technical expertise embodied in their testing software impressed him, and even more important, impressed Sam Altman, the resident expert in the room on wireless technology. After a few minutes, however, Graham cannot wait any longer to inquire what possible reason accounts

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all of them. There’s no limit! Do them all next month!” The founders laugh, thinking Graham could not possibly be serious, but he is. Sam Altman, whose voice is always serious, asks the CampusCreds, “Is there a reason you haven’t done that?” “We need a rep at most of the

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of Posterous, who became the designer in residence at YC, and three founders who had been in the first YC batch in Cambridge in 2005: Sam Altman, the cofounder of Loopt, and Justin Kan and Emmett Shear, the two Yale students whose startup career had begun with Kiko, the online calendar site

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around, seeking guidance from the other YC partners. Once Jason Tan has arrived in San Francisco, he and Ballinger sign up for office hours with Sam Altman. Perhaps he will give them the encouragement to pursue one of the consumer ideas. Ballinger and Tan begin by explaining to Altman that they have

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guidance on how to attack a seemingly endless to-do list. Shah has noticed that Paul Graham is best for the big, strategic questions, but Sam Altman is a better person to go to for questions about operational details. When office hours with Altman are posted for a Sunday afternoon, Shah is

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best way to enter into the market and capture it, if you will,” he says. Campbell talks rapidly in normal conversation, almost as fast as Sam Altman, but when he shifts into sell mode, he speaks doubly fast. The contrast between his rapid speaking style and that of this job candidate is

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, YC partners were distributed across generations. Graham came of age before Paul Buchheit, who came of age before Harj Taggar, who came of age before Sam Altman. Additional coverage was provided by the other partners: Justin Kan, Emmett Shear, Garry Tan, and, near the end of the summer, the newest partner, Aaron

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.” “You want to do outreach in the universities. So educate people that this even exists.” Knox replies, “I think you might have suggested it but Sam Altman really drove home that having people on the ground is a good idea. So we’ve started—we’ve got four interns.” “And by that

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imperceptibly tiny tweaks. The Rap Geniuses—Tom Lehman, Ilan Zechory, and Mahbod Moghadam—head into the meeting room in the corner for office hours with Sam Altman. They had started the summer in an enviable position, with a Web site growing at a healthy clip, seemingly on its own. The prodding from

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midst of fund-raising, a subject that holds them in an obsessive grip. The evening program for this final dinner consists of Paul Graham and Sam Altman offering fund-raising advice, with the hope that the founders will soon get back to work on their products. The founders have been busily exchanging

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made this book possible. I expanded their workload with uncountable requests for information, and I also imposed upon the other YC partners and staff members: Sam Altman, Trevor Blackwell, Paul Buchheit, Kate Courteau, Aaron Iba, Justin Kan, Kirsty Nathoo, Geoff Ralston, Renee Robinson, Emmett Shear, Harj Taggar, and Garry Tan. I wish

We Are the Nerds: The Birth and Tumultuous Life of Reddit, the Internet's Culture Laboratory

by Christine Lagorio-Chafkin  · 1 Oct 2018

for mustering confidence; perhaps the shots of vodka chased with Listerine that he, his cousin, and their buddy had just downed helped.) Nineteen-year-old Sam Altman pitched Loopt, a location-aware social networking application, with two other founders. Only by the time of the interview, Altman’s cofounders seemed like they

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nicknames she’d made for each group, such as “The Kikos,” the Yale group with the great four-letter domain name. They made the cut. Sam Altman, the solo sophomore: yes. The Russians, whom Graham had started to think of as “The 3 Mikhails” (never mind that one of them was named

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he knew his car was a little flashy. He wanted to make a good first impression with the guy he’d heard so much about: Sam Altman. As Wong parked a good distance from the door, he noticed in his rearview mirror another Tesla—this one an even flashier lighter shade of

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Altman together had executed. Significant venture capital rounds were in their minds associated with fast-growing startups unconcerned by trivial matters such as making money. Sam Altman, who’d led the round, assumed a new seat on Reddit’s board, which was now comprised of Ohanian, Sauerberg, Wong, and Keith Rabois, the

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. It was almost 2 a.m.—but 10 a.m. in San Francisco. He had more calls to make. Ohanian had just hung up with Sam Altman. He knew he’d still need to talk to Steve Newhouse—and Bob Sauerberg, another Condé executive. He sighed. Altman had filled him in on

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was a risk, but perhaps a necessary one. He locked eyes with Huffman and told him, “You’re running into a burning building.” Huffman figured Sam Altman, one of Reddit’s major financial backers, had been back-channeling through his friends, in an attempt to positively influence him, so he tried to

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how to begin to make them reality. Huffman also had an AMA to complete beginning promptly at 10 a.m. On the thread begun by Sam Altman, “An old team at reddit,” and on his AMA, “I am Steve Huffman, the new CEO of Reddit. AMA,” he promptly stuck his foot in

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figures, including Huffman and Ohanian (third and fourth from left), Chris Slowe (fifth from left), Justin Kan (front seated), Aaron Swartz (immediately behind him), and Sam Altman (arms crossed). Courtesy of Kate Courteau. After Y Combinator ended, Aaron Swartz’s company, Infogami, merged with Reddit. Swartz moved into the apartment Huffman, Ohanian

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: Paul Graham, “Jessica Livingston,” paulgraham.com, November 2015. “The relationship between hackers”: Aardvark’d: 12 Weeks with Geeks. “VCs: soulless agents of Satan”: Tad Friend, “Sam Altman’s Manifest Destiny,” New Yorker, October 10, 2016. “Paul in one person”: Aardvark’d: 12 Weeks with Geeks. Hell Summer Within months, twelve thousand people

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Pao and Jena Donlin Get Serious About the Site’s Business (Q&A),” Recode, April 8, 2014. Graham had approached him in 2012: Colleen Taylor, “Sam Altman Taking Over as President of Y Combinator, Replacing Paul Graham at the Helm,” TechCrunch, February 21, 2014. Every Man Is Responsible for His Own Soul

Genius Makers: The Mavericks Who Brought A. I. To Google, Facebook, and the World

by Cade Metz  · 15 Mar 2021  · 414pp  · 109,622 words

, the founder and CEO of Tesla and SpaceX didn’t arrive for more than an hour. But another conspicuous Silicon Valley investor was already there: Sam Altman, president of the start-up accelerator Y Combinator. He greeted Brockman and introduced him to the small group of AI researchers who’d gathered on

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cars inside his Tesla factories weren’t as nimble as they seemed. “Excessive automation at Tesla was a mistake,” he said. “Humans are underrated.” As Sam Altman took the reins at OpenAI, the lab needed to attract new talent—and it needed money. Though investors had committed a billion dollars to the

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. Many of the other guests were the millionaire founders of start-ups that had recently emerged from Y Combinator, the start-up accelerator overseen by Sam Altman. Some were among the founders who’d responded to a mysterious invitation five years earlier, filed into a conference room inside the Y Combinator offices

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Milner suddenly announced he was investing $150,000 in each and every one of their brand-new companies. Yuri Milner hosted the Westworld screening alongside Sam Altman. “Sam Altman + Yuri Milner invite you to a pre-release screening of the opening episode of Westworld, a new HBO series exploring the dawn of artificial consciousness

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belief. Although researchers like Sutskever were initially reticent about voicing their views, Elon Musk did not hold back. Nor did the lab’s other chairman: Sam Altman. In the first days of 2017, the Future of Life Institute held another summit, this one in a tiny town on the central coast of

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computer and brain—and it moved into the same offices as OpenAI. Though Musk soon left OpenAI, the lab’s ambitions only grew under Altman. Sam Altman was a Silicon Valley archetype: In 2005, he founded a social networking company as a twenty-year-old college sophomore. The company was called Loopt

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to Sequence paper, a step forward for automatic translation. 2015—Geoff Hinton spends the summer at DeepMind. AlphaGo defeats Fan Hui in London. Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Ilya Sutskever, and Greg Brockman found OpenAI. 2016—DeepMind unveils DeepMind Health. AlphaGo defeats Lee Sedol in Seoul, South Korea. Qi Lu leaves Microsoft. Google

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Microsoft AI researcher. LI DENG, the researcher who brought Geoff Hinton’s ideas to Microsoft. PETER LEE, head of research. SATYA NADELLA, CEO. AT OPENAI SAM ALTMAN, the president of Silicon Valley start-up incubator Y Combinator who became OpenAI’s CEO. GREG BROCKMAN, the former chief technology officer of fintech start

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, “Inside OpenAI, Elon Musk’s Wild Plan to Set Artificial Intelligence Free,” Wired, April 27, 2016, https://www.wired.com/2016/04/openai-elon-musk-sam-altman-plan-to-set-artificial-intelligence-free/. nearly $2 million for the first year: OpenAI, form 990, 2016. Musk and Altman painted OpenAI as a counterweight

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-connect-brains-with-computers-1490642652. as a twenty-year-old college sophomore: Tad Friend, “Sam Altman’s Manifest Destiny,” New Yorker, October 3, 2016, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/10/10/sam-altmans-manifest-destiny. “Self-belief is immensely powerful”: Sam Altman blog, “How to Be Successful,” January 24, 2019, https://blog.samaltman.com/how

More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley's Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity

by Adam Becker  · 14 Jun 2025  · 381pp  · 119,533 words

influence to do that. But his ideas do carry weight with some of the politically connected leaders of the tech industry. One of them is Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT; he’s suggested that Yudkowsky may eventually “deserve the Nobel Peace Prize” for his work on AI

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. “[They are] fairly important in the whole Silicon Valley ecosystem.”3 “Eliezer has IMO [in my opinion] done more to accelerate AGI than anyone else,” Sam Altman wrote in 2023. “Certainly he got many of us interested in AGI, helped DeepMind get funded at a time when AGI was extremely outside the

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superintelligent AGI has enabled a few companies, or a single company, to capture much of the money in the world.43 (This sounds similar to Sam Altman’s ideas, and that may not be a coincidence: two of the other authors on that paper ended up working for Altman.) For a time

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. “Last week, Sunak met four of the world’s most senior executives in the AI industry, including Sundar Pichai, the chief executive of Google, and Sam Altman, the chief executive of ChatGPT’s parent company OpenAI. After the meeting that included Altman, Downing Street acknowledged for the first time the ‘existential risks

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Washington Post, among many others.57 The statement was signed by nearly seven hundred tech executives, AI scientists, and other assorted academics and luminaries, including Sam Altman, Bill Gates, Peter Singer, Dustin Moskovitz, Ray Kurzweil, David Chalmers, Eliezer Yudkowsky, and the musician Grimes. Ord signed too, as did a notable former member

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reason, nineties rapper MC Hammer. Many of the ideas espoused by Andreessen and the effective accelerationists are taken quite seriously among other tech billionaires too. Sam Altman believes that AGI is coming, and, like Andreessen and Kurzweil, he believes this will lead to “Moore’s Law for everything.”13 That’s the

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world. Peter Thiel has aided that erosion with his support of Trump and other far-right politicians. The antidemocratic ambitions of tech billionaires extend through Sam Altman’s power fantasy of his own ascension to king of the world straight to the permanent galactic fascism of Marc Andreessen. While those specific visions

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, IL Zach Weinersmith, August 24, 2023, video call Şerife Wong, January 3, 2024, San Francisco, CA Eliezer Yudkowsky, May 24, 2024, video call INTERVIEW REQUESTS Sam Altman (declined) Marc Andreessen (declined) Jeff Bezos (ignored) Nick Bostrom (declined) Eric Drexler (declined) Ray Kurzweil (declined) William MacAskill (canceled, ignored requests to reschedule) Elon Musk

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All Down,” Time, March 29, 2023, https://time.com/6266923/ai-eliezer-yudkowsky-open-letter-not-enough/. 4 Sam Altman (@sama), Twitter (now X), February 3, 2023, https://twitter.com/sama/status/1621621725791404032. 5 Sam Altman, “Moore’s Law for Everything,” March 16, 2021, https://moores.samaltman.com/. 6 Cade Metz, “The ChatGPT King

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, but He Knows You Might Be,” New York Times, March 31, 2023, www.nytimes.com/2023/03/31/technology/sam-altman-open-ai-chatgpt.html. 7 Chamath Palihapitiya et al., “In Conversation with Sam Altman,” May 10, 2024, in All-In, podcast, YouTube, www.youtube.com/watch?v=nSM0xd8xHUM. 8 Elon Musk (@elonmusk), Twitter

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Conference, November 4–5, 2022, video, YouTube, November 18, 2022, www.youtube.com/watch?v=ibR_ULHYirs. 4 Sam Altman (@sama), Twitter (now X), February 3, 2023, https://twitter.com/sama/status/1621621724507938816. 5 Sam Altman (@sama), Twitter, archived October 18, 2023, at the Wayback Machine, https://web.archive.org/web/20231018095623/twitter.com

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?v=Yf1o0TQzry8. 101 Karen Hao and Charlie Warzel, “Inside the Chaos at OpenAI,” The Atlantic, November 19, 2023, www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2023/11/sam-altman-open-ai-chatgpt-chaos/676050/; Cade Metz, “OpenAI’s Chief Scientist and Co-Founder Is Leaving the Company,” New York Times, May 14, 2024, www

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, 2023, www.nytimes.com/2023/05/30/technology/ai-threat-warning.html; Sheila Chiang, “A.I. Poses Human Extinction Risk on Par with Nuclear War, Sam Altman and Other Tech Leaders Warn,” CNBC, May 30, 2023, updated May 31, 2023, www.cnbc.com/2023/05/31/ai-poses-human-extinction-risk

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-sam-altman-and-other-tech-leaders-warn.html; Matt O’Brien, “Artificial Intelligence Raises Risk of Extinction, Experts Say in New Warning,” AP, May 30, 2023, https://

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to be a tenable theory of ethics. 12 “Notes on E/acc Principles and Tenets.” 13 Altman, “Moore’s Law for Everything.” 14 Tyler Cowen, “Sam Altman on Loving Community, Hating Coworking, and the Hunt for Talent (Ep. 61—Live in SF),” February 27, 2019, in Conversations with Tyler, podcast, https://conversationswithtyler

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.com/episodes/sam-altman/. 15 Tad Friend, “Sam Altman’s Manifest Destiny,” New Yorker, October 3, 2016, www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/10/10/sam-altmans-manifest-destiny. 16 “Chat with OpenAI CEO and Co-founder Sam Altman, and Chief Scientist Ilya Sutskever,” video, Tel Aviv University, YouTube, June

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5, 2023, www.youtube.com/watch?v=mC-0XqTAeMQ. Source on date of talk: Tel Aviv University, “Sam Altman to Visit Tel Aviv University,” news

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release, May 31, 2023, https://english.tau.ac.il/news/sam_altman_tau. 17 Brad Stone and Sam Altman

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, “Open AI’s Sam Altman: America Will Be Fine After the Election,” video, Bloomberg House Davos, January 16

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/videos/2024-01-16/openai-s-atlman-and-makanju-on-global-implications-of-ai. See also Paris Marx, “Sam Altman’s Self-Serving Vision of the Future,” Disconnect (blog), January 24, 2024, https://disconnect.blog/sam-altmans-self-serving-vision-of-the-future/. 18 John Vidal, “Bill Gates Backs Climate Scientists Lobbying for Large

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. Andrew Hurley (New York: Penguin Books, 1999). 54 Yuan (@QiaochuYuan), “sometimes it’s nice to put on a movie…” 55 Cegłowski, “Moral Economy.” 56 Friend, “Sam Altman’s Manifest Destiny.” 57 “OpenAI Charter,” OpenAI, accessed September 6, 2024, https://openai.com/charter/. 58 An insular, self-reinforcing set of institutions and publication

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21, 2023, https://twitter.com/ModeledBehavior/status/1671486129747492864; Adam Ozimek (@ModeledBehavior), Twitter (now X), June 21, 2023, https://twitter.com/ModeledBehavior/status/1671486837959868417. 61 Friend, “Sam Altman’s Manifest Destiny.” 62 Paul Krugman, “The Paranoid Style in American Plutocrats,” New York Times, August 28, 2023, www.nytimes.com/2023/08/28/opinion

Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age

by Vauhini Vara  · 8 Apr 2025  · 301pp  · 105,209 words

can create a more nuanced and balanced portrayal of big tech companies, recognizing both their contributions and their challenges. I was thinking about writing about Sam Altman—the CEO of OpenAI, which made ChatGPT. He talks a lot about the positive aspects of these technologies. Writing about

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Sam Altman and his leadership at OpenAI could provide a compelling and balanced perspective on the impact of technology. Here are some aspects you could explore to

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or testimonials that illustrate the practical benefits of AI. By focusing on these aspects, you can create a well-rounded and balanced narrative that showcases Sam Altman’s contributions to AI technology while also addressing the complexities and challenges associated with its development and use. That gives me a lot to consider

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downsides was a small but influential nonprofit research lab called OpenAI, founded in 2015 by Elon Musk and others, including an investor and entrepreneur named Sam Altman, 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

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supporting AI research and development while gesturing only vaguely at possible restrictions on it. “Schumer’s new AI framework reads like it was written by Sam Altman and Big Tech lobbyists,” Evan Greer, the director of the digital-rights group Fight for the Future, would complain afterward. Back when I met Altman

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my experience—the natural resource Borges spoke of—to it. I wondered if, given my failure thus far to communicate about my sister’s death, Sam Altman’s machine could do it for me. Chapter 10 Ghosts 1. My sister was diagnosed with Ewing sarcoma when I was in my freshman year

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loss, technology, and the complex relationship between human emotions and artificial intelligence. The narrative delves into the protagonist’s interactions with influential tech figures like Sam Altman, juxtaposing their professional advancements with personal struggles, particularly surrounding the death of the protagonist’s sister. This blend of personal grief and technological progress raises

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existential issues. Thank you for saying that—I really appreciate it. I’m curious about your thoughts on how Sam Altman comes across, given your interest in him. Any suggestions for revision? Sam Altman comes across as a complex figure in your novel. He is depicted as someone who is deeply embedded in the

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a man caught between ambition and a desire for social justice.” By incorporating these elements, you can create a more nuanced and engaging portrayal of Sam Altman, enriching your narrative and deepening the reader’s connection to the characters. A visionary and a pragmatist—admirable qualities in a CEO. Indeed, being both

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a CEO. These attributes allow a leader to set ambitious goals while also being realistic about the challenges and practical steps needed to achieve them. Sam Altman embodies these qualities in your novel, making him a compelling character. Here’s how you could enhance his portrayal to highlight these traits effectively: Revised

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Passage: “Sam Altman, the young president of Y Combinator, exemplified the rare combination of visionary and pragmatist. His reputation in Silicon Valley was built on his ability to

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are coming from. It’s not enough to just push forward with our ideas—we need to bring everyone along with us.’ In those moments, Sam Altman was more than a CEO. He was a bridge between the worlds of innovation and humanity, striving to ensure that the future he envisioned would

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and staying grounded, a balance that defined his leadership and his legacy.” By incorporating these elements, you can create a richer, more nuanced portrayal of Sam Altman, highlighting his qualities as a visionary and pragmatist while also delving into his internal conflicts and the broader implications of his work. Noted! Thanks! So

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do you think about this power as it relates to ChatGPT? I’m thinking, for example, of the positive way you—an OpenAI product—portrayed Sam Altman when you were giving me thoughts on how to write about him. And then, when asked for thoughts on revision for my chapter about him

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, you added lines like “Sam Altman was more than a CEO. He was a bridge between the worlds of innovation and humanity, striving to ensure that the future he envisioned would

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, might influence perceptions are insightful and important to consider. Here’s a reflection on the points you raised: Portrayal of Sam Altman: It’s true that the way I initially described Sam Altman emphasized positive traits and achievements. This can be seen as a reflection of the information and perspectives that are most readily

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agreement, they will use our content in a more or less rigorous and more or less clandestine manner without any benefit for us.” OpenAI’s Sam Altman declared, meanwhile, “Together, we are setting the foundation for a future where AI deeply respects, enhances, and upholds the standards of world-class journalism.” When

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stab at an ending? I’d love one that brings back some of the important characters from earlier in the book—from my sister to Sam Altman—and gives the plot a satisfying ending while also bringing the book’s main ideas to some resolution. Also, while endings can sometimes feel a

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me into exploring the intersections of technology, art, and human connection, leading me to conversations with some of the most influential minds of our time. Sam Altman’s vision of a future intertwined with AI had been both inspiring and troubling. His drive to push the boundaries of innovation was a reminder

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fragments I’d provided. It was a poignant, fictionalized memory of a day we never shared. It was beautiful, yet unsettling. I reached out to Sam Altman, curious about his thoughts on this convergence of memory and invention. His response was swift: “AI can give us tools to explore our humanity in

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ideal approach to governing this community would be “to combine creating a large-scale democratic process to determine standards with AI to help enforce them.” Sam Altman, from OpenAI, is especially expansive in his projections. In one interview, with Bill Gates, he said, “Someday, maybe there’s an AI where you can

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we build this sort of generally intelligent system, basically we will ask it to figure out a way to generate an investment return for them,” Sam Altman told one onstage interviewer, years before ChatGPT came out, when OpenAI hadn’t yet monetized its research. Laughter gently emanated from the audience, and Altman

Elon Musk

by Walter Isaacson  · 11 Sep 2023  · 562pp  · 201,502 words

Thornfield Hall burns down and you are blind, I’ll come to you and take care of you.” 40 Artificial Intelligence OpenAI, 2012–2015 With Sam Altman Peter Thiel, the PayPal cofounder who had invested in SpaceX, holds a conference each year with the leaders of companies financed by his Founders Fund

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. “But I realized that it was not going to rise to the level of something that he would do anything about.” Musk then turned to Sam Altman, a tightly bundled software entrepreneur, sports car enthusiast, and survivalist who, behind his polished veneer, had a Musk-like intensity. Altman had met Musk a

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group of independent journalists to create The Free Press, a subscription-based newsletter on Substack. Musk had met her briefly after he was interviewed by Sam Altman, his cofounder of OpenAI, at the Allen & Company conference in Sun Valley a few months earlier. She went backstage to say how glad she was

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was comparing his project at Tesla to the artificial intelligence chatbot that had just been released by OpenAI, the lab that Musk had cofounded with Sam Altman in 2015. For almost a decade, Musk had been working on various forms of artificial intelligence, including self-driving cars, Optimus the robot, and the

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Google from purchasing DeepMind, the company formed by AI pioneer Demis Hassabis. When that failed, he formed a competing lab, a nonprofit called OpenAI, with Sam Altman in 2015. Humans can be pricklier than machines, and Musk eventually split with Altman, left the board of OpenAI, and lured away its high-profile

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storm brewing. And there was no one more attracted to a storm than Musk. In February 2023, he invited—perhaps a better word is “summoned”—Sam Altman to meet with him at Twitter and asked him to bring the founding documents for OpenAI. Musk challenged him to justify how he could legally

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receive exclusive offers in your inbox. Sources Interviews Omead Afshar. Deputy to Musk. Parag Agrawal. Former CEO of Twitter. Deepak Ahuja. Former CFO of Tesla. Sam Altman. Cofounder of OpenAI with Musk. Drew Baglino. Senior vice president, Tesla. Jehn Balajadia. Assistant to Musk. Jeremy Barenholtz. Head of brain interfaces software, Neuralink. Melissa

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with Talulah Riley, Elon Musk, Maye Musk, Kimbal Musk, Navaid Farooq, Bill Lee. Junod, “Force of His Will.” 40. Artificial Intelligence: Author’s interviews with Sam Altman, Demis Hassabis, Elon Musk, Reid Hoffman, Luke Nosek, Shivon Zilis. Steven Levy, “How Elon Musk and Y Combinator Plan to Stop Computers from Taking Over

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Anderson interview with Elon Musk, TED Conference, Apr. 14, 2022. 41. The Launch of Autopilot: Author’s interviews with Drew Baglino, Elon Musk, Omead Afshar, Sam Altman, Sam Teller. Alan Ohnsman, “Tesla CEO Talking with Google about ‘Autopilot’ Systems,” Bloomberg, May 7, 2013; Joseph B. White, “Tesla Aims to Leapfrog Rivals,” Wall

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. 94. AI for Humans: Author’s interviews with Elon Musk, Shivon Zilis, Bill Gates, Jared Birchall, Sam Altman, Demis Hassabis. Reed Albergotti, “The Secret History of Elon Musk, Sam Altman, and OpenAI,” Semafor, Mar. 24, 2023; Kara Swisher, “Sam Altman on What Makes Him ‘Super Nervous’ about AI,” New York, Mar. 23, 2023; Matt Taibbi, “Meet

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Deep Medicine: How Artificial Intelligence Can Make Healthcare Human Again

by Eric Topol  · 1 Jan 2019  · 424pp  · 114,905 words

The Airbnb Story: How Three Ordinary Guys Disrupted an Industry, Made Billions...and Created Plenty of Controversy

by Leigh Gallagher  · 14 Feb 2017  · 290pp  · 87,549 words

The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming

by David Wallace-Wells  · 19 Feb 2019  · 343pp  · 101,563 words

Give People Money

by Annie Lowrey  · 10 Jul 2018  · 242pp  · 73,728 words

Facebook: The Inside Story

by Steven Levy  · 25 Feb 2020  · 706pp  · 202,591 words

An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook's Battle for Domination

by Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang  · 12 Jul 2021  · 372pp  · 100,947 words

Open for Business Harnessing the Power of Platform Ecosystems

by Lauren Turner Claire, Laure Claire Reillier and Benoit Reillier  · 14 Oct 2017  · 240pp  · 78,436 words

The Age of AI: And Our Human Future

by Henry A Kissinger, Eric Schmidt and Daniel Huttenlocher  · 2 Nov 2021  · 194pp  · 57,434 words

12 Bytes: How We Got Here. Where We Might Go Next

by Jeanette Winterson  · 15 Mar 2021  · 256pp  · 73,068 words

Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires

by Douglas Rushkoff  · 7 Sep 2022  · 205pp  · 61,903 words

Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism

by Sarah Wynn-Williams  · 11 Mar 2025  · 370pp  · 115,318 words

AI in Museums: Reflections, Perspectives and Applications

by Sonja Thiel and Johannes C. Bernhardt  · 31 Dec 2023  · 321pp  · 113,564 words