Sam Altman, the AI executive with an eye on the risks

When OpenAI CEO Sam Altman turned up to testify on Capitol Hill for the first time this week, he could hardly have expected an easy ride. The breakout success of ChatGPT, his company’s AI-powered chatbot, has triggered a frantic arms race in the tech industry — even though Altman himself has been among those warning that AI, if not properly controlled, could have troubling consequences for humanity.

His appearance before a Senate subcommittee produced what one former committee staffer described as “Altman-mania.” Lawmakers and the media appeared to hang on his every word as he called for AI regulation and admitted, with disarming understatement, “If this technology goes wrong, it can go quite wrong.”

The performance was “night and day compared to other CEOs”, Senator Richard Blumenthal told reporters — a reminder of the antagonism during Congressional grillings of other tech leaders, including Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos. Altman’s Capitol Hill debut gave many their first sight of the next would-be tech mogul. ChatGPT has turned OpenAI from a nerdy research lab into the hottest of tech properties, seriously rattling AI powerhouse Google along the way.

The 38-year-old Altman is a product of Silicon Valley who, in many ways, resembles a less manic version of Elon Musk. Like the Tesla and SpaceX entrepreneur, he has an eye for the big bet and fondness for the grand visionary statement. Where Musk has rocket ships, Altman has fusion energy (he has sunk $375mn of his own money into nuclear fusion start-up Helion.) Last week, the FT reported that Altman was closing in on a $100mn funding round for his plan to use iris-scanning technology to create a global secure cryptocurrency called Worldcoin.

Brad Lightcap, who has worked with him for seven years and is chief operating officer at OpenAI, describes him as a polymath who slips easily between subjects like AI, nuclear fusion and quantum computing. Altman’s “superpower”, Lightcap adds, is his ability “to articulate a mission around a technology that’s going to be very important to the next two, three, five decades”.

Eight years ago, Altman was at a dinner with Musk and other tech luminaries, which sparked the plan for an AI company dedicated to ensuring the tech’s advances were used safely. As he told the New Yorker, it had dawned on him a few years before, while hiking with friends, that “hardware capable of replicating my brain” was already on the horizon.

“There were only a handful of people investing in these technologies,” says Alexandr Wang of Scale AI, a company first backed by Y Combinator, the renowned tech incubator that Altman then headed. “He’s willing to take big bets, it’s one of the things that made him a great investor. He’s willing to bet long term.”

A dropout from Stanford University, Altman’s first start-up, the location-based social media service Loopt, didn’t take off. But it was enough to put him on Silicon Valley’s fast track. Y Combinator’s founder, Paul Graham, plucked him from relative obscurity aged 28 to run the tech incubator, whose successes include Airbnb and payment company Stripe. It gave Altman a ringside seat to some of the hottest new investment fads, and a taste for placing bets on ideas yet to make it off the drawing board.

At OpenAI, where he has been CEO since 2019, Altman is now engaged in the tech world’s most difficult balancing act. After forging a close partnership with Microsoft, he is racing to capitalise on the global sensation caused by ChatGPT. But he has also taken to warning that the technology, without better controls, could end catastrophically. “It’s a very difficult position for him to be in,” says Wang.

“He’s not a typical ‘tech bro’ excited by the technology alone, he is fascinated by it but also cares deeply about the societal implications,” says Sal Khan, founder of the online tutorial service Khan Academy, who has worked with OpenAI. “It’s not an act.”

Altman has also struggled with finding the best way to balance AI’s huge moneymaking potential with OpenAI’s original mission of making sure the technology benefits humanity at large. Michael Moritz, partner at Sequoia Capital, which is an investor in OpenAI, says Altman rejected his suggestion that the company be set up as a commercial venture from the beginning, preferring to make it a non-profit. But later, to bring in a $1bn investment from Microsoft, Altman recast it in a new hybrid form, capping the returns outside investors could make from a new commercial arm while directing any extra profits into a not-for-profit fund.

Altman himself told US lawmakers this week that he hadn’t taken any equity — unheard of for a start-up founder — and has described his indirect interest in the company through a Y Combinator investment as “immaterial”. With typical deadpan delivery, he said: “I’m doing this because I love it.”

His apparent willingness to pass up potentially huge riches could turn out to be an important factor as OpenAI pursues its unusual dual objectives. The cap on the return to the company’s investors would have been difficult to accept “by itself, without Sam’s absence of equity”, says Moritz. Still, if the technology behind ChatGPT lives up to the big claims around it, Altman could already be on his way to joining the ranks of tech’s biggest moguls. But he may be very unlike any mogul that came before.

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