Given the deep disenchantment with tech power that has set in during the past decade, why would political leaders have lined up to fete Sam Altman, the head of OpenAI?
In 2023, buoyed by the blockbuster release of his company’s ChatGPT, Altman set out on a world tour that brought audiences with leaders in countries including France, the UK and India. He came with a message that was both chilling and inspiring: without proper controls, advanced artificial intelligence might spell doom — but if you trust OpenAI to build it first, the technology will redound to the good of humanity.
A slightly built, earnest talker who was little known outside Silicon Valley, Altman had soaked up the lessons from an earlier generation of tech luminaries. The tour was a brilliant pre-emptive strike suggested by his friend Brian Chesky, head of Airbnb, whose own company had failed to win over politicians early enough.
As both Keach Hagey in The Optimist and Karen Hao in Empire of AI point out, Altman had also absorbed a valuable lesson from hearing Elon Musk talk about sending rockets to Mars: even the most far-fetched claims, made with enough conviction, can attract an army of believers.
Unlike Musk, Altman played it humble. He liked to point out that his company was under the control of a non-profit board that could sack him if he deviated from the mission to benefit humanity. And he had no financial stake in the company: It was all about doing what’s right.
It is still too early to tell if OpenAI’s impact on humanity will put it in the positive or negative column. But these two accounts of the AI boom it unleashed — one a biography of Altman, in which he reluctantly co-operated, the other a broader account of the power the leading AI companies are amassing, with OpenAI at the centre — don’t come a moment too soon. Each picks away at the myths that Altman has built around his company and leaves an unavoidable conclusion: behind all the do-gooder rhetoric, this is no different from past tech booms, driven by the pursuit of power and wealth and spiked with hubris.
It didn’t take long after that world tour for Altman’s disingenuousness to become clear. Later the same year OpenAI’s board did, in fact, sack him — but he didn’t stay sacked, instead turning the tables to oust the board. And by the end of last year, he was ready to convert OpenAI into a more standard, profit-seeking company, a shift that was widely expected to make him hugely wealthy.
The OpenAI chief executive has turned out to be one of tech’s great survivors. He outlasted Musk, an OpenAI co-founder, who stalked away after failing to get more control and eventually launched the rival xAI, as well as a string of executives who fell out with him or quit out of frustration that he wasn’t taking the issue of AI safety seriously enough. Both authors quote Paul Graham, head of start-up incubator Y Combinator and an early mentor: “You could parachute him into an island full of cannibals and come back in five years and he’d be the king.”
There is considerable overlap between these two books, particularly in their very similar — and equally well reported — accounts of Altman’s brief but shocking sacking. But each author brings important reporting and insights, making these works useful companion pieces about one of the biggest stories of our times.
Hagey, a Wall Street Journal reporter, describes how, after Graham put him in charge of Y Combinator, Altman’s almost uncanny ability to weave alluring stories about the power of technology to transform the world made him one the industry’s most effective networkers and money-raisers. Tech investor Peter Thiel said he was at “the absolute epicenter . . . of a Silicon Valley zeitgeist”.
As head of OpenAI, though, Altman ended up losing the trust of some top executives and the board. Hagey details the accusations of dishonesty and manipulative behaviour, but also gives weight to the idea that his failings may mainly have resulted from weak communication skills and lack of patience.
Karen Hao’s Empire of AI, by contrast, doesn’t pull any punches. In her telling, Altman is driven by the pursuit of raw tech power. He is deeply competitive, becoming anxious when rivals gain an edge or people around him appear to disagree. It results in a dysfunctional leadership style that causes him to undermine anyone who seems to pose a challenge.
A veteran AI reporter, Hao’s more detailed account of OpenAI’s progress reveals how much it has in common with other tech start-ups — the messy race to build and release new products, often before they have been fully tested — regardless of the company’s unusual non-profit origins or the grandiose rhetoric Altman wove around it.
In fact, his brilliance at controlling the narrative has been central to Altman’s success. That includes his invocation of AI “doomerism” — the idea that a rogue AI might end up destroying humanity. Although highlighting the dangers of his own company’s technology it was also a stroke of genius, creating what Hagey calls an “apocalyptic frisson” that mesmerised his audience and made him seem the responsible voice of his industry. It also distracted from issues that deserved more immediate scrutiny, such as the questionable way OpenAI was soaking up data, the bias and inaccuracies in the output from its AI models and the environmental harm from its massive computing needs.
This month, long after these books went to press, OpenAI abandoned its attempt to shift ultimate control of the company away from its non-profit board. Regulators, it seems, weren’t happy about the attempt to sideline its grandiose philanthropic commitments. Maybe that means Altman will now follow through on his promise to create AI for the benefit of all humanity. But on the evidence of these two books, you shouldn’t count on it.
The Optimist: Sam Altman, OpenAI, and the Race to Invent the Future by Keach Hagey WW Norton £25/$31.99, 352 pages
Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI by Karen Hao Penguin Press £25/$32, 496 pages
Richard Waters is the FT’s tech writer at large
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