Sam Altman, the risk-aware AI executive

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When OpenAI CEO Sam Altman first showed up this week to testify on Capitol Hill, he could hardly have expected an easy ride. The massive success of ChatGPT, his company’s AI-powered chatbot, has ignited a frenzied arms race in the tech industry, although Altman himself was among those who warned that AI, if not properly controlled, it could have worrying consequences for humanity.

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

THE performance he was “night and day compared to other CEOs,” Senator Richard Blumenthal told reporters – a reminder of the antagonism during congressional grilling from other tech leaders, including Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos of Amazon. Altman’s Capitol Hill debut gave many their first glimpse of the next aspiring tech mogul. ChatGPT has transformed OpenAI from a nerdy research lab into the hottest tech property, seriously shaking up Google’s AI power 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 stake and a fondness for the big visionary statement. Where Musk has rocket ships, Altman has fusion energy (he invested $375 million of his own money in nuclear fusion start-up Helion). Last week, the FT reported that Altman was closing in on a $100 million funding round for its plan to use iris scanning technology to create a secure global cryptocurrency called Worldcoin.

Brad Lightcap, who worked with him for seven years and is chief operating officer of Open AI, describes him as a polymath who slips easily between topics such as artificial intelligence, 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 relevant for 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 advances in technology are used safely. As he told The New Yorker, a few years earlier, on a hike with friends, it had occurred to him that “hardware that can replicate 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 initially backed by Y Combinator, the renowned technology incubator that Altman went on to head. “He is willing to make big bets, it’s one of the things that made him a great investor. He is willing to bet long term.

A Stanford University dropout, Altman’s first start-up, location-based social media service Loopt, hasn’t taken off. But it was enough to put him on the fast track to Silicon Valley. Y Combinator founder Paul Graham plucked him from relative obscurity at age 28 to head up the tech incubator, whose hits include Airbnb and payment company Stripe. He gave Altman a front-row seat to some of the hottest new investment fads and a taste for betting on yet-to-be-realized ideas.

At OpenAI, where he’s been CEO since 2019, Altman is now engaged in the tech world’s toughest balancing act. Having partnered closely with Microsoft, he is racing to capitalize on the global sensation caused by ChatGPT. But he also warned that the technology, without better controls, could end catastrophically. “It’s a very difficult position for him,” Wang says.

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

Altman also struggled to find the best way to balance AI’s huge revenue potential with OpenAI’s original mission to make sure the technology benefits humanity at large. Michael Moritz, a partner at Sequoia Capital, who is an investor in OpenAI, says Altman rejected his suggestion to form the company as a commercial venture from the start, preferring to make it a non-profit organization. But later, to get a $1 billion investment from Microsoft, Altman reframed it into a new hybrid form, limiting the returns outside investors could get from a new trading arm and directing any extra profits into a non-profit fund. of profit.

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

Its apparent willingness to give up potentially huge wealth could prove to be a major factor as OpenAI pursues its unusual dual goals. The yield cap for the company’s investors would have been difficult to accept “by itself, without Sam’s lack of equity,” says Moritz. However, if the technology behind ChatGPT lives up to the big claims surrounding it, Altman may already be on his way to joining the ranks of the biggest tech moguls. But he may be very different from any tycoon who has come before.

richard.waters@ft.com, madhumita.murgia@ft.com