During the AI summit in India, the OpenAI boss, Sam Altman, tried to ease concerns about how much power is used by artificial intelligence models. He told the Indian Express: “People talk about how much energy it takes to train an AI model – but it also takes a lot of energy to train a human. It takes about 20 years of life – and all the food you consume during that time – before you become smart.”
First let us take a look at who Sam Altman is. He is a product of Silicon Valley. His career was first as a founder of a startup, and then as the president of Y Combinator (YC), which is one of the most famous startup accelerators in Silicon Valley, and then the CEO of OpenAI. He is incredibly good at telling stories about the future and painting these sweeping visions that investors and employees want to be a part of.
He tried to build a portfolio of different investments and different initiatives to place himself in the center of various trends, depending on which one took off. He invested in quantum computing, in nuclear fusion, in self-driving cars and he developed a fundamental AI research lab. Early on at YC, he came to the conclusion that AI would be one of the trends that could take off.
Ultimately, the AI research lab was the one that started accelerating really quickly. So he made himself the CEO of that company. Originally, he started it as a nonprofit to try and position it as a counter to for-profit incentives in Silicon Valley. But within one and a half years, OpenAI's executives concluded that if they wanted to be the lead in this space, they had to go for a scale at all costs approach. Apparently, there are actually many other ways to have progress in AI that does not take this approach.
But once they decided on this approach, they realized that the bottleneck was capital. It just so happens that Sam Altman is a once-in-a-generation fundraising talent. He created a new structure, nesting a for-profit arm within the nonprofit to become a fundraising vehicle for the tens of billions and ultimately hundreds of billions that they needed to pursue the approach that they had decided on.
He is extremely good at understanding human psychology and then motivating people to do what he wants them to do. He is able to wear different hats depending on who he's talking to. He pushes a certain narrative when he's talking to the government and he pushes another narrative when he's talking to podcasters or journalists. He figures out what it is that his audience needs to hear to get them to then come along with him to the next step. That's why he's been such a successful fundraiser, even when the financial picture of this company is rather bleak.
In Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI, Karen Hao paints a much more critical portrait of Sam Altman than the standard “visionary founder” narrative. He is someone who genuinely believes in the transformative (and potentially dangerous) power of AI. He talks about existential risk and the need for caution, yet simultaneously pushes aggressive scaling and deployment. He seeks to concentrate power in a small set of institutions (like OpenAI and its partners), with himself positioned as a central gatekeeper of the future.
She opened the book with a quote which encapsulates in a nutshell his character and the role that he has played in creating the mythology around AI, AGI and OpenAI: “Successful people create companies. More successful people create countries. The most successful people create religions.”
In her book, Hao describes the difference in opinion within OpenAI between Boomers (AI accelerationists) and Doomers (AI safety advocates). Many Doomers were skeptical about having Sam Altman as the leader of the company that brings Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) because he seemed in too much of a hurry to bring his products to market without paying adequate attention to safety and alignment concerns. AGI could give the company that develops it ultimate power and many employees felt Altman wasn’t the right leader.
Hao says that these tensions were often fueled by Altman’s untrustworthy character. Altman would listen carefully to people to understand what they wanted and would seem to agree with their views. Then he would do the same for others with opposing views. He preferred one to one meetings so employees would learn about this when they talked to each other and they were unsure of what exactly his views were. For those who opposed his agenda, he would quietly work behind the scenes to eliminate them from the company.
He has a younger sister, Annie, from whom he is estranged. She had psychological problems and even did sex work to support herself when Altman was living in million dollar homes. She has even alleged childhood sexual molestation by Altman. Hao writes:
Annie’s story deepens the dueling portraits that people paint of Sam. He is at once generous and self-serving, agreeable and threatening, a benefactor for so many people and the source of great personal pain for others. Someone who projects sincerity and altruism in public but reveals a more complicated calculus through his behaviors behind closed doors.
Someone who can give and take away, leaving many with an impression that they are part of a larger game of chess for which only he can see the full board, and the end game is to preserve his power as king.
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