Acclaimed Wall Street Journal reporter Keach Hagey has written the first biography of the enigmatic leader of the AI revolution, charting his ascent within the tech world as well as his ambitions for this powerful new technology. We are delighted that Hagey will be joining us to discuss The Optimist: Sam Altman, OpenAI, and the Race to Invent the Future.
On November 30, 2022, OpenAI released ChatGPT, a chatbot that captivated the world with its uncanny ability to hold humanlike conversations. Not even a year later, Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, was summarily fired on a video call by the company’s board. The firing made headlines around the globe: OpenAI is the leader in the race to build AGI—artificial general intelligence, or AI that can think like a human being—and Altman is the most prominent figure in the field. Yet it was mere days before Altman was back running the company he had co-founded, with most of the directors who voted to fire him themselves removed from the board.
The episode was a demonstration of how quickly the industry is moving, and of Altman’s power to bend reality to his will. In The Optimist, reporter Keach Hagey presents the most detailed account yet of Altman’s rise: from his precocious childhood in St. Louis to his first, failed startup experience; his time as legendary entrepreneur Paul Graham’s protégé and successor as head of Y Combinator, the start-up accelerator where Altman became the premier power broker in Silicon Valley; the founding of OpenAI and his recruitment of a small yet superior team; and his struggle to keep his company at the cutting edge while fending off determined rivals, including Elon Musk, a former friend and now Altman’s bitter opponent.
Hagey conducted more than 250 interviews with Altman’s family, friends, teachers, mentors, co-founders, colleagues, investors, and portfolio companies, in addition to spending hours with Altman himself. The person who emerges in her portrait is a brilliant dealmaker with a love of risk, who believes in technological progress with an almost religious conviction—yet who sometimes moves too fast for the people around him. With both the promise and peril of AI increasing by the day, Hagey delivers a nuanced, balanced, revelatory account of the individual who is leading us into what he himself has called “the intelligence age.”
Altman is a figure out of Isaac Asimov or Neal Stephenson. Or he is the author himself: if it feels as though we have all collectively stepped into a science fiction short story, it is Altman who is writing it.
Hagey will be in conversation with journalist and author Cade Metz.
About the Author
Keach Hagey is a reporter at the Wall Street Journal. The author of The King of Content: Sumner Redstone’s Battle for Viacom, CBS, and Everlasting Control of His Media Empire, she lives in Irvington, NY.
About the Moderator
Cade Metz is a technology reporter at the New York Times and the author of Genius Makers: The Mavericks Who Brought A.I. to Google, Facebook, and The World, the story of the people, ideas and companies behind the rapid rise of artificial intelligence. At the Times he covers artificial intelligence, driverless cars, robotics, virtual reality, and other emerging areas. He was previously a senior writer with Wired Magazine.
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