“Sam Altman Is the Oppenheimer of Our Age: OpenAI’s CEO Thinks He Knows Our Future. What Do We Know about Him?”, 2023-09-25 (; backlinks):
[PR] …By Altman’s own assessment—discernible in his many blog posts, podcasts, and video events—we should feel good but not great about him as our AI leader. As he understands himself, he’s a plenty-smart-but-not-genius “technology brother” with an Icarus streak and a few outlier traits. First, he possesses, he has said, “an absolutely delusional level of self-confidence.” Second, he commands a prophetic grasp of “the arc of technology and societal change on a long time horizon.” Third, as a Jew, he is both optimistic and expecting the worst. Fourth, he’s superb at assessing risk because his brain doesn’t get caught up in what other people think…The new nice-guy vibe can be hard to square with Altman’s will to power, which is among his most-well-established traits. A friend in his inner circle described him to me as “the most ambitious person I know who is still sane, and I know 20,000 people in Silicon Valley.”
…I was the 10-billionth journalist he spoke to this summer. As we sat down in a soundproof room, I apologized for making him do yet one more interview. He smiled and said, “It’s really nice to meet you.”
[Early life] …Altman grew up the oldest of 4 siblings in suburban St. Louis: 3 boys, Sam, Max, and Jack, each two years apart, then a girl, Annie, 9 years younger than Sam. If you weren’t raised in a Midwestern middle-class Jewish family—and I say this from experience—it’s hard to imagine the latent self-confidence such a family can instill in a son. “One of the very best things my parents did for me was constant (multiple times a day, I think?) affirmations of their love and belief that I could do anything”, Jack Altman has said. The stores of confidence that result are fantastical, narcotic, weapons grade. They’re like an extra valve in your heart.
The story that’s typically told about Sam is that he was a boy genius—“a rising star in the techno whiz-kid world”, according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. He started fixing the family VCR at age 3. In 1993, for his 8th birthday, Altman’s parents—Connie Gibstine, a dermatologist, and Jerry Altman, a real-estate broker—bought him a Mac LC II. Altman describes that gift as “this dividing line in my life: before I had a computer and after.”
The Altman family ate dinner together every night. Around the table, they’d play games like “square root”: Someone would call out a large number. The boys would guess. Annie would hold the calculator and check who was closest. They played 20 Questions to figure out each night’s surprise dessert. The family also played Ping-Pong, pool, board games, video games, and charades, and everybody always knew who won. Sam preferred this to be him. Jack recalled his brother’s attitude: “I have to win, and I’m in charge of everything.” The boys also played water polo. “He would disagree, but I would say I was better”, Jack told me. “I mean, like, undoubtedly better.”
Sam, who is gay, came out in high school. This surprised even his mother, who had thought of Sam “as just sort of unisexual [asexual?] and techy.” As Altman said on a 2020 podcast, his private high school was “not the kind of place where you would really stand up and talk about being gay and that was okay.” When he was 17, the school invited a speaker for National Coming Out Day. A group of students objected, “mostly on a religious basis but also just, like, gay-people-are-bad basis.” Altman decided to give a speech to the student body. He barely slept the night before. The last lines, he said on the podcast, were “Either you have tolerance to open community or you don’t, and you don’t get to pick and choose.”
[YC] …In 2014, Graham tapped Altman to take over as president of Y Combinator, which by that point had helped launch Airbnb and Stripe. Graham had described Altman in 2009 as among “the 5 most interesting start-up founders of the last 30 years” and, later, as “what Bill Gates must have been like when he started Microsoft … a naturally sort of formidable, confident person.”
…Through much of his tenure, Altman lived with his brothers in either of his two houses in San Francisco, one in SoMa, the other in the Mission. He preached a gospel of ambition, insularity, and scale. He believed in the value of hiring from the network of people you already know. He believed in not caring too much what others think. “A big secret is that you can bend the world to your will a surprising percentage of the time—most people don’t even try”, he wrote on his blog. “The most successful founders do not set out to create companies. They are on a mission to create something closer to a religion, and at some point it turns out that forming a company is the easiest way to do so.” He believed the greater downside is cornering yourself with a small idea, not thinking big enough.
[Political ambitions] …For several years, Altman kept his day job as YC president. He sent myriad texts and emails to founders each day, and he tracked how quickly people responded because, as he wrote on his blog, he believed response time was “one of the most striking differences between great and mediocre founders.” In 2017, he considered running for California governor. He had been at a dinner party “complaining about politics and the state, and someone was like, ‘You should stop complaining and do something about it’”, he told me. “And I was like, ‘Okay.’” He published a platform, the United Slate, outlining 3 core principles: prosperity from technology, economic fairness, and personal liberty. Altman abandoned his bid after a few weeks.
…Several months later, in late May [2018], Altman’s father had a heart attack, at age 67, while rowing on Creve Coeur Lake outside St. Louis. He died at the hospital soon after. At the funeral, Annie told me, Sam allotted each of the 4 Altman children 5 minutes to speak. She used hers to rank her family members in terms of emotional expressivity. She put Sam, along with her mother, at the bottom.
…This is not the portfolio of a man with ambitions like Zuckerberg, who appears, somewhat quaintly compared with Altman, to be content “with building a city-state to rule over”, as the tech writer and podcaster Jathan Sadowski put it. This is the portfolio of a man with ambitions like Musk’s, a man taking the “imperialist approach.” “He really sees himself as this world-bestriding Ubermensch, as a superhuman in a really Nietzschean kind of way”, Sadowski said. “He will at once create the thing that destroys us and save us from it.”
…A black entrepreneur—who, like almost everybody in tech I spoke to for this article, didn’t want to use their name for fear of Altman’s power—told me they spent 15 years trying to break into the white male tech club.
… Jerry Altman’s 2018 death notice describes him as: “Husband of Connie Gibstine; dear father and father-in-law of Sam Altman, Max Altman, Jack (Julia) Altman”—Julia is Jack’s wife—“and Annie Altman …”…Readers of Altman’s blog; his tweets; his manifesto, Startup Playbook; along with the hundreds of articles about him will be familiar with Jack and Max. They pop up all over the place, most notably in a dashing photo in Forbes, atop the profile that accompanied the announcement of their joint fund, Apollo. They’re also featured in Tad 2016 Altman profile in The New Yorker and in much chummy public banter.
…Of Sam, she told me, “He’s probably autistic also, but more of the computer-math way. I’m more of the humanity, humanitarian, justice-y way.”
[Annie Altman] …That same year, Jerry Altman died. He’d had his heart issues, along with a lot of stress, partly, Annie told me, from driving to Kansas City to nurse along his real-estate business. The Altmans’ parents had separated. Jerry kept working because he needed the money. After his death, Annie cracked. Her body fell apart. Her mental health fell apart. She’d always been the family’s pain sponge. She absorbed more than she could take now…As Annie tells her life story, Sam, their brothers, and her mother kept money her father left her [in his will] from her. [She has also repeated this accusation in many social media posts.]
Sam offered to help her with money for a while, then he stopped. In their email and text exchanges, his love—and leverage—is clear. He wants to encourage Annie to get on her feet. He wants to encourage her to get back on Zoloft, which she’d quit under the care of a psychiatrist because she hated how it made her feel…Among her various art projects, Annie makes a podcast called All Humans Are Human…After she posted the show online, Annie hoped her siblings, particularly Sam, would share it. He’d contributed to their brothers’ careers. Jack’s company, Lattice, had been through YC. [Retired in 2023.] “I was like, ‘You could just tweet the link. That would help. You don’t want to share your sister’s podcast that you came on?’” He did not. “Jack and Sam said it didn’t align with their businesses.”