The optimist Sam Altman, OpenAI, and the race to invent the future

Wall Street Journal reporter Hagey (The King of Content) portrays OpenAI CEO Sam Altman as the ultimate comeback kid in this fleet-footed biography. The future billionaire landed his first major deal as an undergraduate at Stanford University, scaling up his location-based social network Loopt with an investment from venture capital firm Y Combinator in the mid 2000s. Altman narrowly avoided getting ousted from Loopt over allegations he helped former colleagues illegally reverse-engineer a competitor's code in 2009, and landed at Y Combinator after Loopt was "sold for parts" in 2012. Hagey's crackerjack reporting fleshes out Altman's ascendance to Silicon Valley royalty, detailing how he outmaneuvered Elon Musk's attempted takeover of OpenAI in the late 2010s by persuading board members that Musk would be too difficult to work with, and how a staff mutiny convinced the board to overturn their firing of Altman in 2023. Hagey also gives due credit to Altman's brilliance as a businessman without glossing over his contradictions, noting that he mostly equivocated in her interviews with him when confronted with how turning OpenAI into a for-profit company appeared to bring about the very AI "arms race" the organization once sought to avoid by making its software open source. The first major biography of tech's newest titan, this sets a high bar for those to follow. Agent: Alice Martell, Martell Agency. (June)

Searching portrait of Silicon Valley tech tycoon Sam Altman, "the global prophet of an unimaginably prosperous future."Wall Street Journal reporter Hagey has been tracking Sam Altman for years, charting the rise of various strains of AI that have risen at his behest and that of his competitors. Altman, Hagey notes, isn't a coder, though he's indisputably brilliant and charismatic: One colleague notes that if you dropped him on an island of cannibals and came back later, he'd be king, while tech funder Peter Thiel told her, "We should treat him as more of a messiah figure." Instead, Hagey writes, he's a promoter, an evangelist, the optimist of the title, although he has allowed that the algorithms he's created through OpenAI--an oddly structured company that's both for-profit and nonprofit--may indeed one day yield computers that are smarter than us, bringing on "the singularity," that tipping point after which humans may not be needed. Indeed, in a book full of telling anecdotes, one of the most profound comes from Altman's now nemesis, Elon Musk. One of Altman's predecessors told Musk that he was working on superintelligent AI, "the most important thing in the world," to which Musk responded that his project to bring humans to Mars was more important still. His interlocutor said fine, as long as a rogue AI didn't follow humans to Mars and put an end to them there. "Musk got very quiet. He had never thought about that." By Hagey's vivid account, Altman has thought about that and most things, layering one venture atop another, with one comprising "an impressive synthesis of Altman's many pet projects and obsessions---AI, UBI [universal basic income], affordable housing, techno--utopianism--that cohered into a worldview." Altman's life isn't uncheckered, but he emerges from these pages as someone far worthier than most tech giants of close attention. An exemplary blend of biography, financial technology reportage, and futurology. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.