It’s been decades since a titan of tech became a pop-culture icon.
Steve Jobs stepped out on stage in hisblack turtleneckin 1998.
Elon Muskset his sights on Marsin 2002.
Mark Zuckerberg emerged from hisHarvard dorm roomin 2004.
And now, after years of stasis in Silicon Valley,we have Sam Altman.
And as with his mythic-hero predecessors, people are hanging on his every word.
It’s easy to laugh at our desperation for crumbs of wisdom from Altman’s table.
But the notability of Altman’s notetaking ability is a meaningful signifier.
The new mayor-elect of San Francisco, for instance, put Altman on histransition team.
A Jobsian singularity could be upon us.
How will the way he thinks shape the world we live in?
I’ve dipped into a decade’s worth of interviews he’s given maybe 40 hours or so.
I won’t claim to have taken anything more than a core sample of the vast Altmanomicon.
But immersing myself in his public pronouncements has given me a new appreciation for what makes Altman tick.
The innovative god-kings of the past were rule-breaking disruptors or destroyers of genres.
The new guy, by contrast, represents the apotheosis of what his predecessors wrought.
Let’s start with the vibes.
In interviews, he comes across as confident but laid back.
He often starts his sentences with “so,” his affect as flat as his native Midwest.
Another contrast with the tech gurus of yore: Altman says he doesn’t care much about money.
Altman is even looking into universal basic income giving money to everyone, straight out, no strings attached.
That’s partly because he thinks artificial intelligence will make paying jobs as rare as coelacanths.
But it’s also a product of unusual self-awareness.
Rare is the colossus of industry who acknowledges that anyone other than himself tugged on those bootstraps.
Altman’s seeming rejection of wealth is a key element of his mythos.
Altman explained that the company was set up as a nonprofit, so equity wasn’t a thing.
(Under Altman’s watch, OpenAI is shifting to a for-profit model.)
Altman didn’t get where he is because he made a fortune in tech.
Loopt, the company Altman founded at 20 years old, was in the second category.
Yet despite that, the Y Combinator cofounder Paul Graham named him president of the incubator in 2014.
And second, he believes that scale and growth can solve every problem.
They are the key to his mindset and maybe to our AI-enmeshedfuture.
It was primarily a paean to the idea of believing you are right about everything.
“The ideas are so malleable,” Altman said.
I left thinking ‘huh, so that’s the benchmark for what conviction looks like.'"
“Have almost too much self-belief,” he writes.
“Almost to the point of delusion.”
What determines whether a founder turns out to be “right,” as he puts it?
The answer, for Altman, is scale.
A good idea is one that scales, and scaling is what makes an idea good.
For Altman, this isn’t just a business model.
It’s a philosophy.
It doesn’t matter what real estate, natural resources, equity in a business.
In Altman’s view, big growth isn’t just a way to keep investors happy.
It’s the evidence that confirms one’s unwavering belief in the idea.
Artificial intelligence itself, of course, is based on scale on the ever-expanding data that AI feeds on.
But hebelieves that scale will provide the answers.
“We’ll also discover new things that are really powerful.
We don’t know what those will be either.”
You just trust that the exponential growth curves will take you somewhere you want to go.
Fiction, to Altman, appears to hold no especially mysterious human element of creativity.
“I think we really understand that well now.
We just haven’t tried to do that.”
It’s also not clear to me whether Altman listens to music at least not for pleasure.
But his top pick was Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No.
“This became something I started listening to when I worked,” he said.
“It’s a great level of excitement, but it’s not distracting.
you might listen to it very loudly and very quietly.”
Music can be great, but it shouldn’t get in the way of productivity.
For Altman, even drug use isn’t recreational.
In 2016, a"New Yorker" profiledescribed Altman as nervous to the point of hypochondria.
He would telephone his mother a physician to ask whether a headache might be cancer.
He relied on caffeine to be productive, and used marijuana to sleep.
He’s “very calm.”
He doesn’t sweat criticism anymore.
If that sounds like the positive outcome of years of therapy, well sort of.
He went into more detail on the Songs podcast in September.
Psychedelics were just another life hack to resolveemotional turmoil.
There’s the ability to write code, sure.
Altman also says AI will someday be a tutor as good as those available to rich people.
And what would you or I do with a superintelligent buddy?
“What if everybody in the world had a really competent company of 10,000 employees?”
“What would we be able to create for each other?”
And besides, AI won’t take long to give us the answer.
Superintelligence, Altmanhas promised, is only “thousands of days” away half a decade, at minimum.
But, he says, the intelligent machine that emerges probably won’t be an LLM chatbot.
It will use an entirely different technical architecture that no one, not even OpenAI, has invented yet.
That, at its core, reflects an unreconstructed, dot-com-boom mindset.
Altman doesn’t know what the future will bring, but he’s in a hurry to get there.
But that’s the kind of ballistic arc of progress that Altman is selling.
He is, at heart, an evangelist for the Silicon Valley way.
His wealth comes from investments in other people’s companies.He’s a macher, not a maker.
In a sense, Altman has codified the beliefs and intentions of the tech big shots who preceded him.
He’s just more transparent about it than they were.
Did Steve Jobs project utter certainty?
But Altman is on the record.
His predecessors in Silicon Valley wrote the playbook for Big Tech.
Altman is just reading it aloud.
Adam Rogersis a senior correspondent at Business Insider.
