Sam Altman’s escape from the Silicon Valley pack is a sprawling farm at the tip of a road that snakes through the vine-swept hills in Napa Valley. I spot the 40-year-old with barely tousled hair within the open-plan kitchen of the wide bay-windowed house, and I step right in. His bemused look tells me that I wasn’t expected. I’m, it seems, nearly an hour early, however the man behind ChatGPT will wind up a gathering and join me within the garden. I wait under a grapevine-shaded pergola that runs along the home.
For a Lunch with the FT, Altman offered to cook an easy vegetarian meal at his farm as an alternative of meeting me at a restaurant of his alternative, where he’s more likely to be hounded by selfie-seekers. Since OpenAI, the corporate he runs, released the generative AI model in 2022, Altman has been catapulted to the status of worldwide celebrity. Last 12 months, he married his software engineer boyfriend they usually’ve recently had a baby boy via surrogacy (he consulted ChatGPT on which crib to purchase) so he’s been spending more time on the Napa farm.
Altman takes only just a few minutes to hitch me outside. He has built OpenAI into considered one of the fastest-growing firms ever, with a staggering valuation of greater than $250bn, and accelerated a fierce race for AI supremacy: the pursuit of artificial general intelligence, when a machine can surpass the cognitive abilities of humans, not only absorbing knowledge but reasoning and learning by itself.
But it has been a rollercoaster journey wherein Altman has been fired and rehired by his own company, his character and commitment to the secure development of AI subjected to bruising questions. He’s wrestled with Elon Musk, with whom he co-founded OpenAI, and sparred with Scarlett Johansson, who accused him of using an “eerily similar” voice to her own to coach a chatbot. Having stolen a march on more established competitors (Google particularly, on condition that it has long had the lead in AI research), he’s been courted by presidents and prime ministers and he has seduced among the world’s biggest investors.
I find Altman brimming with confidence as our conversation ranges from AI products to the existential query of an AI future that a handful of optimistic technologists are steadily leading us to, whether we prefer it or not. Radiating ambition, he appears like a person convinced of his own destiny. He tells me that he has the “coolest, most vital job possibly in history” and while he used to think AI was as consequential because the Industrial Revolution, he now reckons the “explosion in creativity” makes the Renaissance a more apt analogy.
We are meeting soon after the discharge of OpenAI’s o3, a more advanced AI model with improved capability to reason and generate images. It is, he says, a crucial step towards the creation of AI agents that may execute tasks on humans’ behalf, and which all leading AI firms are furiously pursuing. “People are saying like, that is . . . genius-level intelligence,” he gushes.
No sooner was the tool released than users flooded the web with images generated within the sort of the Japanese animation house Studio Ghibli. That gave Altman and OpenAI a sensational marketing boost, but renewed questions on the liberal use of others’ mental property to coach AI models and generate art. Altman says compensation for artists could also be required (his company has done licensing deals with publishers, including the FT), but he prefers to place the tools out into the world after which find answers to questions that arise.
“There are some people who find themselves, like, ‘all AI art is terrible’, but then there’s a whole lot of artists who’re, like, ‘that is the most effective tool ever, it’s just like the invention of the camera’,” says Altman. “We agree we want a brand new business model for this type of a world, but what it’s, the community remains to be kind of feeling their way through. I do know that we’ve got to converge on what it needs to be.”
We are back within the kitchen and I watch Altman season with cumin the yellow and orange carrots grown on the farm, that are then roasted within the oven. With impressive determination, he chops an infinite amount of garlic, which he tosses right into a pan with red chilli peppers, walnuts, parsley and pecorino to make what looks like a Californian tackle spaghetti. The salad leaves, with thinly sliced carrots and radishes, are within the fridge already and want only dressing. Altman visibly enjoys cooking and, as I’ll soon discover, is quite good at it.
As we talk, I seek for clues in his upbringing that hint at his future stardom. He says there are none. “I used to be like a sort of nerdy Jewish kid within the Midwest . . . So technology was just not a thing. Like being into computers was kind of, like, unusual. And I definitely never could have imagined that I might have ended up working on this technology in such a way. I still feel kind of surreal that that happened.”
The eldest of the 4 children of a dermatologist mother and a father who worked in real estate, Altman read a whole lot of science-fiction books, watched and liked computers. In 2005, he dropped out of Stanford University before graduating to launch a social networking start-up. In those days, AI was still in its infancy: “We could show a system a thousand images of cats, and a thousand images of dogs, after which it (the AI) could accurately classify them, and that was, like, you were living the high life.”
Soon, Altman was running Y Combinator, a start-up accelerator that had backed his first enterprise. He was still there when he began OpenAI in 2015 as a non-profit with a mission that artificial general intelligence should profit all of humanity. Musk was a co-founder who financed it with tens of tens of millions of dollars but then fell out with Altman and left its board in 2018 in considered one of Silicon Valley’s most closely watched feuds. Musk, who has been growing his own AI rival company, xAI, alleges in a lawsuit that Altman had strayed from the corporate’s founding mission. Altman has countersued: “It seems clear to me why he’s doing all of this,” he says of Musk. “Because he’s attempting to decelerate a competitor and he doesn’t like that he’s like not winning in AI.”
Menu
Sam Altman’s farm
Napa Valley, California
Pasta with chillies, garlic, walnuts, parsley and pecorino
Roasted carrots
Salad leaves with carrots and radishes
Espresso
Tea
Musk could have his personal motives but the controversy over methods to “win” in AI — which requires massive computing power and investment — without loosening commitment to safety, has long divided OpenAI. The splits exploded into the open in November 2023, when the non-profit board suddenly fired Altman, with one board member later accusing him of misrepresenting information and in some cases lying to the board.
Altman prevailed. He was reinstated inside days, after nearly all employees threatened to resign and Microsoft, then the corporate’s largest financial backer, offered to rent Altman and his team. “It was very painful and really embarrassing that this whole thing happened, and nobody, including me, really knew all of it on the time. What I wanted was to go sit on a beach and recuperate but I had to only keep running the corporate and now clean up a huge mess.” That mess, he says, included customers and investors asking whether or not they could rely on the corporate.
The storm led to the departure of a few of OpenAI’s best researchers and left lingering questions on Altman. But it also cemented his status as the corporate’s undisputed leader, with a brand new board that backs him.
His ambitions too have expanded: early this 12 months, he starred in one other headline-grabbing event, appearing on the White House with Donald Trump to announce a three way partnership with Japan’s SoftBank that can raise a whole bunch of billions of dollars to develop AI infrastructure, including data centres.
But while he has shifted the narrative around OpenAI’s mission as its business potential has turn out to be more apparent, attempts to alter the corporate structure to a more traditional for-profit business have met with resistance, from Musk in addition to from AI experts who insist the corporate must remain under a non-profit board to fulfil its mission of developing technology to profit all humanity.
I ask Altman whether he learnt from the attempted coup. One criticism of him is that he tells people what they need to hear, depending on what’s expedient. All he’ll admit to is that he does prefer to avoid conflict and he’s needed to learn quickly methods to run such a fancy company. “In the last two years now we have undergone a decade and half of a standard company’s growth.”
It’s a busy day on the farm. Altman’s mother is visiting, as are his in-laws. His husband and son, in addition to a colleague, are in the home too. They are available and out of the kitchen. Altman lays the bowls of food on a table, we serve ourselves and return to sit down within the garden. The pasta is delicious, with just the appropriate amount of spice, the carrots crunchy, and the salad tastes light and juicy.
As a chief disrupter who’s hyperactive on social media and, by his own description, OpenAI’s “marketing division”, he generates a relentless stream of stories. Recently that has included a dispute with an estranged sister who has accused him of sexually abusing her when she was a baby (the remaining of the family has backed his denials and he says he feels each compassion and upset towards a sister who’s “had a tough time of it for a very long time”).
Altman claims that being competitive shouldn’t be considered one of his defining features — “Am I not an outlier by way of competitiveness,” he asks aloud, “in comparison with other tech CEOs?” — yet he relishes talk of winning. He admits that he has entertained running for governor of California (not a presidential bid though, as some have claimed); his favourite way of describing the reach of ChatGPT shouldn’t be 800mn users but “10 per cent of the world”.
But how much does the competitive race ultimately matter? While Silicon Valley has been sinking massive investment into AI, DeepSeek, a Chinese start-up, released a model this 12 months developed on a limited budget. That suggested that AI models were becoming commoditised and the US technological edge over China was diminishing. Altman says there may be an “asterisk” to the commoditisation narrative: “Most of those models might be commoditised. The frontier models I don’t think might be.” He is, after all, expecting to prevail in frontier models but in addition win within the commoditisation game, given what number of users are already attached to ChatGPT.
And how will OpenAI deliver the returns on massive investment? Altman hints at his ultimate goal, but describes it as only one compelling idea: when a subscription to ChatGPT becomes a private AI, through which users log into other services. “You could just take your AI, which is gonna get to know you higher over the course of your life, have your data in and be more personalised and you possibly can use it anywhere. That can be a really cool platform to supply.”
The sun is simply too strong so we return inside. Altman is sipping his tea, curled up on the lounge sofa, his arms wrapped around his legs. We talk concerning the AI-dominated future his son will inherit. Diseases could also be more rapidly cured by AI, and sectors from education to banking transformed. But it’s a world that also raises existential questions on the way in which we live. Why should society trust a handful of AI men to choose on the form of the longer term? In a response unlikely to persuade, he says those developing the technology are “committed to meeting the gravity of the moment with responsible technology”.
AI progress is moving at such breathtaking speed that some experts favour slowing down until internationally agreed norms and regulations are put in place. Two years ago, Altman himself signed a statement with others in the sphere cautioning that “mitigating the chance of extinction from AI needs to be a worldwide priority alongside other societal-scale risks reminiscent of pandemics and nuclear war”.
Altman insists he hasn’t modified his mind and there might be moments when holding back could also be required. For now, he seems satisfied with the rollout of tools for people to experiment with and assess the risks. “The world must find out about it (AI), the world must weigh in on it, very heavily. By having our users help us determine what the boundaries needs to be, like learning this collective value, function and preferences of humanity,” he says.
Some advances do scare him. After releasing a memory feature that enables the AI to register past behaviour, he has heard of cases where users turn out to be too emotionally depending on the AI. “People are like, that is my recent best friend, you’ll be able to never delete this version, I would like this thing . . . I even have little question that we, society, will work out methods to navigate this, but that’s a brand new thing that’s just happened and you’ll be able to imagine all varieties of ways in which it goes really mistaken.”
More alarming, I note, is a future wherein AI agents communicate with one another without instruction by humans. Altman explains that perhaps it’s not an agent that creates other agents but an AI system that’s so good, so trusted, that it in effect controls what humans do. “It (the AI model) becomes just higher than we kind of have a conception for.” This sounds so spooky that even he seems alarmed by his words.
Altman doesn’t strike me as a person who entertains doubt but I ask how his grand plan of constructing an AI giant could go mistaken. Is he confident that OpenAI will exist in 10 years? “Fixing fences and caring for cows” can be his plan B, he jokes. More seriously, he says: “We could make a mistaken research bet, you already know, we could fall behind on product to any individual else. It’s like we’re doing a really complicated thing.”
We’ve been talking for greater than two hours and his husband, holding the child, joins us within the lounge, and after some fussing, the tiny infant is falling asleep. I ask whether Altman finds his brave recent world, wherein humans are usually not essentially the most intelligent thing on the planet, threatening — if not for him, then for his son?
He is, predictably, too enthralled by his AI creation to feel menace. “Do you’re thinking that you’re smarter than o3 straight away? I don’t . . . and I feel completely unbothered, and I bet you do too,” he says. “I’m hugging my baby, having fun with my tea. I’m gonna go do very exciting work all afternoon . . . I’ll be using o3 to do higher work than I used to be in a position to do a month ago. I’ll go for a walk tonight. I feel it’s great. I’m more capable. He (his son) might be more capable than any of us can imagine.”
