The rapid rise and slow decline of Sam Altman

Summary

Things aren’t as rosy as they wereFive years ago, hardly anyone had heard of Sam Altman. But by the time I ran into him, in May of 2023 in Washington, at the US Senate, he had become a superstar. Senators called him by his first name, and flaunted the meetings they had with him. Prime Ministers welcomed him with open arms. Newspapers wrote glowing profiles, many with scarcely a critical word. Tech leaders loved him, too. Microsoft had already at that point put in billions soon after ChatGPT was released. In June 2024, Apple made a deal with him, or so it seemed. At that point Altman was widely seen as the man who would be king.Altman, back in the day, when everyone thought he was a world-conquering hero.But in the end, charm is not enough. Business Insider’s Katie Notopoulous once called Altman the ultimate “personality hire”, but his only technical vision was scaling and that was never going to be enough. The company always looked like an accident waiting to happen, to me. (I have long speculated that it might turn out to be the WeWork of AI).For a time, though, all the heavy hitters, like Tim Cook, Satya Nadella and (many years earlier) Elon Musk seemed to buy Altman’s act. Two years ago, the sky seemed like the limit for Silicon Valley’s golden child.§By now, though, Altman’s act is starting to wearing thin. Elon of course parted ways with Altman long ago; their dirty laundry goes before a jury soon. The Microsoft-OpenAI relationship is not what is used to be.Over the last couple years, Altman’s public credibility has steadily waned (see e.g., Karen Hao’s bestseller, and my earlier essay on Altman in The Guardian). Lots of people have raised questions about the circular financing deals that he has been making in recent months. His defensive, empty response to investor Brad Gerstner in which he couldn’t begin to explain how he would make financial ends meet was atrocious and utterly unconvincing. More than one person has called him “Scam” Altman. His endless hints...