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)