On 16 May 2023, Sam Altman, OpenAI’s charming, softly spoken, eternally optimistic billionaire CEO, and I stood in front of the US Senate judiciary subcommittee meeting on AI oversight. We were in Washington DC, and it was at the height of AI mania. Altman, then 38, was the poster boy for it all.
Raised in St Louis, Missouri, Altman was the Stanford dropout who had become the president of the massively successful Y Combinator startup incubator before he was 30. A few months before the hearing, his company’s product ChatGPT had taken the world by storm. All through the summer of 2023, Altman was treated like a Beatle, stopping by DC as part of a world tour, meeting prime ministers and presidents around the globe. US Senator Kyrsten Sinema gushed: “I’ve never met anyone as smart as Sam… He’s an introvert and shy and humble… But… very good at forming relationships with people on the Hill and… can help folks in government understand AI.” Glowing portraits at the time painted the youthful Altman as sincere, talented, rich and interested in nothing more than fostering humanity. His frequent suggestions that AI could transform the global economy had world leaders salivating.
