Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI

Chapter 1 describes the origins of OpenAI and its key founder, Sam Altman. In 2015, Altman held a dinner party with Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk to discuss “the future of AI and humanity” (23). At the time, Altman was the president of Y Combinator (YC), a leading seed fund for Silicon Valley startups. After conversations with tech leaders Demis Hassabis of DeepMind Technologies and Larry Page of Google, Musk had become concerned about the “existential risk” posed by AI technologies. Musk worried that AI would become capable of eluding human controls and cause the death of humanity to achieve its own ends. He was concerned people like Larry Page did not take this risk seriously. He was also inspired by warnings about AI risk from controversial philosopher Nick Bostrom’s book Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies. Bostrom argued that AI should be designed to “achieve its objectives without harming humans” (26). Altman shared Musk’s concerns about AI. At the dinner party in 2015, they decided to create an AI company, OpenAI, to head off this potential catastrophe by building an AI they could control.

Sam Altman was born in Chicago in 1985 to a doctor and real estate developer.