In 2008, Paul Graham, founder of the Silicon Valley firm Y Combinator, described Sam Altman, who was then 23 years old, like this: “You could parach

Sam Altman Goes Full Emperor - by Robert Wright

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2024-10-07 20:00:04

In 2008, Paul Graham, founder of the Silicon Valley firm Y Combinator, described Sam Altman, who was then 23 years old, like this: “You could parachute him into an island full of cannibals and come back in five years and he’d be the king.” In 2011, Graham made Altman a partner at Y Combinator. Three years later, Graham stepped down as president of the company and crowned Altman as his successor.

It soon became clear that the Y Combinator island wasn’t big enough to contain Altman’s ambitions. In 2015, while still president of the company, he co-founded a non-profit called OpenAI and became, along with Elon Musk, its co-chair. Within a few years, Altman and Musk were having disagreements—over, for example, who was alpha male. Musk left the OpenAI island and Altman settled in to run it.

I don’t think I’d be good at parachuting into cannibal-inhabited islands and securing political control of them, but I imagine that, if I were good at it, I’d follow this algorithm: