THE ALCHEMIST OF AI

SAM ALTMAN FOUNDED HIS FIRST TECH COMPANY AS A TEENAGER AND WAS RUNNING Y COMBINATOR, THE WORLD'S LEADING STARTUP ACCELERATOR, BY 28. AS CEO OF OPENAI, THE 40-YEAR-OLD BILLIONAIRE UNLEASHED CHATGPT, CREATING A $500 BILLION BEHEMOTH. AS A NEW FATHER, HE'S BUILDING THE FUTURE HIS KIDS WILL HAVE TO LIVE IN. OH YEAH, AND THE REST OF US, TOO.

- Richard Nieva and Anna Tong

Sitting vertically on his desk at OpenAI headquarters in San Francisco like a squat ebony Slim Jim, it is perhaps the most eyebrow-raising among the impressive array of historic innovations he has collected over the years. “That’s depleted,” he says casually of the uranium-238 rod, the same element used to create nuclear energy. “It’s not going to hurt you.” He waves a Geiger counter over it and proves his point.

“You make a big discovery in physics and . . . unlock basically unlimited energy,” he says of the uranium rod. “We didn’t know about this, then theorized that such a thing was possible. A couple decades later, they had made an atomic bomb. Just a crazy, fast thing.”

Altman, wearing Adidas Lego Ultraboost sneakers and a simple gray knit sweater, works methodically and chronologically through the artifacts, most of which typically live in his home office, unseen by anyone but his closest friends. On display today, Altman says: a 40,000-year-old hand ax (“an amazing general purpose Stone Age tool”), a 3,500-year-old bronze sword (“an interesting example of technology having a big geopolitical impact”) and a compressor fan blade from a Concorde jet engine (“the only piece small enough” to carry in). In casual defiance of museum curator protocol, he has lugged all these items to his office in a duffel bag, individually wrapped in bathroom towels.

“I am consistently amazed by how much each generation builds a new layer of scaffolding,” he says of technological progress. “We’re really seeing that now.”

As memorable as the uranium rod is, one of the other striking items in Altman’s collection is an old GPU chip. It trained an early version of the model behind OpenAI’s signature product, ChatGPT, which catapulted AI into the mainstream in November 2022 and set off a chain reaction of innovation that may turn out to be as transformative as the Industrial Revolution.