100 Most Influential Companies 2023 - Disrupters

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is pushing past doubt, into the future

- By Edward Felsenthal/San Francisco and Billy Perrigo/London

YOU EVER WATCH STAR TREK?" SAM ALTMAN, the CEO who has become the most visible face of the current artificial-intelligence boom, has just called us an Uber. The 38-year-old serial entrepreneur has lately become known for talking up the risks of AI, but he is at his most animated in talking about its possibilities. So transformative is this new technology that responds naturally to our verbal commands that he envisions new hardware for it something, eventually, like the Star Trek holodeck, in which characters use their voice to conjure and interact with 3D simulations of the world. An interface like that feels "fundamentally right," he says.

Altman's company, OpenAI, is only seven years old. It has fewer than 500 employees. Pipe some pan flutes and whale sounds into the airy, light-filled lobby of its headquarters in San Francisco's Mission District, and it could almost be mistaken for a spa. But in the span of 6½ months, the company-through its viral product ChatGPT-has vaulted Al into public consciousness. Few doubt it's at the vanguard of a revolution that will, for better or worse and probably both, change the world.