Sam Altman: ChatGPT and the AI revolution

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Welcome to Good, Bad Billionaire from the BBC World Service.

Every episode, we pick a billionaire and find out how they made their money.

Then we judge them.

Are they good, bad, or just another billionaire?

I'm Simon Jack, I'm the BBC's business editor.

And I'm Zing Sing, I'm a journalist, author and podcaster.

And this week's billionaire is the founder of a company that's either going to kill us all, cure us all, put us all out of a job, means we can't believe anything we read, see or hear.

It's the man behind artificial intelligence or one of the companies behind it, OpenAI.

It's Sam Altman, who is, I think, for my money, the first openly gay billionaire we've had on the show.

I think so.

He's 39 years old.

He's the chief executive of OpenAI, who makes something you may have heard of, everyone seems to have heard of it in the last couple of years, called ChatGPT.

He's newly minted.

He only was worth $1 billion as of this year.

And interestingly, he didn't make his fortune from artificial intelligence.

He is also what you might call an incredible deals guy.

He actually describes himself as having a delusional level of self-confidence.

As I say, he's in charge of OpenAI, although wasn't for about a very tumultuous week.

We'll get into that a bit later in the programme.

This is a company that is shaping all our futures.

For years, I've been going to places like Davos, and they've been saying artificial intelligence is going to change our lives.

They've been droning on about it for decades, and in the last couple of years, it's hit us like a freight train.

In fact, we'll actually probably try and use ChatGPT during this program.

Let's give it a whirl.

What is Good Bad Billionaire Podcast?

Good Bad Billionaire is a show that examines the lives of billionaires through a critical lens, aiming to explore whether they've had a positive or negative impact on the world.

The hosts delve into personal histories, business practice, and philanthropic efforts of these ultra-wealthy individuals, discussing both their achievements and their controversies.

That's pretty good.

That's actually pretty accurate.

Putting us out of a job already.

I wish we'd never picked it up now.

Well, but maybe when it comes to judging, Sam Altman, we'll give ChatGPT the last word.

Stay tuned.

So...

Sam Altman is a man who likes expensive and rare things as befits any billionaire.

He's got a half a million dollar watch, so rare only 33 were ever made.

If you're a watch geek, it's called a Grubel Falsy Invention Piece One in red gold.

He also splashed out on a $15 million Red McLaren F1 car.

And he collects technological artefacts, including, we're told, a Bronze Age sword and a jet engine.

He's also a survival prepper.

And that means people preparing for some apocalypse to befall the Earth.

Yes, so he's collected guns, gold, potassium iodide, antibiotics, batteries, water, and gas masks.

So he's clearly readying himself for some cataclysmic event.

Yeah, in fact, he's getting ready should artificial intelligence, which he is kind of helping to foster in case it attacks humanity.

Let's have a listen to Sam testify before a U.S.

Senate committee in 2023.

My worst fears are that we, the field, the technology, the industry, cause significant harm to the world.

I think that could happen in a lot of different ways.

It's why we started the company.

It's...

big part of why I'm here today.

Well, it doesn't sound like he's that confident.

If he's doing all this prepping, it doesn't sound he's very confident that he can stop it, attacking humanity.

Or maybe he just enjoys having a plan B.

What you might gather from that quote is that Sam actually believes that open AI, with him in charge, that's an important caveat, will be able to harness AI to make the world a better place.

So, our fundamental question we always ask in this: is he a good, bad, or just another billionaire?

is a pretty pertinent one and one that's really current.

Well, before we get into all of that, let's just trace Sam Altman's journey from a zero to a million.

Sam Altman was born in 1985, grew up in a solid middle-class Jewish family in St.

Louis in the United States.

His dad worked in real estate, his mother was a dermatologist, and he was the eldest of four children.

Yeah, the family played maths games over dinner and they were super competitive.

His brother remembers Sam saying, I have to win and I'm in charge of everything.

Born with that instinct to rule you might say and Sam was good with tech from a very young age so by three years of age he could work the VCL by eight he could program the Macintosh computer his parents gave him and he went to a private school called John Burroughs rated one of the top 100 schools in the US and he was well liked there in fact his head teacher said that teachers liked him because he was very very bright and a hard worker but he was also super social and as you said saying he is gay he came out to his parents at 16 and he described growing up gay in the Midwest in the 2000s as not the most awesome thing.

At 17, and this is really interesting, when fellow students objected to a speaker booked for the school for National Coming Out Day, Sam actually announced he was gay to the whole school at Assembly and he asked everyone whether the school wanted to be a repressive place or one that was open to different ideas.

So quite a ballsy move.

Yeah, brave.

The school councillor said what Sam did changed the school.

It felt like someone had opened up a great big box full of all kinds of kids and let them out into the world.

I actually think this is quite brave because, you know, Sam Altman is now about 39 and I think that when he was growing up, you know, that was a time when kids were still using the word gay as a pejorative.

Yeah, and the Midwest is not New York City, that's for sure.

Certainly not.

Or San Francisco.

But I also think in a way, as we go through his story, he can look people in the eye and sort of be very, very direct with them.

He could stand his ground and say his thing and feel confident in his own skin.

And that will become very important in the boardroom dramas he'll have to deal with when he grows up.

For sure.

So not our first billionaire to enroll at Stanford University in Palo Alto.

He joined in 2003 to study computer science.

And you know, at the time, going to Stanford would have been really exciting and inspiring because Silicon Valley, which is exactly where Stanford University is, was coming back strong after the dot-com bust.

So while at the university, there were some technological developments that would influence what he was doing.

He learned that GPS, global positioning satellite services, would soon be available on mobile phones.

Right.

I remember in my younger days having to write down directions on a piece of paper to get places.

Sure, on you, something called an A to Z in London.

You're using a map to get somewhere.

You're talking to someone who used to deliver pizzas at the age of 17 without GPS.

It was a nightmare.

We'll see whether artificial intelligence beats it.

For my money, GPS is the single most useful invention ever on the face of the earth.

And understandably, Sam also felt the same way because, with his then-boyfriend, Nick Sevo, he developed an app called Looped.

This would allow users to track their friends on a map.

So, basically, location-based social media, sort of like what Snapchat does with Find Your Friends.

Yeah, and the app got Sam a place on a brand new summer camp.

That's a big American tradition.

Everyone goes on camp, but usually you go a bit younger, but this was a special camp for tech startups called Y Combinator, which he attended in Cambridge, Massachusetts during the summer break off for his second year at Stanford in 2005.

So, Y Combinator at the time was a relatively new thing.

It was a kind of investment experiment which was run by a guy called Paul Graham and his wife, Jessica Livingston, and their friends.

And they were frustrated at the pace of venture capital investing because they believed that investors should be, quote, making more smaller investments.

They should be funding hackers instead of suits.

They should be willing to fund younger founders.

So at this camp, each founder was given $6,000 to work on their idea whilst being coached with the chance to pitch to Paul's wealthy friends for 15 minutes at the end.

He worked so hard reportedly that summer that he says he got scurvy, which is something that used to beset sailors back in the old shipfaring days because it's caused by vitamin C deficiency, which they used to cure by putting Lymes on board, which is why to this day Brits in America are called Lymes.

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Learn something new with this podcast every time.

So Sam was inspired by a summer Y Combinator because by the age of 19, he actually dropped out of Stanford to focus on loop.

That is so ballsy.

I just cannot imagine you get into like the premier tech and science university in the world and you decide you're so confident you're going to drop out.

It's just, you know, I can't imagine doing that.

I mean, he shares that with one of our other billionaires, Mark Zuckerberg, you know, both programmers who drop out of university to build essentially the nascent social media companies of this day and age.

And Bill Gates, remember, dropped out of Harvard.

So, you know, basically, if you want to make it big, drop out of school, kids.

I think that's a good message to leave people with.

In his role as startup founder, Sam proved to be what people say as an incredible deals guy.

One of the reasons he got a place on Y Combinator was that he passed the so-called young founders test.

He could manage adults.

And this is really important, right?

Because if you're a 19-year-old who behaves like a 19-year-old, you're put in charge of a million, billion-dollar company, and you cannot manage 35, 45, 55-year-olds, you're a toast.

Yeah, in fact, Y Combinator's Paul Graham, the guy who founded it, said that age 19, Sam seemed like he had a 40-year-old inside him.

There are other 19-year-olds who are 12 inside.

And this is interesting, given what you said about how he seems to be a very straight-talking guy, because when he was challenged by these older venture capitalists that his idea for Looped was stupid, he would apparently look them straight in the eye and say, Really, why do you think so?

Yeah, a profiler in New Yorker magazine described him as a formidable operator, quick to smile, but also quick to anger.

With Paul saying Sam is extremely good at becoming powerful.

Interesting choice of words.

A year later, after Sam started looped, he'd raised $12 million.

So clearly those venture capitalists kind of liked his ballsiness.

And he'd secured a deal with the mobile phone company Sprint.

Yeah, and over the next few years, he got more deals with other mobile carriers.

And the valuation of the company reaches $175 million.

That was its peak.

It soon dropped.

Because while the company and him were popular with investors, the app actually wasn't taking off among users.

Yeah, this is interesting because he said that his mistake was thinking that locations would be important with social media.

And I remember when there was a phase when people thought that was going to be important.

But he said, in his words, people would lie on their couches and just consume content and learned you can't make humans do something they don't want to do.

So Sam actually caused time on looped.

In 2012, him and the other co-founders sell the company for a much lower value of $43 million.

And that was actually a negative return for some of the venture capitalists who who bought in at a higher price.

But Sam himself made $5 million from the sale.

So while he was probably worth a lot more on paper at one point, we now know he's definitely got $5 million in the bank.

In 2012, Sam Altman is a millionaire.

However, he is not happy with how all of this ended.

He said failure always sucks, but failure when you're trying to prove something really, really sucks.

And it's not just the business that failed.

His relationship failed after selling their company.

Sam and Nick, his partner, break up after nine years together.

So at this point, Sam is newly single, newly a millionaire, and now he really has a chip on his shoulder and something to prove.

Yeah, so he's going to prove it by becoming a famous billionaire, that journey from a million to a billion, a journey that will involve being fired and upsetting scholar Johansson.

And we'll get into that in just a second.

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So now let's start Sam's journey from a million to a billion.

We've talked about making smaller investments in smaller companies and lots more of them.

And while he was still at Loop, Sam had started doing just that, investing small amounts in his entrepreneurial peers.

Yeah, he'd also become a partner in Y Combinator.

So he'd become a mentor to these startups and was also starting to invest directly with them.

Yeah, so Y Combinator had grown from the first summer program into a full-time professional incubator.

In eight years, it had supported over 500 startups, including some household names, Dropbox, Airbnb, for example.

So as well as personally investing $100,000 in Airbnb, Sam also gave them some advice when he saw their pitch for the initial funding.

They projected their revenue at 30 million, and Sam advised them to change all the M's to Bs because either you don't believe everything you said in the rest of the deck or you're ashamed or I can't do math.

So change all the millions in the pitch to billions.

And I remember this period really well and we had some friends in California and they said, actually, unless you are ludicrously ambitious and you say you're going to spend tons of money investing in this company, the venture capitalists won't be interested.

They're not interested in sensible projections they want moonshots all of the time so replace the m's with b's and then you've got some interest that's so intriguing so basically you have to aim high and then if you kind of fall under that you'll still have succeeded more than if you just aimed lower exactly so in 2012 when he sells looped he takes the five million dollars from that sale and he uses it to set up his own venture capital fund with his brother jack and calls it hydrazine capital i have a question about venture capital which is is that just a fancy name for investing well yeah venture capital is not for investing in companies on the stock exchange.

Venture capital is for investing in companies that might only have an idea on the board.

It might not have even made anything yet.

It might be pre-revenue, so they haven't made any money yet, and it certainly would be pre-profit.

Most of these companies will never have made a profit.

They are the big companies of the future, and most of them fail.

The point is, it's a bit like a movie studio.

You make a bunch of movies, nine of them lose money, the tenth one is Titanic.

Do you know what I mean?

And so basically, the big hits pay for all the misses many times over.

That's the model.

And do you just need to be ludicrously wealthy to be a venture capitalist?

Yeah, I think it's fair to say that most venture capitalists and the money they get from investors are from people who have got a very high risk appetite, which means they can afford to

take bigger chances, which must mean they've got a bigger...

comfort level and which means they must be wealthy.

Which means that neither of us would really qualify as venture capitalists ever.

I don't think we'd be allowed to be venture capitalists.

There's quite a lot of when you sign up to a lot of these things, you have to fill in quite a lot of forms.

So he's founded this hydrazine capital five million from his own money.

He raises a further 21 million, including money and some mentorship from Peter Thiel, the co-founder of PayPal, an early investor in Facebook.

You can listen to our episode on the Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, where Peter Thiel plays a big role.

So Sam then uses most of his money to invest via hydrazine capital in Y combinated companies.

And within two years, he's written on his blog that five of his first 40 investments were worth 100 times their invested capital.

So that goes back to what I was saying.

He made 40 investments, five of them are worth 100 times their invested capital.

Even if the other 35 are worth nothing, he's making big money.

Right.

So clearly he's made some bets that have paid off.

At least he says they have.

Yeah.

In 2014, Paul Graham steps aside from Y Combinator and makes Sam the president.

Silicon Valley was pretty surprised he'd handed it over to Sam, who was just 28 at this point.

Paul said, said, Y Combinator needs to grow, and I'm not the best person to grow it.

Sam is what it needs at this stage in its evolution.

And he wanted to expand Y Combinator's remit beyond just technology.

In fact, his ambition was to build a sort of trillion-dollar conglomerate that moved the whole world forward in a number of different industries.

He blogged that science seems broken.

He asked for applications from companies in energy and biotech.

artificial intelligence, robotics and other scientific fields.

And this expansion into new fields was a gamble, but it was profitable.

The year before Sam took over, Y Combinator's combined companies had a valuation of 11.5 billion.

The year after he took over, it was $65 billion.

That is an astonishing acceleration in value.

You know, one of these things about being right place, right time, what we saw from post dot-com bust to today is probably the biggest period of wealth creation in history.

And they were right in the middle of that stream.

And Paul Graham said, I think his Sam's goal is to make the whole future so it's not just about getting money and becoming rich it's also about shaping the future if it was just about money I'd be out by 10 million probably even earlier than that or certainly by a hundred to press on to a billion and beyond you've got to think you're doing something more than just accumulating wealth it's more like I think one of them mentions it we'll get to it later more like a religion than it is investing oh yeah and in fact it's very Alexander the Great I think yeah so it's at this moment that Sam Altman sets up an organization that will shape the future of the world and is probably the reason we're covering him today because in 2015 he founds OpenAI, a non-profit artificial intelligence company with a goal, a humble goal, to benefit humanity.

So the non-profit bit is interesting, right?

Because it was set up that way to resist some of these factors that drive much of the tech industry, you know, that for-profit motive.

So instead, Sam believed it would operate more like a research facility or a think tank.

And it's interesting they set this up because clearly, even at this stage, they've got an instinct and a hunch.

It's a very powerful technology which will need some kind of conscience and some kind of regulation, some kind of moderation, someone to think about it.

Ethics, basically.

Yeah, for sure, exactly.

And perhaps the world's most famous billionaire at the moment, Elon Musk, was his co-chair.

Other founders included, Peter Thiel, LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, and Infosys, founded by another of our good, bad billionaires, NR Nariana Murti.

And together these founders pledged $1 billion to work on AI that would be quote-unquote good and dominate the market before other companies could release quote bad AI.

Yeah, and this is one of the biggest investment trends around.

Anything that has got anything to do with AI over the last couple of years has exploded in value.

If you look at a company called NVIDIA, which supply the chips, which basically power a lot of the AI, that company has gone stratospherically, in the period of two years, it's overtaken Google, Microsoft, Amazon, all of them, because they basically think AI is going to be a dominant technology.

They have the chips to power it.

By the way, it's also led to a lot of sort of AI washing.

So now every company says, oh, we're an AI company, we're an AI company, hoping that some of that hysteria rubs off on them and their shares shoot up.

So a lot of people claiming to be AI-enabled or at the cutting edge of AI are not at all.

Oh, wow.

I love that term, AI-washing.

So Open AI, this billion-dollar AI project, was from one of the biggest names in in tech, and it made people very excited.

Yeah, but the big money needed was proving beyond a non-profit organization.

Because the costs were really high, right?

AI is a specialist field.

You had to hire the world's best AI researchers.

They want multi-million dollar salaries.

Cloud computing power alone, so the power it takes to fuel AI development, also costs tens of millions of dollars.

And Elon Musk felt OpenAI was actually falling behind Google, which was developing its own take on AI, and that it would not be relevant without a dramatic change, in his words, in execution and resources.

And he wanted Tesla to buy OpenAI, but the board refused, so Elon left OpenAI.

But something was going to have to change.

And during this time, Sam had been working simultaneously on Y Combinator and OpenAI, so doing two jobs at once.

But OpenAI was taking so much of his time, the board at Y Combinator asked him, listen, you've got to choose.

You're going to choose between these two companies.

And Sam chose OpenAI, leaving Y Combinator as present in 2019 to concentrate on being CEO of OpenAI.

But importantly, he keeps hold of his Y Combinator investments, so he still keeps the investments that he's got.

However, Sam did agree with Elon Musk on one thing.

He felt that OpenAI was falling behind, and he had this kind of grand solution for it.

He wanted to create a for-profit organization, OpenAI LP, that exists within the larger company structure.

Although this is important, the non-profit board remained in control.

Okay, so you've got a non-profit board, but you've got a division of the company which can make money in order to fund the kind of things that OpenAI was set up to do.

So once they'd made this change, Sam quickly raised a billion dollars in investment from Microsoft.

And becoming a for-profit was not an uncontroversial move, and which we'll discuss later.

But Sam also claims to have had no equity in OpenAI and to draw a salary of just $65,000 as CEO.

So he's basically trying to say, I'm not making any money from this.

Right, this is not personal enrichment that's motivating me here.

So OpenAI clearly isn't the way that Sam Altman is going to become a billionaire, but it is how he becomes famous and why we're covering him.

So let's continue the OpenAI story.

Now, cast your mind back to the end of 2022 when all of a sudden everyone started talking about something called ChatGPT.

And this was OpenAI's huge breakthrough.

Yeah, as I say, people have been droning on about AI's impact on the world for years and years and years.

And it suddenly arrived in real form in ChatGPT, which you could go onto the internet to use you could download it onto your phone you type in questions and it's something which is more than a glorified search engine it's something that can actually figure out by scraping information whenever it can help you write an essay it can solve novel logical problems you know the first time I ever used it I was blown away I couldn't believe what it was doing I think the thing that really blew my mind about chat GPT you can type in questions and it will answer you but something about it feels like you're talking to someone else and someone else is responding in real time, which, you know, just Google searching something doesn't have that feeling.

No, it certainly passes what is called the Turing test.

And the Turing test was named after the famous guy who broke the Enigma code during the war, Alan Turing, brilliant mathematician.

And he said the test of artificial intelligence is could you tell the difference between talking to the computer or talking to a person?

And I think in certain times on the chat GPT, it is very, very hard.

If someone told you there was a person at the other end of it you would believe it.

When it launched Sam immediately became a household name and also someone the world really listened to right?

In fact in spring 2023 he did a 22 country world tour meeting world leaders including British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, Emmanuel Macron, French president, the Spanish Prime Minister Pedras Sanchez, German Chancellor Olaf Schultz, Narendra Modi, Prime Minister of India and many others.

And Sam said for many people 2023 was the year they started taking AI seriously.

So Sam Altman is now becoming a household name.

But then a dramatic twist occurs in the story because on a Thursday in November of that very year, a year after ChatGPT's launch, Sam receives a text from an OpenAI board member to join a Google meet the next day.

And this Google meet, if we leashed chaos, a chaotic power struggle at OpenAI that was literally the headlines around the world.

Because on the Friday, Sam was fired as the chief executive of OpenAI.

Yes, it kicked off this chaotic five-day power struggle.

You can really see this as the culmination of this battle between two ideologies within OpenAI.

Yeah, one side, essentially the Silicon Valley techno optimist, they strongly supported the for-profit model.

And on the other side, it was the bunch fearful of AI, probably the founding reason for establishing OpenAI.

They wanted to be much more cautious.

They believed the non-profit model was safer.

And Sam, it seems, was in the former camp, the for-profit side.

And the release of ChatGPT had exacerbated the division between these two sides because when you release ChatGPT into the world, immediately other companies were like, hey, we could make a lot of money using this.

Yeah, so on that Friday, he was fired by the non-profit board, who announced that a deliberative review process had found Sam was not consistently candid in his communications with the board.

That was the language they used.

Pretty vague, but that lack of candidness led it to lose confidence in his ability to be OpenAI's CEO.

Is it actually that unusual for boards to sack their CEOs?

No, it's not that unusual.

I mean, if a CEO is going to get sacked and they do get sacked, it's the board that sacks them.

That's the board's job.

The board's job is to hire and fire CEOs, one of their many jobs.

And so it's not unusual.

It is quite unusual for a company which is becoming this successful

and high-profile.

They must have known this would be a huge shock through the system.

Actually, some of OpenAI's investors only found out that he was being fired through social media and it basically spooked them.

Yeah, over the next few days, there was pressure from OpenAI's biggest investor, Microsoft, and lots of OpenAI staff threatened mass resignations unless he was reinstated into his job.

And the board kind of, I guess you could put this quite simply, panicked.

They went through three CEO changes in basically as many days.

By Tuesday night, Sam was rehired as chief executive of OpenAI.

And two weeks later, Time magazine announced Sam Altman was chief executive of the year.

People were talking about little else in technology circles other than what was going on at OpenAI.

I mean, it's pretty much their fastest firing and hiring that I've heard of.

Yeah, it's not the kind of firing and rehiring that unions care about, but it is an interesting boardroom drama.

And Time magazine quoted a source who witnessed all of this stuff going on who said, in a lot of ways, Sam is a really nice guy.

He's not an evil genius.

He cares about humanity, but there's also a clear pattern if you look at his behavior of really seeking power in an extreme way.

Let's note that comment for our judging panel later.

So after this brief boardroom blip, he's back in position as the CEO of OpenAI.

So let's get back to Sam's money and his journey to a billion.

Back during his years at Y Combinator, he had invested in some of the world's biggest startups.

He invested his personal wealth in 125 companies.

Reid Hoffman, who founded founded LinkedIn, said Sam is rare in that he's a capable investor, but he's also making bold bets.

And those included some quite small investments he made early on that paid off big time.

He put $100,000 into Uber in its early days.

By the time of its IPO, that was Uber was valued at $82 billion.

He put $100,000 into Airbnb in 2008.

So he's really backed some very, very good horses here.

He's also invested big.

So not just kind of a few $100,000 here and there.

He put $375 million into Helion Energy, a nuclear fusion company that in 2021 was valued at $2.5 billion.

And another one of his investments, Reddit, paid off in March 2024.

It sold shares to the public, had an IPO.

On that day, Sam's stake in the company rose to be worth $600 million.

And a month later, Forbes declared him worth $1 billion.

So, just this year,

March of this year, age 39, Sam Altman is a billionaire.

Just a month after being named a billionaire, Sam is back in the headlines.

Yeah, enter stage left in May 2024, Scarlett Johansson, who said she was shocked and angered after OpenAI launched a chat bot with a voice eerily similar to her own.

Now, if you are a fan of Joaquin Phoenix films, you will know that Scarlett Johansson starred in a sci-fi movie called Her in 2013.

So it's about a guy played by Joaquin Phoenix who falls in love with his device's AI operating system, which basically exists as a voice.

It's voiced by Scarlett Johansson.

And this is Sam Altman's favourite science fiction movie.

And Scarlett Johansson revealed that Sam Altman had approached her about voicing the new chatbot, but she had rejected that.

Sam apologised when the AI chatbot came out and explained the voice was not Scarlett's, it was a voice actress.

Having said that, if you listen to the chatbot, it sounds exactly like her.

And many commented that his approach with OpenAI was a bit like Mark Zuckerberg's kind of move fast and break things, an approach that saw tech companies make big decisions, then deal with the consequences afterwards.

Still, Sam's approach has made OpenAI valuable.

As of 2024, it's valued at $80 billion.

But as we've said, Sam claims he has no equity.

That means an ownership stake in OpenAI.

So that is not the reason he's on this list.

It's the reason we're talking about him, but it's not the reason he's rich.

Meanwhile, in his private life, he married his long-term partner, Oliver Mulherin, a software engineer at their estate in Hawaii, as you do.

Of his marriage, he said, I was expecting it not to feel any different or better.

However, it does feel different and feels better.

I'm very happy.

Oh, wow, overwhelming response to marriage, that.

Naturally, the tech couple live primarily in San Francisco, but as a billionaire, he has, of course, houses all over the place.

That includes a 950-acre cattle ranch in Napa Valley, California, despite the fact Sam's a vegetarian.

And interestingly, at least one of his properties is dedicated to lasting out the apocalypse.

Back in 2016, this is just after he's founded Apenni, I remember, he told the New Yorker magazine that he prepped for survival.

He's a prepper.

What does that mean?

Basically, preppers are a kind of subculture, I guess, of people who believe that the end of the world will come in their lifetime and therefore they have to hoard resources and land in order to wait out the apocalypse.

And Sam Altman said that him and his friends would get drunk and discuss the ways the world would come to an end.

One of their most popular scenarios that they brainstormed was AI attacking humanity.

And he said, I have guns, gold, potassium iodide, antibiotics, batteries, water, gas masks from the Israeli Defense Force, and a big patch of land in Big Sa that I can fly to.

I find this deeply problematic.

So I think that if you're, you know,

nothing...

dents your confidence in the

ethical and safe deployment of AI than the boss of open AI basically arming himself to the teeth with medical supplies and guns and God knows what else in a bunker somewhere to wait for when the AI starts attacking us.

That's quite unsettling, no?

I mean, it doesn't really inspire confidence in his confidence that he'll be able to fix the problem of AI.

So I suppose this is where we are now.

He's prepped, he's ready to go for when AI attacks us.

Maybe this is the time we should judge Sam Altman and find out whether he's good, bad, or just another billionaire.

So we do this on a range of categories and we rank him from zero to ten.

Let's begin with wealth because Sam Altman's actually quite a very entry-level billionaire.

I mean entry-level just this year.

He only became a billionaire this year.

So he is on the bottom rung on wealth of our billionaires.

Having said that, he likes to splash the cash that he does around a lot.

That half a million dollar watch?

A yeah.

$50 million car.

The Napa Valley Ranch, even though he doesn't even eat beef.

The Bronze Age sword.

Yeah, so he definitely does love to spend it.

And we do factor that into our rating, how much they splash the cash.

So although he's definitely a one when it comes to absolute wealth, his penchant for spending it big nudges him up to a three for me.

Oh, I would rank him higher because there's something about the Bronze Age sword that really gets me.

There's a megalomania in there, isn't there?

Oh, yeah.

I mean, I mentioned Alexander the Great earlier.

There is something a little bit Alexander the Great about him, right?

Where he just wants to conquer everything.

I would give him a four out of ten for this.

Okay, three for me, four for you.

We then have a category on rags to riches.

How far have they come from their beginnings, whether they be humble or not?

He grew up in a kind of comfortable middle-class family.

He went to a prestigious private school.

He hasn't really traveled that far.

He was in the surroundings where he could develop his skills, taking a part and using a Mac at the age of eight.

Which his parents gave him as a present.

Playing maths games and competitive math games with the family, whatever.

He's primed for success.

And as you say, he went to the best school and he went to Stanford, which basically is a kind of license to print money, it seems, in this day and age.

And also, he's not that rich.

I mean, he's obviously fabulously wealthy, but by our standards for this podcast, not that rich.

That's very true.

Yeah, so what do you reckon?

I think maybe a two out of ten riches.

I agree with you.

Two out of ten for ragster riches.

Villainy, always an interesting category.

Now then, there's lots of lenses we could look at this through.

Yeah, Sam Altman has been very clear about the fact he thinks AI is a threat, but he also thinks of himself as the guy to handle it.

Yeah, he's the AI wrangler.

Basically, he thinks it could bring about the end of the world.

And he's also talked to having an absolutely delusional level of self-confidence.

So confident is he that he's prepping for Armageddon.

Interestingly, many people have said he's not responsible enough to be taking on this mantle of being the AI wrangler.

Business Insider quoted this venture capitalist who said, he's one of the more intellectually dishonest guys in tech.

Now, Business Insider didn't identify the person who said that.

It could be someone who's got an axe to grind against Sam Altman.

You know, he's had investments in multiple companies.

You can upset people along the way.

So we don't know who or why that was said, but it's a perspective to throw into the pot.

Yeah, and actually in January 2024, OpenAI quietly changed some language around a policy which kind of walked back on a ban on the military use of its AI.

Its policy still states it shouldn't be used to harm yourself or others, including to develop or use weapons, but but it's interesting that they've kind of tried to walk that back.

And it's also worth noting that ChatGPT has already been used in various war propaganda campaigns, ones that OpenAI claims they've shut down,

but apparently bad actors in Russia, China, and Israel have been using ChatGPT to spread misinformation and disinformation.

So there's this fear already that AI is being used to threaten democracy.

Okay.

So the question on villainy is, is he malevolent?

Has he created something that is malevolent?

Not necessarily, but could be used for malevolent purposes.

Does that make him a villain, given the fact that there were plenty of other people who were working on this, including Google, including Microsoft, including others?

This genie was always going to come out of the bottle anyway.

It's an interesting one because I feel like in five to ten years, the Sam Altman story will have moved on enough that we will get a clearer idea of that.

malevolence or villainy.

There seem to be murmurings, right, of people talking about he has this almost kind of crazy desire for power.

The board clearly didn't trust him initially.

After a revolt, he was reinstalled.

It feels like we're at the beginning of this biopic.

Given his prepping for the disaster, he feels a bit to me like the pilot on the airplane who jumps out with his parachute and says, see you all.

That person is not a good guy.

This is also very true.

I think for me, he comes out at a six out of ten.

You know, I think AI definitely has been used for nefarious ends.

Yeah, I don't think he's done anything particularly villainous apart from tell us everything's going to be okay while preparing for total disaster.

And that doesn't sit well with me, so I'll give him a six as well.

But maybe we'll save some of those other considerations for our final judgment on whether he's good or bad or just another billionaire.

So let's come to the category that could save his reputation, philanthropy.

In May 2024, Sam announced he had signed the Giving Pledge to give away at least half of his fortune in his lifetime.

This was set up by Warren Buffett and Bill Gates to encourage the super rich to give away half of their fortune in their lifetime.

That brings the total members to 240, which sounds great, but remember, there are nearly 2,800 billionaires, so it's less than 10%.

So, worth noting, this announcement was also made at a time he was hitting the headlines for less positive stuff, including making Scully Hansen very angry indeed.

But while he was at Y Combinator, Sam did invest in some non-profit organizations.

He invested $100,000 for a 0% stake rather than his usual $100,000 for a 7% stake.

And in 2015, he started a non-profit yc research with ten million dollars of his own money okay so philanthropy i think he scores pretty highly here i'm gonna give him uh i'm gonna give him a seven

yeah i think i'll give him a seven it's interesting i mean the timing of it obviously quite convenient for his peow but not every single newly minted billionaire immediately signs up to the giving pledge to give it away no they don't they don't so okay we'll give him seven for that there's another category we have power in 2016 he blogged a big secret is that you can bend the world to your will a surprising percentage of the time.

The most successful founders don't set out to create companies.

They're on a mission to create something closer to a religion.

Oh, I don't know.

This gives me the hebi-gbs.

I don't like that at all.

Yeah, but I do think, you know, like we say, a lot of our billionaires have to have that zeal, if you like, religious zeal.

Messianic kind of

power, there's no doubt that, you know, Microsoft made a $10 billion investment in OpenAI.

That is the GDP of some small Eastern European countries and there's no doubt that ChatGPT is probably seen as the

market leader in a world-changing technology and he's in charge of it.

So I'd say power is pretty high.

Put it this way, we saw the list of people he met on that world tour in 2023.

He's walking straight into the most powerful rooms in the world.

If you don't have a messiah complex of four, you certainly would develop one after you met the 15th world leader, right?

Yeah, exactly.

He was entertained at the courts of these world leaders.

So I would give him an 8 for power.

Right now, as it currently stands, if Sam Altman came out and said AI is rubbish, he would cause entire companies to crumble.

He would.

I think he's got real power.

So 8 might be even an underestimate, but I'm going to stick with it.

8.

Okay, well, I'll kind of nudge that up to a 9 out of 10.

I think he's enormously powerful right now.

Okay.

The other category is legacy.

Now, this one could be...

possibly,

we just don't know yet, right?

But it could be maybe one of the most consequential legacies of anyone that we've covered so far.

Oh, yeah.

More than Bezos, more than Zuckerberg.

In fact, in 2024, in January, the IMF warned that AI would affect 40% of jobs worldwide.

Yeah, it could put hundreds of millions of people out of work.

And it also, it also, I think the other part of the legacy is that

with the deep fakes that we see, a lot of these are generated by AI, that it's shaken our faith in anything we read, see, or hear.

It's very common now, isn't it?

If you scroll through stuff on social and say, you know, I just don't believe that.

I think it must be AI.

Yeah.

And, you know, initially when AI-generated images came out, people said things like, oh, yeah, you can tell it's fake.

Look at these people.

They've got 11 thumbs.

But every single month, I think it is getting better.

It is improving.

And it all really takes a kind of malevolent actor, bad, you know, a bad actor to just redirect that technology towards kind of nefarious means.

On the other hand, I was talking to the boss of a big drug company the other day, and they said that artificial intelligence has the capacity to make incredible breakthroughs in things like infectious diseases, in cancer, in treating Alzheimer's potentially, just the sheer computing power to notice patterns and do diagnostics and whatever could see a huge change.

Having said that, we are talking about Sam Altman, not AI generally, but his legacy, I think, is that he was the person who put it in a form that really grabbed the public's attention in ChatGPT.

Artificial intelligence being, you know, with lots of other people, it brought us to our attention in a way that others hadn't.

Yeah, that's very true, actually.

And I think that if it wasn't for OpenAI making chat GPT, A lot of these AI developments would have kind of slid relatively under the radar of the average consumer.

You know, with Chat GPT, you suddenly realize, oh wow, this is happening.

This is a thing that exists.

Yeah, and children will never have to do their own homework ever again.

That is not

encouraging it.

No, they're not encouraging that, but all I know is that, you know, ChatGPT has put AI in the hands of individuals.

So for legacy, as somebody who made AI a reality for millions of people, I think he'll be remembered.

But his legacy, I think, is way too early in this powerful technology to see where he personally will figure in it.

So I'm just going to give him a five.

Oh, I actually disagree because I think whatever happens with the future of AI, whether or not OpenAI survives as a company and people chat GPT to the dustbin of history, I think when historians write the story of AI, assuming that there are historians after AI kills us all,

I think ChatGPT will be one of the first things that they'll talk about.

It'll be like the Model T Ford of the automobile.

That's a good argument.

Once again, you persuaded me to bump him up to a seven.

I'm bumping him up for myself to an eight out of ten for legacy.

Because Joe's chat GPT will be like the model T of the automobile industry when it comes to AI uses.

That's a really good way to put it.

So you're what?

Eight.

I'm going to go seven.

Okay.

So the final judgment.

Is Sam Altman good, bad, or just another billionaire?

Shall we see what Chat GPT says?

Yes, let's do it.

Sam Altman's impact is multifaceted.

Opinions about him vary.

Here are some key points.

Altman played a crucial role in nurturing numerous successful startups through his leadership at Y Combinator.

As a co-founder and CEO of OpenAI, he's been at the forefront of AI research and development, pushing for advancements that aim to benefit humanity.

I mean, that seems slightly biased on ChatGPT's part.

Okay, Sam Altman can be seen as a force for both positive innovation and potential ethical concerns.

His contributions to technology and entrepreneurship are significant, but the broader implications of his actions and the industry he represents invite critical scrutiny.

Right.

So ChatGPT's hedging.

Hedging.

Yeah, well, you know, there we go.

So we've got to come off the fence.

Okay.

I'm going to say that it's hard not to conflate your view of him with your view of AI.

Yes.

Right.

And that might be unfair, but I think it's impossible not to do it.

And

bear in mind also that he

is not the person who invented artificial intelligence.

People have been working on it since post-war.

Alan Turing, people like that.

Demis Habessis,

Google Deep Mind, and many others.

But for me, the swing factor on this one is if he's so convinced that it's going to be a force for good, why is he stocked a bunker full of gas masks, iodine,

antibiotics, guns, gold?

Yeah.

Why is he prepping for the apocalypse if he thinks it's going to be such a good thing?

And that is a tension I cannot get out of my mind and unsettles me.

So I'm going to say, with apologies to Sam Altman, but I think ultimately that makes him a bad billionaire.

Having said that, he also doesn't make his money.

In fact, he hasn't made his billion off artificial intelligence.

But you're right, I do think there's something a little bit odd about that tension.

And, you know, just chat GPT alone, for instance, in one industry, in journalism and publishing, there are now people saying they could just automate journalists out of a job just through ChatGPT alone.

I mean, and maybe we are at the beginning, the very beginnings of his story.

I mean, maybe we're being a little bit foolhardy in assessing him so quickly.

But I do think there is something of the bad billionaire about him.

And I'm not just saying that because ChatGPT hedged it and said he was just another billionaire.

On the other hand, he's not the inventor of artificial intelligence.

He's an investor in technology who ended up as the chief executive of a company which is in the forefront of developing AI, which is different.

He's not the evil genius who's kind of plotting the downfall of humanity.

He's running a company which has a lot of power and it has made huge strides.

So I still think that tension that he's preparing for disaster when he tells everyone else it's going to be all right is like the pilot on an airplane jumping out with the last parachute saying it's all going to be fine.

So he just creeps into bad territory, but only just.

In Sam Altman's defense, maybe prepping for the apocalypse is sort of a billionaire version of building a fire escape.

Yeah, but a fire escape in a building is something everyone can use.

I'm willing to bet there's only room for Sam Altman's nearest and dearest in his bunker.

I don't think it's the same thing at all.

Sam Altman, you are officially a bad billionaire.

So who do we have next episode?

We have Africa's richest person, a title he's held for 13 years in a row, and he's a good old-fashioned industrialist.

He's also the world's richest black billionaire.

He's made a fortune out of cement, sugar, salt.

Was very late to the oil refining game.

He is Alico Dangote.

Good Bad Billionaire is a podcast from the BBC World Service.

It's produced by Hannah Hufford and Mark Ward with additional production by Tamzin Curry.

James Cook is the editor and it's a BBC Studios production for BBC World Service.

For the BBC World Service, the senior podcast producer is Kat Collins and the podcast commissioning editor is John Minnell.

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