A brief history of Sam Altman’s hype
Each time you’ve heard a borderline outlandish idea of what AI will be capable of, it often turns out that Sam Altman was, if not the first to articulate it, at least the most persuasive and influential voice behind it.
For more than a decade he has been known in Silicon Valley as a world-class fundraiser and persuader. OpenAI’s early releases around 2020 set the stage for a mania around large language models, and the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022 granted Altman a world stage on which to present his new thesis: that these models mirror human intelligence and could swing the doors open to a healthier and wealthier techno-utopia.
This story is part of MIT Technology Review’s Hype Correction package, a series that resets expectations about what AI is, what it makes possible, and where we go next.
Throughout, Altman’s words have set the agenda. He has framed a prospective superintelligent AI as either humanistic or catastrophic, depending on what effect he was hoping to create, what he was raising money for, or which tech giant seemed like his most formidable competitor at the moment.
Examining Altman’s statements over the years reveals just how much his outlook has powered today’s AI boom. Even among Silicon Valley’s many hypesters, he’s been especially willing to speak about open questions—whether large language models contain the ingredients of human thought, whether language can also produce intelligence—as if they were already answered.
What he says about AI is rarely provable when he says it, but it persuades us of one thing: This road we’re on with AI can go somewhere either great or terrifying, and OpenAI will need epic sums to steer it toward the right destination. In this sense, he is the ultimate hype man.
To understand how his voice has shaped our understanding of what AI can do, we read almost everything he’s ever said about the technology (we requested an interview with Altman, but he was not made available).
His own words trace how we arrived here.
In conclusion …
Altman didn’t dupe the world. OpenAI has ushered in a genuine tech revolution, with increasingly impressive language models that have attracted millions of users. Even skeptics would concede that LLMs’ conversational ability is astonishing.
But Altman’s hype has always hinged less on today’s capabilities than on a philosophical tomorrow—an outlook that quite handily doubles as a case for more capital and friendlier regulation. Long before large language models existed, he was imagining an AI powerful enough to require wealth redistribution, just as he imagined humanity colonizing other planets. Again and again, promises of a destination—abundance, superintelligence, a healthier and wealthier world—have come first, and the evidence second.
Even if LLMs eventually hit a wall, there’s little reason to think his faith in a techno-utopian future will falter. The vision was never really about the particulars of the current model anyway.
