When I interviewed OpenAI boss Sam Altman

I don't think he liked me much

Sam Altman, boss of OpenAI, might be the most important person in technology right now. You’ve probably come across the company’s ChatGPT, a ‘large language model’ that allows users to use prompts to produce incredibly good machine generated content. Last week Sam released SORA, their new text-to-video software that has people terrified / ecstatic. With just a few words, SORA will spit out a scarily realistic videos that are difficult to distinguish from the real thing.

There are incredible possibilities here. But also some problems. People are worried about the internet getting flooded with believable nonsense; others reckon there are major copyright questions hanging over the training data used in these models (although one lawsuit was partially dismissed last week).

Nevertheless, OpenAI just concluded a deal valuing them at $80 billion. The decisions Sam makes really will change the world. So it’s important to understand how he thinks about the future and technological progress.

I interviewed Sam Altman back in 2017. Although he’d already started OpenAI at that point, I wasn’t there for that. I knew him as the head of Y Combinator, Silicon Valley’s most influential early stage investment firm. It was making a BBC documentary called The Secrets of Silicon Valley.

Credit to Sam for speaking to me. He didn’t need to; he didn’t make any requests on what I could ask; and answered all the questions I put to him. But it was awkward. I’m not sure he was impressed by my line of questioning. He thought I was ‘anti-progress’, although I was simply asking whether he was thinking enough about the society-wide disruption his companies create.

It was an interesting exchange. I think about it each time OpenAI releases a new game-changing piece of software. So here it is:

‘You’re going in the wrong direction’ Sam tells me.