"The wit of Silicon Valley, the dramatic tension of The Morning Show, and a little bit of Black Mirror to boot." That is how the artificial intelligence (AI) expert Gary Marcus amusingly described the Sam Altman affair on X. The crisis at OpenAI kept the world on edge, as if it had blended the most addictive of Netflix or AppleTV series. The star boss of the hottest AI start-up was sacked and then replaced to everyone's surprise, before he announced his departure for Microsoft, only to make his triumphant comeback backed by 700 out of 770 employees.
Beyond the almost fictional aspects of this business saga, the case of OpenAI and Altman is emblematic of the philosophical and political debates sweeping through the AI industry. The entrepreneur seeks to embody the return of a messianic discourse in the business, after years in which the leaders of tech giants like Google, Meta (Facebook, Instagram) and Apple have had to tone down their attitude, in response to criticism of their power and the effects of their activity.
"I hate to say this, because it sounds arrogant, but, before OpenAI, what was the last truly great scientific breakthrough to come out of a Silicon Valley company?" he asked, deceptively naive, in a podcast in early June, regretting that recent years have seen the creation of "very well valued on the stock market" companies in web and mobile services. "The technological progress we make in the next 100 years will be far larger than all we’ve made since we first controlled fire and invented the wheel," he affirmed in a 2021 manifesto entitled "Moore's Law for Everything," referring to the principle of exponential growth in the computing capacity of computer chips. The driving force behind this revolution – which, according to Altman, will make it possible to "colonize space," "make nuclear fusion work," "cure all diseases" or "build new realities" – is of course artificial intelligence and the advent of a supposed "superintelligence," which would surpass that of humans.
The OpenAI drama has upset Altman's ascendant trajectory. Confronted with certain atypical contradictions in the OpenAI project, he was ousted, as some criticized him for moving too fast, with an overly commercial and imprudent policy, contrary to the structure's original mission. Altman eventually prevailed and was reinstated, thanks to the support by Microsoft, but in this new OpenAI he faces new challenges.
Altman was born on April 22, 1985. All articles describe this almost forty-year-old as precocious. "He epitomizes the classic Silicon Valley entrepreneur," said Olivier Alexandre, sociologist at CNRS (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, France’s state research organization)and author of La Tech. Quand la Silicon Valley refait le monde ("Tech. When Silicon Valley redesigns the world"). Raised in Saint-Louis, Missouri, in a Jewish family – his mother a dermatologist and his father a real estate agent – Altman grew up in a "nerd" environment, a computer and science fan, dreaming of space travel with his two brothers, playing video games or guessing square roots. At the age of 8, he was given a MacLII, which he quickly learned to take apart. Computers and online forums proved an escape for him, as "growing up gay in the Midwest in the two-thousands was not the most awesome thing," he told The New Yorker, having come out in high school.
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