THE OPTIMIST

Searching portrait of Silicon Valley tech tycoon Sam Altman, “the global prophet of an unimaginably prosperous future.”

Wall Street Journal reporter Hagey has been tracking Sam Altman for years, charting the rise of various strains of AI that have risen at his behest and that of his competitors. Altman, Hagey notes, isn’t a coder, though he’s indisputably brilliant and charismatic: One colleague notes that if you dropped him on an island of cannibals and came back later, he’d be king, while tech funder Peter Thiel told her, “We should treat him as more of a messiah figure.” Instead, Hagey writes, he’s a promoter, an evangelist, the optimist of the title, although he has allowed that the algorithms he’s created through OpenAI—an oddly structured company that’s both for-profit and nonprofit—may indeed one day yield computers that are smarter than us, bringing on “the singularity,” that tipping point after which humans may not be needed. Indeed, in a book full of telling anecdotes, one of the most profound comes from Altman’s now nemesis, Elon Musk. One of Altman’s predecessors told Musk that he was working on superintelligent AI, “the most important thing in the world,” to which Musk responded that his project to bring humans to Mars was more important still. His interlocutor said fine, as long as a rogue AI didn’t follow humans to Mars and put an end to them there. “Musk got very quiet. He had never thought about that.” By Hagey’s vivid account, Altman has thought about that and most things, layering one venture atop another, with one comprising “an impressive synthesis of Altman’s many pet projects and obsessions—­AI, UBI [universal basic income], affordable housing, techno-­utopianism—that cohered into a worldview.” Altman’s life isn’t uncheckered, but he emerges from these pages as someone far worthier than most tech giants of close attention.

An exemplary blend of biography, financial technology reportage, and futurology.