Altman Is His Own Risk Factor in OpenAI’s Mega-IPO
Effective leadership is hard.
Photographer: Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images
A profile-cum-investigation of Sam Altman in The New Yorker drilled deep into the OpenAI chief executive officer’s personality foibles, to put it mildly, as he steers the AI firm to an initial public offering that may value the company at more than $1 trillion. The takeaway is that even though the documents governing the IPO are unlikely to mention it, one of the biggest so-called risk factors facing the company is Altman himself.
In essence, the IPO is an acknowledgement that the ChatGPT-maker, which just raised $122 billion from investors at a valuation of $852 billion, needs what seems to be an endless amount of money to fund its race for artificial general intelligence. That aim alone would be cause for careful diligence — is AGI even possible? — without the worry that the CEO is highly unpredictable and prone to falsehoods.