In 2021, Nvidia produced about 5,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 FLOPs of GPU compute, the equivalent of about 5 million human brains. If Sam Altman is to achieve his dream of artificial general intelligence in his lifetime, that number will need to double or triple every year for the foreseeable future.
Such a dream will require more money than has ever been spent on any business venture in history, an order-of-magnitude increase in the rate at which we produce energy, a global supply chain that can pump out GPUs like Triscuits, and a teardown redesign of nearly every human institution. But don’t worry, Altman’s on it.
For the better part of a decade, he’s used his position at the nexus of power in Silicon Valley (not to mention his personal millions) to build out a network of hundreds of moonshot startups designed to prepare for the coming of AGI.
From scalable nuclear fusion and a $7 trillion plan to upend global chip production, to a universal human-powered cryptocurrency, and a company looking to end aging, Altman sits atop a sprawling techno-optimist empire.
He joins the ranks of CEOs like Elon Musk who have transcended merely running a business and are instead selling a worldview, one in which private companies and benevolent billionaires hold the key to solving humanity’s problems. For Musk, it’s to bring humans to Mars. For Altman, it’s achieving AGI.
These wide-ranging plans for global transformation go far beyond Altman’s role as the CEO of generative AI behemoth OpenAI, developer of ChatGPT. The money comes from his personal fortune, which does not include a stake in OpenAI, and travels through his own VC funds or those that he runs with his brothers Max and Jack, including Hydrazine Capital and Altman Capital. Even the investments made by the OpenAI Startup Fund are apparently owned outright by Sam himself.
A representative for OpenAI and Altman declined to comment for this story.
“This technology could help us elevate humanity,” Altman wrote in a blog post in 2023, and by all accounts he believes it. He also seems to believe it’s his duty to lay the groundwork for the coming revolution.
Energy
The first pillar of Altman’s grand unified theory of the future rests on energy. Though AI models sometimes feel like they exist in the realm of the abstract, they run on chips and are at the end of the day constrained by the laws of physics. Altman knows his dream of AGI will require new sources of cheap, abundant power.
“We still don’t appreciate the energy needs of this technology,” Altman said at a Bloomberg event at Davos in January, talking about the need for an energy breakthrough in an industry that is already on track to consume as much power as a major city.
Last month shareholders and executives of scalable fission reactor startup Oklo gathered in a conference center in New York for their first ever investor day. Headlining the event was company chairman and investor Sam Altman, who appeared via video call projected on a towered cineplex.
“I so believe in the importance of abundant energy,” a hoodie-clad Altman said from a sterile wood-paneled room with museum lighting and cathedral ceilings. Behind him sat a dead plant flanked by empty unmarked pill bottles and a scale model of the Concorde jet, another brilliant failure that Altman is currently trying to correct, through an investment in a hypersonic jet startup called Hermeus.
“The obvious reason is of course AI,” he went on, “the thing that I spend most of my time thinking about now is how we’re going to build enough AI compute, which really comes down to chips and energy.”
It was this thinking that inspired him in to empty his bank account in 2021 to back nuclear fusion startup Helion, a company looking to commercialize miniature suns and secure the world’s energy future.
“It was immediate fit between us and Sam in terms of the scale of impact we were trying for,” said Helion CEO David Kirtley. He first met Altman in 2014, when he was a newly-minted millionaire and the newly appointed leader of legendary startup incubator Y Combinator. Altman was also in the early days of his obsession with energy, specifically how to create enough of it to fuel his plan for a new world. He showed up at Helion’s headquarters in Redmond, Washington with nuclear physics textbooks under one arm.
“He had done a tremendous amount of engineering and physics research into fusion,” said Kirtley. Altman articulated a vision of a world without fossil fuels, he admonished Helion to move faster, be more ambitious, to apply Y Combinator principles to a field long mired in public sector malaise. Don’t do a science project, put a product in people’s hands.
“That means not demonstrating one power plant, but actually manufacturing a generator every single day, a fusion generator a day, a giga-factory for mass producing fusion,” said Kirtle. “That’s pretty uniquely Sam.”
Silicon and delayed death
The second pillar of Altman’s grand unified theory is a plan to make silicon as free as air and water. He’s reportedly been meeting with the oil rich sovereign wealth funds in support of a $7 trillion plan to radically expand the global semiconductor and chips industry, according to The Wall Street Journal. Little is known about the project other than its eye-popping price tag.
And Altman’s AGI empire extends beyond just the energy and raw material required to build AGI. In 2022 Altman poured $180 million into Retro Biosciences, a company using “cellular reprogramming” to delay death.
“Most VCs are thinking, you know, on the five to seven year time horizon for getting liquidity,” said Retro CEO Joe Betts Lacroix, “Sam can see a longer time horizon.” Lacroix says that Altman’s interest in life extension is part of his pursuit of AGI, which he believes will have the power to usher in unprecedented abundance and create the potential for longer healthier lives.
“He wants to be as actively involved as possible in helping AGI unfold in a beneficial direction,” Lacroix said.
No small ideas
A fixation on moonshots seems to extend to every part of Altman’s portfolio, where there are apparently no small ideas.
Over the years Altman has invested in hundreds of utopian ideas including natural carbon capture, lab grown meat, self driving cars, an end to infertility, an operating system for romantic partnerships, a company making robots to mine cobalt, a company making robots to perform cheap manual labor, a company making “intelligent robots for a new golden age”, and, by far the most adorable, a company that pays water bills for low-income elderly people.
He’s also brought his entrepreneurial spirit and substantial war chest to Washington, where’s become a regular fixture on Capitol Hill as he tries to help set the agenda on AI regulation. He also reportedly has ties to a PAC supporting a tech-friendly challenger to President Joe Biden.
“He only cares about big things, like things that have the ability to fundamentally reshape society,” said Tade Oyerinde, founder and CEO of Campus, a virtual community college backed by Altman. “Maybe over a beer next time I’ll ask him exactly how his psychology ended up that way, maybe it’s something from his childhood, a chip on the shoulder.”
Before Altman agreed to invest in Campus, he and Oyerinde met every day for a week to have sprawling conversations about the future of education. Altman shared stories about the community college where he took classes while in high school and they discussed how AI would raise the minimum level of knowledge required by a worker to be useful, how colleges would need to learn to scale to keep up.
“He’s somehow seen the world like in the year 2050 and I think he’s working back from there,” Oyerinde said.
Not everyone in Silicon Valley shares Altman’s belief in the need for totalizing transformation. Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi says he’s skeptical of Altman’s multi-trillion dollar plans for a new world.
“Look, if your worldview is that you have AGI and it’s basically superhuman, and these are like the gods, we invented god, yeah then maybe you should turn the whole planet upside down. I don’t think that’s what’s happening,” Ghodsi said.
