Last year was a huge one for Sam Altman. The OpenAI CEO rocketed to household name status, was sought by dozens of world leaders for his audience, and saw his personal wealth balloon, all thanks to the success of ChatGPT. But just before Thanksgiving, the rocket engine faltered. OpenAI’s nonprofit board fired Altman, saying he had been dishonest with them. Altman eventually saw off the board’s threat, and was back in the top job by the time he sat down for home-cooked vegetarian pasta on Thanksgiving. But to many observers—if not for his many allies in Silicon Valley—the events had tarnished Altman’s golden year.
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In 2024, as well as shepherding OpenAI through several new products including a voice assistant, a synthetic video generator, and an AI search engine, Altman resumed his project of smoothing the ground for OpenAI’s future plans. In February, it emerged he was seeking up to $7 trillion from investors in an audacious attempt to build a new manufacturer of the chips necessary to build cutting-edge AI, seeking to loosen some of Nvidia’s stranglehold of the market. And in July, he published a manifesto of sorts in the Washington Post, arguing that for democracies to succeed against authoritarianism, they must improve their cybersecurity, invest more deeply in AI hardware, and collaborate with China on setting global norms for AI deployment.
But ever since that fateful Thanksgiving, Altman’s pitch—that he is developing AI for the betterment of humanity—has come under greater scrutiny. Newspaper investigations have raised questions over his many apparent conflicts of interest at OpenAI. While Altman holds no equity and only draws a meager salary, he has large stakes as a private investor in many of OpenAI’s collaborators and customers. Several of OpenAI’s senior safety researchers have resigned in recent months, with one claiming that safety had “taken a backseat to shiny products” under Altman’s leadership. The company’s president and a key Altman ally, Greg Brockman, is taking an extended leave of absence to spend time with his family. And the CEO was embroiled in a controversy over restrictive non-disclosure agreements that has since prompted whistleblowers to ask the SEC to investigate. Altman said in posts on X he was unaware of a non-disparagement clause that would prevent departing employees from selling their valuable equity, adding that OpenAI had never, and would never, claw back departing employees’ vested equity.
Despite these headwinds, Altman does not appear to be going anywhere. After the resignations of its senior safety researchers, OpenAI set up a new safety committee that said it would assess and strengthen the company’s existing measures. And Bret Taylor, the new chair of OpenAI’s board, defended Altman over accusations of conflicts of interest, saying Altman’s personal investments had all been disclosed to the board in line with company policies. Through most of that time OpenAI has remained out ahead of the AI race, with its latest chatbot GPT4-o at the top of an open-source leaderboard at the time of writing. As a longtime startup investor and occasional blogger, Altman is fond of dispatching pearls of wisdom. Among his favorites: “So much of being a successful entrepreneur is about just not giving up.”
*Disclosure: OpenAI and TIME have a licensing and technology agreement that allows OpenAI to access TIME’s archives.
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