CHAPTER 1High School Hero
Sam Altman knew he ought to keep his mouth shut. In the conservative stronghold of St. Louis, Missouri, people didn’t talk about whether they were gay or straight. While the rest of America was coming to grips with gay rights, Altman’s midwestern hometown was lagging in the early 2000s and still made it a crime to sleep with someone of the same gender. Teenagers like him who had an inkling they were gay tended to find safety in silence. Altman was different. He had to speak up, not because he wanted people to know everything about him, but because talking about it would become a mission.
Altman was that one kid in high school who seemed to magically transcend the labels that others tried to slap on him. He was as bright as any geek, charismatic as any jock. In his English literature assignments, he’d emulate the challenging prose of Faulkner, and in math, he breezed through calculus. Then he’d jump into the pool to bark orders to his water polo team, which he captained, or head home to coordinate video games with his friends for hours on end. At the dinner table with his younger brothers, Max and Jack, he’d geek out about space travel and rocket ships, and then when they played a board game, like Samurai, Sam would declare himself the leader. In this and many other situations, he liked to take charge.
Altman grew up in a middle-class Jewish family, his mother, Connie, a dermatologist and his father, Jerry, a lawyer. Jerry helped push for affordable housing in the city of St. Louis, as well as the reconstruction of historic buildings, and his actions fueled his son’s public-spirited view of the world. Sam vividly remembers Jerry bringing him to his office one day and telling him that even if he didn’t have the time to help somebody, “you have to figure out how to do it anyway,” he says.
Sam also had an enormous amount of self-belief that came from being the eldest of four children as well as a brazenness that others respected. He talked openly about his sexuality when other kids his age, and kids generally in the late nineties, would have kept it secret. He leaned into something that many folks in the Midwest believed was bad and made it seem cool, in part because he wanted to help others who were like him.
That calling came from the internet. When Altman started logging onto the web portal America Online (AOL), he realized there were many more out there like him. Here was the wonderful thing about logging onto AOL’s chat rooms. You’d hear the dial tone and beeps denoting the “handshake” as your modem negotiated a secure connection to the World Wide Web, and the screeching tonal overtures of what sounded like a busted CB radio. Then you got connected, your heart beating a little faster at all the possibilities before you, all the chat rooms. Here you could talk to another interesting person on a computer in another part of the world. The rooms had names like “Beach Party” or “The Breakfast Club.” Some of the biggest rooms were noisy and teeming with creeps, but if you explored rooms in more specific categories like Pet Lovers, X-Files Fans, or Gay & Lesbian, you’d find more coherent conversations.
For people like Altman, these rooms became a lifeline. You could hide under the anonymity of a screen name and lurk while others talked about LGBTQ-friendly places to go. They gave him a sense of belonging in a world where it was easy to feel like an outsider. “Finding AOL chat rooms was transformative,” he would say later in a New Yorker magazine profile. “Secrets are bad when you’re eleven or twelve.”
AOL chat rooms were so significant to the LGBTQ community that by 1999, when Altman was fourteen, about a third of its rooms were focused on gay topics. When he was sixteen, he came out to his parents. His mother was shocked. Her son had always seemed “unisexual and tech-y,” she later said in that same magazine profile on her son, but he also tended not to fit classifications. For instance, he was a vegetarian in a part of America where everybody loved barbecue. He was obsessed with computers, but he also wasn’t reclusive or socially awkward. And while everyone else was listening to nineties pop, he preferred classical music.
The Altmans transferred their precocious teen to John Burroughs, an elite private school on the outskirts of St. Louis that boasted a sprawling, leafy campus and sought to grow its students’ talents for “the improvement of human society.”
He stepped up to as many leadership roles as he could manage. As well as captaining the water polo team, he edited the yearbook and spoke at school assemblies. He socialized with the faculty while occasionally stretching the rules so he could make a stir. At the annual fall pep rally, Altman and his water polo team ripped off their clothes on stage so they were left standing in their Speedos, grinning to whoops and cheers.
He got in trouble for that with the school’s athletic director, but rather than let it go and complain about the admonishment to his friends, or even to another teacher, he fought back and went straight to the top. He knocked on the door of school principal Andy Abbott, a former English teacher with a gentle demeanor. The older educator was charmed by the gangly, dark-haired teen with eyes like saucers, who frequently dropped into his office to pitch ideas or complain about an injustice that he planned to write about in the student paper.
The young man was utterly unintimidated by authority, he noticed. If Principal Abbott ever made an unpopular decision that affected the other students, the kid would take it upon himself to be their savior. “He would object,” Principal Abbot remembers, “and thoughtfully.” To this day, the soft-spoken educator sees Altman as “the most brilliant kid I knew.”
That same earnestness, along with an ability to come across as candid and vulnerable, would later help the young man curry favor with other powerful figures in the worlds of technology and government, from investors to the press, to some of the world’s most powerful CEOs, his solemn stare imploring them to support an epic mission. Altman would learn over time that people in power could smooth the road for your ambitions, just as Principal Abbott would do for him in high school.
His big school project was to build a real-life version of the network he’d found on AOL. He pushed through the school’s red tape and got his principal’s blessing to create the school’s first LGBTQ support group. It was like an underground network that students could visit for counseling or to meet others like themselves. Within a year, about a dozen students had joined.
But Altman wasn’t satisfied. He started approaching his teachers, asking them to put stickers on their doors that said their classrooms were a safe space for gay students, trying to turn his teachers into allies. He eventually started a Gay-Straight Alliance group, aimed at raising public awareness of gay rights.
He then decided to make a splash at the morning assembly. His new group went into the main hall early and placed a series of printed numbers on all the chairs before the audience took their seats. As Altman went up to the mic, he asked everyone with a certain one of the numbers to stand up. “Look around you,” he told the audience, as about sixty kids stood up. “That’s one in ten of you. That’s how many people in the school identify as gay.”
It was a bold demonstration, but something was odd. Several students were missing from the audience, and they all happened to be part of the school’s Christian club. Altman found out later that they had boycotted his presentation by staying at home or in their classrooms. Indignant that these kids had pushed back against his objective, he once again marched into the office of Principal Abbott, demanding that the Christian kids be counted as absent.
“There was nothing damaging about making them more aware,” the teenager argued. He wasn’t a table thumper, but it was clear by his words and his stern expression that he was angry.
“I tried to justify it for a while,” Principal Abbott remembers. “But I think he was probably right about that.”
Altman left school with a hard lesson. If you had ambitious ideas, there would always be some haters. The solution was to align yourself with those who had power and authority and to surround yourself with a support network.
Soon enough, Altman got accepted into the prestigious Stanford University in the heart of California’s Silicon Valley, a fount of brilliant software engineers and technology entrepreneurs who populated the sun-drenched region with technology start-ups. Despite his interest in programming and his admittance to a computer science degree, the lanky eighteen-year-old couldn’t stand to focus on one subject alone. He was fascinated by everything. He took an array of humanities classes and creative writing classes.
Then outside of school hours, he’d drive twenty minutes south for lessons that would become critical to his future life as a globally renowned entrepreneur. He’d play hours of poker at a popular casino in San Jose, honing his skills of psychological maneuvering and influence. Poker is all about watching others and sometimes misdirecting them about the strength of your hand, and Altman became so good at bluffing and reading his opponents’ subtle cues that he used his winnings to fund most of his living expenses as a college student. “I would have done it for free,” he would later tell one podcast. “I loved it so much. I strongly recommend it as a way to learn about the world and business and psychology.”
The field that Altman would one day focus on to transform the world came up as part of his regular degree. He became a researcher at Stanford’s AI lab, a pocket of the university’s vast campus that was filled with cables and the odd robot arm. The AI lab had just been reopened and its leader was Sebastian Thrun, a computer scientist with radical views, a soft German lilt, and piercing blue eyes. Thrun was part of a new breed of academics who weren’t content to spend their days writing grant proposals and waiting for tenure but who worked with tech giants. Stanford was just five miles from Google’s headquarters, and Thrun also ran the cutting-edge “moonshot” projects at Google X that made self-driving cars and augmented reality glasses.
In class, Thrun taught his students about machine learning, a technique that computers used to infer concepts from being shown lots of data instead of being programmed to do something specific. The concept was critical in the field of AI, even though the term learning was misleading: machines can’t think and learn as humans do. Thrun noticed that the serious kid from St. Louis was interested in the possibility of unintended consequences in AI. What would happen if a machine learned to do the wrong thing?
Thrun explained that AI systems could act in unpredictable ways to achieve their “fitness function,” or goal. If an AI was designed with a fitness function to survive and reproduce, it might inadvertently wipe out all biological life on Earth, Thrun said. This didn’t mean the AI was bad. It was just unaware of the gravity of what it was doing. Its motives weren’t all that different from ours when we washed our hands. We didn’t hate the bacteria on our skin and want to destroy it. We just wanted clean hands.
Altman mused on this idea for some time. As a science fiction fan, he wondered if this was why humans had never had contact with alien life. Perhaps beings on other planets had tried creating AI, too, and then been wiped out by their own creation. If that was avoidable, someone would have built safer AI before others created the dangerous kind.
This seed of an idea would lay dormant in the back of Altman’s mind for a little over a decade before blossoming into the creation of OpenAI. But for now it was far too big to tackle. Academics like Thrun built AI systems. Stanford students like Altman built start-ups that became companies like Google, Cisco, and Yahoo. The young geek wanted to do the same. He just needed a business idea. Then it came to him when he was walking out of class. “Wouldn’t it be great if I could open my mobile phone and see a map of where all my friends are?” he asked his Stanford classmate and friend Nick Sivo.
Copyright © 2024 by Parmy Olson
