Sam Altman’s escape from the Silicon Valley pack is a sprawling farm at the end of a road that snakes through the vine-swept hills in Napa Valley. I spot the 40-year-old with slightly tousled hair in the open-plan kitchen of the wide bay-windowed house, and I step right in. His bemused look tells me that I wasn’t expected. I am, it turns out, nearly an hour early, but the man behind ChatGPT will finish up a meeting and join me in the garden. I wait under a grapevine-shaded pergola that runs along the house.
For a Lunch with the FT, Altman offered to cook a simple vegetarian meal at his farm instead of meeting me at a restaurant of his choice, where he’s likely to be hounded by selfie-seekers. Since OpenAI, the company he runs, released the generative AI model in 2022, Altman has been catapulted to the status of worldwide celebrity. Last year, he married his software engineer boyfriend and they’ve recently had a baby boy via surrogacy (he consulted ChatGPT on which crib to buy) so he’s been spending more time on the Napa farm.
Altman takes only a few minutes to join me outside. He has built OpenAI into one of the fastest-growing companies ever, with a staggering valuation of more than $250bn, and accelerated a fierce race for AI supremacy: the pursuit of artificial general intelligence, when a machine can surpass the cognitive abilities of humans, not only absorbing knowledge but reasoning and learning on its own.