The new tech worldview

Sam Altman is almost supine. He is leaning back in his chair, feet up, in his home library overlooking San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge. In washed jeans and a t-shirt, the 37-year-old entrepreneur looks about as laid-back as someone with a galloping mind ever could. Yet the ceo of OpenAi, a startup reportedly valued at nearly $20bn whose mission is to make artificial intelligence a force for good, is not one for light conversation. The only signs of playfulness are two pairs of pink-coloured high-tops sitting on a bookshelf, with logos representing his two favourite technologies, AI and nuclear fusion. Occasionally he drifts into nerd-speak. At one point, keen to convince your correspondent that AI will progress faster than people think, he says, sounding rather robotic himself: “I’m curious if that caused you to update your priors.”