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COVER STORY |
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Today, Vanity Fair’s New Establishment returns for the first time in nearly a decade. As in the original, portraits by Annie Leibovitz accompany profiles of newsmakers of the moment. It’s a list as varied as the Kushners and the Kalshi founders, Matthieu Blazy and Mayor Mamdani. You can read more about it in my editor’s letter. In the top spot: OpenAI cofounder and CEO Sam Altman. Every day a new scientific breakthrough or existential threat seems to make the world more aware and more distrusting of an AI future that we’re told is rapidly approaching—whether we like it or not. And nobody is more recognized as the face of artificial intelligence—as a technology, an industry, and a civilizational shift—than Altman. Long before he became a household name, Altman established a towering reputation in Silicon Valley: persuasive prodigy, visionary futurist, relentless CEO. But as OpenAI’s influence broke out of tech’s insular bubble, some of the very same traits that served him well in Northern California have become his greatest liabilities. Today, Altman is finding it hard to shake a public image as unknowable, at best, and perhaps delusional about what constitutes an acceptable future. As the public understanding of AI grows—along with the anxiety it induces—he has found himself the figurehead of humanity’s next chapter. Even Altman admits there’s a “non-zero” chance that it’s our last. I sat down with Altman for two interviews in San Francisco, the first on September 11 and then again on October 2. In the intervening three weeks, the story about AI seemed to turn upside down about a half dozen times. Both conversations are now episodes of Vanity Fair’s new interview show, Fair Game. Over the course of these two conversations, we discussed Altman’s life—his children, his rivalries, pronatalism, “prepping” for the apocalypse, visiting Trump’s ballroom, Luca Guadagnino’s Artificial, and being characterized as a villain in society. We talked about his company—new products, the delayed IPO, his compensation, the recent exodus of executives. And we talked about the technology itself—exinction risk, alignment, regulation, and ChatGPT’s role in mental health and suicide. It is clear that while Altman publicly asks to be regulated, he is also aware that it is unlikely he will be. “We’re going to make…I’m going to make many individual decisions that you’re clearly not going to like,” he told me. “You can come try making them all; they’re not so easy.” (OpenAI has an agreement with Condé Nast, the owner of Vanity Fair, which allows OpenAI to display its content in search results for a limited term.) Our conversations have been lightly edited for length and clarity. |
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MARK GUIDUCCI GLOBAL EDITORIAL DIRECTOR |
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