The ChatGPT king isn’t worried, but he knows you might be

I first met Sam Altman in the summer of 2019, days after Microsoft agreed to invest $1 billion in his 3-year-old startup, OpenAI. At his suggestion, we had dinner at a small, decidedly modern restaurant not far from his home in San Francisco.

Halfway through the meal, he held up his iPhone so I could see the contract he had spent the past several months negotiating with one of the world’s largest tech companies. It said Microsoft’s billion-dollar investment would help OpenAI build what was called artificial general intelligence, or AGI, a machine that could do anything the human brain could do.