The Optimist

Sam Altman, OpenAI, and the Race to Invent the Future

20 May 2025

Territory Rights — Worldwide.

Keach Hagey (Author)

Description

The first biography of the enigmatic leader of the AI revolution, charting his ascent within the tech world as well as his ambitions for this powerful new technology

On 17 November 2023, Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, was fired on a video call. The firing quickly made headlines around the world. A week later, Altman was back running the company he had co-founded—and most of the directors who voted to fire him were themselves removed from the board. It was a demonstration of the then 38-year-old Altman’s power to bend reality to his will, and of how vicious and personal the rush to create this world-changing technology is. In The Optimist, acclaimed reporter Keach Hagey tells the Altman story so far: from his childhood in St. Louis to his first startup experience, his time leading Y Combinator, his recruitment of a superior team at OpenAI, the machinations that led to his temporary removal and his struggle to keep his company at the cutting-edge while fending off rivals including Elon Musk. Based on more than two hundred interviews, The Optimist is an essential portrait of an individual whose vision of the future is already shaping our lives.

Reviews

"The Optimist serves to remind us that however unprecedented the consequences of AI models might be, the story of their development is a profoundly human one." — James Ball, The Guardian

"Compelling..." — Ben Wallace-Wells, The New Yorker

"Hagey’s book, written with Altman’s cooperation [is] critical, but no hagiography. “The Optimist” lets the reader see how thoroughly Altman outfoxed his patron, leveraging Musk’s paranoia into enormous sums of money while slowly making OpenAI his own ... [An] excellent and deeply reported book." — Tim Wu, The New York Times Book Review

"[An] excellent new book… [Altman’s] personality is vivid and complicated enough that her story never flags. It is no hagiography." — The Economist

"A brisk, compelling account of Sam Altman’s rise… If you want to understand the forces behind Altman and OpenAI, this is the book to read." — Shakeel Hashim, Transformer

"Timely and myth-busting" — Richard Waters, Financial Times

Hardback

9781324075967

160 x 236 mm • 384 pages

£25.00

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Ebook

9781324075974

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£23.74

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