As one VC partner told Business Insider at the time: "Sam is bigger than Taylor Swift."
But the bigger you are, the faster the fall, and a few months later, things began to unravel.
Others simply said Altman was overhyped, that he didn't have all the answers that the public and investors seemed to expect of him.
Thanks to good old-fashioned capitalism, Altman and OpenAI have enjoyed business win after win and held their positions as the leaders in the aggressive AI race.
"I thought Sam Altman did a really good job in the special," she told The Washington Post in a discussion about her TV program on artificial intelligence.
Persons:
—, Sam Altman, Taylor Swift, Altman, Oscar, Scarlett Johansson, Johansson, Ilya Sutskever, Jan Leike, Leike, Anthropic —, Greg Brockman, OpenAI, Siri, Goldman Sachs, OpenAI fanboys, Wharton, Ethan Mollick, Anderson Cooper, Josh Kushner —, Oprah Winfrey
Organizations:
Service, OpenAI, Business, —, Leike, Apple, Microsoft, Nvidia, tech's, o1, Washington
Locations:
OpenAI —, Valley