The Optimist

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

Keach Hagey

$52.95

Hardback

Forthcoming
Pre-Order now

QTY:

English

Norton
14 August 2025

Biography; Biography: business & industry; Biography: science, technology & engineering; Entrepreneurship; Information technology industries

On November 30, 2022, OpenAI released ChatGPT, a chatbot that captivated the world with its uncanny ability to hold humanlike conversations. Not even a year later, on November 17, 2023, Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, was summarily fired on a video call by the company's board. The firing made headlines around the globe: OpenAI is the leader in the race to build AGI-artificial general intelligence, or AI that can think like a human being-and Altman is the most prominent figure in the field. Yet it was mere days before Altman was back running the company he had co-founded, with most of the directors who voted to fire him themselves removed from the board.

The episode was a demonstration of how quickly the industry is moving, and of Altman's power to bend reality to his will. In The Optimist, the Wall Street Journal reporter Keach Hagey presents the most detailed account yet of Altman's rise, from his precocious childhood in St. Louis to his first, failed startup experience; his time as legendary entrepreneur Paul Graham's protégé and successor as head of Y Combinator, the start-up accelerator where Altman became the premier power broker in Silicon Valley; the founding of OpenAI and his recruitment of a small yet superior team; and his struggle to keep his company at the cutting edge while fending off determined rivals, including Elon Musk, a former friend and now Altman's bitter opponent.

Hagey conducted more than 250 interviews, with Altman's family, friends, teachers, mentors, co-founders, colleagues, investors, and portfolio companies, in addition to spending hours with Altman himself. The person who emerges in her portrait is a brilliant dealmaker with a love of risk, who believes in technological progress with an almost religious conviction-yet who sometimes moves too fast for the people around him. With both the promise and peril of AI increasing by the day, Hagey delivers a nuanced, balanced, revelatory account of the individual who is leading us into what he himself has called ""the intelligence age.""

Altman is a figure out of Isaac Asimov or Neal Stephenson. Or he is the author himself: if it feels as though we have all collectively stepped into a science fiction short story, it is Altman who is writing it.

By: Keach Hagey
Imprint: Norton
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 236mm, Width: 160mm, Spine: 33mm
Weight: 589g
ISBN: 9781324075967
ISBN 10: 1324075961
Pages: 384
Publication Date: 14 August 2025
Audience: General/trade , ELT Advanced
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Forthcoming

Keach Hagey is a reporter at the Wall Street Journal. The author of The King of Content: Sumner Redstone’s Battle for Viacom, CBS, and Everlasting Control of His Media Empire, she lives in Irvington, NY.

Reviews for The Optimist: Sam Altman, OpenAI, and the Race to Invent the Future

Keach Hagey is one of the best writers about media and tech. Here she tells the story of Sam Altman and the AI revolution. And a fantastic story it is, not only because it affects all of our lives and futures, but because it is told so well.--Michael Wolff, #1 New York Times best-selling author of Fire and Fury Sam Altman is a pure creation of Silicon Valley. And Keach Hagey artfully captures how the place thinks, operates, and amasses power. A deft biography from a relentless investigative reporter who leaves no stone unturned.--Mark Bergen, author of Like, Comment, Subscribe: Inside YouTube's Chaotic Rise to World Domination The Optimist is a wonder of fair-minded investigation and page-turning storytelling. It reveals Sam Altman--our self-styled messiah of the age of artificial intelligence--in all his charismatic self-contradiction. A must-read for anyone worried that AI will alter or even end human society.--Steve Coll, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Ghost Wars and The Achilles Trap The Optimist is more than a consistently revelatory biography of the man at the center of Silicon Valley's zeitgeist. It's also a clear-eyed history of an important piece of the tech industry and its power structures. Deeply reported and gripping, Keach Hagey's book is packed with insight into Sam Altman's sometimes mystifying decisions, why investors seem mesmerized by him, and previously unreported revelations about his firing from OpenAI.--Christine Lagorio-Chafkin, author of We Are The Nerds: The Birth and Tumultuous Life of Reddit, the Internet's Culture Laboratory