Sam Altman's leap of faith

Earlier this year, founder-investor Sam Altman left his high-profile role as the president of Y Combinator to become the CEO of OpenAI, an AI research outfit that was founded by some of the most prominent people in the tech industry in late 2015. The idea: to ensure that artificial intelligence is "developed in a way that is safe and is beneficial to humanity," as one of those founders, Elon Musk, said back then to the New York Times. Whether OpenAI is able to attract so much funding is an open question, but our guess is that it will, if for no reason other than Altman himself -- a force of nature who easily charmed a crowd during an extended stage interview with this editor Thursday night, in a talk that covered everything from YC's evolution to Altman's current work at OpenAI.