Every December, TIME recognizes the people who have done the most to influence the events of the last year, and in 2023, Sam Altman is TIME’s CEO of the Year. Thanks to the release of ChatGPT, the most rapidly adopted tech product of all time, and its successor, GPT-4, this was the year that, as Altman puts it, the world started taking AI seriously. Open AI has become an $80 billion phenomenon, AI has become a revolution, and Altman himself has become the public face of what may be the most exciting technological shift in the history of humanity.
It’s also been a rocky few weeks for Altman, after he was suddenly ousted from OpenAI and then reinstated just days later. My colleagues executive editor Naina Bajekal and tech correspondent Billy Perrigo have been speaking with Altman and the people around him for months in order to chronicle the rise, the fall, and the comeback of the man who may be the most powerful human in tech.
On this week’s Person of the Week, I spoke to Naina and Billy about how OpenAI revolutionized technology this year, and why Sam Altman is the CEO of the Year. And at TIME’s Person of the Year event on Dec. 12, our Editor in Chief Sam Jacobs spoke with Altman about the turmoil at OpenAI, why it happened, and what he learned from it.
We’re going on a short holiday hiatus, but we’ll be back in January with brand-new episodes about what shapes the people who shape the world.
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