The Optimist
The Altman biography: capital formation, narrative, and personal indispensability at the center of the AI age.
Hagey — a Wall Street Journal reporter with access to Altman, his family, and the people around him — writes the fullest account yet of how a St. Louis dropout became the capital-formation engine of the AI age, including the most detailed reconstruction so far of the five days of November 2023. Read it against Empire of AI: the sourced, sympathetic-but-unsparing biography and the structural critique, describing the same company from opposite sides of the wall. Of the AI-lab histories on this shelf, this is the one I enjoyed most.