At President Donald Trump’s inauguration, Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, was relegated to the overflow room while other tech billionaires like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg took prime spots on the dais under the Capitol rotunda.
But days earlier, before flying to Washington, Altman was on the phone with Trump, preparing an announcement that would outflank Musk and put Altman’s company at the center of the new administration’s agenda for artificial intelligence.
On the 25-minute call, Altman appealed to Trump’s love of a big story and of a big deal. He told the president-elect that the tech industry would achieve artificial general intelligence — the hypothetical moment when technology matches human intelligence — during the Trump administration, according to three people familiar with the call. And to get there before Chinese competitors, OpenAI, Oracle and SoftBank had completed a $100 billion deal to build data centers across the country.
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