Sam Altman lays claim to Steve Jobs' mantle
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OpenAI's latest power move in the AI race is to cast CEO Sam Altman as a Steve Jobs for the new era.
Why it matters: Jobs remains Silicon Valley's most revered founder, and since his 2011 death no industry figure has been able to match his success at product innovation, strategy and marketing.
Driving the news: This week OpenAI nabbed Jony Ive, the design guru who closely collaborated with Jobs to shape iconic devices like the iPhone and the iPod, to oversee a big new bet on AI hardware.
- OpenAI's promotional materials paired Altman and Ive in a video that strongly implies Altman's team-up with the Apple veteran makes him Jobs' natural successor.
- Altman has even invoked Jobs directly, saying the Apple founder would be "damn proud" of Ive's move, per Bloomberg's Mark Gurman.
Reality check: It's never that smart to speculate about what a dead person would think, but Altman's suggestion sounds particularly wrongheaded.
- Jobs devoted his life to Apple and was fiercely protective of the company. At the very least he would have regretted Ive's decision to pursue his next ambitious goal outside Apple. More likely, he'd have seen it as a betrayal.
Zoom out: Every Silicon Valley founder wants to be Steve Jobs at some point, and, for many industry insiders, Altman's success at bringing ChatGPT forth from OpenAI to spark the generative-AI wave qualifies as a Jobs-like leap.
- Altman shares with Jobs a penchant for vast visionary schemes and a "reality distortion field" that persuades listeners those schemes could come true.
- As Jobs did, Altman has also sometimes alienated collaborators and left them feeling deceived.
Altman and Jobs also both experienced getting booted from the companies they founded, but in different ways.
- Jobs spent more than a decade in exile from 1985 to 1997, and many of his associates credit that period with strengthening his human skills for his second act at Apple.
- Altman returned to his CEO post just a few days after OpenAI's board fired him in November 2023.
Yes, but: There are plenty of ways in which the Altman-Jobs comparison falls short.
- Jobs was a control freak who obsessed over details and held projects back until they were well-tested.
- Altman takes more of a Zuckerberg-style "move fast and break things" approach. OpenAI ships products to the public early so users can try them out and show developers what to fix.
- Also, Jobs — who ruthlessly pruned sprawling product lines — might have found OpenAI's approach to naming and numbering product releases unwieldy.
- On the other hand, there are no reports to date that Altman likes to park his car in the accessible parking space the way Jobs famously did.
The bottom line: Every industry has its cherished icons whose legacy is fought over by successive generations. While imitating them is common, displacing them is a greater win.
