Cracking The Tight World of Artificial Intelligence

Published 10 months ago10m ago • Bookmarks: 501

May 15, 2025

Wall Street Journal reporter Keach Hagey, an Irvington resident, shares with The Hudson Independent what it took to report and write The Optimist: Sam Altman, Open AI, and the Race to Invent the Future (W.W. Norton & Company). Hagey previously wrote The King of Content: Sumner Redstone’s Battle for Viacom, CBS, and Everlasting Control of His Media Empire (Harper Business, 2018). Her new book launches on Tuesday, May 20, at the Irvington Town Hall Theater, where Hagey will sign books and discuss the world of artificial intelligence along with New York Times deputy investigations editor David Enrich of Dobbs Ferry. The program begins at 7:00 p.m.

Q: How did you come to this project?

Hagey: I was assigned to co-write a profile of Sam for The Wall Street Journal with my colleague Berber Jin shortly after ChatGPT went viral, for no real reason other than I happened to have his phone number and had talked to him a bit about the copyright issues underlying the technology.

In the beginning, this was the most interesting part of the story for me: what writing was this bot trained on, and with what kind of permission or payment? After the profile ran, Norton reached out and asked if we’d be interested in writing a book. In the end, only I was.

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Did you have access to Altman?

Hagey: We had access for the profile, but initially Sam was not thrilled about the idea of the book. The Journal covers OpenAI pretty aggressively and the book project was not something that he chose.

He disliked the idea that the story was about him, rather than about OpenAI, and argued that it was too soon for a book about either.

But the subject of my last book, Sumner Redstone, was so incapacitated that he communicated with an iPad loaded with clips of him saying “yes,” “no” and “fuck you,” so I have a fair amount of experience reporting on subjects without their help. In the end, Sam came around and was generous with his time.

Was reporting on this in Silicon Valley more difficult than other fields? How so?

Hagey: Yes. For most of my career, I’ve been a media reporter, and media people are generally pretty chatty. The businesses are mature, most of them are public and the executives have thick skins.

Silicon Valley is small and incestuous. Power is incredibly concentrated. Many important companies are still private. Everything is about the word-of-mouth through these whisper networks of founders and VCs [Venture Capitalists]. For many years, Sam has operated from the very center of that. People are terrified of crossing him, not just because of OpenAI’s success, but also because of the weight that his opinion carries in the world of venture-backed startups.

To get what I needed for the book, I conducted more than 250 interviews with Altman’s friends, family, teachers, mentors, co-founders, colleagues, investors and portfolio managers—and of course Altman himself.

This is a topic deeply soaked in technology? How did you school yourself in AI? Do you have any background in the field?

Hagey: Zero background, although my husband works in AI and spent many long car trips answering my remedial questions about vectors and training weights. The first book I bought after signing the book deal was Cade Metz’s Genius Makers, which tells the story of how neural networks and deep learning melted the AI winter, and I recommend it to everyone.