AI Moguls Vie for Leadership Crown
Plus, Chime IPO scorecard, Musk's robotaxi gamble & the latest from Y Combinator
The Week in Short
Sam Altman and what it takes to be the next Steve Jobs. Behind the paywall: Newly minted Y Combinator companies get funded as agents and dev tools storm the latest batch. Elon Musk rolls the dice with Austin robotaxis. Chime’s IPO a big win for some investors, not others, while Stripe and Automattic help ease the M&A drought.
The Main Item
The Real Heir to Steve Jobs
Sam Altman sometimes looks like he’s deliberately positioning himself as the next Steve Jobs — a title with plenty of pretenders, though none quite ready for coronation.
Altman has had a remarkable run with OpenAI, and this week dropped a philosophical missive on what he called the gentle singularity, asserting that the big changes have already begun and it will all be for the good, probably. He’s fresh off sealing a partnership with Jobs’ design muse Jony Ive.
It got us recollecting the mix of attributes that made Jobs so special. He was a visionary, a master marketer, and a product genius who married an uncanny ability to see and communicate how things might work in the future with a maniacal attention to the look and feel of Apple devices. He reinvented multiple industries, and also had the insight to hire and empower Tim Cook and others.
Brought to you by Forethought
CX used to be built in pieces. But today, companies like Scale, Cohere, and Airtable use Forethought to connect every part of the customer journey.
Now, a team of AI agents can work across sales, onboarding, support, and retention. They understand, plan, take action, and improve.
No circles. No silos. No dead ends. This is what enterprise AI should look like.
Standing Out From the Pack
A handful of current tech execs can claim some of those characteristics. Elon Musk certainly has the visionary and the maniacal parts, and has reinvented both cars and rockets. Arguably he has the operations and hiring intuition too. With the absurd breadth of his activities, though, he seems to have taken his eye off the ball with products like the Cybertruck, and his vision of the future often seems mechanistic and lacking Jobs’ affection for humanity.
Jack Dorsey was self-consciously a contender for a while, but his Jobsian feel for how to make a special product, which he showed at both Twitter and Square (now Block), hasn’t been matched by any ability to paint a picture of where it’s all going. Mark Zuckerberg’s flip-flopping on what he believes in, and corresponding tendency towards vision-du-jour, would rule him out, at least for now.
The Meta boss’s new partner, Alexandr Wang, is exceptional for the tender age at which he built a firm worth tens of billions. Scale AI isn’t the kind of company that screams visionary, but now that the 28-year-old Wang has Meta’s sandbox to play in we’ll see what his next act might look like — though Jobs wasn’t famous for working for someone else.
Jensen Huang, a newer contender by sheer dint of his achievement with Nvidia, can claim brilliant product insight and otherworldly perseverance, along with crack operational skills. He also gives a hell of a presentation on the AI future. As a debutante in the land of celebrity tech super-moguls, he may need to marinate in the milieu a little before fully making his case.
Altman leans insanely hard into the vision thing. The blog post this week waxed lyrical about what AI will do for us by 2035, part of his relentless efforts to convince the world that 1) AI is coming fast 2) it will change everything in mostly wonderful ways 3) we’re well-meaning people here at OpenAI who can be trusted to steer it reasonably, and 4) we need a whole bunch of money to make it happen.
Altman is certainly not the guy sweating the product details. But then again, maybe “product” is less important for a foundation model company; it’s not the design or fit-and-finish of ChatGPT that matters, but how smart it is.
As a master marketer, Altman has certainly won a place among the all-time greats. ChatGPT continues to bury Gemini and Claude in consumer adoption even though the three products are comparable—quite a feat for a previously unknown brand.
Altman has deftly inserted himself into a global conversation at just the right moment and become the public face of a seminal new industry. He hasn’t reinvented multiple major sectors, but maybe AI is exceptional enough that it’s fair to count it twice.
It wouldn’t seem right to grant Altman the Jobs crown just yet though. He still needs to steer the OpenAI ship through a gnarly non-profit conversion and existential copyright lawsuits, and prove that it can throw off enough cash to justify a $300 billion valuation. Reality distortion fields are great for the short term, but don’t ultimately pay the bills.
To that point, it’s worth noting that when it comes to assessing Cook, the commentariat at the outset was 100% wrong about Jobs’ successor and what mattered most for Apple.
When Cook took the helm shortly before Jobs’ death in 2011, the consensus view was that the new CEO needed to prove that he could be more than an operations guy. He had to bring visionary, industry-moving innovations to market, and the Apple Watch just wasn’t big enough.
But it turned out that operations was underrated. Cook added immense value for Apple shareholders and kept the company at the cutting edge mainly by doing an outstanding job managing the production, the pricing, and the marketing of the iPhone.
That doesn’t make him the next Steve Jobs, and it’s fair to ask whether the company can still be an industry-leading innovator. And Cook, like Satya Nadella, is essentially ineligible for next-Steve-Jobshood anyway, as the crown requires founder mojo.
But it seems pretty likely that whomever we collectively decide is the singular, transcendent tech impresario of the new era won’t look like the original Steve Jobs. They will carry their own collage of special genes, and for Altman and the other contenders, what they might yield is still playing out.