On Monday, two of the biggest AI players had a bit of a public tiff that started with a well sourced report from Reuters that OpenAI was not satisfied with Nvidia’s chips and ended with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman Tweet“I don’t know where all this craziness is coming from,” said top Nvidia executive Jensen Huang the public is skeptical of its investments in the creator of ChatGPT.

That seems like a new place for Altman, because he’s used to what he wants. A new one Forbes profile of the AI ​​industry’s top exec #1 darling is really hammering home what Altman expects the world to do, and hasn’t been presented with much evidence that he can’t get it. Which makes this particular moment interesting.

Until a few months ago, ChatGPT seemed to have reached genericide, where it became the Band-Aid or Kleenex of AI. That’s in no small part thanks to OpenAI’s initial quick launch of the chatbot in 2022, which, in Forbesis basically all of Altman’s ideas. While the rest of the company’s board worried they were going public too soon, Altman insisted.

It probably works. In the following years, the company locked in tons of investments – hundreds of billions committed to their operation from companies like Oracle, Microsoft, and (of course) Nvidia. OpenAI has become so intertwined with the economy that it had (and still has) concerns may require a large government bailout if it fails. And it reinforced the image that Altman had cultivated as a man who was used to things going his way.

Forbes spoke to several people for its profile on Altman, but perhaps the most illuminating observation came from his mentor and the founder of the startup accelerator Y Combinator, Paul Graham. “Sam got what he wanted,” he SAYSby explaining why he handed over the reins of his company to Altman in 2014. “He’s good at convincing people of things. He’s good at getting people to do what he wants.” Of course, that doesn’t mean he wants good for anyone but himself.

For a man often presented as a visionary, Altman seems like he has trouble seeing the ball—a problem that has plagued him in the past. According to ForbesAltman took the Y Combinator team by surprise when he was announced as CEO of the for-profit branch of OpenAI, and they asked him to resign from his role at the startup accelerator once he started treating it like a hobby instead of his job.

Altman has certainly remained focused on AI since then, but after getting ahead of the competition by releasing ChatGPT before any other major LLM was publicly available, he seems to be chasing the puck instead of trying to skate where the puck is going. According to Forbes, he currently has a stake in more than 400 companies. And while many of those have at least some use in the AI-driven future (such as the energy company Helion or the Very scary human verification company World), Altman seems to have no clear vision of what will happen next.

“I think I’m very good at projecting a lot of things — years or a few decades into the future — and figuring out how they fit together,” he Forbes said. And yet, OpenAI seems stuck. The company is reportedly working on a wearable with Jony Ive that should embed AI into everyone’s daily lives, but even that pitch seems dubious. Altman describes the gadgets as “observing you” and offering recommendations based on everything from a wealth of personal data to eye movement tracking. But Altman has been down this road again. He backed Humane, which created an AI pin that failed spectacularly.

The wearable is just one example of OpenAI throwing shit at the wall and seeing what sticks. The company has been branching out in all sorts of directions recently — more and more employees want to slow down and reassess. According to Forbes, people inside the company thought they were doing it too quickly and missed opportunities that looked like layups just a few months ago, such as Apple chooses Google over OpenAI for the upgraded Siri however there is a working relationship with OpenAI.

Still, Altman kept pushing forward. “We’re basically building an AGI, or very close to it,” he told Forbes (though he later walked back on it by saying, “I meant that as a spiritual statement, not a literal one”). He hopes people will accept that when he says it, because he’s used to that being the case — that he says something a certain way and it’s treated as true.

Cracks are starting to show, though. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella told Forbes, “I don’t think we’re anywhere close to (AGI),” and said getting there is a technical process. Simply put, Nadella said, “It’s not about Sam or me making this statement.” Meanwhile, companies that bet big on Altman and OpenAI are starting to see the bill coming. Reported by Microsoft a $3.1 billion hit from OpenAI investments last year. The Oracle collapsed because it doesn’t get out of the billions that OpenAI has dropped. Altman and company are gone trying to earn more money from supporters like Nvidia and Amazon, but the walls seem to be closing warnings that the company may run out of cash in 2027 and still a half a decade from harvest.

Altman may start taking “no” for an answer for the first time in his life. Let’s see how that goes.