Sam Altman says he can't go out to eat in public anymore in San Francisco: 'It's a strangely isolating way to live'

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is one of the best-known figures in the AI industry. He says it's "strangely isolating" to be recognized all the time.

• OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is one of the biggest names in the AI industry.
• This makes him pretty recognizable in San Francisco — too much so for his liking.
• He says "the inability to just be mostly anonymous in public is very, very strange."

Sam Altman is one of the best-known names in AI, but he wasn't prepared for just how much he'd be recognized in public.

The OpenAI CEO reflected on the privacy and anonymity he's lost as a result of his job during an episode of the podcast The Logan Bartlett Show, published Tuesday.

"The inability to just be mostly anonymous in public is very, very strange," he said. "I think if I had thought about that at the time, I would've said, 'Okay, this will be a weirder thing than it sounds like,' but I didn't really think about it. It's like a much weirder thing. It's a strangely isolating way to live."

He continued: "I was like, 'AI's going to be really important, OpenAI's going to be a really important company.' I didn't think I would not be able to go out to dinner in my own city."

Though OpenAI has shone a bigger spotlight on Altman, he was far from anonymous in Silicon Valley before. He was president of the startup accelerator Y Combinator for several years before taking the helm at OpenAI in 2019.

Later in the podcast episode, Altman discussed his dramatic ousting from OpenAI last year. He said he was living in an "adrenaline-charged state" and didn't eat or sleep much during that time.

Altman was fired in mid-November after OpenAI's board at the time announced a "deliberate review process" showed he was "not consistently candid in his communications with the board." Altman, however, was brought back less than a week later, and the board has since changed.