| The cover story of our February issue is an interview with OpenAI Chief Executive Officer Sam Altman, conducted by former Bloomberg Businessweek Editor Josh Tyrangiel. In today's newsletter, we've got something meta for you: a Q&A with Tyrangiel about the Q&A. It's been edited for clarity and length. If this email was forwarded to you, click here to sign up. How did this interview come about? I have met and interviewed Sam a couple times, most recently for a special I executive-produced with Oprah Winfrey about AI. I heard from his people that, two years after the debut of ChatGPT and one year after the messiness around his firing, he was interested in setting the record straight on some things and also talking a little bit more about what OpenAI is today. They asked if I'd be open to coming out and spending a couple hours talking through that. So, yeah, obviously I would.  Photo illustration by Danielle Del Plato for Bloomberg Businessweek; Background illustration: Chuck Anderson/Krea, Photo: Bloomberg You spent two consecutive days with Altman in San Francisco. What did you make of him during that time? He's very focused but also very shrewd about understanding the audience he's attempting to reach. During the Oprah special, before we even started our pre-interview process, he asked: "Who am I speaking to? Who's the audience for this special?" That was for a very general audience that had almost no idea of what artificial intelligence is. And he processed that very quickly and was like, "Got it." What he delivered was perfect for that kind of viewer. That's very different from this interview. Knowing that he would be speaking to a Bloomberg audience, he recalibrated his level of discussion, how and what he wanted to talk about, to match the fluency of the audience. That's a highly unusual thing in my experience with tech CEOs. Most of them are too deep in the weeds. So I'm very impressed by his ability to understand what kind of audience he wants to reach and then tweak his language and his context so that he can reach them effectively. It almost sounds like you're describing a chatbot. I guess? But I actually think that it's a skill effective communicators have. Because chatbots are modeled on effective communication, at some point we go around this circle: Well, is it human ability, or is it a chatbot ability? I have experienced it on occasion with very successful people—Steve Jobs was a little bit like this, there are politicians who are like this—who are just good at tailoring a message, even their diction, to strike a meaningful chord with the audience they're trying to reach. What part of the interview surprised you the most? Having done a lot of these, no matter how experienced you are and no matter how experienced the person on the other side of the table is, you know there's stuff that you're going to talk about that's going to be uncomfortable. In this instance, the firing happened a year ago, and we've never really gotten an adequate explanation of what happened, and it surprised me how uncomplicated that back-and-forth was, how eager he was to talk about it. Also how visceral it still feels to him, how he's angry about it. He's really pissed. And he speaks about that in ways that you know he's not trying to disguise it. Also I never really knew much about how he runs OpenAI. The pivot between being at Y Combinator, which is very specific kind of VC, into being an operational CEO is a really big pivot, and hearing more about the ways in which he uses his time, where he spends the bulk of his time—the fact that he's in Slack to gather the breath of data he needs to be effective—I found all that sort of surprising. What was your favorite thing that got left out of the Q&A? Did we leave anything out? It's long, man, as—let's call me one of the ancestors of the Businessweek philosophy—I think that there are moments when length is very important. It's a way to communicate depth to a reader, to tell them to stop and pay attention. So I think it's worth it, but it wasn't like there's a ton of stuff on the cutting room floor.  Tyrangiel at a Businessweek event in 2014. Photographer: Kevin Mazur/Getty Images Last question: You were the editor of Businessweek from 2009 to 2015. Does that feel like a million years ago or a week ago? It feels like a million years ago. But only because all of you have gotten so much older. Read the interview: Sam Altman on ChatGPT's First Two Years, Elon Musk and AI Under Trump | 
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