Altman's $27 million San Fransisco mansion, just one of his many properties, includes an underground garage with an automobile turntable and a cantilevered infinity pool. But some of the artifacts in his office take more prehistoric inspiration.

"At one end, the side of the room that I sit on, there's a hand ax, which is one of the earliest pieces of human, or hominin, technology and was maybe the only one for more than a million years," he said.

The hand ax, one of the oldest tools in human history, is thought to have originated around 1.7 million years ago, though classic wooden and bone handles came later. The first hand axes used by early humans were made of stone that was typically knapped into flat, symmetrical almond or teardrop shapes.

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"I stare at that thing a lot," he said. "And I just think about how far we have come from this single piece of technology we used everything for."

Altman himself has a big hand in today's technical evolution, of course. OpenAI recently released its new o1 model, which is designed to "think" more like humans through a more advanced reasoning process. Other tech giants are also throwing their hats in the AI ring, with Microsoft building an in-house AI model and Apple announcing the forthcoming launch of Apple Intelligence.

Although the world may be enamored with artificial intelligence right now, Altman still muses over civilization's beginnings.

"We started digging stuff out of the ground, and melting things we found, and combining them together," he said. "And now we have all of this."