Joe Betts-Lacroix

OpenAI’s founder Sam Altman has a finger in more than one tech pie, so to speak. The controversial former president of startup accelerator, Y Combinator, and current ChatGPT kingpin isn’t only interested in getting his company’s artificial intelligence-powered chatbot into classrooms. He’s also interested in living forever—or at least longer than current human lifespan researchers suggest is possible. Altman has banked big bucks on a biotech startup, Retro Biosciences, as first reported Wednesday by MIT Technology Review.…

There was reason to worry. In 2016, after Peter Thiel, one of Altman’s mentors, expressed interest in possibly getting age-defeating blood transfusions, he was mocked in the media as a vampire on the prowl for young victims. A year later, the HBO parody show Silicon Valley drove the stake in with an episode called “Blood Boy.” In it, a fictional tech CEO takes a meeting while his veins are connected to those of a handsome young man introduced as his “transfusion associate.” “We don’t really want … these old billionaires…