Vol. I · No. 1 · Autumn 2025
On the pre-2019 Altman, the operating-system layer, and what gets built next.
From the editors
The inaugural issue of Frontier Bylines was assembled in the autumn of 2025, in the period when the field had finished pretending the agentic shift was speculative and had not yet decided what to call it. We open the magazine with two pieces that take the question on its own terms: a long profile of Sam Altman's pre-2019 years drawn from the public record, and a speculative essay on the operating-system layer that is forming underneath the current product wave. The issue is short on purpose. We wanted to publish a magazine whose first table of contents could be read in an afternoon and remembered for a year.
Contents
Profile
Before the protein folding, before the Nobel, before DeepMind itself, there was a decade of game design that almost no one in the AI field has actually sat with. A long look at the years that produced the operator who would, much later, become the operator.
Profile
Before the OpenAI of the post-ChatGPT era, before the board firing, before the trillion-dollar conversation, there was a decade of much smaller decisions. A reported essay on the Loopt years, the Y Combinator years, and the operator the public conversation has stopped trying to remember.