Sam Altman appears destined to be Silicon Valley’s next tech titan, surpassing both Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk. The life of the man who became the face of OpenAI’s ChatGPT and will continue to shape artificial intelligence.
He was a tech whiz before he graduated from elementary school, pulled out of one of America’s most prestigious universities. And now seems to be leading a revolution that could alter our lives forever.
So far, so Silicon Valley.
OpenAI’s Sam Altman is on track to become a household name like many of California’s billionaire entrepreneurs.
Before the launch of his company’s groundbreaking chatbot ChatGPT, the 38-year-old would have been largely obscure outside of tech circles, but he now spends much of his increasingly valuable time rubbing shoulders with world leaders and some of America’s most recognisable executives.
His path to becoming “a remarkable figure in the realm of innovation and entrepreneurship” (those are ChatGPT’s words when asked to introduce its founder, not mine) began in Missouri, where he was gifted his first computer at the age of eight. He quickly learned not only how to use it, but also how to programme for it.
Altman attended John Burroughs School in St. Louis and stated in a 2016 interview with The New Yorker that his computer assisted him in coming to terms with his sexuality and coming out to his parents as an adolescent.
“Growing up gay in the Midwest during the 2000s was not the most awesome thing,” he recalled. “And the discovery of AOL chatrooms was revolutionary. “Secrets are harmful when you are 11 or 12 years old.”
A familiar reject
With high school behind us, it was time for college – Stanford, no less. Altman attended the renowned California university to study computer science, but he dropped out after only two years, following in the footsteps of tech titans Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, who both abandoned their Harvard degrees before becoming two of history’s most influential CEOs.
Abandoning a coveted spot at one of the nation’s top universities appeared to be such a rite of passage for the country’s leading tech entrepreneurs that it played right into the success story of the now-disgraced Elizabeth Holmes, whose departure from Stanford to gatecrash Silicon Valley resulted in a wave of media attention not dissimilar to that given to Altman currently.
His first company after college was Loopt, a smartphone software that let users selectively broadcast their real-time position. Approximately $30 million (£24 million) was raised to initiate the company, with assistance from Y Combinator, a start-up accelerator firm that has helped establish internet companies such as Airbnb and Twitch.
In 2014, Altman became president of Y Combinator itself, following the 2012 sale of Loopt for $44 million (£35 million). He founded Hydrazine Capital, a venture capital fund that made Forbes 30 Under 30 for venture capital. Altman ran Reddit for eight days in 2014, calling it “kind of fun.”
Advancement of OpenAI
He led Reddit for eight days, but OpenAI for eight years. In February, he tweeted that he was “doing pretty well” with it (certainly compared to Loopt. Which he now claims “sucked”).
In 2015, he co-founded the company with a certain Elon Musk (who only ran SpaceX and Tesla at the time). The two men providing $1bn (£800m) in funding alongside Amazon and Microsoft.
It was a non-profit organisation with the altruistic mission of developing AI while ensuring that it does not destroy humanity.
The mission has been accomplished thus far. But if Altman is to be believed, the risk has become very real since then.
Under his leadership, OpenAI ceased to be a non-profit and is now estimated to be worth up to $29bn (£23bn), all due to the extraordinary success of its generative AI tools – ChatGPT for text and DALL-E for images.
Satya Nadella called Sam Altman a “unbelievable entrepreneur” who bets big and wins. OpenAI’s success validates this.
ChatGPT amassed tens of millions of users within weeks of its late 2022 launch, astounded experts and casual observers with its ability to pass the world’s most difficult exams, complete job applications, compose anything from political speeches to children’s homework, and write its own computer code.
Suddenly, the concept of a large language model (which is trained on massive amounts of text data so that it can understand our requests and respond appropriately) became something of a mainstream buzzword, with Microsoft investing more money into OpenAI and integrating the technology into its Bing search engine and Office apps due to its popularity.
OpenAI’s record validates Satya Nadella’s description of Sam Altman as a “unbelievable entrepreneur” who bets big and wins.
In the meantime, OpenAI’s technology is advancing. An upgrade designated GPT-4 was released within months of ChatGPT’s release, demonstrating how rapidly these models evolve.
“My greatest dreads”
Concerns, however, are equal to, if not greater than, the marvel that these systems have provided. Governments are scrambling to regulate a technology that may forever change the globe, whether it be deception or job loss.
Altman appears eager to be a willing participant in exactly how it should be done. He may have seen how his Silicon Valley peers ignored the risks of their inventions until it was too late.
“My worst fears are that we, the industry, cause significant harm to the world,” Altman told the US Senate, his assessment that government regulation would be “critical to mitigate the risks” surely music to the ears of politicians who are rarely impressed by tech industry figures.
Altman met the vice president of the United States, Kamala Harris, the president of France, Emmanuel Macron, the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, and the prime minister of the United Kingdom, Rishi Sunak, all of whom share the same hopes and fears regarding the potential benefits and dangers of AI.
With the EU apparently unimpressed by Elon Musk’s management of Twitter, TikTok achieving the nearly impossible feat of uniting Democrats and Republicans against a common foe, and Mark Zuckerberg struggling to repair his reputation in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, the upstart Altman could be positioning himself to become a more durable tech star than some of his predecessors.
However, he has admitted to being a prepper, storing weaponry and medicine for emergencies.
Let us pray he is being excessively cautious.
