Who is Sam Altman? The OpenAI boss and ChatGPT guru who is now one of AI's biggest players

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He was a tech whizz earlier than he left main faculty, dropped out of one among America’s high universities, and now seems to be spearheading a revolution that would change our lives without end.

To date, so Silicon Valley.

And like so lots of the billionaire entrepreneurs which have emerged from that notorious stretch of sunny California, OpenAI’s Sam Altman seems nicely on his strategy to turning into a family title.

The fresh-faced 38-year-old would have been unknown to most outdoors tech circles earlier than the launch of his agency’s breakthrough chatbot ChatGPT, however he now spends a lot of his more and more valuable time rubbing shoulders with world leaders and a few of America’s most recognisable executives.

His path to turning into “a exceptional determine within the realm of innovation and entrepreneurship” (these are ChatGPT’s phrases when requested for an introduction to its chief creator, not mine) started at his childhood house in Missouri, the place eight-year-old Altman was gifted his first laptop, shortly studying not simply learn how to use it, however to program for it.

Altman attended John Burroughs College in St Louis, and advised The New Yorker in a 2016 interview that having his laptop helped him come to phrases together with his sexuality and are available out to his dad and mom when he was a youngster.

“Rising up homosexual within the Midwest within the 2000s was not essentially the most superior factor,” he recalled. “And discovering AOL chatrooms was transformative. Secrets and techniques are unhealthy when you find yourself 11 or 12.”

A well-recognized dropout

With faculty within the rear view mirror, it was time for college – Stanford, no much less. Altman made his strategy to that well-known California establishment to check laptop science, however dropped out after simply two years, following within the footsteps of earlier dropouts-turned-tech superstars Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, who each deserted their Harvard levels earlier than turning into two of historical past’s most influential CEOs.

Abandoning a valuable spot at one among America’s high universities appeared such a ceremony of passage for the nation’s main tech entrepreneurs that it played right into the success story of the now disgraced Elizabeth Holmes, whose departure from Stanford to gatecrash Silicon Valley led to a wave of media consideration not dissimilar to that at the moment given to Altman.

His first post-university enterprise was a smartphone app known as Loopt, which let customers selectively share their real-time location with different individuals. Some $30m (£24m) was raised to launch the corporate, aided by funding from a start-up accelerator agency known as Y Combinator, which lists the likes of Airbnb and Twitch among the many web firms it has helped set up.

Altman turned president of Y Combinator itself in 2014, after the sale of Loopt for $44m (£35m) in 2012. He additionally based his personal enterprise capital fund known as Hydrazine Capital, attracting sufficient funding to be named on the Forbes 30 Below 30 checklist for enterprise capital. As if he wasn’t busy sufficient, Altman additionally ran Reddit for a grand complete of eight days amid a management shake-up in 2014, describing his tenure as “form of enjoyable”.

The rise of OpenAI

Whereas his time on the high of Reddit solely lasted eight days, his oversight of OpenAI has now lasted eight years. He is “doing fairly nicely” with it, he stated in a February tweet (actually in comparison with Loopt, which, he now says, “sucked”).

He launched the corporate with a sure Elon Musk (who solely ran SpaceX and Tesla on the time) in 2015, the 2 males offering funding alongside the likes of Amazon and Microsoft, totalling $1bn (£800m).

It was run as a non-profit with the noble objective of growing AI whereas ensuring it does not wipe out humanity.

To date, mission achieved – but when Altman’s to be believed, the danger since has turn into very actual certainly.

Below his tenure, OpenAI has ceased to be a non-profit and now has an estimated worth of as much as $29bn (£23bn), all due to the exceptional success of its generative AI instruments – ChatGPT for textual content and DALL-E for pictures.

Microsoft boss Satya Nadella has described Altman as an “unbelievable entrepreneur” who bets massive and bets proper, which OpenAI’s success makes exhausting to argue with.

ChatGPT amassed tens of thousands and thousands of customers inside weeks of launching in late 2022, wowing specialists and informal observers alike with its potential to move the world’s hardest exams, get through job applications, compose something from political speeches to children’s homework, and write its personal laptop code.

Immediately the idea of a big language mannequin (which means it’s skilled on large quantities of textual content information in order that it will possibly perceive our requests and reply accordingly) turned one thing of a mainstream buzz time period, its reputation seeing Microsoft make investments additional money into OpenAI and convey the tech to its Bing search engine and Office apps.

Google additionally received in on the act with its Bard chatbot, some of China’s biggest tech companies entered the race, whereas Musk – who left OpenAI in 2018 as a consequence of a battle of curiosity with Tesla’s work on self-driving AI – has said he wants to launch his own one too.

All of the whereas, OpenAI’s know-how can also be bettering – an improve dubbed GPT-4 inside months of ChatGPT’s launch showing just how quickly these models can develop.

Learn extra:
We asked a chatbot to help write an article

‘My worst fears’

However for all of the surprise such programs have supplied, it is matched – if not surpassed – by the considerations. Whether or not it’s spreading disinformation or making jobs redundant, governments are scrambling to formulate an efficient method of regulating a know-how that appears destined to vary the world without end.

Maybe with an eye fixed on how a few of his Silicon Valley contemporaries have failed to act on the dangers of their creations before it’s too late, Altman seems eager to be a prepared participant in simply the way it needs to be executed.

“My worst fears are that we, the business, trigger vital hurt to the world,” Altman told the US Senate, his evaluation that authorities regulation can be “crucial to mitigate the dangers” undoubtedly music to the ears of politicians who by no means appear overly impressed by figures from the tech world.

Learn extra:
Who is the ‘godfather of AI’?

Within the area of some brief weeks, Altman met the US vice chairman, Kamala Harris, France’s Emmanuel Macron, European Fee president Ursula von der Leyen and the British prime minister, Rishi Sunak – all politicians who share the identical hopes and fears in regards to the potential advantages and risks of AI.

With the EU seemingly none too impressed by Elon Musk’s running of Twitter, TikTok managing to attain the largely unimaginable activity of uniting Democrats and Republicans against a common enemy, and Mark Zuckerberg having struggled to repair his reputation after the Cambridge Analytica scandal, the upstart Altman could possibly be positioning himself to turn into a extra sturdy tech star than a few of his forebears.