First there were Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg. Some place Elon Musk next. Many believe that now it is Sam Altman’s turn: he is the one chosen to be the face of Silicon Valley, the technological genius who sets the pace for others. At 38 years old, Altman is the standard-bearer of the artificial intelligence (AI) revolution, which in just 12 months, since he himself launched ChatGPT, has made big technology companies quickly change their priorities and focus on this technology. The soap opera that took place last week on OpenAI gives us an idea of how highly valued his figure is. The shareholders’ meeting lost confidence in him and decided to fire him last Friday. On Monday he signed for Microsoft, owner of 49% of OpenAI, and that same day 95% of the staff threatened to leave if they do not reinstate him. On Tuesday, the young executive returned to his position as CEO of OpenAI and purged those who fired him. He returned with reinforced powers and with the explicit support of Microsoft’s leadership.
What is the new star in the San Francisco sky like? First of all, he is not a newcomer to the jet setCalifornian. In 2014, at the age of 29, Altman became the president of Y Combinator, the iconic incubator of startupsfrom which companies such as Airbnb, Dropbox or Twitch have emerged. A year later, he was tasked with directing OpenAI, a newly created company that sought to challenge Google for its absolute leadership in the development of AI. He was chosen for the position by Elon Musk, the then fashionable entrepreneur thanks to Tesla and SpaceX, and Peter Thiel, one of the first investors in Facebook and founder of Palantir. His relationship with Thiel remains good; with Musk, on the other hand, he has split pears: the owner of Grok, your alternative to ChatGPT.
Designed as a research laboratory, OpenAI made a strong commitment to the model transformer, a specific machine learning architecture developed by Google scientists on which all large language models (LLM) have ended up being based. They invested about $1 billion to apply more and more computing power and scale the model. The results came last year, when they launched the Dall-E2 image generator and its big hit: ChatGPT, the conversational bot that has placed AI in the public conversation. You can write poetry, summarize texts, suggest recipes or pass medical exams, all in a matter of seconds.
It still makes major mistakes (so-called hallucinations) and invents things, but it shows the path that AI can take. ChatGPT is the most successful application of all time. It surpassed 100 million unique users two months after its release. It took Facebook four years to achieve those figures. TikTok, nine months. Altman has managed to ensure that OpenAI is now valued at around $90 billion.
ChatGPT is not the first tool of this kind (Google already had some models in the experimental phase), but it is the one that has previously been opened to the general public. It was Altman who decided to offer it openly, something that Google had ruled out when they judged that the flaws of these great models were not yet sufficiently polished. That mix of boldness and lack of caution in handling AI apparently influenced a section of the OpenAI board to force Altman’s dismissal. Some media, in fact, maintain that, just before the dismissal, a group of workers warned the board of directors of a powerful discovery in the field of AI, with the potential to “threaten humanity”, although it is not clear that That will affect the decision to dismiss the executive.
Altman is convinced that technology will increase social well-being. He has dedicated part of his fortune to financing two techno-futuristic dreams: obtaining an unlimited energy source and prolonging life expectancy. He invested some 355 million euros in Helion Energy, the startupwhich seeks to make nuclear fusion viable, and another 170 in Retro Biosciences, which investigates ways to extend life. “I took all my liquid assets and invested them in these two companies,” he told the MIT Technology Review. He has said on more than one occasion that money is not his priority (and that he had no salary at OpenAI), although she has never revealed how much his net worth is. He is one of the few Silicon Valley gurus who does not appear in the rankings of Forbes. It is known that he retains several stakes in startupsfrom his time at Y Combinator, including at Stripe and Airbnb.
What do you do in your free time? “Well, I like racing cars,” she declared to The New Yorker. He has five sports cars, including two McLarens and a vintage Tesla. “I like to fly rented small planes through the skies of California. Oh, and I’m a prepper”. He’s preparing for when the world collapses. “I try not to think about it too much, but I have guns, gold, potassium iodide, antibiotics, batteries, water, gas masks, and a ranch in Southern California I can fly to.”
Born in Chicago, but raised in deep America (St. Louis, Missouri), Altman studied two years at Stanford University before leaving college to launch his first startup: Loopt, a mobile application to geolocate friends, which sold in 2012 for $43 million. He pointed out ways since he was a child. At the age of eight he was already disassembling and assembling his Macintosh. Computer science was his refuge. “Growing up gay in the Midwest in the 2000s was not the best thing that could happen to you,” he told The New Yorker. “Sam is not especially religious, but culturally he is very Jewish: optimistic and at the same time a survivor, with the feeling that things can always go very wrong,” Peter Thiel has said of him.
Magnetism and leadership
The fact that 738 of OpenAI’s 770 employees threatened to leave the company if Altman did not return gives an idea of his popularity among his subordinates. They see in him an unwavering determination in his goal, which is also his personal obsession: to develop a general artificial intelligence (which will equal or surpass human intelligence). He believes that mission can be carried out at OpenAI.
“Sam is extremely good at making himself more powerful. “He had a gift for finding opportunities in chaos,” Paul Graham, co-founder of Y Combinator and one of the leading men of Silicon Valley, described him. “No one in the world is better than Sam at dealing with these types of situations,” he tweeted on Sunday, when neither his signing for Microsoft nor his return to OpenAI had yet been announced. His faith in the young man remains intact, since in 2008 he wrote on his blog: “You can parachute him to an island of cannibals and when you return in five years he will have become its king.”
Altman likes to have the upper hand. And, according to his former collaborators, Washington Post, usually puts his personal interests ahead of those of the organization. It already happened to him at Y Combinator, which he used as a platform from which to learn startupsin which to invest with a fund that he and his brother manage. This tendency to serve his own interests would have been the trigger for his mentor, Graham, to decide to fire him from Y Combinator after giving him control of the incubator for five years, when Altman was still in his twenties.
Aware of the status it has acquired in recent times, a few months ago it undertook a tour with heads of government, including the Spanish president Pedro Sánchez and his French counterpart Macron, to warn of the dangers of AI. He attended the meeting organized by the White House with the first swords of technology to analyze the state of AI and has promoted his own open letter warning of these dangers. “My worst fear is that this technology will go wrong. And if it goes wrong, it can go very wrong,” he said on Capitol Hill at a hearing on AI.
But OpenAI is still in the race to lead this technology, destined to make significant advances in the coming years. There are many top executives in Silicon Valley, but only a few end up in its pantheon. Gates turned computers into a consumer object. Jobs ushered in the era of smartphones; Zuckerberg, the one of social networks. Will Altman prevail as the pioneer of AI?
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