He was a tech whizz earlier than he left major college, dropped out of one among America's prime universities, and now seems to be spearheading a revolution that would change our lives endlessly.
So far, 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 properly on his method to changing 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 changing into "a remarkable figure in 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 dwelling in Missouri, the place eight-year-old Altman was gifted his first pc, shortly studying not simply tips on how to use it, however to program for it.
Altman attended John Burroughs School in St Louis, and advised The New Yorker in a 2016 interview that having his pc helped him come to phrases along with his sexuality and are available out to his dad and mom when he was an adolescent.
"Growing up gay in the Midwest in the 2000s was not the most awesome thing," he recalled. "And finding AOL chatrooms was transformative. Secrets are bad when you are 11 or 12."
A well-known dropout
With college within the rear view mirror, it was time for college - Stanford, no much less. Altman made his method to that well-known California establishment to review pc 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 changing into two of historical past's most influential CEOs.
Abandoning a valuable spot at one among America's prime 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 present 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 corporations it has helped set up.
Altman grew to become 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 Under 30 record 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 "sort of fun".
The rise of OpenAI
While his time on the prime of Reddit solely lasted eight days, his oversight of OpenAI has now lasted eight years. He's "doing pretty well" with it, he mentioned in a February tweet (definitely 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 aim of creating AI whereas ensuring it does not wipe out humanity.
So far, mission completed - but when Altman's to be believed, the danger since has turn out to be very actual certainly.
Under his tenure, OpenAI has ceased to be a non-profit and now has an estimated worth of as much as $29bn (£23bn), all because of the outstanding 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 arduous to argue with.
ChatGPT amassed tens of tens of millions of customers inside weeks of launching in late 2022, wowing consultants and informal observers alike with its means to cross the world's hardest exams, get through job applications, compose something from political speeches to children's homework, and write its personal pc code.
Suddenly the idea of a big language mannequin (which means it's skilled on large quantities of textual content knowledge in order that it may possibly perceive our requests and reply accordingly) grew to become 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 obtained 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 because of a battle of curiosity with Tesla's work on self-driving AI - has said he wants to launch his own one too.
All 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.
Read extra:We asked a chatbot to help write an article
'My worst fears'
But for all of the marvel such techniques have offered, it is matched - if not surpassed - by the issues. Whether 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 alter the world endlessly.
Perhaps 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 ought to be executed.
"My worst fears are that we, the industry, cause significant harm to the world," Altman told the US Senate, his evaluation that authorities regulation could be "critical to mitigate the risks" undoubtedly music to the ears of politicians who by no means appear overly impressed by figures from the tech world.
Read extra:Who is the 'godfather of AI'?
In the house of some quick weeks, Altman met the US vp, Kamala Harris, France's Emmanuel Macron, European Commission 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 realize the principally unattainable 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 out to be a extra sturdy tech star than a few of his forebears.
But simply in case it does all go mistaken, he is beforehand admitted to being a prepper - someone who stockpiles everything from guns to medicine should the worst should befall us.
Let's hope he is being overly cautious.
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