OpenAI, Microsoft and Sam Altman. Though there are many things interconnected among the three, all the three managed to grab the headlines last week, with clear focus on Altman, AI wizard and co-founder and CEO of ChatGPT-maker OpenAI.
First, OpenAI’s board of directors ousted its high-profile CEO Altman, and appointed its CTO, Mira Murati, as the interim CEO. Second, even while debates were on about his sudden sacking, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella declared that Altman will join Microsoft to lead an new advanced AI research team. Soon, OpenAI announced its CEO — former CEO of Twitch, Emmett Shear.
When the tech industry concluded that Altman will be working with Microsoft, he was reinstated by OpenAI as employees threatened to resign en masse, and the board that sacked him replaced.
Altman, 38, grew up in Missouri. Eldest among four siblings, he learned to programme when he was aged only eight. “I am a mid-western Jew with an awkward childhood at best,” Altman told New York Magazine.
Altman, a gay, came out in high school. This surprised even his mother, a dermatologist, and father, a property broker. In a podcast, he had said that his private high school was not the kind of place where one would really stand up and talk about being gay. His childhood idol was Steve Jobs, and he studied computer science at Stanford University for two years, but dropped out to start a location-based social networking app called Loopt.
Loopt allows individuals to use their location to discover the real world around them, and the start-up was part of the eight companies at start-up accelerator Y Combinator (YC). Loopt managed to complete Series A and B financing and in 2012, the start-up agreed to be acquired by Green Dot Corporation for $43.4 million in cash. Altman broke up with Loopt co-founder Nick Sivo, whom he had been dating for nine years, after the firm was acquired.
In 2014, Altman became Y Combinator’s president. The New Yorker interviewed Altman in 2016, and said in an article, “Altman’s great strengths are clarity of thought and an intuitive grasp of complex systems. His great weakness is his utter lack of interest in ineffective people.”
Altman is considered to be the classic Silicon Valley geek and a workaholic. The New Yorker reported, “Two YC partners sat Altman down and told him, ‘Slow down, chill out!’ Sam said, ‘Yes, you’re right!’ and went off and did something else on the side that we didn’t know about for a while.” That was YC Research, a non-profit, initially funded with a 10 million dollar personal gift.
According to the New York Post, Altman owns a $27 million house on San Francisco’s Russian Hill and a ranch in Napa Valley. He likes to fly, and race his fleet of prestige cars that include a $1m Lexus LFA and more than one McLaren Though his exact net worth is not known, reports claim it to be around $500 million. Reports also claim that Altman’s present partner is Oliver Mulherin, a software engineer located in the San Francisco Bay area.
In 2015, he teamed with Elon Musk and others to start OpenAI, initially started as a non-profit AI research company, and in 2019, he left YC to focus on OpenAI. In 2018, Musk left OpenAI, and a for-profit subsidiary was created that started raising money from investors.
Microsoft invested $1 billion in OpenAI in 2019. Three years later, it made a multi-billion-dollar investment. So far, the tech giant has invested over $13 billion in OpenAI, whose valuation now stands at about $29 billion.
When OpenAI introduced ChatGPT, it went viral and every company started talking about generative AI.
It is said that before his ouster, the board felt that Altman was not always honest in his talk. Some members felt he was too focused on expansion, when they wanted to balance growth with AI safety.
Altman expects AI to be capable of superhuman persuasion well before it is superhuman at general intelligence, which may lead to some very strange outcomes. Now that he is back as the CEO, the tech world expects big AI announcements in near future.