Born in 1985, Sam Altman was the son of a Jewish family who grew up in St. Louis, Missouri, to a dermatologist mother.
At the age of 8, Sam Altman learned to program and disassemble a Macintosh computer without a teacher, using a computer given to him by his father.
In his early years, Sam Altman attended the John Burroughs School, a private, non-denominational college preparatory school in St. Louis, and later attended Stanford University's Department of Computer Science. However, after only two years of college, he dropped out to start his own business, just like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and Zuckerberg. Perhaps the first-class geniuses are probably like this, and the prestigious schools that others envy are not taken seriously by them, or even a constraint, so we see the familiar style of painting, and after dropping out, Sam Altman and a few classmates start an entrepreneurial career.
In 2005, he led a team that developed a mobile app, Loopt, a location-based social networking app that was valued at $175 million. But Loot didn't get much attention and was eventually acquired for $43.4 million in 2012.
Sam Altman got $5 million, and the average person who made a huge sum of money at a young age might lie down there, but he didn't. He raised $21 million to found Hydrazine Capital, a venture capital fund that invested 75% of the funds in Y Combinator, and led the Series B funding of the well-known social networking site Reddit. At this point, Sam Altman has gone from being an entrepreneur to an investor.
After investing in Y Combinator, Sam Altman was named President of Y Combinator in 2014 at the age of 28. He has a clear investment style and is bullish on science and engineering-related startups. He writes blog posts calling for investment in energy, biotechnology, artificial intelligence, robotics and more, and has an angel investor program to fund at least 1,000 startups each year. During his tenure as president of YC, Sam Altman also conducted a lecture series at Stanford University in the fall of 2014 called "How to Start a Business."
As a result, in 2015, 29-year-old Sam Altman was named to Forbes' list of 30 Under 30 venture capitalists. Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen says of his leadership at Y Combinator: Y Combinator under Sam Altman has seen a tenfold increase in ambition. Also in this year, he raised $1 billion with Musk, LinkedIn co-founder and other bigwigs to co-found OpenAI. They have an almost pure mission: to develop artificial general intelligence (AGI) in a way that is most likely to benefit all of humanity.
Since becoming an investor, Sam Altman has never stopped investing. In 2021, he led a $375 million investment in fusion startup Helion, his largest investment in a start-up since he became an investor.
Sam Altman has a clear plan for the future, he believes that there are two restricted commodities in the world today, intelligence and energy, the former is trying to work with artificial intelligence, which is what OpenAI is doing; The latter is betting on nuclear fusion technology. Although he knew that the commercial prospects of nuclear fusion were slim, he chose to believe that the company had a chance of success.
Sam Altman likes to be sociable, and at his most exaggerated time, he once spent 6,000 minutes a month on the phone, which averaged more than three hours a day. His sociability has allowed him to build a stable and close circle of friends in Silicon Valley, many of whom are billionaires. As a result, he has been called "the most well-connected millennial in Silicon Valley" by Information.
In addition, Sam Altman likes to run his own personal blog, where he shares his thoughts from time to time, mostly around tech startups, investing, and personal career development.
Part.2
AI may be a double-edged sword, calling for regulation
If Sam Altman's life trajectory was as smooth as a genius programmer to the clouds, then he was as down-to-earth as a pragmatic tech executive after his success.
In February of this year, speaking on the Tech For Hardware blog, he bluntly said that ChatGPT is cool, but it also has a lot of flaws, such as easy crashes, error messages, etc. Still, people are willing to put up with these imperfections because there is more value in them.
In fact, last December, he also reminded everyone that although ChatGPT excels in some areas, it is also very limited and not everything important should be relied upon. This is the usual style of Sam Altman, who is cautious and optimistic about technology.
On the one hand, in his opinion, the revolution of general artificial intelligence is unstoppable.
In March 2021, he mentioned in an article titled "Moore's Law That Applies to Everything" that in addition to the three major technological revolutions of agriculture, industry and computers, we must add the fourth revolution - the artificial intelligence revolution. If society manages it responsibly, this revolution will generate enough wealth for everyone to have what they want.
On the other hand, he also believes that the regulation of AI is necessary and urgent.
For example, after the new version of Bing "went crazy" and scared users, Microsoft adjusted it from "easy" to "restricted", where users can only ask up to 5 questions per day and have 5 conversations at a time (but can have multiple conversations in the same day).
AI is a double-edged sword that can be used for the benefit of humanity, and if used by sinister people with ulterior motives, it will harm humanity, which is why he wrote on Twitter: "Regulation will be crucial, and it will take time to figure out what to do with this." While the current generation of AI tools isn't scary, I don't think we're far from potentially scary tools.
The risk is indeed predictable, and there are already people who use ChatGPT to fake news reports, generate fake images, and even use magic to defeat competitors, wearing extra prosthetic fingers to make it look like surveillance footage cannot be synthesized as evidence in court... This kind of thing can't be prevented, after all, people's hearts are unfathomable.
Companies like OpenAI alone can't completely eradicate them. So, Sam Altman sees it as a "shared responsibility" of the government and society.
Sam Altman's optimistic and cautious personality extends from work to life. He loves racing and has five cars at home, including two McLaren and an early Tesla, and also enjoys renting planes to fly all over California. He is a "doomsday preparer" who is prepared for danger in times of peace.
Part.3
AI: The next true technology foundational platform
You may wonder how Sam Altman himself uses ChatGPT. He often uses it to summarize long articles and emails, and he also uses it to discuss programming problems and debug code, which makes him feel like he is talking to a super smart programmer. OpenAI also has another well-known generative AI tool - text-to-image DALL· E 2。
The Forbes report mentions an interesting detail that Sam Altman refused to take a picture during an interview, instead using DALL· E 2 draws itself.
Judging by the numerous reports, Sam Altman doesn't seem to care about AI today, but about what happens next. For example, on the question of whether ChatGPT will replace Google, Sam Altman seems to have said nothing and nothing. He believes that the current ChatGPT will not replace the search engine, but there may be some AI system that can do it in the future. At the Greylock Summit last September, he described a futuristic world where AI is ubiquitous.
He believes that AI has become the next real technical basic platform, and it is a new basic platform after the mobile Internet. A large number of AI startups do not need to start from scratch, but simply improve a large number of fundamentally trained data models to create their own models for vertical domains.
This kind of AI company that provides differentiated services will see "explosive growth".
Sam Altman said that OpenAI started as a non-profit organization and transformed into a limited-profit company in 2019. About how to make a profit? He replied: "There are no plans to make money at the moment, and we don't know how to make money in the future. "Recently, OpenAI launched a premium version of ChatGPT for $20 per month to earn money through the developer platform. OpenAI has also become closer to Microsoft, which has added ChatGPT to Bing and will invest billions of dollars in additional dollars. As one of the founders of OpenAI, Musk expressed dissatisfaction with this. Musk pointed out that OpenAI was founded as an open-source, non-profit company, so it has the word "open" in its name, and the goal is to counterbalance Google. But now it appears that OpenAI has become a closed profit-seeking company controlled by Microsoft, which is contrary to the original purpose of its founding.
But Sam Altman believes that Microsoft is the tech company that best aligns with their values right now.
In addition to DALL· E 2 and ChatGPT, OpenAI also has the following AI projects:
OpenAI Codex: An AI system that translates natural language into code. It helps developers understand and write code faster by translating the natural language of human input into programming language-specific code.
Whisper: An automatic speech recognition system that converts speech to text. It can be used in scenarios such as voice assistants, voice transcription services, and more.
GPT-4: This is the next generation of natural language processing models planned by OpenAI and is expected to bring even greater breakthroughs in performance and functionality. It hasn't been officially released yet, but it has attracted a lot of attention and discussion.
Altman's personal style is similar to Musk's, and they are both full of ambition and determination. He believes that AI can change the world and is committed to advancing the development and application of AI technology. His leadership and vision have made him one of Silicon Valley's next generation of leaders, with unique insights and predictions about the future of artificial intelligence.