It is already certified that Sam Altman is a smart guy and smarter than hunger. That was said in the picaresque, although he does not seem to have experienced difficulties in his family and professional life.
Ready it is, and a lot. Mark Zuckerberg, another savvy being, took to the metaverse to come to the rescue of his discredited Facebook. But Altman understood that the issue is not about that, but about artificial intelligence (AI).
And the one that has been involved with ChatGPT, the flagship product of the OpenAI company led by Altman.
Just as an example, in the midst of the controversy, with a school system like the one in New York that has banned it for doing student work and "misinforming", this tool, with basic data, passed the exam to achieve the title of Law in an experiment conducted at the University of Minnesota.
The conclusion was that he was "a mediocre student", but with a lot of potential.
“There is a belief that creativity is something profoundly special, only human,” he reasoned. "Maybe it's not so true anymore," the OpenAI executive director clarified in a videoconference held last summer from the San Francisco barracks to explain the advances in DALL-E, which was being trained to create its own original art.
In November, however, ChatGPT emerged, stealing all the attention and creating a huge debate, strewn with uncertainties about the future of AI and its influence on everyday life. The fear of dystopia never goes away when the discussion turns to artificial intelligence. Altman himself recognizes that the future is a coin in the air that it is not known which way it will fall.
ChatGPT, a computerized chatbot to simulate humans, has generated a buzz unlike any since the iPhone was launched in 2007. It is not surprising that this smart guy, a rebel who would appear in shorts or hooded in his sweatshirt to meetings with top executives, begins to evoke the stamp of Steve Jobs. The magazines Forbes (list of young investors) and Business Week (one of the great entrepreneurs in technology) have exalted him.
Born in Chicago (Illinois) on April 22, 1985, but raised in St. Louis (Missouri), he was raised in a Jewish home and came out as gay while in high school.
At the age of eight, he was given a Mac LC2 computer. “It cost 2,200 1993 dollars. It was horribly expensive and not much, 40 megabytes on the hard drive. But putting it in my bedroom reminds me that it drew a dividing line in my life, before and after the computer,” she said.
After high school he entered the prestigious Stanford University, the cradle of technology. He left early, in 2005, when he was 20. By that time he had founded and was CEO of Loopt, the seed of a location-based social network.
He sold it to him some time later, amassed a good number of millions (they did not fall below 40) and impressed one of his investors, the Y Combinator fund, which he ended up presiding between 2014 and 2019. From this accelerator platform for startups such as Airbnb, Dropbox or Coinbase, also invested in Reddit or Change.org.
In 2015 he founded OpenAI together with Elon Musk and others. The Tesla businessman left the board in 2018, though he continued as a donor. Now, in addition, he has become critical of deals with Microsoft, such as the Seattle giant's $10 billion investment announced this week. “OpenAI started as a non-profit and open source. None of them are still valid," Musk tweeted.
Since 2019, when he left Y Combinator, Altman has been the CEO of OpenAI. "My personal belief is that technology does more great things than bad," he stressed, "but it is unpredictable."
