Tech's Next Household Name: Sam Altman

Sam Altman may become the next big name in technology, but most Americans have probably never heard of him.

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Altman would likely appear to anyone outside of San Francisco as just another young tech Leader. He is a Stanford University dropout who made a tidy profit when he sold a tech business years ago. Over the following ten years, he has devoted his time mentoring and investing in new entrepreneurs. He tweets upbeat, upbeat life advice and sprinkles line graph allusions throughout his speech.

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Yet, on the strength of OpenAI during the last three months, Altman, 37, has shot to the top of the power rankings in the IT sector. The company that developed the popular artificial intelligence chatbot ChatGPT is led by Altman. At competitors like Google, the technology has brought on a panic, which appeared to change the course of technological advancement overnight, aroused worries about killer robots.

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Dispatch Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk. The next great CEO may have been discovered in Silicon Valley.

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Oren Etzioni, a leader in artificial intelligence who oversaw the Allen Center for Artificial Intelligence in Seattle for many years, declared that "he is unquestionably the man of the hour," which is all the more astonishing considering his age of 37. 

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In Northern California, Altman is already well-known to everyone in the IT industry, and he is now poised to do the same everywhere else as he and OpenAI gain influence at the cutting edge of artificial intelligence.

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According to a tweet from Altman, the San Francisco-based OpenAI employed 375 individuals as of last month, which is still a small staff by tech firm standards but understates both the company's and Altman's significance.

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Altman may have a boyish demeanor and a closet full of T-shirts and jeans, but he is a seasoned insider in both political and business circles. He and former Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer co-hosted a fundraiser for President Barack Obama in 2014, and despite having little prior political experience, he reportedly thought about running for California governor in 2017, according to former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown. His friends include internet millionaires like Peter Thiel, Reid Hoffman, and Elon Musk, whose money was used to launch OpenAI in 2015. He has attended the exclusive Sun Valley and Bilderberg business conferences.

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Prior to turning 30, Altman assumed leadership of Y Combinator, a renowned startup incubator and investment company that has aided in the creation of businesses like Airbnb, Dropbox, and Reddit. He drove the company's investments into fields like nuclear energy since he was not afraid of big ideas.

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Within three minutes of meeting him, Y Combinator co-founder Paul Graham recalled thinking, "Oh, so this is what Bill Gates must have been like when he was 19," alluding to the Microsoft co-founder. Altman was later chosen by Graham to lead Y Combinator.

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Legendary computer scientist Alan Kay referred to Altman as "the greatest thing ever" and "a builder of civilizations" in a 2016 address after Altman pitched him on a new research project that eventually gave rise to OpenAI. Kay gave the company advice.

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Some in the industry have found all the praise to be overwhelming, such Timnit Gebru, a well-known AI ethics researcher who was fired from Google in 2020 as a result of a paper she co-wrote that challenged expansive language models like those OpenAI and Google have released.

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Gebru wrote this month on LinkedIn, "I honestly feel that the whole world is going wild with the ChatGPT hoopla."

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Gebru, who declined to be interviewed, cited one of Altman's most unreasonably upbeat statements from the previous year. In other words, a utopia where no one needs to work, Altman predicted that "before this decade is out," inexpensive energy and cutting-edge AI would be so widespread that "many people will opt to relax all the time."

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He's not someone to follow for any kind of truth, Gebru commented on LinkedIn.

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A spokesman for OpenAI claimed that neither Altman nor any other officials were available for an interview.

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Those who have worked with Altman are unfazed by the criticism and applaud his vision for the future of technology.

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Aaron Harris, a previous partner at Y Combinator, wrote in an email that he has a special talent for seeing enormous opportunities in new things and inspiring others to work as hard as he does to make those prospects a reality.

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Since new technologies like ChatGPT promise to have an impact on industries like education, journalism, technology, and more, the buzz and concern around them aren't going away any time soon. The picture generators DALL-E and DALL-E 2 were created by OpenAI. 

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On a number fronts, ChatGPT is the target of harsh criticism. Its system is founded on data that was obtained from the public internet, which some people consider plain theft. Second, it occasionally throws out inaccurate information with assurance. Thirdly, it might be so disruptive that paradoxically OpenAI should not have made it available to the general public so early. Four years ago, OpenAI initially refrained from making the full version of GPT-2, the predecessor of ChatGPT, available to the public on the grounds that it might be abused, including for impersonation.

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Then there is the notion that AI robots may one day endanger human life, which is supported by philosophers and popular culture. 

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According to Margaret O'Mara, a professor at the University of Washington and an expert on the history of the technology sector, Altman is now in a position to serve as both a gatekeeper and an explainer-in-chief of cutting-edge technology.

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"There's always this enthusiasm about the intelligent individual who is introducing the rest of the world to this novel and intriguing thing. When they also appear to be a good guy, there is additional enthusiasm," O'Mara added.

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Altman seldom agrees to interviews with mainstream media, therefore he often explains things on Twitter, in meetings with Congress, on his blog, and in conversations with affluent investors or niche media professionals. Although Altman has regularly counseled people in the IT industry to disregard the media, he did give a recent Forbes magazine interview and participate in a New York Times podcast where he attacked his own work.

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Altman has been able to remain under the radar while having great impact in the San Francisco tech industry, according to O'Mara, who has written on Silicon Valley's long line of golden 20- and 30-somethings, which she refers to as "the whiz child cliché." She claimed that's in part due to his reserved nature.

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He is not a performer. He is not like Thiel or Musk. He lacks catchphrases, according to O'Mara.

But she said, he does frequently share their viewpoint. He shares the perspective of the small, incredibly close-knit group of males who currently hold a lot of power in Silicon Valley, she claimed.

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When Altman authored a blog article in 2017 denouncing political correctness and claiming that tech entrepreneurs were fleeing San Francisco because of it, his worldview erupted into controversy.

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I discovered that I was more at ease debating contentious ideas in Beijing than in San Francisco," he wrote. Two days later, he followed up to make it clear that he wasn't supporting hatred. Recently, he has been upbeat about San Francisco's future, calling it "the heart of the AI revolution," despite a "negligent" municipal administration.

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The fact that Altman is both affable and intelligent contributes to some of his influence. Before Zoom calls, he once admitted to chatting on the phone for as much as 6,000 minutes per month, or more than three hours per day, to the tech website Re/code. 

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According to a 2016 feature on Altman in The New Yorker, the actor, the son of a dermatologist, grew up in the St. Louis region with two brothers. When he came out as gay, he contributed to changing the culture of his high school, according to the magazine. According to regulatory papers, he now resides in a home on San Francisco's storied Russian Hill.

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And although Altman has largely shied away from making headline-grabbing appearances in the national spotlight, tech audiences have known him for years. He spoke on stage during the debut of the iPhone app store in 2008 as a co-founder of an app named Loopt. Also, he was a special visitor at Microsoft's corporate headquarters last week as part of a relationship.

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Despite his money and power, Altman has enjoyed the concept that he and other tech founders are underdogs.

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In a blog post titled "The Power of Being Misunderstood" from December 2020, he stated, "You and a tiny group of rebels acquire the room to tackle an important problem that might not get solved otherwise."

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After a string of failures, it's unclear whether Americans want another tech prodigy in their lives. Elizabeth Holmes, the founder of Theranos, will enter prison in April. Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of FTX, is charged. Also, people gave Musk and Zuckerberg dismal scores in an NBC News poll conducted last year. 

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Altman, however, might also fill a void. Due to their mass layoffs, IT companies are battling the notion that they are stagnant. Despite being extremely profitable, businesses like Apple and Google haven't dazzled customers with a game-changing product in years.

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Moreover, ChatGPT frequently produces top-tier tech news. Even Chinese businesses are contemplating ChatGPT clones as a result of OpenAI's leadership in the field.

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For what it's worth, ChatGPT does not specifically credit Altman, despite the fact that he holds the position of CEO, with the creation of the service.

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In answer to a query from NBC News, ChatGPT responded, "If we were to pick one person who played a crucial role, it would be Ilya Sutskever." Sutskever is the head scientist at OpenAI, a former Googler, and a co-author of a significant article on neural networks from 2017.

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The expanding collaboration between OpenAI and Microsoft may reveal a lot about Altman's future plans. Former Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence director Etzioni said he interprets this as an indication that OpenAI isn't attempting to displace Microsoft or grow into a massive independent firm, and that Altman may never be a Bill Gates.

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“I believe he will only become a billionaire,” said Etzioni.