By all signs, he will be the next big name. He will make the Silicon Valley news that echoes around the world. Have you heard of Sam Altman?
The famous ChatGPT owes its success to him; he runs OpenAI, the company that showed the world how far artificial intelligence has come.
It is clear that Sam still has to get used to the spotlight, just as Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk had to. And today his few interviews are worth listening to closely as we look for the big news coming in the world of artificial intelligence.
A programmer who never quite happened, an entrepreneur who has seen both success and failure up close. An innovator who landed in exactly the right place. A visionary without grand words. An American of Jewish descent, the first leader on such a scale who makes no secret of being gay. This figure, still hidden behind the chatbot, has yet to give birth to big stories and big changes. And conspiracy theories, everything that comes with his status.
And one more thing: not long ago he set aside from his “savings” two sums of hundreds of millions of dollars each and gave them to research into dramatically extending human life and the search for cold fusion—a technology that could solve humanity's energy needs for the long term…
Sam All Alone
Until a few months ago his name was far from famous, even though at 38 he had already piled up impressive achievements. Then ChatGPT came along to sweep everything away and change it. Yes, perhaps not so much because of some great technological innovation, but because it reached millions of people around the world and showed them where artificial intelligence already stands. That technology has advanced at breakneck speed and we have unexpectedly found ourselves in the future.
All of this, little by little, pushed the project's “father” to the front. Sam Altman heads OpenAI, the company behind the famous chatbot, behind the GPT-3 algorithm and its long-awaited successor GPT-4, and behind DALL·E, which in turn started the fashion for algorithms that paint impressive images from a description.
Like the other great innovators of the digital age, he is only now becoming a recognizable figure. That is why it is interesting to meet him today, before he settles into his role in the spotlight.
Sam's Alter Ego
At first glance Sam is not especially charismatic; he lacks the lofty words and the thundering metaphors. And yet, much of the future is hidden in what he says.
Because he is one of those people who leave you with the feeling that they know what they are doing. They say he was good at math from kindergarten, and at 8 he got his first computer. He quickly learned to take it apart and put it back together, then dove deep into the thickets of programming.
That “Mac,” as Sam calls it, soon became his closest friend and his lifeline from the world. Especially when adolescence arrived. “Growing up gay in the Midwest in the early years of the century was not the most awesome thing,” he recalls. “Finding chat rooms where you could talk to people who understood you was transformative.” At 16 he told his parents, and his mother was surprised, because she had always thought he was interested only in computers and completely indifferent to either sex.
Clearly he was brave from an early age. When a scandal flared up at his high school over a discussion of sexuality, he took the stage, declared openly that he was gay and asked rhetorically: “Do you want this school to be a repressive place, or one that is open to people who are different?” According to his teachers, the gesture proved revolutionary and made life much easier for the young people who later found themselves in the same situation.
A Lone Warrior
Technology remained his great passion, and he was admitted to study computer science at Stanford. After the first two years, however, he decided he needed no more schooling—it was time to roll up his sleeves and change the world…
With two fellow students he founded the startup Loopt. The year was 2005. Social networks were just rising over the horizon, and the young men thought it would be a good idea to build a mobile platform that shows you where your friends are and tells you when you are nearby. They managed to attract serious funding, but it turned out the idea could not gather enough users. Is it luck or not that it was Facebook, and not their idea, that became the everyday solution?
Either way, Sam was lucky after all. On the one hand, the startup ended in a sale that made him a millionaire; on the other, it was what brought him together with the people who would appreciate his skills and launch him into the highest orbit of Silicon Valley.
The Maya promised that 2012 would bring the end of the world. Well, it was not an especially pleasant time for our hero: at the same time as the sale of Loopt, he also split with his partner in business and in life, Nick Sivo, the only love of his life that ever reached the media.
Sam decided that his great talent was entrepreneurship and… it turned out that was exactly right. He set up a small investment fund, which nonetheless drew attention—the legendary Peter Thiel came in with $5 million, the investor who paved the way for almost all the giant ventures of Silicon Valley over the past two decades.
The Solitude of Prime Numbers
By then Sam had also met Paul Graham, the founder of Y Combinator. You have probably never heard of him, but ventures like Airbnb, Dropbox and Stripe owe their rise to this startup accelerator. The company does not simply invest in projects it finds promising; it also supports them with a whole body of know-how, with guidance and proven solutions.
In 2014 this same Paul Graham decided to retire from his role at the top, because it turned out he had found the ideal replacement—our hero, Sam Altman. “Three minutes after I met him, I thought, ‘Ah, so this is what Bill Gates must have been like when he was 19.’” Soon the list of potential successors was complete, and it contained a grand total of… one name.
At the time, the accelerator was working with companies worth more than $65 billion. The pace of growth was incredible—every year it supported more than 1,000 new startups in all kinds of fields. At the new leader's insistence, many of them were high-tech and science-based, even outside information technology.
Sam did a wonderful job; the projects he took on achieved impressive successes and piled up investment. At one point he even had to take the helm of Reddit for 8 days to quickly put things in order.
Uncle Sam
So, are you surprised that we are getting close to the present and haven't mentioned artificial intelligence anywhere so far? Even though this is the man who, more than anyone, is paving the way for it in its modern form… Well, here we come to the fascinating story of OpenAI.
Why “open,” of all things? The company was founded in 2015 by 5 investors and 3 organizations, and quickly raised more than a billion dollars for development. Its idea was to counter Google's ventures in artificial intelligence at the time. As the founders put it, there was a danger that an extremely important new technology would become a monopoly of the big companies, with no clarity about regulation. Without knowing whether the rise of AI might turn out to be our last mistake as a species. The project set itself against this, with the aim of developing technologies open to everyone, with an eye on ethics and with tighter control over the capabilities we delegate to algorithms. What an irony of fate that less than a decade later the roles would be sharply reversed…
Speaking of the investors, among them stand out the names of Elon Musk, Peter Thiel and… Sam Altman.
Papa Geppetto
A few years later Sam had already taken control of the company. In 2019 he left Y Combinator to concentrate on running OpenAI. Soon after, the first big successes we have mentioned began to appear. It was Altman who made the hotly contested decision to let ChatGPT talk to anyone who wanted. This brought him a lot of criticism from professional circles, but won his company an enormous advantage. ChatGPT swept up public interest, drew every gaze and became a synonym for artificial intelligence. And all of this from a company with only… 375 employees! Gradually, though, the venture drifted completely away from the ideas of open access and open source, becoming ever more commercial. The partnership with Microsoft, which will gradually integrate the AI projects into almost all of its products, is growing ever more serious too. This even prompted Musk to write that the project had strayed from its idea and that things were not going well. Where will all of this turn next?
One Hundred Years of Solitude
In search of answers, it is only right to give the floor, of course, to our hero. He does not like media appearances at all, and it will be interesting to see whether that changes in his new, inevitable role as a global celebrity. Still, Sam gave a rather curious interview to Forbes at the end of February.
The entrepreneur is convinced that we are already on the road to creating artificial general intelligence—an algorithm able to solve different types of tasks no worse than a human. “I think there's a real chance we've truly uncovered something important here and that this paradigm will take us very, very far,” he says. But it will not happen soon. One of the conclusions he has drawn in recent years is that the transition will be gradual; it will not happen all at once, with one particular project.
The Robot vs. Capitalism
He is frank that artificial general intelligence is the thing driving all his actions forward. “Some are more direct, others don't look that way, but they actually are. And then there's also the goal of getting to a world of abundance.”
At the same time, Sam says, this step will bring a very serious change to all our lives.
“I think capitalism is great. I love capitalism,” the multimillionaire admits. “Of all the bad systems we've found so far, it's the best one—or the least bad. I hope we find a much better one. But if AGI arrives in its full form, I can imagine all the ways it will break capitalism.”
Sam answers the criticism that he released a technology not yet proven safe too early like this: “I really believe society needs to feel this, to wrestle with it, to see the benefits and understand the downsides. So I think the most important thing we have to do is put these things out there, so the world can start to understand what's coming.” “We need time to figure out exactly what to do,” Sam says. “Regulation is necessary, but it will take time. Although the tools of this generation aren't very dangerous, I think we're not far from creating potentially frightening AI technologies.”
Afraid of Bears, Stay Out of the Woods
And so the long-awaited successor to the most successful algorithm has arrived: weeks ago GPT-4 was unveiled, once again significantly improving on the previous versions. And that was the occasion for Sam to give another important interview, this time to CNBC, in which he added that he is “a little bit scared” of what is happening in the AI world.
Well, what he means is his worry that authoritarian regimes might develop this kind of technology, which would be dangerous… In other words, it is perfectly safe if giant companies do it. He says he worries that such models could be used for hacking attacks and for disinformation. Those are certainly serious risks, but no smaller are the ones that come from the future decisions of our hero, whose story is not yet fully told.
Only One Future
What lies ahead? What will the next algorithms created by Sam and his colleagues be capable of? Exciting news is certainly on its way, and the development of the whole field of artificial intelligence depends on it.
Meanwhile, Sam does not keep away from other technological directions that herald big news either. In 2020 he created Worldcoin—a concept for new digital money that could be used through a unique “fingerprint”: the iris of the eye, which sets every earthling apart. The project has not managed much success because of regulatory difficulties in many countries… but who knows, after the onset of the blockchain winter, ideas like this may be reborn—the world visibly needs a new generation of payments.
Sam has long said that “science is broken,” so he tries to help companies in energy, biotechnology and robotics.
During the pandemic Sam gave serious money to the development of COVID vaccines. Science remains an important part of his interests as an investor. Not long ago it emerged that Altman had invested $180 million in the startup Retro Biosciences, which promises to extend our lives by at least 10 years in the foreseeable future. It is also a record: never before has a single investor put so much into a venture of this kind. He set aside $375 million for Helion Energy, a company pursuing the long-awaited cold fusion and the energy solution that would give us an endless and at the same time completely green source of energy.
In recent months he has drawn many eyes both with OpenAI's newest AI models and with… the scandal in which he was briefly ousted from the company. Then he returned with a bang, stronger than ever.
Only Forward
And still, what kind of person is Sam? In 2016 a blogger asked him whether life is better with Asperger's syndrome or whether it gets in his way. It is a diagnosis on the autism spectrum in which people have serious difficulties communicating with others. He did not answer… “Damn it, but I don't have Asperger's! Then I thought about it, and I understood why he'd think so. I seem strange in a lot of ways. I have broad interests in technology, and I'm not drawn to what most people like—parties, meeting lots of people. When someone looks at a photo and says, ‘Oh, I sense this and that,’ all those hidden emotions, I sit there looking at them like an alien.”
His great skill is a clear vision and an intuitive understanding of complex systems. By all appearances, though, empathy is not one of his strong suits.
“Our phones already control us,” Sam believes. “The merging of humans and technology has already begun. And merging is the best option. Any other scenario, in which we don't merge with technology but develop in parallel, ends in conflict. Either we enslave them, or they enslave us.”
In his free time he likes to drive his 5 fast cars; two of them are McLarens, a third is “an old Tesla” (what could “old” possibly mean?). His other hobby is flying rented planes over California. And the third, as Sam puts it, is preparing to survive. His acquaintances often talk about apocalyptic scenarios involving viruses, wars or… lethal AI. He does not think it will come to that soon, but… just in case, he has prepared a bunker with guns, gold, iodine, antibiotics, batteries, water and gas masks from the Israeli special forces.
As Peter Thiel says, “Sam is not at all religious, but culturally he's a typical Jew—an optimist, but ready to survive. With the feeling that things can always go wrong and that there is no place in the world where you can truly feel at home.”
Do It Yourself
Every year he writes a list of goals; some are about business, others about physical activity, such as cycling 100 miles every week. They say it is rare for any of the tasks he sets himself to go undone.
Before the last election, one of his two brothers half-jokingly suggested he run for president of the United States. “Who could be better than you, Sam?” And he replied: “Oh, sure! Let's send the gay Jew to fix things. That'll definitely work…”
It is nice that he has a sense of humor, but… don't reveal what you have read here to conspiracy lovers. If you decide to anyway, tell them too that he has been a vegetarian since he was a kid.
Whether he eats steaks, whether he is an emotional man—I don't think that matters much. But it is worth hoping for Sam Altman's common sense over the coming years, when he will be painting the future. The future in which every one of us, without exception, will live…
