Sam Altman
Y Combinator to Open AI
According to ChatGPT, "Sam Altman is a Silicon Valley entrepreneur and investor. He's known for co-founding the startup incubator Y Combinator, which has been instrumental in launching numerous successful tech companies, including Dropbox, Airbnb, Reddit, and many others." He is now CEO of OpenAI, which launched ChatGPT to the world in 2022, creating a revolution in public consciousness about generative AI.
Altman, born in St Louis in 1985, received his first computer at the age of eight. In 2005, after one year at Stanford University studying computer science, he dropped out. In 2005, at the age of 19, he co-founded Loopt, a location-based social networking mobile application. As CEO, Altman raised more than $30 million in venture capital for the company, however, Loopt did not catch on.
In 2011 he became a partner at Y Combinator, the Silicon Valley technology startup accelerator, becoming its president three years later. In a 2014 blog post, he said that the total valuation of Y Combinator companies had surpassed $65 billion, including Airbnb, Dropbox, and Stripe.
In 2019, he co-founded Tools For Humanity, a company building a global iris-based biometric system using cryptocurrency, called Worldcoin. Worldcoin aims to provide a reliable way to authenticate humans online, he said, to counter bots and fake virtual identities facilitated by artificial intelligence.
Also in 2019, he stepped up to Y Combinator chairman, allowing him to spend more time on other interests including Open AI. Within a year he had left Y Combinator to focus full-time on OpenAI as CEO. OpenAI was initially funded by Altman, plus others including Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, Infosys.
In 2020, OpenAI announced GPT-3, a language model trained on large internet datasets. GPT-3 is aimed at natural language answering questions, but it can also translate between languages and coherently generate improvised text. It also announced that an associated API, named simply “the API”, would form the heart of its first commercial product.
In December 2022, OpenAI received widespread media coverage after launching a free preview of ChatGPT, its new AI chatbot based on GPT-3.5. According to OpenAI, the preview received over a million signups within the first five days.
In his Startup Playbook, published back in 2015, he writes:
“Life is not a dress rehearsal—this is probably it. Make it count. Time is extremely limited and goes by fast. Do what makes you happy and fulfilled—few people get remembered hundreds of years after they die anyway. Don’t do stuff that doesn’t make you happy (this happens most often when other people want you to do something). Don’t spend time trying to maintain relationships with people you don’t like, and cut negative people out of your life. Negativity is really bad. Don’t let yourself make excuses for not doing the things you want to do.”
“What makes a great founder? The most important characteristics are ones like unstoppability, determination, formidability, and resourcefulness. Intelligence and passion also rank very highly. These are all much more important than experience and certainly “expertise with language X and framework Y”.”
“A CEO has to 1) set the vision and strategy for the company, 2) evangelize the company to everyone, 3) hire and manage the team, especially in areas where you yourself have gaps 4) raise money and make sure the company does not run out of money, and 5) set the execution quality bar.”
“The missing circuit in my brain, the circuit that would make me care what people think about me, is a real gift. Most people want to be accepted, so they won’t take risks that could make them look crazy—which actually makes them wildly miscalculate risk.”