Who is Sam Altman, the genius behind the success of ChatGPT and the driving force behind generative AI

Sam Altman is the name of the moment in the technological field (despite Elon Musk).He is the one hidden behind the global success of brands such as OpenAI, Dalle 2 or ChatGPT, his most famous creation. Sam Altman is increasingly exposed to public opinion, embarked on a whirlwind of press conferences, interviews with policy makers and appearances of all kinds all over the world in which those around him are always asking him for more information to understand the scope of the current boom in artificial intelligence.

So we thought it was a good time to review his story 😉

Sam Altman: first years

Samuel Harris Altman was born in Chicago, Illinois, USA, on April 22, 1985 (he is 38 years old). He grew up in St Louis, Missouri, where he attended John Burroughs High School. He later attended Stanford University, the same university where other digital geniuses such as Sergei Brin and Larry Page, founders of Google, grew up. There he studied computer science, but soon dropped out.

In 2005, when he was only 19 years old and out of college, he decided to start his first technological project and launched Loopt, an application with which users could share their location with friends and get discount coupons from nearby businesses. Although Loopt managed to raise $30 million in venture capital, it shut down for lacking traction and eventually, in 2012, was bought by Green Dot Corporation for $43.4 million.

Altman’s next stop was Y Combinator, a well-known tech startup accelerator that has been involved in such important projects as Airbnb, Dropbox or Coinbase, of which he became a partner in 2011. In 2014, he relieved Paul Graham as president of the company, a position that allowed him to rub shoulders with important figures such as Elon Musk, with whom he would work years later.

Until 2019, Altman was at the helm of the accelerator, when he decided to focus more on OpenAI, the artificial intelligence company he launched in 2015.

Birth and evolution of OpenAI, Sam Altman’s great project.

In its early days, OpenAI was funded by Altman, as well as several prominent Silicon Valley figures and companies, including (again) Elon Musk, Jessica Livingston, Peter Thiel and YC Research. By 2015, when the company was launched, it had reached $1 billion from external funders. With OpenAI, the group had set a goal of creating a nonprofit organization that was focused on developing AI in a way that would best benefit humanity as a whole.

A year after its launch, in April 2016, the company launched Gym, a platform for reinforced learning research. It allows researchers and developers to compare reinforcement learning systems, systems that teach AI to make better decisions. In December of the same year, they launched Universe, the software platform for training intelligent agents on websites and games.

By 2018, OpenAI announced that Musk would resign from the company to eliminate possible future friction stemming from the mogul’s approach to AI. In the following years, Musk used his Twitter account to express his dissatisfaction with the direction OpenAI was taking. In fact, in March of this year, he signed, along with other technology experts, an open letter expressing his concern about the impact AI will have on society and urging that its development be put on hold for at least six months.

Returning to OpenAI, in 2019, the company abandoned its nonprofit status to become a limited-profit corporation. This same year, it signed an agreement with Microsoft, in which the company created by Bill Gates would invest $1 billion in exchange for OpenAI licensing its technology exclusively with them. A move that would become the first in a series of investment deals that would culminate in 2023, when the tech giant announced that it would make a multi-year investment of “billions of dollars” in OpenAI with the aim of “accelerating advances in AI and ensuring that these benefits are widely shared with the world.” Although the exact figure of the new investment was not disclosed, the U.S. digital media Semafor advanced in early January that the total amount would be $10 billion (€9.207 billion).

But before that, OpenAI continued to grow and launch new products. So in 2021, OpenAI launched Dalle-2, a text-based image generator tool, the first to popularize text-based image generation tools worldwide, and in late 2022 it launched ChatGPT, the text and code generative AI tool that has revolutionized the tech world.

Throughout 2023, it has released several improved versions of ChatGPT, the latest being GPT4, a paid version of the tool, plus APIs and integrations for developers.

Sam Altman under scrutiny by governments and the judiciary

Recently OpenAI’s senior management, including Altman, Greg Brockman (President) and Ilya Sutskever (Chief Scientist), acknowledged that AI could be compared to nuclear power because of the risks it poses to humanity. They stated, that AI is likely to surpass expert-level skills in almost every domain in the next decade, so it needed to be regulated.

But despite this concern, Sam Altman doesn’t seem too encouraged by the regulations that governments want to propose. In May he had to appear before the U.S. Congress, where he took on the task of convincing regulators that he is willing to help in finding the balance between innovation and the risks that AI brings.

While during his visit to Capitol Hill, he called for the U.S. to be the first country to act and stated that AI companies must comply with an appropriate set of safety requirements, he has called for regulation to be “flexible enough to adapt to new technological developments.”

Likewise, in his recent visit to the UK, which is part of a tour of several European countries (Spain among them), he said he was very concerned about the AI law that will be voted by the European Parliament in a few weeks and stressed “we will try to comply, but, if we cannot comply, we will stop operating”.

Altman’s warning comes shortly after governments such as the Italian government decided to block the use of its flagship tool, ChatGPT, due to concerns about OpenAI’s handling of user data.