In the latest chapter in an artificial intelligence saga that shocked the industry, the ousted leader of ChatGPT-maker OpenAI returns to the company that fired him late last week.
There is no doubt his name is appearing in headlines all over the world lately because he has been dismissed from the company he founded, OpenAI. This may be the result of the fact that over the past year, Sam Altman, the father of ChatGPT, has become the face of artificial intelligence, or AI.
However, his fame is nothing new—he has been in the public eye in Silicon Valley for almost 20 years.
2005 saw Altman enter the IT industry as a recent college dropout. Similar to Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Mark Zuckerberg, the twenty-year-old guy left Stanford University's computer science program to found Loopt, a platform that lets users broadcast their geolocation.
Altman joined the Y Combinator (YC) - a major accelerator of technology start-ups that has helped launch the likes of Airbnb, Reddit, Dropbox, and Coinbase - when he had no academic commitments and the future of Loopt in his hands as well. YC was also responsible for helping launch Airbnb, Reddit, Dropbox, and Coinbase.
The Looptd company has raised more than $30 million (€28 million) in venture capital before it has been widely adopted by the likes of Apple and Blackberry. Loopt failed after seven years, and American financial technology and bank holding company Green Dot Corporation purchased it for over €40 million.
San Francisco-based OpenAI said in a statement late Tuesday: "We have reached an agreement in principle for Sam Altman to return to OpenAI as CEO with a new initial board" made up of former Salesforce co-CEO Bret Taylor, former US Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, and Quora CEO Adam D'Angelo.
From failure to success
Despite its failure, Loopt helped Altman establish a reputation for himself in Silicon Valley. Two years later, he was selected as the successor of Y Combinator's president, American computer engineer Paul Graham.
Three years later, Altman co-founded Open Artificial Intelligence with Tesla CEO Elon Musk, LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, and other sponsors in 2015, to encourage and create "friendly AI in a way that benefits all humanity".
Altman originally showed in 2016 that OpenAI was developing GPT-1, a General Artificial Intelligence (GAI) capable of matching human intelligence.
On January 5, 2021, OpenAI announced DALL-E, an AI that can create images based on a user's description.
OpenAI surprised the staff by launching ChatGPT, one of the most complex AI models to date: a chatbot capable of creating text on demand utilizing advanced AI, scenarios, songs, tales, and presentations.
The release of ChatGPT, which has both enthralled and horrified millions, has swiftly propelled Altman to the forefront of public attention. It has also spurred his requests to meet with legislators and lawmakers to collaborate on AI safety and alignment efforts.
The Future of AI
Altman has stated that the most recent and advanced versions of ChatGPT would be pushed out gradually to familiarize individuals, institutions, and policymakers with it, "thinking about the implications, feeling the technology, getting a sense of what it can and cannot do."
He believes that "artificial general intelligence" (AGI) is driving an "unstoppable" revolution.
He said in an essay titled 'The Moore's Law for Everyone' that the technical advances that AGI will bring in the next 100 years "will be far larger than all we've made since we first controlled fire and invented the wheel".
Fired by OpenAI and recruited by Microsoft.
The AI community was surprised in November 2023 when Altman was driven out of OpenAI by the board, which said he was "not consistently candid in his communications" to the board of directors, leading to a loss of trust in his capacity to run OpenAI.
In the days that followed, more than 700 of 770 OpenAI workers signed a letter threatening to leave the firm if he was not returned, according to the Financial Times, citing people familiar with the situation.
Altman was quickly hired by Microsoft, who had previously spent billions in OpenAI, to head a "new advanced AI research team".
The AI oracle is also recognized for his charitable actions. The 38-year-old has expressed support for universal basic income, a policy that would guarantee an adequate living wage to all residents, as well as criticism of economic disparity in the computer industry.