Courtesy of Sam Altman
f11photo/Shutterstock
Source: The New Yorker
Matt Weinberger/Business Insider
“Growing up gay in the Midwest in the two-thousands was not the most awesome thing,” he told The New Yorker. “And finding AOL chat rooms was transformative. Secrets are bad when you’re eleven or twelve.”
Source: The New Yorker
Joseph Sohm / Shutterstock
Altman came out as gay to the whole community after a Christian group boycotted an assembly at his school that was about sexuality.
“What Sam did changed the school,” his college counselor, Madelyn Gray, told The New Yorker. “It felt like someone had opened up a great big box full of all kinds of kids and let them out into the world.”
Source: The New Yorker
turtix/Shutterstock
Source: The New Yorker
Getty Images
Source: The New Yorker, The Business of Business
Drew Angerer/Getty
The $43 million sale price was close to how much it had raised from investors. The company was acquired by Green Dot, a banking company known for prepaid cards.
One of Loopt’s cofounders, Nick Sivo, and Altman dated for nine years, but they broke up after they sold the company.
It’s unclear what Altman’s current net worth is.
Source: The Wall Street Journal, All Things Digital, Y Combinator, The New Yorker
Marco Bello/Getty Images
Altman invested 75% of that money into YC companies, and led Reddit’s Series B fundraising round.
He told The New Yorker, “you want to invest in messy, somewhat broken companies. You can treat the warts on top, and because of the warts the company will be hugely underpriced.”
Lucy Nicholson/Reuters
Source: How to Start a Startup
Courtesy of Sam Altman
Source: Forbes
Drew Angerer/Getty
Mark Andreessen, cofounder of venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, said, “Under Sam, the level of YC’s ambition has gone up 10x.”
Source: The New Yorker
McLaren
Source: The New Yorker
Drew Angerer/Getty
“I try not to think about it too much,” Altman told the founders in 2016. “But I have guns, gold, potassium iodide, antibiotics, batteries, water, gas masks from the Israeli Defense Force, and a big patch of land in Big Sur I can fly to.”
Source: The New Yorker
Getty Images
Source: The New Yorker
San Francisco Chronicle/Hearst Newspapers via Getty Images/Contributor
“Moonshot” companies are startups that are financially risky but could potentially pay off with a breakthrough development.
Source: Insider
Michael Kovac/Getty Images for Vanity Fair
“We discussed what is the best thing we can do to ensure the future is good?” Elon Musk told The New York Times in 2015. “We could sit on the sidelines or we can encourage regulatory oversight, or we could participate with the right structure with people who care deeply about developing A.I. in a way that is safe and is beneficial to humanity.”
Source: Insider, The New York Times
Tony Avelar/AP
Source: Insider
Drew Angerer/Getty Image
In a thread on Twitter, Altman said he was “voting against Trump because I believe the principles he stands for represent an unacceptable threat to America.”
He also said Peter Thiel, who was still working with YC at the time, “is a high profile supporter of Trump,” and that, “I disagree with this.”
But, he said, “YC is not going to fire someone for supporting a major party nominee.”
YC and Thiel stopped working together a year later in 2017 for unspecified reasons.
During his interviews, Altman said he “did not expect to talk to so many Muslims, Mexicans, Black people, and women in the course of this project.”
He said almost everyone he approached was willing to talk to him, but they also didn’t want to share their names in fear of being “targeted by those people in Silicon Valley if they knew I voted for him.” Altman said one of the people he talked to in Silicon Valley made him sign a confidentiality agreement before talking because she was scared of losing her job for supporting Trump.
Source: Twitter, Sam Altman, Insider
Getty
Altman said OpenAI had “never made any revenue,” and that it had “no current plans to make revenue.”
“We have no idea how we may one day generate revenue,” he said at the time.
Source: TechCrunch
Skye Gould/Business Insider
“We want to increase our ability to raise capital while still serving our mission, and no pre-existing legal structure we know of strikes the right balance,” OpenAI said on its blog. “Our solution is to create OpenAI LP as a hybrid of a for-profit and nonprofit — which we are calling a ‘capped-profit’ company.”
Brian Ach/Getty Images for TechCrunch
Source: The Wall Street Journal, LinkedIn, Insider
Brian Ach/Getty
Altman and OpenAI’s chief scientist, Ilya Sutskever, said the move to focus on large language models is the best way for the company to reach artificial general intelligence, or AGI, a system that has broad human-level cognitive abilities.
Source: Fortune
Marc Olivier Le Blanc/Worldcoin
The company was started in 2020, but stopped operating in a few countries in 2022 due to logistics issues. In January, the company recently tweeted that it has reached 1 million people and has onboarded over 150,000 first-time crypto users.
OpenAI
Both DALL-E and ChatGPT are known as “generative” AI, meaning the bot creates its own artwork and text based off information it has been fed.
After ChatGPT was released on November 30, Altman tweeted that it had reached over 1 million users in five days.
Getty Images
Altman tweeted that ChatGPT was “great” for “fun creative inspiration,” but “not such a good idea” to look up facts.
ChatGPT recently began testing a paid version of ChatGPT called “ChatGPT Professional” that is supposed to give better access to the bot. In December, Altman tweeted that OpenAI “will have to monetize it somehow at some point; the compute costs are eye-watering.”
Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images
“Helion is more than an investment to me,” Altman told TechCrunch. “It’s the other thing beside OpenAI that I spend a lot of time on. I’m just super excited about what’s going to happen there.”
He told TechCrunch that he’s “happy there’s a fusion race,” to build a low-cost fusion energy system that can eventually power the Earth.
Source: TechCrunch, CNBC
Future Publishing/
People who pay $20 a month for ChatGPT Plus get benefits such as access to the site even when traffic is high, faster responses from the bot, and first access to new features and ChatGPT improvements.
The subscription is only available for people in the US, and OpenAI said it will soon start inviting people on the waitlist to join.
Source: OpenAI
JASON REDMOND/AFP via Getty Images
“If AGI is successfully created, this technology could help us elevate humanity by increasing abundance, turbocharging the global economy, and aiding in the discovery of new scientific knowledge that changes the limits of possibility,” Altman wrote on OpenAI’s blog.
Despite its potential, Altman said AGI, or artificial general intelligence, comes with “serious risk of misuse, drastic accidents, and societal disruption.” But instead of stopping its development, Altman said “society and the developers of AGI have to figure out how to get it right.”
Altman went on to share the principles OpenAI “care about most,” including that “the benefits of, access to, and governance of AGI to be widely and fairly shared.”
Source: OpenAI
Jaap Arriens/NurPhoto via Getty Images
In an interview with ABC News, Altman said he thinks “people should be happy that we’re a little bit scared” of generative AI systems as they develop.
Altman said he doesn’t think AI systems should only be developed in a lab.
“You’ve got to get these products out into the world and make contact with reality, make our mistakes while the stakes are low,” he said.
Getty
In a blog post, the company said it hopes the option to turn off chat history “provides an easier way to manage your data than our existing opt-out process.”
When a user turns off their chat history, new conversations will be kept for 30 days for OpenAI to review them for abuse, then are permanently deleted.
Correction: February 2, 2023 — An earlier version of this story defined AGI incorrectly and listed the incorrect age at which Altman was named president of Y Combinator. AGI in this context stands for artificial general intelligence. Altman became president of Y Combinator at 28, not 31.
This post was originally published on Business Insider
