📝 Sam Altman — the Oppenheimer of Our Age
This week, New York Magazine released the story of OpenAI's CEO Sam Altman titled "The Oppenheimer of our Age." Sam Altman is the frontman of the AI revolution and one of the outstanding tech entrepreneurs. Altman thinks he knows our future. What do we know about him? Here is a summary of the article.
✅ "Sam is very much a servant leader," characterizes Altman, Jack Kornfield, a Buddhist monk from Silicon Valley. He asks: how much can we trust Altman? After all, this 38-year-old, relatively young man appears to be controlling how artificial intelligence will enter our world.
Altman believes we are facing "bigger than a standard technological revolution." AI will change politics (deep fakes are already a major concern in the presidential election), labor (AI has been at the heart of the Hollywood writers' strike), civil rights, surveillance, economic inequality, the military, and education.
Altman sees himself as a plenty-smart-but-not-genius "technology brother" with an Icarus streak and a few outlier traits:
— an absolutely delusional level of self-confidence;
— a prophetic vision of "the technology and societal change";
— he is both optimistic and expecting the worst;
— he's superb at assessing risk because his brain doesn't get caught up in what other people think.
🎓 As a child, Sam was a boy genius — "a rising star in the techno whiz-kid world." He started fixing the family VCR at age 3. In 1993, for his 8th birthday, Altman's parents bought him a Mac LC II: that gift "divided life into before and after."
In 2003, Altman enrolled at Stanford. In his second year, Altman and his boyfriend (Sam is openly gay) launched Loopt — the early geo-tracking program. They raised investment from the business incubator Y Combinator (YC). But Loopt never became popular. In 2012, Altman sold the company for $43.4 million. He also took a year off, read a stack of books, traveled, played video games, and went to an ashram.
In 2014, Altman became the president of YC. The founder of the incubator, Paul Graham, called him among "the five most interesting start-up founders of the last 30 years." While Altman was president of YC, the incubator fielded about 40,000 applications from start-ups each year. A couple hundred got YC funding. Altman believes the greater downside for founders is cornering themselves with a small idea, not thinking big enough.
🤖 In 2015, Sam Altman, Elon Musk, and 4 other partners founded OpenAI to create "a computer that can think like a human in every way and use that for the maximal benefit of humanity." The idea was to build good AI and dominate the field before bad people built the bad kind.
Altman's character is closer to Musk than to Zuckerberg. One of his friends describes him as "the most ambitious person I know who is still sane."
In addition to OpenAI, Altman invests in side projects, preparing for an AI-transformed world: cheap energy sources, increasing life expectancy, and retinal scanning.
In 2017, Altman planned to run for governor of California but changed his mind.
In 2021, Altman published an essay called "Moore's Law for Everything". In the article, he writes: "My work at OpenAI reminds me every day about the magnitude of the socioeconomic change that is coming sooner than most people believe."
🌐 In May 2023, Altman went on a tour of 22 countries. Often in a suit but sometimes in his gray henley, Altman met with world leaders and presented himself to diplomats as the inevitable new tech superpower.
Critics note that since Altman became CEO of OpenAI, the company has stopped being open, publishing its data and source code, and working "for the maximum benefit of humanity."
In Munich, during the world tour, Sam asked the audience if they wanted OpenAI to release GPT-5 with open-source code. The crowd responded with a resounding yes.
Altman said, “Whoa, we’re definitely not going to do that, but that’s interesting to know.”
The article: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/sam-altman-artificial-intelligence-openai-profile.html
