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Sam Altman is the CEO of the company that developed the fastest growing product in history, ChatGPT. Despite being an incredible achievement, that's not the main goal of OpenAI, his company. Their aspiration is the so-called "artificial general intelligence", a system that by itself reproduces and improves the capabilities of a human brain. At 38, Altman no longer has the youth of the classic tech founder, but he is an ideal Silicon Valley product. His belief in the unlimited power of technology is persistent: "We have lost our collective sense of optimism about the future. We should all act as if getting it back is a duty. The only way I know to get back to that optimism is to use technology to create abundance," he said in May in Toronto. Without that abundance created by technology there will be no democracy, he says.
Altman is so confident in technology that he is a bad seller of his current flagship product. It seems little to him and highlights his deficiencies as well as his virtues. ChatGPT, a program developed with artificial intelligence (AI) that gives plausible answers to most questions, is for Altman an "impressive, but not robust" technology, as he stressed at a recent conference. "In the first test you have the reaction of 'this is impressive and it's ready', but if you use it a hundred times, you see its weaknesses," he explained. It is like a Don Quixote, but whose mills already have some solid wall, they are not just daydreams. The entrepreneur equates his plan to achieve general AI to the "Manhattan Project," which Robert Oppenheimer led to build the atomic bomb. As Altman likes to point out, he was born on the same day as Oppenheimer, April 22.
It has an exaggerated confidence in that general artificial intelligence, which is something we don't even know if it's possible. And he is confident that it will happen in both his hopes and his fears: "The positive case is so incredibly good that you look like a madman talking about it. The worst possible event is that we all palm it," he wrote on Twitter. Altman speaks of these apocalyptic prophecies with the calm of someone who has a beer with friends, in fact has been doing it for years. In 2015 he wrote: "Popular topic of debate among my friends: will the end of the world be due to synthetic biology, AI or energy shortages/war?"
popular debate topic among my friends: will the end of the world be synthetic biology, AI, or energy shortage/war?
— Sam Altman (@sama) March 17, 2015
Years before the pandemic, Altman had already embraced the prepper community, a group of people who are prepared to survive an apocalypse on Earth: "My problem is that when my friends get drunk they talk about how the world will end," he expressed in a profile published in the New Yorker magazine in 2016. "I try not to think about it too much, but I have guns, gold, potassium iodide, antibiotics, batteries, water, gas masks from the Israeli army and a ranch in Southern California that I can fly to," he adds. In the wake of the pandemic, he still believes we haven't seen anything: "This is unlikely to be the worst new pandemic we'll see in our lifetimes," he wrote.
A couple of McLarens in the garage
Flying to his ranch is not a metaphor: one of his two great recognized hobbies is renting planes to fly around California. The other is racing cars: he has a couple of McLarens and an old Tesla, five cars in total. It also makes annual lists that it revises with physical and business objectives. Follow a vegetarian diet and eat intermittent fasting.
Altman grew up in Saint Louis, Missouri, in deep America. At the age of eight he was already tinkering with computers, as is de rigueur in these profiles of success in Silicon Valley. In several interviews he has said that it was not easy to be a teenager and gay in that region in the early 2000s. His first Mac and online forums helped him share those secrets. In 2015, at a dinner with Elon Musk, Peter Thiel and other Silicon Valley godfathers, they decided to found OpenAI. Their goal was to compete with Google and DeepMind so that they wouldn't be the only ones dominating the AI explosion in the future. Altman's relationship with Musk has ended on a regular basis. Musk wanted to take full power in OpenAI, but they did not let him and, since then, he tries to torpedo his activity.
Thiel, a promoter of PayPal and Facebook, is one of his close friends. Before the pandemic, Altman said he would go into seclusion at Thiel's home in New Zealand. Thiel, a Trump supporter and founder of Palantir, a company with access to sensitive data and involved in military technology, gives him a reputation as a dark character. Before the 2016 election, Altman had to explain that he did not support Trump, but would continue to work with Thiel.
3) Thiel is a high profile supporter of Trump. I disagree with this. YC is not going to fire someone for supporting a major party nominee.
— Sam Altman (@sama) October 17, 2016
OpenAI is Altman's second startup. The first was with 19 years, Loopt, and to develop it he abandoned the career of computer science at Stanford. It received seed funding from YCombinator, a platform that quickly became famous for helping to give birth to other technology companies such as Reddit, Dropbox or Airbnb. He managed to sell Loopt (which allowed selective location sharing with other people) for $43 million, though he expected much more. At age 28, the founders of YCombinator offered him to lead their platform: "He has a natural ability to convince people," says Paul Graham, founder of that company and a leading figure in Silicon Valley. "If it's not innate, I had it fully developed before I turned 20. I met Sam when I was 19 and I remember thinking then, 'So this is what Bill Gates should have been,'" she explained.
Why do I want more money?
Money does not seem to be one of his priorities: "I have earned more than I will ever need," he said. A year ago he went shopping for his grandmother and later admitted to his mother that he had not set foot in a supermarket for four or five years. Power interests him more, according to Graham, and he has investments in a lot of startups with which he has made a lot of money. OpenAI, he says, only collects social security; He's not in this for profit. In 2016 he said he didn't want too much: he had enough with his house in San Francisco, his cars, his ranch in Southern California and a reserve of 10 million dollars, whose annual interest would cover his expenses. The rest, always according to Altman, would be to improve humanity.
Now that global success has arrived, legends from his past emerge. Altman is the typical young man who is told by his brothers that he should run for president and he does not see it as a joke. Altman speaks in a guttural voice and slowly, as if he likes to hear what his voice is going to say. The comparisons he receives are already naturally exorbitant: Kevin Scott, chief technology officer of Microsoft, whose company has invested $10 billion in OpenAI this year, told the New York Times that Altman will end up on the same plane as Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg.
Although Altman is not obviously famous as a singer or sportsman, his impact is greater. This week he spent 24 hours in Madrid, within a global tour that he has organized to listen and be heard. He has met so far with the presidents of Spain, France, the United Kingdom and Germany. After the talk at IE University in Madrid, he spent half an hour chatting with the students. They took pictures of him and people wanted to tell him their stories (something that Altman himself expressly requested). The conversation flowed as if at a cocktail party someone drew more attention, but in a polite way.
How to Succeed
With his role at YCombinator, Altman also became a startup guru. In 2014 he taught a course at Stanford entitled "How to Start a Startup". There he provided this mathematical formula: "The result [of a startup] is something like idea [multiplied] by product by execution by team by luck, where luck is a random number between zero and ten thousand. Literally. But if you do really well in the four areas you can control, you have a good chance of at least a certain amount of success." This experience in the world of business has led him to write posts with titles such as "How to succeed", where there are phrases that illustrate his way of seeing the world: "A great secret is that you can bend the world to your will a surprising percentage of the time" or "Self-confidence is immensely powerful. The most successful people I know believe in themselves almost to the point of deluding themselves."
Great meetings today in Warsaw, Paris, and London. and... since i was out of the US, i finally got signed up for worldcoin! pic.twitter.com/VUouPyYDpa
— Sam Altman (@sama) May 23, 2023
His first startup, Loopt, was an app to share your location with the friends and family you selected, one of those ideas that seem good until they collide with the reality of complex human lives. Altman is today co-founder of Worldcoin, a company that aims to gather the irises of all human eyes to certify their identity. One of its alleged purposes is that if general AI brings immense wealth to the world, that money can be distributed and humans are already identified. It always promises all possible privacy, but they are approaches that seem to have little thought of their possible misuses. Work, for example, is just one of the problems of the future that he intends to solve: his investment in Helion, a nuclear fusion startup, is one of his biggest interests today.
The confusion between humans and machines may seem like a fantasy today, but it's something Altman has joked about for years. The New Yorker reporter who wrote his profile in 2016 joked that he didn't go to the bathroom much: "I'll practice toileting more often so humans don't realize I'm an AI," he replied.
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