OpenAI
"Fabulous people meet fabulous people".
Jari Jokela. Link below to newsletter:
Sam Altman:Altman, who co-founded OpenAI in 2015 as a nonprofit research lab, was fired as CEO on Friday. The A.I. start-up announced Tuesday that he will return to his post.
But by late Tuesday, Altman agreed to certain demands, including not being on the board and retaining Quora CEO and current director Adam D’Angelo, announcing a return as CEO around 10 p.m. Pacific time.
“And now, we all get some sleep,” Helen Toner, one of the board members involved in negotiations, wrote on X, formerly Twitter.
The same qualities have made Altman an unparalleled fundraiser, a consummate negotiator, a powerful leader and an unwanted enemy, winning him champions in former Google chairman Eric Schmidt and Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky. Altman’s ability to inspire fealty from employees and faith in his mission was broadcast across X this past weekend in a flood of heart emojis from OpenAI staffers and in threats from nearly all of the company’s 770-person workforce to quit unless he was reinstated.
“Ninety-plus percent of the employees of OpenAI are saying they would be willing to move to Microsoft because they feel Sam’s been mistreated by a rogue board of directors,” said Ron Conway, a prominent venture capitalist who became friendly with Altman shortly after Altman founded Loopt, a location-based social networking start-up, in 2005. “I’ve never seen this kind of loyalty anywhere.
”But Altman’s personal traits — in particular, the perception that he was too opportunistic even for the go-getter culture of Silicon Valley — have at times led him to alienate some of his closest allies, say six people familiar with his time in the tech world.
Altman’s ambitions were on clear display as he announced an app-store-like marketplace where people could make their own versions of ChatGPT, and get a share of revenue from the company.
Though Altman was one of OpenAI’s founders, he has said he does not own any shares of the company. While CEO of OpenAI, Altman continued to make investments in other companies such as nuclear fusion company Helion and AI hardware start-up Humane. He has made dozens of personal investments in start-ups over the years, including 12 in 2023 alone, according to venture capital data firm PitchBook.
Microsoft, which is OpenAI’s biggest investor, said its partnership with the company wouldn’t be affected by Altman’s departure. But a person familiar with the matter, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal information, said Microsoft heard about the news just minutes before the blog post went out. Microsoft’s stock fell 1.7 percent, erasing billions from its market capitalization.
“We have a long-term partnership with OpenAI, and Microsoft remains committed to Mira and their team as we bring this next era of AI to our customers,” Microsoft spokesman Heather Weitnauer said.
The wording of the blog post and the confidence that Microsoft has shown in the company in recent weeks suggests that Altman’s departure is related to him, rather than problems with the broader business, said Rowan Curran, an AI industry analyst with research firm Forrester.
“I see this as a CEO change at a large technology company, but I don’t see this at this point as a fundamental change in OpenAI’s approach, their direction, their technology,” Curran said.
Launched as a nonprofit in 2015, OpenAI was created to keep advanced artificial intelligence out of the hands of monopolistic corporations and foreign governments. But since accepting a major investment from Microsoft in 2019, the company has transitioned into a “capped profit” structure that limits how much return backers can make on their investment. OpenAI often says it is still pursuing its original goal of building AI that “benefits all of humanity.” But its path forward lately looks more like business as usual.
As OpenAI took on more of a public presence in May, around the time of Altman’s appearance before Congress, the company began a hiring spree, poaching executives from Meta, Apple and Amazon Web Services. Around the same time, Altman began a tour around the globe visiting heads of state and developers in dozens of cities, including Tel Aviv and Doha, Qatar, an even more ambitious stage than Zuckerberg’s 2017 tour of America.
After the announcement, some tech leaders publicly posted about their admiration of Altman, speculating on what his next moves would be.
“Sam Altman is a hero of mine. He built a company from nothing to $90 billion in value, and changed our collective world forever,” former Google CEO Eric Schmidt wrote on X.
Brockman, in his Friday evening post expressing his shock at the OpenAI board’s moves, thanked people for their support.
“Please don’t spend any time being concerned. We will be fine. Greater things coming soon,” he said.
Who is Sam Altman?
Altman entered the tech world as a fresh college dropout in 2005. In the same vein as Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Mark Zuckerberg, the then twenty-year-old man quit his Stanford University degree in computer science to start a company that allowed users to share their geolocation called Loopt.
With no academic commitments and the future of Loopt in his hands, Altman joined the Y Combinator (YC) - a major accelerator of technology start-ups that also helped launch the likes of Airbnb, Reddit, Dropbox and Coinbase - which helped launch him to stardom.
领英推荐
Looptd managed to raise over $30 million (€28 million) in venture capital before being widely adopted by the likes of Apple and Blackberry. After seven years, Loopt failed to thrive, and American financial technology and bank holding company, Green Dot Corporation, bought the venture out 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 of former Salesforce co-CEO Bret Taylor, former US Treasury Secretary Larry Summers and Quora CEO Adam D’Angelo.
From flop to the top
Despite its flop, Loopt allowed Altman to make a name for himself in Silicon Valley. And two years later, he was picked as the successor of Y Combinator president, American computer scientist Paul Graham.
Three years later, Altman came together with Tesla boss Elon Musk, LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman and other sponsors in 2015 to co-found OpenAI, an artificial intelligence (AI) research and deployment company that aimed to promote and develop "friendly AI in a way that benefits all humanity".
In 2016, Altman first announced that OpenAI was building a General Artificial Intelligence (GAI) - an AI that matches human intellect - known as GPT-1.
On January 5, 2021, OpenAI released DALL-E, an AI capable of generating an image based on a user's description.
In November 2022, OpenAI launched - to the surprise of its own employees - ChatGPT, one of the most advanced AI models to date: a chatbot capable of generating text on demand using advanced AI, scenarios, lyrics, stories, and presentations.
The launch of ChatGPT - which has both fascinated and terrified millions - has quickly brought Altman to the fore of the public eye. It has also prompted calls for him to meet with politicians and lawmakers to work on AI safety and alignment work.
The future of AI
Altman has said the latest and most advanced versions of ChatGPT will be rolled out very gradually to get people, institutions, and policymakers familiar with it, "thinking about the implications, feeling the technology, getting a sense for what it can do and can't do," he said.
He thinks that the revolution sparked by "artificial general intelligence" (AGI) is "unstoppable".
In an essay titled 'Moore’s Law for Everything,' Altman wrote that the technological progress 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, hired by Microsoft
In November 2023, the AI world was shocked as Altman was forced out by the board at OpenAI, which claimed he was "not consistently candid in his communications" with the board of directors, which lost confidence in his ability to lead OpenAI.
In the days that followed, more than 700 out of 770 OpenAI employees had signed a letter threatening to quit the company should he not be reinstated, according to the Financial Times citing people familiar with the matter.
Altman was swiftly hired by Microsoft, which had already invested billions in OpenAI, to lead a?"new advanced AI research team".
The AI oracle is also known for his altruistic endeavours. The 38-year-old has shown his support for a universal basic income, a policy that would provide a guaranteed minimum income to all citizens, and has criticised income inequality in the tech industry.
Valuation $90.0b
Investors $12.3b
And saga continues...