ChatGPT and DALL-E: who is Sam Altman, the entrepreneur who wants to transform the world of artificial intelligence

The first thing we did to find out more about Sam Altman’s life was ask ChatGPT, the revolutionary artificial intelligence system he invented himself through the company he founded in 2015, OpenAI.

“Sam Altman is an American entrepreneur and technologist, known as the president of OpenAI and previously the CEO of Loopt,” the virtual robot being talked about has informed us a lot since its launch on November 30.

Also in his response, he referred to the fact that he is considered an influential leader in the technology community and lectures on topics related to artificial intelligence.

A reliable cover letter that is based on facts or generalizations, but which, as the system itself recognizes, “does not make subjective claims about someone’s personality or character”.

So we decided to turn to slightly more traditional sources to learn more about the man who is beginning to shape our present day with a series of technological innovations such as the aforementioned ChatGPT and the DALL-E image generator.

First the non-artificial

Samuel H. Altman learned to program and disassemble one of Apple’s first computers, the Macintosh, when he was 8 years old, according to an interview with The New Yorkers.

Altman said in that same interview that having a computer helped him with his sexuality, thanks to the conversations and groups he was able to participate in during his teenage years.

At the age of 16, he told his parents that he is gay and later said it openly at the school where he studied.

He attended Stanford University (in California, USA) to study computer science, but did not complete his studies.

Together with some friends, they decided to devote themselves completely to it develop your first idea, Runsan application to share the location with other people.

We are talking about the year 2005, long before WhatsApp existed and almost simultaneously with the appearance of Facebook.

Loopt didn’t make much sense, but it served as a springboard to launch Altman’s career as an entrepreneur and opened the doors to the world of major technology investments.

And it’s that one of the companies that supported Loopt in the beginning was Y Combinator (YC), one of the most prestigious and successful accelerators of Startup who invested in innovations such as Airbnb and DropBox.

Altman sold his first project for more than $40 million, allowing him to expand his areas of interest and invest in several ideas under the YC umbrella, of which he served as president between 2014 and 2019.

It was during this period that he co-created with Elon Musk Open AIa company that allowed him to immerse himself in a world that aroused both fascination and fear in him: that of artificial intelligence.

human side

OpenAI is a research company whose mission, as it says on its website, is to make sure “artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity” and don’t put an end to it.

An idea that was partly inspired by Altman’s fear that artificial intelligence could become a lethal weapon against humans.

In the extensive report that Tad Friend wrote for The New Yorkers in 2016, Altman speaks of the need for a merger as the best possible scenario for the future.

“Either we enslave artificial intelligence or it will enslave us.”said.

An idea shared by Musk, who, although he distanced himself from OpenAI in 2018 due to what he called conflicts of interest with his main company Tesla, continues to invest in it and fund other projects moving in the same direction to take control of artificial intelligence. .

One is NeuraLink to try to connect our brains to computers.

That is what the now owner of Twitter believes only in this way can humans keep up with artificial intelligence and not replaced by them when those systems provide feedback.

“Our way of speaking will sound very slow to computers,” he said, “a sort of whale call,” an obvious allusion to computers’ ability to process information in terabytes.

In the present

That fatalistic vision of the future that drove Musk and Altman to get involved in artificial intelligence has also shaped OpenAI’s strategy with regard to ChatGPT and DALL-E.

“One of the things that we really believe is that the most responsible way to introduce these systems into society is gradually,” Altman said a few weeks ago in a conversation with StrictlyVC, a company that shows what’s happening in Silicon Valley happens and the technological world.

“That’s how we get people, institutions and regulators familiarize yourself with it, think about the implications, feel the technology and get a sense of what it can and cannot do, rather than dropping a super-powerful system all at once.”

A strategy that, according to the Dot CSV channel on YouTube, which specializes in informing and explaining artificial intelligence, marks a turning point with what has been the trend of major technology companies for the past 20 years.

“There is a tendency among AI leaders to act on the Silicon Valley motto of moving fast and breaking things,” they note, analyzing Altman’s words.

“That philosophy of being flexible and releasing products without thinking about the implications.”

They emphasize that “in Sam’s case, it’s not about moving fast, it’s about bringing out products that aren’t perfect yet so that society gradually adapts to them”.

In a sense, that’s what’s happening with ChatGPT and DALL-E, which are already receiving a lot of criticism from many quarters, including academic and creative.

“ChatGPT is incredibly limited,” Altman acknowledged in a thread he posted to Twitter in December.

“But good enough in a few things to give a false impression of greatness.” It’s a mistake to trust him for anything important right now.”.

Altman ended by saying that this is just a taste of the progress to be made and that there is still a lot of work to be done on its soundness and veracity.

Something similar to what he wrote on that same social network regarding the questions the chat receives about the biases or prejudices he has in his answers.

“We know that ChatGPT has weaknesses in terms of bias, and we are working to improve it,” he acknowledged.

“We work for improve default settings and make them more neutraland also so that users can operate our systems within broad limits according to their individual preferences.

“This is harder than it looks and will take some time to get to,” he justified at the end of his thread.

In the future

Altman turns 38 in April and recently revived a post from three years ago in which he predicted the “major technological advancements to be achieved by 2025.”

understand that the nuclear fusion works on prototype scale in a sustainable way, that the artificial intelligence is widely available to many people in the industry and that the gene editing managed to cure at least one of the main diseases that afflict us.

In that tweet, he mentions nuclear fusion, his other major concern.

Altman has invested heavily for years to boost the research and development efforts of the company Helion Energy, which is trying to produce low-cost, clean electricity using a fuel derived solely from water.

There are still two years to go before we see if one or more of Altman’s predictions turn out to be true.

but from them the one that is already becoming more tangible is that of artificial intelligenceof which we are witnessing the first steps thanks to OpenAI.

The company that Altman conceived as part of a more global concept of what he believes will be the future and for which he has focused his investments on technological and scientific advancements for years.

A future according to his words in the article The New Yorker, one can imagine that it will have values ​​similar to the present around it.

“I unabashedly love this country, the best country in the world”, he said in reference to the United States, also assuring that democracy can only exist in an economy based on growth.

Position he takes as a commitment.

“Without the benefits of economic growth, the experiment with democracy will fail,” he said.

do you make it?

During his career, Altman has been able to raise the capital of strong investors to fund projects that he approved during his time at Y Combinator and invested in later.

Little is known about the exact amount of his estatebut recently there have been several announcements projecting the growth towards the select group of billionaires.

Born as a non-profit project, OpenAI became a limited-profit hybrid company.

A few weeks ago The Wall Street Journal mentioned in an article that OpenAI was on its way to becoming one of the Startup most powerful in the US valued at US$29,000 million, despite the few benefits it generates.

Soon after, the multi-year, multi-billion dollar deal the company reached with Microsoft was announced with the promise of having a strong impact in the not-too-distant future “in personal computing, the web, smart devices and in the cloud”.

and this week we got to know the plus version of ChatGPTa subscription service it’s testing in the US that will charge you $20 per month.

Any changes they make will not affect their commitment to creating reliable and secure artificial intelligence systems and products.

do you make it? That might be something we can ask ChatGPT in the future.