OpenAI boss Altman: In a league with the tech greats

Zuckerberg, Musk, Dorsey: Within a short period of time, OpenAI boss Altman has reached new heights. His company is causing a sensation with the ChatGPT bot. Now he has reached what was probably a temporary high point in his career.

The sleeves of the olive-green sweater are rolled up, as if Sam Altman wants to say: Here we go. The 37-year-old managing director of the company OpenAI had come to Microsoft headquarters to announce what was probably the biggest news of his career to date.

Microsoft’s search engine Bing is to be supported by artificial intelligence in the future, which is also the basis of the chatbot ChatGPT, among other things. Altman’s company caused a sensation with this: The bot can answer queries and write texts relatively quickly.

ChatGPT quickly propelled Altman into a league with tech greats like Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey, and Elon Musk.

Altmann took refuge in virtual chat rooms

Altman is from St. Louis, Missouri. He started programming and disassembling computers at the age of eight. At 16, Altman came out as gay, which wasn’t easy in the Midwest, he told The New Yorker in a 2016 interview. He often took refuge in virtual chat rooms.

The fascination with tech remains: Altman studied computer science at the renowned Stanford University, but dropped out to work full-time on the Loopt app, which he sold again in 2012 – for 43 million US dollars.

Politically, Altman positions himself with the Democrats, he is a critic of Donald Trump and, according to his own statements, supported Hillary Clinton as a presidential candidate. In his free time, he flies planes and drives sports cars – and, as he revealed in an interview in 2016, likes to do survival training.

OpenAI is founded in 2015

In 2014, Altman became president of Y-Combinator, an almost legendary incubator in Silicon Valley that has already promoted companies such as AirBnB, Coinbase and Reddit. At Stanford University he teaches courses how to set up a start-up. With his own money he invests “in companies that interest me, I think about that when I go hiking,” he said recently at a panel discussion.

In 2015 he founded OpenAI together with numerous Silicon Valley greats, including Musk and Peter Thiel. A company that is initially intended to research and develop artificial intelligence as a non-profit – also to prevent a possible overpowering artificial intelligence. The credo: AI should be made accessible to as many people as possible in the world, as it is dangerous in the hands of a few.

Altman: Chatbots in any area you want

Altman firmly believes that AI can above all help humanity – and that it will bring about dramatic changes at the same time. Each technological revolution has eliminated a number of jobs and will create new ones on the other side.

“In 10 years, I think we’re going to have chatbots working for an expert in whatever field we want. For example, I say I want an animated short film to be made that looks like this,” Altman explained. The AI ​​will solve tasks that are often repeated and sometimes creative – that will change a lot.

“We are in a new world”

He reacts sympathetically to criticism and concerns, especially from teachers and professors, but says: “We are in a new world, automatically generated text is part of it and we have to adapt!” Instead of inventing tools to prove that AI was used for essays and homework, the system must be adapted, as before to the use of calculators, for example.

He doesn’t believe that artificial intelligence suddenly “wakes up and is suddenly evil”. Nevertheless, he also sees the dangers of the technology – but rather that it could be misused by mistake, for example, and that is “very bad”.