ChatGPT has ushered in a whole new era in the world of technology. Its growing popularity has got people talking about AI and its potential even though it has been around for a while, from students who use it to write articles to programmers who rely on it to automate some tasks.
The huge success of the ChatGPT bot - which has become the fastest growing application in history - has prompted big tech companies to quickly introduce updates and new products to keep pace with the new era of AI that we are witnessing.
in addition to; This robot sparked a fierce new competition between Google and Microsoft over the integration of generative artificial intelligence into search engines, as Microsoft seeks to get rid of Google's dominance in the market for search engines and web browsers.
With a lot of talk about ChatGPT; Let's get to know Sam Altman, the mastermind behind it, because he is the CEO of OpenAI and co-founded it in 2015.
Sam Altman, 37, has become the most exciting face in the world of artificial intelligence over the past few months, but this is nothing new to him, because he has been in the world of Silicon Valley since 2005, as Altman entered the world of technology in 2005, when he left his studies at Stanford University to found his company, similar to Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg.
Sam Altman's Beginning:
Born in April 1985, Sam Altman grew up in St. Louis, Missouri, and when he received a computer as a gift for his birthday, his passion for programming showed that he began learning at the age of 8.
Altman studied computer science at Stanford University for two years before leaving in 2005 with two colleagues to work on developing an app called Loopt that allowed users to share their location with their friends in real time.
Loopt raised more than $30 million in venture capital, but it didn't achieve the success Sam had planned, so he sold it in 2012 to Green Dot for $43 million.
Work at Y Combinator:
Y Combinator was one of the first investors in Sam's Loopt app and is also known for its investment in several prominent companies, such as Airbnb, Stripe, Reddit, Dropbox, Pinterest, Zenefits, FarmLogs, and Instacart, to name a few.
Y Combinator has funded more than 3,500 startups, graduated more than 9,000 founders, and the total value of companies that have graduated from its program is nearly $1 trillion.
Sam Altman joined Y Combinator as a partner in 2011, and after selling his app in 2012 he took up a full-time job for the company, quickly taking over as president in 2014 from co-founder Paul Graham.
Forbes magazine ranked him in 2015 as the most important investor under the age of thirty. Altman became President of the YC Group in 2016, a group consisting of: Y Combinator, YC Continuity, and YC Research.
OpenAI Founding:
Sam Altman met with a large group of technology investors in July 2015, including Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, LinkedIn co-founder Reed Hoffman, and others, who pledged a billion dollars to create a nonprofit focused on developing artificial intelligence in a way that is likely to benefit humanity as a whole, according to a statement published in OpenAI on December 11, 2015.
At the time, Elon Musk saw AI as the greatest threat to humanity, and he wasn't the only one to warn of AI's harmful potential. In 2014, Stephen Hawking warned that artificial intelligence could wipe out humanity.
OpenAI was founded in 2015, and one year later launched two products: Gym, a platform that allowed researchers to develop enhanced learning systems, and Universe, a software platform for training AI systems.
Musk resigned from OpenAI's board of directors in 2018 after three years of helping to establish the company, with the stated reason to avoid any future conflicts of interest due to his automaker's focus on developing artificial intelligence.
But Musk said in 2019 in a tweet: "He quit OpenAI because of its competition with Tesla for some employees, plus he didn't agree with some of what the OpenAI team wanted to do."
In 2020, Musk said in another tweet: "His trust in the company is not high when it comes to security."
Microsoft's investment in OpenAI:
Sam Altman stepped down as president of YC Group in March 2019 to focus on OpenAI, then Altman became CEO of OpenAI in May 2019 after it switched from being a non-profit to a Capped profit.
After changing the company's structure, Altman traveled to Seattle to meet with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, where he showed him OpenAI models, according to the Wall Street Journal. OpenAI then secured a billion-dollar investment from Microsoft in 2019.
After Altman took over as CEO of OpenAI, and after Microsoft's investment in it, the company began to focus more on the development of natural language processing.
Altman and Elijah Sutzkeefer, chief scientist at OpenAI, told Fortune magazine, "Moving to focus on large language models is the best way for the company to reach out to AGI, a system with extensive human-level cognitive capabilities."
In addition, on October 21, 2021, Altman & Partners launched a global cryptocurrency project called Worldcoin, which aims to give everyone in the world access to cryptocurrency. This company stopped operating in a few countries in 2022 due to logistical issues. But it announced via Twitter in January 2023 that it had reached one million users.
During Altman's tenure as CEO, OpenAI launched the popular generative AI tools, DALL-E and ChatGPT, which were hugely successful.
This success prompted Microsoft to increase its investment in OpenAI to $10 billion, and is currently working to integrate ChatGPT's capabilities into its products.
OpenAI is also working on a paid version of ChatGPT called ChatGPT Plus, which costs $20 per month, and offers benefits, such as: using the service at any time, specifically at peak times, providing faster responses than the free version, and priority access to new features and improvements.
The Future of Artificial Intelligence:
Sam Altman believes that the revolution sparked by artificial general intelligence (AGI) is unstoppable. As he wrote in an article on his blog titled "Moore's Law of Everything," he wrote, "The technological advances that general artificial intelligence will make in the next hundred years will be far greater than anything we've made since we first controlled the fire and invented the wheel."
