Microsoft on Monday announced the hiring of Sam Altman, co-founder and former No. 1 startup OpenAI that launched ChatGPT, whose board abruptly fired him late last week.
Immediately fired, immediately recruited. Sam Altman, the public face of OpenAI, which launched generative artificial intelligence platform ChatGPT, joined IT giant Microsoft’s teams on Monday, November 20, a few days after his surprise dismissal.
The dismissal on Friday, for reasons still unclear, of the man who became a Silicon Valley superstar within a year came as a surprise because the 38-year-old entrepreneur was considered a pioneer and one of the industry’s leading figures. with the significant challenges posed by artificial intelligence (AI).
Three days later, Satya Nadella, the head of Microsoft, which has invested billions of dollars in the IT infrastructure used by OpenAI, announced that he was hiring him, along with other executives who resigned after his firing, “to lead a new AI research team.” “The mission continues,” responded the person in question on X (ex-Twitter).
OpenAI is now in danger of disappearing. According to several media outlets, on Monday night, nearly 700 of the startup’s approximately 770 employees signed a letter promising to leave if the board refuses to resign. The board criticized Sam Altman for prioritizing the rapid development of OpenAI, creator of the ChatGPT interface, without taking the time to analyze the risks involved, US media reported.
“Superpowers on Demand”
Sam Altman created OpenAI (originally a non-profit foundation) in 2015 with the idea of developing AI that would be “safe and beneficial to humanity,” according to Elon Musk, one of the co-founders fired in 2019, in an interview with the New York Times.
Artificial intelligence has been in the spotlight since millions of people adopted ChatGPT, an OpenAI interface capable of conversing with people in natural language and generating all kinds of text on simple request.
“As (artificial) intelligence is integrated everywhere, we will all have superpowers on demand,” Sam Altman promised at a conference on Thursday, a day before his resignation. In the face of major concerns that have emerged especially in relation to democracy and employment, the businessman assured AFP: “I have a lot of empathy for people’s feelings, regardless of their feelings.”
Push the limits
The entrepreneur was born in April 1985 and grew up in St Louis (Missouri). His life changes when he gets a Mac for his eighth birthday. The Internet helps him live out his homosexuality, when he still “has no one to talk to about it,” he told Esquire in 2014.
He studied computer science at Stanford, but quickly left the university to create the social network Loopt in 2005, valued at more than $43 million when he sold it in 2012. In 2014, he took over the helm of Y Combinator, which invests in startups, supports and advises entrepreneurs in exchange for shares. In particular, Airbnb, Stripe and Reddit helped the organization.
Under his leadership, the incubator is expanding far beyond software to include startups in many other industries, such as an industrial microbe, a biotech startup.
Its president, Derek Greenfield, remembers someone very “intense.” “He thinks and talks fast, asks difficult questions, but always in an encouraging way,” he describes. “He pushed the boundaries. I don’t know where we would be if (Y Combinator) hadn’t transformed.”
“He’s a (deep-thinking) thinker who tries to do things right at all costs,” comments Insider Intelligence’s Jeremy Goldman. Sam Altman, a fan of shorts and t-shirts, a sports car enthusiast and an airplane pilot in his spare time, often gives the impression of an introvert.
He calls himself an optimist, but according to the New Yorker, he’s also a survivalist: he stores guns, gold, water and antibiotics on his property in Big Sur on the California coast.
Convenient for universal reception
The prolific entrepreneur has personally invested in various companies, including $375 million in Helion, a nuclear fusion startup.
“My vision for the future and the reason I love (Helion and OpenAI) is that if we can really reduce the cost of intelligence and the cost of energy, the quality of life for everyone will increase dramatically,” he told CNBC. in May.
In July, it officially launched Worldcoin, a new cryptocurrency with an identity verification system based on the human iris. The stated objective: to reduce the risk of fraud and fraud in an industry where the use of pseudonyms is common.
Politically, he has called Donald Trump a “threat to national security” and organized a fundraiser for Democratic candidate Andrew Yang, who is pushing for a universal income, a minimum allowance for all to compensate for job losses due to automation.
“It’s not complicated: we need the technology to create more wealth and the politics to distribute it fairly,” wrote Sam Altman on his blog.
“The technological advances we will (achieve) in the next hundred years will be far greater than anything achieved since we first harnessed fire and invented the wheel,” he predicted in a 2021 blog post.
With AFP