Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

On February 2, Beijing time, the chat robot ChatGPT became popular in the AI circle as soon as it was launched. The developer behind the artifact is AI research firm OpenAI, whose CEO, CEO, Sam Altman, is also famous and unique in Silicon Valley.

▲ Altman: get to know the founder of ChatGPT in graphic form:

Altman, 37, grew up in St. Louis, Missouri. He learned to program and disassemble Mac computers at the age of 8. He said in an interview that owning a Mac computer had an impact on his sexual orientation. Altman came out to his parents when he was 16. "in the 2000s, growing up as a gay man in the Midwest was not particularly wonderful. I found that the AOL chat room has completely changed me. When you are 11 or 12 years old, it doesn't feel good to keep a secret."

He attended John Burroughs High School, a private non-sectarian university preparatory school in St. Louis. Altman revealed his gay identity to the entire community after a Christian group boycotted a sex rally at his school. "what Sam did changed the school," Madelyn Gray, his college counselor, said in an interview. "it's like someone opened a big box full of all kinds of children and let them into the world."

After studying computer science at Stanford for two years, Altman dropped out with two classmates to develop their mobile app, Loopt, full-time, which can share users' locations with friends.

Loopt is one of the first eight companies invested by Y Combinator (hereinafter referred to as YC). Each founder of each startup received $6000 in investment, and Loopt and Reddit were in the same group. Loopt eventually reached a valuation of $175 million, but it didn't attract enough interest that its founder sold it for $43 million in 2012.

The price of $43 million is close to the money it raised from investors. The company was acquired by Green Dot, a banking company known for its prepaid cards. It is not clear what Altman's net worth is.

After Loopt, Altman created a start-up fund called Hydrazine Capital and raised $21 million. That includes a large portion of the $5 million he received from Loopt, as well as investments from billionaire entrepreneur and venture capitalist Peter Thiel. Altman invested 75 per cent of his money in YC-backed companies and led Reddit's round B financing.

In 2015, 29-year-old Altman was included in the Forbes list of 30 venture capitalists under the age of 30. At the age of 31, he was chosen by Paul Graham (Paul Graham), who founded YC in 2005, to succeed him as president in 2014.

During his tenure as president of YC, Altman also gave a lecture series entitled "how to start a Business" at Stanford University in the fall of 2014. After he becomes president of YC, he hopes to have more science and engineering startups on each investment list, and chooses a fission startup and a fusion startup for YC because he wants to start his own nuclear power company. He invested his money in the two companies and served on the boards of the two companies. "under Sam's leadership, YC's ambition has increased tenfold," said Mark Andreessen, co-founder of Anderson Horowitz, a venture capital firm.

Altman once told the two founders of YC that he loved racing. He has five racing cars, including two McLaren and an old Tesla. He also said he likes to rent planes to fly all over California. He told the founder of startup Shypmate, "I'm ready for survival," and warned that there could be "deadly synthetic viruses," artificial intelligence attacks on humans, or nuclear war. " "I try not to think too much about it," Altman told the two founders of Shypmate in 2016. "but I have guns, gold, potassium iodide, antibiotics, batteries, water, IDF gas masks and a large piece of land in Big sur that I can fly over."

"Sam is always out of his mind," said Altman's mother, a dermatologist. "he will call to say that he has a headache and will Google it, so there will also be some online self-treatment maniacs. I have to reassure him that he doesn't have meningitis or lymphoma, but he's just stressed."

Altman has a brother named Jack, who is also the co-founder and CEO of the employee management platform Lattice. The pair and their brother Max launched a fund called Apollo in 2020 to focus on funding the moon landing company.

Altman co-founded OpenAI in 2015 with Tesla and SpaceX's CEO, Elon Musk. Their goal of setting up the non-profit AI company is to ensure that AI does not destroy mankind. "We discussed, what is the best thing we can do to ensure a better future?" "We can stand idly by, or we can encourage regulatory oversight, or we can participate in the right structure with people who are very concerned about developing AI in a safe and beneficial way," Musk said in an interview in 2015. Some Silicon Valley bigwigs, including LinkedIn co-founders Reid Hoffman and Thiel, have joined Altman and Musk in promising to invest $1 billion in OpenAI.

Altman resigned as president of YC in March 2019 to focus on OpenAI but remained chairman of YC. Asked at the 2019 StrictlyVC event how OpenAI plans to make money, Altman said: "to be honest, we don't know." OpenAI "has never generated any revenue" and "does not have any revenue-generating plans at the moment", he said. "We don't know how to generate income in the future," he said at the time. "

Altman became CEO of OpenAI in May 2019, after the company was transformed from a non-profit company into a "limited profit" company. Altman flew to Seattle to meet with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella (Satya Nadella) and showed him OpenAI's AI model. Since then, OpenAI received a $1 billion investment from Microsoft in 2019. After Altman took over as CEO and received investment from Microsoft, OpenAI began to focus more on natural language processing, according to current and former insiders.

On October 21, 2021, Altman and his co-founders Alex Brania and Max Novendstern launched a global cryptocurrency project called Worldcoin. The project hopes to allow everyone in the world to access the cryptocurrency by scanning their iris.

During Altman's tenure as CEO, OpenAI released popular generative AI tools, including DALL-E and ChatGPT. Both DALL-E and ChatGPT are called "generative" AI, which means that robots can create their own works of art and text based on the information provided to it.

The public release of ChatGPT allows OpenAI to use user feedback to improve the robot. A few days after its launch, Altman tweeted that it was "very limited, but good enough in some ways to create a very misleading impression." Last December, he wrote on Twitter that ChatGPT was "great" for "interesting creative inspiration" but "not a good idea" for finding facts. ChatGPT recently began testing a paid version called ChatGPT Professional, which should have better access to robots. Last December, Altman wrote on Twitter that OpenAI "has to be realised to some extent, and the computational cost is incredible."

This month, Microsoft once again announced a "multibillion-dollar" investment in OpenAI. Although no details of the investment were disclosed, Microsoft's investment is believed to have reached $10 billion (currently about 67.4 billion yuan). Before Microsoft invested, other venture capitalists had hoped to buy shares from OpenAI employees through an offer, valuing the company at about $29 billion (currently about 195.46 billion yuan).

Mr Altman is still interested in fusion and invested $375 million in Helion Energy last year. "for me, Helion is more than just an investment," he says. "it's another thing I spend a lot of time doing besides OpenAI. I'm just super excited about the progress in this area." He also said he was "pleased to see a nuclear fusion race" to build a low-cost nuclear fusion energy system that would eventually provide energy for the planet.

OpenAI has just launched a pilot subscription program called ChatGPT Plus, which costs $20 a month. Subscribers can get some perks, such as using the site even when traffic is high, robots are more responsive, and new features and ChatGPT improvements are available first. The service is only available to US users, and OpenAI says it will start inviting people on the waiting list in the coming weeks.

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