It’s clear that Sam Altman, the 39-year-old co-founder of OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, is seeking to the future almost a 12 months ago, he was fired (and quickly rehired) from the company he co-founded after management accused him of lacking “consistent honesty.”
In Tuesday episode of the podcast on Life in Seven Songs from the San Francisco Standard, Altman said the shooting “was an insanely traumatic thing to go through and was quite public.”
This follows an optimistic blog post published by Altman on Monday: “Age of intelligence,“, describing how he hopes artificial intelligence will transform society over the next few decades and that “astounding triumphs – fixing the climate, creating a space colony, and discovering all of physics” will become “commonplace.”
Although he is now one of the public faces behind efforts to alter the future through artificial intelligence, his path to leadership has not at all times been smooth – or assured.
A few days after Altman was fired 10 months ago, 95% of OpenAI signed a letter threatening to quit if Altman was not reinstated. Meanwhile, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella he offered Altman a job leads the research group dealing with advanced artificial intelligence at Microsoft.
Altman returned to the game position of CEO of OpenAI lower than a week after the first burn.
“And I didn’t have time – because there was a lot to deal with – I didn’t have time to deal with it or recover,” Altman said on the podcast. “And for the first few months it was just crazy. It cost me a lot.”
Back in the office, Altman said he still finds little reminders of that drama-filled day, whether or not they’re old documents or lawyers’ notes, but he has learned some positive lessons from the experience that are less visible.
“I learned a lot about gratitude,” Altman said. “I’m just so grateful for the people around me and what I can do. I really appreciate the sense of duty and how you don’t turn away from things, no matter how difficult they are, if it’s what you signed up for and what you feel committed to and what you think is important. It was a real coming of age moment for me that I am proud and happy of.
Sam Altman. Photo source: Life in Seven Songs
Altman also shared on the podcast that he keeps a handaxe, a prehistoric stone tool, in his office as a reminder of how far humanity has come.
“I look at it a lot,” he said.
In the post “The Age of Intelligence,” Altman wrote that technology moved humanity from the Stone Age, through the agricultural age, to the industrial age. He said that inside “a few thousand days” we could have superintelligence, that is, artificial intelligence smarter than the sharpest human minds, and called this development “the most important fact in all of history to date.”
While OpenAI is currently valued at $86 billion, the company is talking to investors about possibly raising $6.5 billion at a valuation of $150 billion a 12 months. Bloomberg.