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In today's episode, we look at the life, philosophy and legacy of Sam Altman, the man behind OpenAI. I started covering OpenAI back in 2017. Even back then, right out of the gate, they were achieving breakthroughs. Only time will tell if Sam ends up being a hero or villan, but one thing is for sure: his company has certainly shaken things up.

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Hi, welcome to another episode of ColdFusion.

In recent times, we've only seen incremental advancements in the field of science and technology.

That was until Sam Altman's OpenAI ushered in a new era for artificial intelligence.

And OpenAI is the company of course behind the artificial intelligence tool chat GPT that has the potential to revolutionise how people work, shop and interact.

I've been covering OpenAI on ColdFusion since the middle of 2017.

At this time, their bot beat Dendi, a professional Dota 2 player, in a 1v1 match at a major eSports tournament.

Since then, the technology has only gotten better.

The next thing I covered from OpenAI was their dexterous robot.

Many years later, the firm brought out their smash hit AI generator, DALI, followed closely by its text generator, ChatGPT, and this has now become a global sensation.

We've talked about ChatGPT and all of these things at length,

But what is hardly ever talked about is Sam Altman himself, the main man leading the revolution in AI.

Those who are following along in the technology space either see him as a villain or the future saviour of the world.

In today's episode, we'll take a look at Altman's history, his inner psyche and his motivations for launching the company OpenAI.

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Sam Altman was born on April 22nd, 1985 in Chicago, Illinois.

As a child, he was incredibly curious and had a passion for science and technology.

At just the age of 8, he got his first computer, a Macintosh SE.

That computer became his gateway to the world.

It was transformational for him in his early development as a person.

Although precocious and nerdy, he was quite a bold kid.

At the age of 16, he would come out to his parents as homosexual.

At the time, he was attending John Burroughs School, a private prep school in St.

There were incidents at the school about his sexuality that caused him to think a bit differently and challenge the world with new ideas.

After graduating high school, he got into Stanford University to study computer science.

Soon though, with 2 of his classmates, he started developing a mobile app called Looped.

This was the early era of Facebook and Twitter.

Everyone was curious about what each other was up to and what was on their mind, but no 1 was able to share their location just yet.

Although somewhat frowned upon for security reasons today, back then in the early 2000s it was a cool and novel idea.

Looped was 1 of the first mobile apps that allowed users to share their location selectively with other people.

To give you some context, Google Maps was launched in 2005,

but its location sharing feature was added in 2017.

and Facebook implemented the feature in 2009 and 2010

of Stanford in 2005 to establish his company, but what he would need was a substantial amount of investment to further develop the product.

Luckily, he received funding from Y Combinator and Sequoia Capital.

At this point, remember the name Y Combinator.

It will be a major part of Sam Altman's life, which we'll cover in the next part of the episode.

In the summer of 2005, Altman worked tirelessly.

He was meeting with mobile carriers and convincing them to feature the app.

Back then there was no App Store, neither Google nor Apple was providing a service like that.

So knocking on the mobile carriers doors was the only option.

His hard work did soon pay off and the apps valuation rose to 175 million.

Despite the valuation consumers never bought the app.

Altman later would say to the New Yorker, quote, we had the optimistic view that location would be all important.

The pessimistic view was that people would lie on their couches and just consume content.

In 2012, he and other founders sold the company for $43 million.

After selling the company, he broke up with his long-term partner, Nick Sivo, who was also the co-founder of Looped.

So this was a major setback both in his personal and professional life.

Despite the blow, he made a name for himself.

A seed stage venture firm that has funded many successful startups like Reddit, Airbnb, Dropbox, Twitch and Sam Altman's now obscure Loopt.

Altman had failed to establish his first company, but he had caught the attention of Paul Graham, the co-founder of Y Combinator.

Loopt was 1 of the first 8 companies that Y Combinator funded.

Paul Graham was impressed by Sam's tenacity and entrepreneurial spirit.

He asked Sam to become a part-time partner at Y Combinator in 2011.

Altman joined and helped build key parts of the Y Combinator experience for founders.

Later in 2014, he'd become president when Paul Graham and his co-founder wife, Jessica Livingston, stepped down to look after their 2 young children.

Once at a party, when asked about his hobbies, he famously remarked, quote, well, I like racing cars.

I have 5, including 2 McLarens and an old Tesla.

I like flying rented planes all over California.

Oh, and an odd 1, I prep for survival." Seeing the bemused look on

the faces of his audience, he further explained, quote, My problem is that when my friends get drunk, they talk about the ways the world will end.

After a Dutch lab modified the H5N1 bird flu virus 5 years ago, making it super contagious, the chance of a lethal synthetic virus being released in the next 20 years, well, non-zero.

The other most popular scenario would be AI that attacks the US and nations fighting with nukes over scarce resources.

Just to clarify though, Altman said all of this in 2016.

We all know what happened 3 years later in late 2019.

the Wall Street Journal reports, according to American government officials, it was the lackluster precautions taken at a research lab in China that caused a deadly virus to break out and cause the whole world to experience an insufferable pandemic.

I'm not going to get into discussing that here, but the point is, Altman was surely onto something that most people were oblivious to.

But what about the scenario of AI attacking?

Well, he took steps to make sure that this wouldn't happen.

Besides his quirky nature, he really did want to change the world, but not

in a scummy Elizabeth Holmes kind of way.

After selling his first company, Looped, Sam launched a small venture fund called Hydrazine Capital.

It would fund technology companies in education, specialty foods, hospitality, consumer networks, enterprise software, and internet connected hardware.

Sam became known for his ability to spot hidden gems and fix their flaws.

Interestingly, Altman invested in and briefly served as the CEO of Reddit.

He helped the company raise $50 million in 2014 when it was in shambles.

Altman also has a passion for nuclear energy and he's invested and joined on the boards of multiple fission and fusion startups.

A challenging business tends to attract more interest.

So you want to create another social media startup.

If you pitched the idea, you'd probably get a bored look from your potential investors.

were to create an AI company with the computer science know-how to back it, suddenly everyone wants to do the same thing.

As Sam progressed in his professional endeavors, he became a powerful figure in Silicon Valley.

As his mentor Paul Graham notes, Sam is extremely good at becoming powerful.

Jeffrey Hinton releases a seminal paper that proved for the first time that neural networks could recognize objects as accurately as humans.

In this same year in 2012 Altman was out hiking with some of his friends in the north of San Francisco.

They were discussing human intelligence and AI.

As the discussion went on, Altman suddenly realized that humans are not as unique as he thought.

He felt that there was no reason to believe that in 13 years, the hardware could replace the human brain.

For example, genuine creativity, inspiration, the ability to feel and to truly empathize.

But someday in the future, computers will be able to mimic the outputs of humans.

And probably, this is where Sam Altman's fear that 1 day, AI might destroy humanity and strip us of our uniqueness began to manifest.

He would keep this revelation close to his chest until much later in 2016, when he opened up in an interview to The New Yorker.

He said, quote, There are certain advantages to

We only learn 2 bits a second, so a ton is lost.

To a machine, we must seem like slowed down whale songs.

He knew machines could someday become all too powerful, and he felt

Sam Altman was definitely not alone in his fears.

Another key figure in the tech world, Elon Musk, had the same premonition.

While some might think that such a fear would lead them

to avoid the creation of an AI company altogether, they opted for a different approach, doing the exact opposite.

In 2015, Altman and Musk would join forces with other influential figures including Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn, Jessica Livingston, co-founder of Y Combinator, and Peter Thiel.

This was in addition to some highly qualified AI researchers and entrepreneurs.

Another significant member who joined the team as chief scientist of the company in January 2016 was Ilya Sutskova.

He's a computer scientist, widely respected in the field of machine learning.

Before joining the Musk and Altman project, he was working at Google Brain as a research scientist.

The group pledged over $1 billion to fund its operations.

They also agreed to make their patents and research open to the public and to collaborate freely with other institutions and researchers.

Initially, they set up OpenAI to be a non-profit entity that would focus on creating Artificial General Intelligence or AGI, AI systems that are generally smarter than humans, but in a safe and beneficial way.

They were particularly concerned that Google's DeepMind Technologies division was seeking to reign supreme in the field of AI.

They thought that Google's DeepMind could monitor the world for competitors and crush them.

Musk would say in an interview, quote, "'If the AI that they develop goes awry, we risk having an immortal and super powerful dictator forever.

He went on, quote, murdering all competing AI researchers as its first move strikes me as a bit of a character flaw.

OpenAI, the nonprofit AI research firm, set off with great excitement and lofty expectations.

With a star-studded roster of big-name investors and a grand vision for the future, the world was eager to see what they would accomplish.

It was quite evident what they feared, but not so much as what they adopted as their vision.

OpenAI's approach was more like a curious explorer constantly seeking to understand and discover new things.

They wanted to create an AI capable of writing a poem or composing a symphony.

But developing an AI system like this is not easy.

It requires patience, dedication, and a willingness to embrace the unknown.

Sam Altman explained the system by comparing it to a child who was just learning about the world.

Just like a child, an AI system needs guidance and oversight.

That's why OpenAI planned to create a governance board that could allow people from all around the world to have a say in how this technology is being developed and deployed.

As time went on though, it became clear that there was some fighting in the ranks.

Elon Musk had grown frustrated with the company's progress and suggested that he take control of the operation himself.

The other founders of OpenAI, including Sam Altman and CTO Greg Brockman, declined Musk's proposal.

A power struggle soon ensued, and Musk, in turn, walked away from the project.

Publicly, though, OpenAI and Musk both cited the reason as a conflict of interest.

Tesla was developing its autonomous driving program, and they had already lured 1 of OpenAI's engineers for that.

Adding fuel to the fire was the fact that Musk had promised to donate roughly $1 billion to the organisation over a period of years.

He stopped making payments after his departure.

This left the non-profit in a precarious position.

There are astronomical fees associated with training AI systems on supercomputers.

1 year earlier in 2017, Google Brain announced a neural network architecture called the Transformer.

It became a popular choice for natural language processing tasks such as machine translation and text generation.

It was revolutionary in the sense that any AI system could now be trained and improved endlessly as long as you could feed it data, but it was costly.

To take advantage of the transformer model, OpenAI soon made a monumentous decision.

They announced that they would be a for-profit entity, capping profits for investors and funneling any excess back into the original non-profit.

Altman however refused to take any equity in the new entity.

The move to for-profit turned off some investors, but less than 6 months later, Microsoft joined hands with OpenAI and initially invested $1 billion.

They provided OpenAI with the cloud computing infrastructure to train their massive AI models, which eventually created ChatGPT and the image generator DALI.

After the huge success of ChatGPT, in January 2023, Microsoft announced an additional $10 billion investment in OpenAI and its technology.

In return, Microsoft had gained access to some of the most advanced and popular AI models in the world, and they could deploy it across their consumer and enterprise products at will.

In some ways, the deal with Microsoft was a deal with the devil.

It would cause OpenAI to diverge from their original ethos.

The research is no longer open and free, it's hidden away, away from the prying eyes of competitors.

Microsoft urged the company to stay ahead of the competition and put pressure to release AI products.

Microsoft and OpenAI's partnership, as well as ChatGPT's early success, drove Google into a panic.

Google has traditionally kept its AI developments under wraps, whereas OpenAI released them to the public for general use.

And this was the beginning of the famous AI war, which I've talked about a lot.

But because these AI tools are still in their infancy, the results have either been remarkable or absurd thus far.

Why would anyone release an unfinished product?

According to Sam Altman, the benefits of democratizing such powerful technology far outweigh the potential risks of 1 individual being in control.

Regardless, the Cat is out of the bag now, and countless companies are using AI tools for developing their own.

And in the world of business, when you see your competitor doing something that generates success, there's going to be a bunch of unlimited copycats.

Government and the general populace are behind.

The United States only had their first meeting with AI leaders in May of

And I think my question is, what kind of an innovation is it going to be?

Is it going to be like the printing press that diffused knowledge and power and learning widely across the landscape that empowered ordinary everyday individuals that led to greater flourishing that led above all to greater liberty or is it gonna be more like the atom bomb?

Huge technological breakthrough but the consequences severe terrible continue to haunt us to this day.

Before we released GPT-4, our latest model, we spent over 6 months conducting extensive evaluations, external red teaming, and dangerous capability testing.

We are proud of the progress that we made.

GPT-4 is more likely to respond helpfully and truthfully and refuse harmful requests than any other widely deployed model of similar capability.

However, we think that regulatory intervention by governments will be critical to mitigate the risks of increasingly powerful models.

And the thing is, this is the baby stages of AI.

It's only going to get better with time and fast.

Who knows what could happen in the distant future.

In Sam Altman's own words, quote, I think it'd be crazy not to be a little bit afraid.

He also states that superintelligence and rogue AI are not immediate threats.

The threats that we face are quite mundane.

His solution is to ensure that AI safety is highly aligned with human values.

And I'd like to think that the result of this could make a better world for us all, but we still have to be careful.

Tracy Glauser are training their own AI to head off suicide in children.

It can give a pediatrician an at-a-glance sense of which kids need immediate intervention.

An output will say this is a patient at high risk, this is a patient at low risk, or we just don't have enough data right now.

Roughly 30 to 40 percent of mental illness, adult mental illness, started as a child.

And so you want to be able to pick that up early.

Technology has always been a driving force in shaping our world.

From the invention of the wheel to the internet, Every new creation has faced its fair share of criticism.

We've all seen the negative sides of the internet, how it can spread misinformation and division.

But hey, we can't just focus on the negatives.

AI is already revolutionising game development, video production, copywriting, coding, and countless other fields.

It allows the heavy lifting of cognitive, repetitive work that nobody likes to do to be automated so people can focus on what they enjoy within their profession.

And that's a great thing that we have to recognize.

There are also those who use it as a tool to enhance their creativity.

But the key is to use this tool as wisely and responsibly as possible.

As Isaac Asimov, the famous science fiction writer once said, quote, The saddest aspects of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.

So let's do our part to not let that happen.

If things do go very wrong with AI in the future, Sam Altman may just become 1 of the most hated people in history.

At that point, it might seem like he started off with pure goals, but ended up becoming the very thing he was trying to prevent.

So that's the story of Sam Altman and what his philosophies are.

Hope you enjoyed it, thanks for watching and I'll see you again soon for another video.

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The Man Behind ChatGPT (Sam Altman)