Who is Sam Altman? The former OpenAI boss and ChatGPT guru who became one of AI’s biggest players
He was a tech whizz before he left primary school, dropped out of one of America’s top universities, and appeared to be spearheading a revolution that could change our lives forever.
Sam Altman would have been unknown to most outside tech circles before the launch of his firm’s breakthrough chatbot ChatGPT, but he has recently much of his time rubbing shoulders with world leaders and some of America’s most recognisable executives.
But in a surprise announcement on Friday, OpenAI – the firm behind ChatGPT – revealed Altman had been ousted as its chief executive after the board said it no longer had confidence in him.
Here, Sky News looks at the 38-year-old’s rise to fame – before his sudden axing.
Earlier life
Altman grew up in the US state of Missouri where, as an eight-year-old, he was gifted his first computer and quickly learnt not just how to use it, but to program for it.
Altman attended John Burroughs School in St Louis, and told The New Yorker in a 2016 interview that having his computer helped him come to terms with his sexuality and come out to his parents when he was a teenager.
“Growing up gay in the Midwest in the 2000s was not the most awesome thing,” he recalled. “And finding AOL chatrooms was transformative. Secrets are bad when you are 11 or 12.”
With school in the rear-view mirror, it was time for university – Stanford, no less. Altman made his way to that famous California institution to study computer science, but dropped out after just two years, following in the footsteps of previous dropouts-turned-tech superstars Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, who both abandoned their Harvard degrees before becoming two of history’s most influential CEOs.
Abandoning a precious spot at one of America’s top universities seemed such a rite of passage for the country’s leading tech entrepreneurs that it played right into the success story of the now disgraced Elizabeth Holmes, whose departure from Stanford to gatecrash Silicon Valley led to a wave of media attention not dissimilar to that currently given to Altman.
His first post-university venture was a smartphone app called Loopt, which let users selectively share their real-time location with other people. Some $30m (£24m) was raised to launch the company, aided by funding from a start-up accelerator firm called Y Combinator, which lists the likes of Airbnb and Twitch among the internet companies it has helped establish.
Altman became president of Y Combinator itself in 2014, after the sale of Loopt for $44m (£35m) in 2012. He also founded his own venture capital fund called Hydrazine Capital, attracting enough investment to be named on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list for venture capital. As if he wasn’t busy enough, Altman also ran Reddit for a grand total of eight days amid a leadership shake-up in 2014, describing his tenure as “sort of fun”.
The rise of OpenAI
While his time at the top of Reddit only lasted eight days, his oversight of OpenAI has lasted eight years. He was “doing pretty well” with it, he said in a February tweet (certainly compared to Loopt, which, he now says, “sucked”).
He launched the company with a certain Elon Musk (who only ran SpaceX and Tesla at the time) in 2015, the two men providing funding alongside the likes of Amazon and Microsoft, totalling $1bn (£800m).
It was run as a non-profit with the noble goal of developing AI while making sure it doesn’t wipe out humanity.
So far, mission accomplished – but if Altman’s to be believed, the risk since has become very real indeed.
Under his tenure, OpenAI ceased to be a non-profit and grew to an estimated value of up to $29bn (£23bn), all thanks to the remarkable success of its generative AI tools – ChatGPT for text and DALL-E for images.
Microsoft boss Satya Nadella described Altman as an “unbelievable entrepreneur” who bets big and bets right, which OpenAI’s success makes hard to argue with.
ChatGPT amassed tens of millions of users within weeks of launching in late 2022, wowing experts and casual observers alike with its ability to pass the world’s toughest exams, get through job applications, compose anything from political speeches to children’s homework, and write its own computer code.
Suddenly the concept of a large language model (meaning it is trained on huge amounts of text data so that it can understand our requests and respond accordingly) became something of a mainstream buzz term, its popularity seeing Microsoft invest extra cash into OpenAI and bring the tech to its Bing search engine and Office apps.
Google also got in on the act with its Bard chatbot, some of China’s biggest tech companies entered the race, while Musk – who left OpenAI in 2018 due to a conflict of interest with Tesla’s work on self-driving AI – has said he wants to launch his own one too.
All the while, OpenAI’s technology is also improving – an upgrade dubbed GPT-4 within months of ChatGPT’s release showing just how quickly these models can develop.
Read more:
We asked a chatbot to help write an article
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Will this chatbot replace humans?
‘My worst fears’
For all the wonder such systems have provided, it’s matched – if not surpassed – by the concerns. Whether it be spreading disinformation or making jobs redundant, governments are scrambling to formulate an effective way of regulating a technology that seems destined to change the world forever.
Perhaps with an eye on how some of his Silicon Valley contemporaries have failed to act on the dangers of their creations before it’s too late, Altman appears keen to be a willing participant in just how it should be done.
“My worst fears are that we, the industry, cause significant harm to the world,” Altman told the US Senate, his assessment that government regulation would be “critical to mitigate the risks” undoubtedly music to the ears of politicians who never seem overly impressed by figures from the tech world.
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AI speech used to open Congress hearing
In the space of a few short weeks, Altman met the US vice president, Kamala Harris, France’s Emmanuel Macron, European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen and the British prime minister, Rishi Sunak – all politicians who share the same hopes and fears about the potential benefits and dangers of AI.
With the EU seemingly none too impressed by Elon Musk’s running of Twitter, TikTok managing to achieve the mostly impossible task of uniting Democrats and Republicans against a common enemy, and Mark Zuckerberg having struggled to repair his reputation after the Cambridge Analytica scandal, the upstart Altman could be positioning himself to become a more durable tech star than some of his forebears.
Sam Altman meets with PM Rishi Sunak in May 2023
But just in case it does all go wrong, he’s previously admitted to being a prepper – someone who stockpiles everything from guns to medicine should the worst should befall us.
Announcing Altman’s departure as OpenAI chief executive on, the company said a review found he had not been “consistently candid in his communications with the board”.
He posted on social media following the announcement, writing: “I loved my time at OpenAI.
“It was transformative for me personally, and hopefully the world a little bit.
“Most of all, I loved working with such talented people. (I) will have more to say about what’s next later.”
An Abu Dhabi state-backed vehicle has moved closer to taking full control of The Daily Telegraph just hours after the launch of a regulatory probe that prevents it from removing key journalists from their posts.
Sky News has learnt that RedBird IMI has given the newspaper’s board and the government notice of its intention to activate a call option that will convert loans secured against the Telegraph titles and Spectator magazine into shares.
The move was communicated to key stakeholders late on Friday, and came as nearly £1.2bn was being transferred to an escrow account prior to its release to Lloyds Banking Group early next week.
A Whitehall source confirmed this weekend that the government had been notified about RedBird IMI’s move to exercise its option to take control of the shares.
A person close to the Abu Dhabi-based investor, which declined to comment formally, said it had already made it clear that it would seek to convert the loans “at an early opportunity”.
The activation of the call option does not mean the broadsheets fall under the immediate control of RedBird IMI, insiders pointed out on Saturday.
Lucy Frazer, the culture secretary, issued a Public Interest Intervention Notice (PIIN) on Thursday which has triggered an inquiry by Ofcom and the Competition and Markets Authority.
Pressure has been mounting in recent weeks from Conservative politicians for the takeover of the traditionally Tory-supporting Telegraph newspapers by a foreign state-backed entity to be probed under public interest and national security laws.
Sir Iain Duncan Smith and Lord Hague of Richmond, two former leaders of the party, have been among those who have called for scrutiny of the deal.
RedBird IMI has insisted that it would preserve the newspapers’ editorial independence and offered to give the government a legally binding assurance of this intention.
RedBird IMI has also pledged not to complete the acquisition of the media assets until it has received government approval.
Culture Secretary Lucy Frazer
On Friday, Ms Frazer confirmed a Sky News report that she would preserve the independence of the Telegraph during the investigations by making an Interim Enforcement Order preventing the Barclay family or RedBird IMI from interfering in their operation.
The IEO prohibits the removal or transfer of key Daily Telegraph journalists or any further change of ownership.
Both the family and RedBird IMI have agreed to the restrictions.
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The notice of the intention to exercise the call option takes two of Britain’s most influential newspapers a stage closer to a change of ownership for the first time in nearly 20 years.
The Barclay family, which has owned the Telegraph since 2004, has been in dispute with Lloyds for years about the repayment of a £700m loan and hundreds of millions of pounds in interest.
Sky News revealed on Friday that Lloyds is preparing to distribute a £500m-plus windfall to its shareholders next year as a result of its ability to recover a loan in full that it had long since regarded as impaired.
Ms Frazer is seeking regulators’ responses before the end of January, after which the takeover of the broadsheet newspapers could be approved or blocked.
RedBird IMI is funded in large part by Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the owner of Manchester City, has agreed that a trio of independent directors, led by the Openreach chairman Mike McTighe, will remain in place while the inquiries is carried out.
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RedBird IMI’s move to fund the loan redemption has circumvented an auction of the Telegraph titles which has drawn interest from a range of bidders.
The hedge fund billionaire and GB News shareholder Sir Paul Marshall had been agitating for the launch of a PIIN.
The Telegraph auction, which has also drawn interest from the Daily Mail proprietor Lord Rothermere and National World, a London-listed local newspaper publisher, is now effectively over.
Until June, the newspapers were chaired by Aidan Barclay – the nephew of Sir Frederick Barclay, the octogenarian who along with his late twin Sir David engineered the takeover of the Telegraph in 2004.
Lloyds had been locked in talks with the Barclays for years about refinancing loans made to them by HBOS prior to that bank’s rescue during the 2008 banking crisis.
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