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.
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“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.
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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”).
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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.
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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.
“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.
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.”
The business secretary will next week hold talks with dozens of private sector bosses as the government contends with a significant corporate backlash to Labour’s first fiscal event in nearly 15 years.
Sky News has learnt that executives have been invited to join a conference call on Monday with Jonathan Reynolds, in what will represent his first meaningful engagement with employers since Wednesday’s budget statement.
Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, unsettled financial markets with plans for billions of pounds in extra borrowing, and unnerved business leaders by saying she would raise an additional £25bn annually by hiking their national insurance contributions.
An increase in employer NICs had been trailed by officials in advance of the budget, but the lowering of the threshold to just £5,000 has triggered forecasts of a wave of redundancies and even insolvencies across labour-intensive industries.
Sectors such as retail and hospitality, which employ substantial numbers of part-time workers, have been particularly vocal in their condemnation of the move.
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On Friday, the Financial Times published comments made by the chief executive of Barclays in which he defended Ms Reeves.
“I think they’ve done an admirable job of balancing spending, borrowing and taxation in order to drive the fundamental objective of growth,” CS Venkatakrishnan said.
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His was a rare voice among prominent business figures in backing the chancellor, however, with many questioning whether the government had a meaningful plan to grow the economy.
Mr Reynolds held a similar call with business leaders within days of general election victory, and over 100 bosses are understood to have been invited to Monday’s discussion.
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A spokesman for the Department for Business and Trade declined to comment ahead of Monday’s call.
The cost of government borrowing has jumped, while UK stocks and the pound are up, as markets digest the news of billions in borrowing and tax rises announced in the budget.
While there was no panic, there had been concern about the scale of borrowing and changes to Chancellor Rachel Reeves’s fiscal rules.
At the market open on Friday, the interest rate on government borrowing stood at 4.476% on its 10-year bonds – the benchmark for state borrowing costs.
It’s down from the high of yesterday afternoon – 4.525% – but a solid upward tick.
The pound also rose to buy $1.29 or €1.1873 after yesterday experiencing the biggest two-day fall in trade-weighted sterling in 18 months.
On the stock market front, the benchmark index, the Financial Times Stock Exchange (FTSE) 100 list of most valuable companies was up 0.36%.
The larger and more UK-focused FTSE 250 also went up by 0.1%.
While there was a definite reaction to the budget, uniquely impacting UK borrowing costs, the response is far smaller than after the UK mini-budget.
Many forces are affecting markets with the upcoming US election on a knife edge and interest rate decisions in both the UK and the US coming on Thursday.
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What you need to know is this. The budget has not gone down well in financial markets. Indeed, it’s gone down about as badly as any budget in recent years, save for Liz Truss’s mini-budget.
The pound is weaker. Government bond yields (essentially, the interest rate the exchequer pays on its debt) have gone up.
That’s precisely the opposite market reaction to the one chancellors like to see after they commend their fiscal statements to the house.
In hindsight, perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised.
After all, the new government just committed itself to considerably more borrowing than its predecessors – about £140bn more borrowing in the coming years. And that money has to be borrowed from someone – namely, financial markets.
But those financial markets are now reassessing how keen they are to lend to the UK.
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The upshot is that the pound has fallen quite sharply (the biggest two-day fall in trade-weighted sterling in 18 months) and gilt yields – the interest rate paid by the government – have risen quite sharply.
This was all beginning to crystallise shortly after the budget speech, with yields beginning to rise and the pound beginning to weaken, the moment investors and economists got their hands on the budget documentation.
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Chancellor challenged over gilt yield spike
But the falls in the pound and the rises in the bond yields accelerated today.
This is not, to be absolutely clear, the kind of response any chancellor wants to see after a budget – let alone their first budget in office.
Indeed, I can’t remember another budget which saw as hostile a market response as this one in many years – save for one.
That exception is, of course, the Liz Truss/Kwasi Kwarteng mini-budget of 2022. And here is where you’ll find the silver lining for Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves.
The rises in gilt yields and falls in sterling in recent hours and days are still far shy of what took place in the run up and aftermath of the mini-budget. This does not yet feel like a crisis moment for UK markets.
But nor is it anything like good news for the government. In fact, it’s pretty awful. Because higher borrowing rates for UK debt mean it (well, us) will end up paying considerably more to service our debt in the coming years.
And that debt is about to balloon dramatically because of the plans laid down by the chancellor this week.
And this is where things get particularly sticky for Ms Reeves.
In that budget documentation, the Office for Budget Responsibility said the chancellor could afford to see those gilt yields rise by about 1.3 percentage points, but then when they exceeded this level, the so-called “headroom” she had against her fiscal rules would evaporate.
In other words, she’d break those rules – which, recall, are considerably less strict than the ones she inherited from Jeremy Hunt.
Which raises the question: where are those gilt yields right now? How close are they to the danger zone where the chancellor ends up breaking her rules?
Short answer: worryingly close. Because, right now, the yield on five-year government debt (which is the maturity the OBR focuses on most) is more than halfway towards that danger zone – only 56 basis points away from hitting the point where debt interest costs eat up any leeway the chancellor has to avoid breaking her rules.
Now, we are not in crisis territory yet. Nor can every move in currencies and bonds be attributed to this budget.
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Markets are volatile right now. There’s lots going on: a US election next week and a Bank of England decision on interest rates next week.
The chancellor could get lucky. Gilt yields could settle in the coming days. But, right now, the UK, with its high level of public and private debt, with its new government which has just pledged to borrow many billions more in the coming years, is being closely scrutinised by the “bond vigilantes”.