Sam Altman's rise in Silicon Valley is a story of ambition, innovation, and leadership. Altman learned programming at the age of 8. As a child, when he played board games with his brother, he told him: "I have to win, I dominate everything." ”
From his teenage years to his thirties, Altman, a college dropout, trading wizard, and the investment genius behind ChatGPT, seems to have been jumping on the path to success. He has won the attention and investment of Silicon Valley's elite, who are looking forward to the future of the ambitious and well-informed second-year Stanford University student. At the age of 20, he dropped out of school to start a business and became CEO, at the age of 26, he became the head of YC, and at the age of 30, he became the CEO of OpenAI, whose extraordinary energy and willpower have always inspired others to be creative, even if he may not have personally lacked the focus or complex technical skills to create products like Steve Jobs.
But his success and current position in Silicon Valley is the result of his early keen entrepreneurial spirit and bold vision for the future. And in recent weeks, in the wake of OpenAI's internal power wrestling farce, friends say that Altman's extraordinary ability to withstand intense pressure seems to have been shaken. But fortunately, Altman finally returned to the king.
As 2023 draws to a close, let's take a look back at the end of the year at the end of the year how 38-year-old Sam Altman dominated Silicon Valley step by step.
Altman grew up in the suburbs of St. Louis and learned to program and disassemble Macintosh computers at the age of eight.
As a child, when he played board games with his brother, he told him: "I have to win, I dominate everything." ”
Altman's father was a real estate developer and his mother was a ** doctor. When Altman was sixteen, his mother was surprised when he told his parents to come out: "Sam has always struck me as monosexual and technologically straight. ”
After a religious group boycotted a rally about sex at Altman's school, Altman opened up about his homosexuality to the entire community.
"What Altman did changed the school, and it felt like someone had opened a big box full of all kinds of kids and let them out into the outside world," his college counselor said. ”
During his sophomore year, Altman and his then-boyfriend Nick Sivo dropped out of Stanford University to start a business on the app Loopt, which allowed smartphone users to discover and meet people nearby, which later spawned a boom in the mobile phone location data usage market.
LoOPT is one of the first eight companies to be funded by tech startup incubator Y Combinator, with $6,000 each available. At that time, along with Loopt, there was also the well-known social **Reddit.
Caption: Altman, then CEO of Loopt, in 2009
loopt ended up at 1$7.5 billion valuation, but it didn't generate enough investor interest, so Altman sold LoOPT in 2012 for $43 million.
Nick Sivo, one of the co-founders of Loopt, and Altman dated for nine years, but the two broke up after the company.
YC founder Paul Graham decided less than three minutes after meeting Altman"This is what Bill Gates looked like when he was 19 years old, and Altman's "tenacity, adaptability, and determination, among others, are all valuable qualities needed to succeed."
Caption: Paul Graham.
Graham said the 19-year-old Altman "looks as if a 40-year-old adult lives inside of him." Other peers may be only 12 years old at heart. When challenged by an older person, Altman never defends himself with "I'm still a kid," he saidInstead, he will look the other person in the eye and respond with "That's a stupid idea" and say, "Really?".Why do you think so?”
Graham wrote in 2008: "You can land him on an island full of cannibals, and in five years he will be king."
Altman went on to become a part-time partner at YC and was astounding in 2014 when he was promoted to president.
Caption: Sam Altman, then president of Y Combinator, in 2016
In addition to Paul Graham, Altman's other most important person is the famous VC investor Peter Thiel, the most high-profile gay man in Silicon Valley, and also an advisor and good friend of Altman.
Caption: Peter Thiel.
Altman's relationship with Peter Thiel has grown, and Peter Thiel's investment style seems to have shaped Altman. Altman, for example, has been criticized for running OpenAI like a monopolist, disrupting open-source technology, and pushing small companies to launch products through its platform – a strategy outlined by Peter Thiel in his book Zero to One.
During his time at YC, Altman became one of Silicon Valley's most recognizable figures overnight. "When Altman took over YC, he felt like he could meet with anyone. ”
Altman immediately began to do things his way. Less than a month after Graham appointed him as the first man, Altman began looking for ambitious founders who would create startups around breakthrough technologies, citing Elon Musk's SpaceX and Tesla as examples and listing areas of interest such as energy, AI, transportation and housing, internet infrastructure, and education. Altman enthuses on his personal blog: "Now small startups are able to accomplish what was previously only possible with national resources. ”
The company that YC has hired has changed dramatically since Altman became president, and he has used YC as a platform to achieve his goals, while also setting the stage for his later departure. ”
The ambition of Altman can be illustrated by an example when an AI company might say, let's try to raise $10 billion. But Altman would say, in a very easy-going way, let's raise 100 billion, and there are almost no boundaries to his way of thinking and ambition.
Interestingly, at the current time, OpenAI's valuation has reached $100 billion.
Altman picks out the most potential winners when he invests and gives them a great deal of freedom so that he can focus on other things of interest, and some people see him as aloof and absent-minded.
This style led to Altman being asked to resign as president of YC. Colleagues believe that Altman is doing his own thing at OpenAI at the same time and investing in YC with his own personal ** Hydrazine. Some have complained that he has made huge personal profits without making construction for these companies.
In 2019, this sentiment led to a flight from the UK to San Francisco for the semi-retired Graham, who held a brief meeting with the company's leadership before Altman was asked to leave the room, which Graham said would no longer be the president of YC.
Five years after Altman took over YC, Graham said he had no idea that Altman spent so little time incubating startups at YC and put so much effort into his own projects.
In 2015, Altman and Musk created OpenAI, a nonprofit organization that aims to warn and protect the world from technologies that Musk believes could inadvertently wipe out humanity.
Altman and Musk created OpenAI in part because they feared that Google's acquisition of DeepMind would create a monopoly in the AI space. OpenAI recruited some of Deepmind's talent to set up the company as a non-profit organization, saying it would be for the benefit of humanity rather than financial rewards.
Musk and Altman spoke at a summit in 2015.
Later, after the dramatic power-grabbing upheaval triggered by Musk, Altman finally took control of OpenAI. Musk was frustrated by OpenAI's lack of progress at the time and offered to lay off half of its workforce, but Altman refused. In contrast, Altman believes OpenAI desperately needs more funding to boost its computing power and compete with tech giants for talent. Altman's solution was to transform the company into a for-profit business, but still run by a nonprofit board. This shift helped Altman secure a $1 billion investment from Microsoft.
Caption: Altman and Microsoft CEO Nadella.
With the popularity of ChatGPT this year, Altman has spent most of 2023 lobbying Congress and tech** in an effort to demonstrate OpenAI's caution in guarding against AI risks.
Altman told them that he owns little to no shares in OpenAI and wants to democratize the AI regulatory process and how OpenAI has a unique organizational structure to ensure that AI systems are controlled by directors of nonprofits. But now, he's in the Middle East with a number of regime-linked investors to push ahead with an ambitious deal that fits in with the contradictory nature of Altman's career.
Caption: Altman attended the meeting and was interviewed by reporters.
According to some of Altman's friends and critics, when he released ChatGPT, it sparked an arms race in companies that OpenAI was founded to prevent.
However, the OpenAI battle that led to Altman's dismissal and re-hiring last month was not about the potential dangers of AI, but about who would take control of the future direction of the world's leading AI company — a battle that has been causing within startups for years.
According to a person familiar with board trading, Altman played a central role in selecting board members. "They're either his friends or they're people who can never stand up to Altman.
OpenAI's shift to for-profit masked internal tensions. Executives complained to each other and openly about Altman's management style, calling it manipulative. "He'll figure out what you want to hear, and that will solve the problem, but it's not a long-term solution. ”
Similar concerns led to the board's decision to expel Altman, but eventually, with Altman's return as king, his reputation was instead boosted by a temporary downfall.
Heman Taneja, a friend of Altman and managing director of venture capital firm General Catalyst, said: "He's the kind of founder who can bend reality. He added that Altman invited him to invest in OpenAI, but he declined because he couldn't understand the company's complex structure.
By creating ChatGPT, the fastest and most popular generative AI consumer app, Altman showed us the art of endless possibilities, the first technology that got CEOs of every company in every industry now thinking about how to incorporate AI into their business, and one that truly changed the world.
In fact, a few weeks before OpenAI released ChatGPT in November last year, the senior management team held a special meeting to discuss whether ChatGPT should be released, and it was not 100% sure that the release of ChatGPT was the right thing to do, OpenAI has a limited GPU, and it is mainly positioned as a company that builds tools for developers and enterprises, but Sam Altman strongly suggested that it must be "tried", and Altman's argument is that we need to build on it with large language models"Somewhat important and personalized" text interactions.
As the world can see, the launch of ChatGPT has been a huge success - there have been 1 million users after only 5 days of launch, hundreds of millions of users 2 months after launch, and people have been inseparable from ChatGPT for a year after it was launched...
And it's Altman who makes it possible.
The first 38 years that belonged to Altman were over, and his next 38 years were just beginning
Note: This article was prepared by The Washington Post based on interviews with more than two dozen of Altman's current and former colleagues, rivals, friends, and others in the industry, many of whom spoke on condition of anonymity.