Who is Sam Altman, the man behind the AI revolution?

The 38-year-old Altman, who was once the president of Y Combinator, and briefly the CEO of Reddit, compared OpenAI to the Manhattan Project, the American effort to build an atomic bomb during WW2, while speaking to The New York Times’ Cade Metz.

When ChatGPT finally made its debut late last year, the generative AI chatbot proved to be almost as revolutionary as an atomic bomb, though far less destructive.

ETtech takes a look at the journey of Sam Altman, the pioneer behind accessible generative AI.

From dropout to CEO

The Chicago-born tech entrepreneur joined Stanford University in 2004 to study computer science, but like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, dropped out of college without finishing his degree.

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At 19, Altman cofounded location-based social media app Loopt, which also managed to raise funding from investors such as startup accelerator Y Combinator and Sequoia Capital. The startup was later sold to Green Dot Corporation for $43.4 million. In 2011, Altman joined Y Combinator as a partner and by 2014, he was named the president by YC cofounder Paul Graham. Under Altman’s leadership, Y Combinator expanded its operations, funding and supporting hundreds of startups across various industries, including well-known companies such as Airbnb, Dropbox, Reddit, and Stripe.

In 2015, Altman, along with entrepreneurs such as Ilya Sutskever, Trevor Blackwell, Andrej Karpathy and Elon Musk, founded OpenAI. He has been serving as its CEO since 2020.

DALL.E and ChatGPT

Under Altman’s leadership, OpenAI launched the GPT-3 language model in 2020, which could answer questions and was also capable of translation.

A more tangible impact of AI was seen with the launch of DALL.E, a tool that could create images using just text prompts, through artificial intelligence.

Currently, OpenAI is valued at $29 billion, though Altman himself reportedly does not own any equity in the company.

A vegetarian since childhood, Altman is also prepared for any apocalyptic event. “I have guns, gold, potassium iodide, antibiotics, batteries, water, gas masks from the Israeli Defense Force, and a big patch of land in Big Sur (California) I can fly to”, he told the in New Yorker magazine 2016.

Altman’s preparedness should come in handy in case AI is as catastrophic as the product of the actual Manhattan Project.