Technology wunderkind Sam Altman freely admits that artificial intelligence will take people’s jobs, but he surely didn’t expect that his would be one of the first to go.
A super-intelligent computer would have failed to predict the chaos that has engulfed Silicon Valley in the past few days after Altman was sacked from his job running the world’s most advanced AI company – and then snapped up by Microsoft.
On Friday, the entrepreneur was ousted as chief executive of OpenAI, a non-profit venture best known for ChatGPT – the popular program that can write essays and even computer code – after the board said he hadn’t been ‘sufficiently candid’ with it.
Investors and many OpenAI staff were furious at 38-year-old Altman’s dismissal, and software giant Microsoft, by far the firm’s biggest investor, announced on Sunday night it had hired him to lead its new in-house AI team.
Yesterday, Altman’s supporters turned their ire on the board that ousted him.
Technology wunderkind Sam Altman (pictured) freely admits that artificial intelligence will take people’s jobs, but he surely didn’t expect that his would be one of the first to go
A super-intelligent computer would have failed to predict the chaos that has engulfed Silicon Valley in the past few days after Altman was sacked from his job running the world’s most advanced AI company – and then snapped up by Microsoft (Stock Image)
More than 500 of OpenAI’s 700 employees signed an open letter threatening to quit unless the board resigned and reinstated Altman as chief executive, and Greg Brockman, who was also pushed out, as president.
It’s now claimed that some senior colleagues were worried that Altman was moving too fast to commercialise OpenAI’s breakthroughs.
He admitted he was anxious to beat rivals to develop ‘artificial general intelligence’, a computer capable of completing any intellectual task a human can, which some scientists argue poses an existential risk to our species.
Altman – estimated to have a net worth of $500 million (£400 million) – set up OpenAI in 2015 with Elon Musk as a research organisation (rather than a full-blown company) seeking to ‘advance digital intelligence… to benefit humanity’.
Along with some of AI’s founding developers, Musk – the Tesla electric-car pioneer and world’s richest person – has raised fears that the technology could set off a global cataclysm as super-intelligent machines take over from humans and even wipe them out.
Musk left OpenAI after a falling-out with Altman – who claims he is fully aware of AI’s risks – in 2018.
Musk recently complained OpenAI had become a ‘maximum-profit company effectively controlled by Microsoft’, a development that was ‘not good karma’. OpenAI is now valued at nearly £69 billion.
Insiders say some OpenAI executives felt the same way as Musk and that one in particular, Ilya Sutskever, the venture’s co-founder and chief scientist, was instrumental in ousting Altman.
But adding to the confusion, Sutskever said yesterday that he ‘deeply regretted’ his involvement in the board’s decision.
As Silicon Valley battles over whether AI is primarily a multi-trillion-dollar commercial opportunity or a hugely dangerous technology that must be continually checked, who is the man at the centre of the digital storm?
Altman is in many ways the classic Silicon Valley geek – only supercharged. Slim and boyish-looking, he’s a fiercely bright and self-confident workaholic who’s notoriously impatient with those he feels aren’t as intelligent as he is.
More than 500 of OpenAI’s 700 employees signed an open letter threatening to quit unless the board resigned and reinstated Altman as chief executive, and Greg Brockman, who was also pushed out, as president (Stock Image)
Altman (pictured) is in many ways the classic Silicon Valley geek – only supercharged. Slim and boyish-looking, he’s a fiercely bright and self-confident workaholic who’s notoriously impatient with those he feels aren’t as intelligent as he is
As a child growing up in in St Louis, Missouri, he could program and take to pieces a Mac computer by the age of eight.
He claims he wants to save the planet, listing curing cancer, achieving nuclear fusion and supersonic airliners as personal priorities.
‘I think his goal is to make the whole future,’ says an ex-colleague. It’s also widely believed – though he’s denied it – that, like many running Silicon Valley, he sits somewhere on the autism spectrum. The man seen as the public face of efforts to protect humanity from machines admits he’s hardly a people person.
‘I have no patience for things I’m not interested in: parties, most people,’ he said in 2016.
He’s also a ‘Doomsday prepper’, conceding that super-intelligent computers are a potential cause of the global civilisation collapse he fears.
‘I have guns, gold, potassium iodide [used to treat radiation injuries], antibiotics, batteries, water, gas masks from the Israel Defence Forces, and a big patch of land in Big Sur [in California] I can fly to.’
He told his parents he was gay when he was 16, later publicly announcing the news to his private school after a Christian group boycotted a meeting about sexuality.
Earlier this year, Altman started a relationship with Oliver Mulherin, an Australian software engineer. They live in San Francisco.
For all his preparation for Doomsday, Altman is an AI optimist, predicting it will ‘solve some of our most pressing problems, really increase the standard of life and also figure out much better uses for human will and creativity’.
Many in Silicon Valley believe he is the person to do this, but they were similarly blown away by another Sam – cryptocurrency guru Sam Bankman-Fried.
While nobody is suggesting Altman is a criminal, Bankman-Fried faces decades in prison after being convicted of a vast fraud.
By Daily Mail Online, November 20, 2023
