The board of directors of OpenAI, which launched the generative artificial intelligence platform ChatGPT a year ago, announced on Friday the departure with immediate effect of boss Sam Altman, saying he had not always been ” frank” with this instance.
“Mr. Altman’s departure follows a deliberative review process by the board, which concluded that he had not always been candid in his communications with the board, hindering his ability to fulfill his responsibilities“, specifies the board of directors in a press release.
Mira Murati, technical director of OpenAI, has been appointed to act as interim at the head of the company while waiting for the ongoing process to find a permanent successor to be successful. She has worked there for five years.
His dismissal surprised Silicon Valleyas the 38-year-old entrepreneur was considered a pioneer and one of the leading figures in a sector with considerable challenges, that of artificial intelligence (AI).
Sam Altman created OpenAI in 2015 – initially a non-profit foundation – with the idea of developing an AI that would be “safe and would benefit humanity”, in the words of Elon Musk in an interview with the New York Times.
AI has been in the spotlight since millions of people adopted ChatGPT, OpenAI’s interface capable of conversing with humans in natural language and generating all kinds of text on a simple request.
“As (artificial) intelligence becomes integrated everywhere, we will all have superpowers on demand“, promised Sam Altman during a conference on Thursday, on the eve of his dismissal from OpenAI.
And faced with the strong concerns raised, particularly regarding democracy and employment, the entrepreneur assured AFP on Thursday: “I have a lot of empathy for people’s feelings, whatever their feelings.”
“Intense”
“Unless there is a merger with AI, either it enslaves us or we enslave it,” he declared in 2016 to a reporter from the New Yorker. “Humans need to move up a level.”
Born in April 1985, the entrepreneur grew up in St Louis (Missouri).
His life changed when he received a Mac for his eighth birthday, and the internet helped him experience his homosexuality when he still had “no one to talk to about it”, he told Esquire in 2014.
He studied computer science at the prestigious Stanford, but quickly left the university to create, in 2005, the social network Loopt, valued at more than $43 million when he sold it in 2012.
In 2014, he took over as head of Y Combinator, which invests in start-ups and advises entrepreneurs, in exchange for shares. The organization has notably helped Airbnb, Stripe and Reddit.
Under his leadership, the incubator is expanding well beyond software, to include startups in many other sectors, such as Industrial Microbes, a biotechnology startup.
Its president, Derek Greenfield, remembers someone very “intense”.
“He thinks and speaks quickly, he asks the difficult questions, but always in an encouraging way,” he describes. “He pushed the boundaries. I don’t know where we would be if he hadn’t transformed (Y Combinator).”
“He is a (deeply thoughtful) thinker who is desperate to do things right“, also comments Jeremy Goldman of Insider Intelligence.
A fan of shorts and T-shirts, a sports car enthusiast and an airplane pilot in his spare time, Sam Altman often gives the impression of being an introvert.
He calls himself an optimist but he is also a survivalist, according to the New Yorker: he stores weapons, gold, water and antibiotics on his property in Big Sur, on the California coast.
Vision
The prolific entrepreneur has personally invested in various companies, including $375 million in Helion, a nuclear fusion startup.
“My vision for the future and the reason I love (Helion and OpenAI) is that if we can really bring down the cost of intelligence and the cost of energy, the quality of life for everyone is going to increase significantly,” he told CNBC in May.
In July, it officially launched Worldcoin, a new cryptocurrency with a human iris-based identity verification system. The stated objective: to reduce the risk of fraud and scams in a sector where the use of pseudonyms is common.
On the political side, he called Donald Trump a “threat to national security” and designed an application in 2016 to encourage young people to vote.
At the end of 2019 he organized a fundraiser for Democratic candidate Andrew Yang, who advocates universal income, that is to say a minimum allowance for all, which would compensate for the loss of jobs due to automation.
“It’s not complicated: we need technology to create more wealth and a policy that distributes it equitably,” Sam Altman wrote on his blog.
“The technological progress we (achieve) in the next hundred years will be far greater than anything accomplished since we first mastered fire and invented the wheel“, he predicted in a blog post in 2021.