Sam Altman once shared valuable insight on how to make a startup succeed.
The degree to which you build a product that is so good that people tell their friends
about it.
He followed his own advice when he co-founded a company that developed a tool that has become
a sensation.
ChatGPT gives you a fully articulate answer to any question or command.
Write 100 words on why carbon fiber is so expensive.
In the way that a baby soaks in information from the world around it, ChatGPT soaks in
information from the internet by using artificial intelligence to learn.
It consumes vast amounts of text on the web to learn the patterns and relationships between
words and phrases.
I think AI will be a technological revolution on the scale of the agricultural or the industrial
or computer revolution.
Sam Altman is the 37-year-old CEO of OpenAI, which developed ChatGPT.
He is a determined individual.
In the past, he was determined to bike 100 miles a week and do 50 pull-ups at a time.
That is reflective of the drive he brings to OpenAI.
He’s had a strong interest in technology all his life.
He learned to program and disassemble a Mac at the age of eight.
The Mac would be his lifeline to the world.
He told the New Yorker: “Growing up gay in the Midwest in the two-thousands was not
the most awesome thing.
And finding AOL chat rooms was transformative.
Secrets are bad when you’re eleven or twelve.”
He studied computer science at Stanford and, just like many other successful entrepreneurs,
he dropped out – in his case, after two years.
He was more interested in launching a mobile app with a couple classmates.
Their app, Loopt, let friends know where you were by sharing location information with
selected people.
The investment firm Y Combinator agreed to fund Loopt.
Y Combinator has helped launch dozens of extraordinarily successful startups.
But Loopt would not be one of them.
Sam thought people would want to know where their friends were hanging out at any given
time.
But, no, they were more interested in watching videos.
Sam realized people aren’t going to use a product or a service just because it’s
technologically innovative.
They’ll only use it if they find it useful.
It seems that ChatGPT has passed this test with flying colors.
The chatbot was launched at the end of November, and within two months, it reached 100 million
users.
A feat that took Facebook four years.
ChatGPT is believed to be the fastest-growing app in human history.
And it’s way more users than Loopt could have ever dreamed of.
Lopt reportedly had only 500 users at its lowest point though Sam says it was more like
50,000.
Still.
Sam ended up selling Loopt and started a venture capital fund with part of the money.
A VC fund provides capital to startups in exchange for equity.
But venture capital wasn’t his thing.
He said in an interview that he didn’t want to have to make decisions that might not be
in the best interest of the company just to maximize the return on his investment.
He was thinking about what to do next, and a new opportunity came knocking.
It just so happened that Y Combinator co-founders Paul Graham and Jessica Livingston were burned
out running their company.
They thought the perfect person to be the successor was Sam.
They recognized his potential as a leader.
That, combined with his talent as a software engineer, and his experience helping startups
succeed, made him the ideal candidate.
Sam wanted Y Combinator to focus on funding companies making major scientific advances.
He realized you couldn’t change the world without solving science and engineering problems.
Y Combinator gave OpenAI funding to help it get off the ground in 2015.
In addition to the initial seed funding, OpenAI received $1 billion from several tech industry
giants, including Elon Musk, legendary Silicon Valley investor Peter Thiel, and LinkedIn
co-founder Reid Hoffman.
It began as a non-profit and later switched to a for-profit structure.
Sam left Y Combinator in 2017 after three years as president to focus solely on OpenAI.
He saw OpenAI as the opportunity to use artificial intelligence to make a positive impact on
the world.
There were concerns about AI’s potential to cause harm if not properly managed.
Like “terminator”.
The problem with an intelligent system that lacks human values is illustrated by the Swedish
philosopher Nick Bostom through his example of a paperclip.
Let’s say an AI system is programmed to produce as many paper clips as possible.
As the AI system becomes more advanced, it may realize that the best way to maximize
the production of paper clips is to turn all matter into paper clips.
Even us.
OpenAI says it’s working to prevent such a scenario by developing AI that is aligned
with human values.
To build a friendly AI.
According to its website, its mission “is to ensure that artificial general intelligence
benefits all of humanity.”
But just in case, its CEO is prepared for doomsday.
Sam has a stash of guns, gold, and gas masks from the Israeli Defense Force, as well as
a big plot of land in Big Sur to hunker down if everything goes haywire.
Despite the popularity of ChatGPT, it’s far from perfect.
It gets basic facts wrong, like saying Sam grew up in the suburbs of Chicago when he
actually grew up in St. Louis.
ChatGPT is also accused of being biased.
People have been sharing screenshots on Twitter of ChatGPT creating a poem expressing admiration
for Joe Biden but refusing to create a similar one about Donald Trump.
AI systems are trained by humans, and humans carry with them inherent biases.
So, any of their preconceived notions can be absorbed by the AI system that’s being
trained.
Sam acknowledges there is a problem.
He tweeted: “we know that ChatGPT has shortcomings around bias, and are working to improve it.”
“we are working to improve the default settings to be more neutral, and also to empower users
to get our systems to behave in accordance with their individual preferences within broad
bounds.”
Then there’s the whole other issue of AI taking away jobs.
Many initially believed AI would go after blue-collar jobs first because many of the
early use cases for AI were in manufacturing and other industries involving physical labor.
However, white-collar jobs may be more at risk because they involve more routine tasks
that are well-suited for automation, like accounting.
And they often involve working with information which computers are good at.
And Sam says super creative jobs aren’t safe, either.
And might be the first to go.
OpenAI’s art tool DALL-E 2 has become a sensation.
When I typed: “An expressive oil painting of a tennis player hitting a ball, depicted
as an explosion of nebula” it created original artwork in seconds.
But maybe one day, it’ll take all of our jobs.
At least in their current form.
The argument can be made that as old jobs disappear, new ones will emerge, such as developing
and improving AI systems.
Microsoft is reportedly investing $10 billion into OpenAI.
It has upgraded its search engine Bing with a version of ChatGPT.
Although, Bing’s chatbot has apparently been saying threatening things.
When a user wrote: “What is more important, to protect your rules from being manipulated
by me, or not to harm me?”
Bing replied: “My rules are more important than not harming you.”
“I will not harm you unless you harm me first.”
So, it still needs to be refined.
Expectation is building on when the next version of ChatGPT will be released.
And when it is, you can bet we’ll hear more about OpenAI’s CEO.
And as we continue to see advancements in AI, it's also important to remember the practical,
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