Have you ever wondered who created ChatGPT?
Me neither. But if you were wondering, well, wonder no further. Dubbed the CEO of the Year by Times Magazine, you can credit the CEO of OpenAI, Sam Altman, for creating the ingenious homework-solver that all your teachers hate (as much as they’d like to think so, AI detectors aren’t exactly the most reliable).
But who is Altman, really?
In ChatGPT’s own words, Altman is “the tech titan who can code an entire app before you finish reading his LinkedIn profile… the guy who probably dreams in binary code and wakes up thinking about disruptive business models.”
But perhaps we shouldn’t take the word from a piece of technology that I asked to specifically generate a funny Sam-themed tidbit about. To unpack Altman piece by piece, it may be easier to understand what happened to Altman that landed him where he is today.
Samuel Harris Altman was born into a middle-class Jewish family in 1985 and though he dropped out of Stanford University before he received his bachelor’s, he quickly established a name for himself in the tech industry with his ambitious startups, eventually rising to become the CEO of OpenAI in 2019. Several of OpenAI’s inventions,including ChatGPT) would become instant hits.
But on November 17, 2023, the company’s board suddenly announced that Altman had been fired because they doubted his ability to continue leading. Strained relationships with some of the top staff and conflicting visions for how OpenAI ought to continue forward also contributed to the decision.
Upon hearing this information, Altman instantly joined Microsoft as the head of a new AI team following his expulsion, an objectively funny thing to do when you get fired. But he needed not to worry. Barely three days later, 738 of OpenAI’s 770 employees were threatening to follow in Altman’s footsteps (the Microsoft CTO, Kevin Scott, promised nearly all of OpenAI's workforce positions at Microsoft if they chose to leave OpenAI) if the board did not resign. Even Ilya Sutskever, one of the four board members responsible for Altman’s ouster, publicly announced that he regretted his decision and that he supported the board stepping down.
Under extreme public scrutiny, most of the board, including its only two women, indeed did step down and were replaced. On November 30—barely two weeks after he was fired—Altman was reinstated as the CEO of OpenAI.
Nowadays, he’s been using his platform to speak about the conflict in the Gaza Strip, urging people to call out both anti-semitism and Islamophobia, the latter of which usually slips under the radar far more.
How will ChatGPT change the landscape of education, employment, and the blurred lines of what defines humanity? Only time will tell.
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