ST. LOUIS — According to an interview with the New Yorker, Sam Altman grew up in St. Louis. He attended the John Burroughs School.
Sam Altman is a computer scientist and business owner. Altman told the New Yorker that as a child, in St. Louis, he grasped the system behind area codes in nursery school, and learned to program and disassemble a Macintosh at eight.
The Mac became his lifeline to the rest of the world. “Growing up gay in the Midwest in the two-thousands was not the most awesome thing,” he told the New Yorker. “And finding AOL chat rooms was transformative. Secrets are bad when you’re eleven or twelve.”
After a Christian group didn’t show up to a sexuality assembly at Altman’s prep school, John Burroughs, he told everyone he was gay and asked if the school wanted to be restrictive or open to new ideas.
Altman studied at Stanford University before dropping out to become an entrepreneur. Now he is the CEO of OpenAI and used to be the president of Y Combinator, a company that helps startups grow. He is well known for his work in artificial intelligence and his support for universal basic income.
Altman has also advised and put money into a number of internet companies, such as Airbnb and Instacart.
In December 2015, Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, and Wojciech Zaremba started OpenAI, a business for AI research and development. Altman took over as CEO of OpenAI in May 2019, after it transitioned from a charity to a “capped-profit” corporation.
Its goal is to make sure that artificial general intelligence (AGI) is good for everyone by doing cutting-edge AI research and sharing what it finds. OpenAI also makes and uses AI solutions for things like language processing, robotics, and gaming, among other things.
According to an insider, in addition to Altman and Musk, some of the most powerful people in Silicon Valley, including the founders of LinkedIn, Reid Hoffman and Peter Thiel, contributed $1 billion to OpenAI.
The most recent AI they created and launched in November 2022 is the ChatGPT program. They also created an AI called DALL-E. Both DALL-E and ChatGPT are examples of “generative” AI, which means the bot generates its own artwork and text based on information provided to it.
Altman tweeted on November 30 that ChatGPT has reached over 1 million users in five days since its release.
ChatGPT was made public so that OpenAI may use user comments to develop the bot. Altman tweeted a few days after its release, “fun creative inspiration; great! Reliance on factual queries; not such a good idea.”
ChatGPT just started testing “ChatGPT Professional,” a paid version of ChatGPT that is meant to make the bot easier to use. Altman tweeted that they will have to start making money at some point.
OpenAI has officially introduced a $20-per-month experimental subscription option for ChatGPT Plus.
ChatGPT Plus users get perks like being able to use the site even when it’s busy, getting faster responses from the bot, and finding out about new features and ChatGPT upgrades before anyone else.
The membership is exclusively available in the United States, and OpenAI said it will begin inviting those in the queue to join in the coming weeks.
Microsoft announced another “multibillion-dollar” investment in OpenAI. The exact amount of Microsoft’s investment was not made public. The revolutionary ChatGPT technology will be added to Microsoft’s search engine, Bing soon.