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Who is Sam Altman?

 


You may have heard Sam Altman on a news broadcast last weekend. Of course, you may not.  There was a lot else going on: two wars, with potentially important developments in each, as well as a guilty plea from the founder of Binance, launch of a spy satellite by the always-popular North Korean regime, and so forth and so on. 

Amidst all of this, the board of directors of a company founded by Sam Altman to research artificial intelligence in a publicly transparent way, aptly called OpenAI, fired Altman. And they did so for no very clearly stated reason. Altman, though, went to Microsoft for assistance. Microsoft offered him a job heading its own AI push, and most of the employees of Altman's old company, OpenAI, threatened to quit if the board didn't persuade their old boss to come back. The implication was that they felt confident enough to quit because the new expanded MS operation headed by their old boss would happily take them on.   

Altman may have the mindset of a nerd but he has the instinct for the gut one needs in corporate knife fighting.  He DID come back to OpenAI and a chastened board. Because once one has won a knife fight in corporate suites, the least one can do is to be a bit gracious about it. 

With that background, I hope you may be a little interested in an answer to the question: Who is Sam Altman?  He is a native of Chicago who did most of his growing-up in St Louis. A native of the Apple ecosystem in computing but, as I've just suggested, one with important friends at Microsoft. Altman can talk in a disarming aw-shucks sort of way, but he clearly exhibits a will to power. he is also a prepper, i.e. someone intent on preparing for possible civilizational collapse. He has said: "I have guns, gold, potassium iodide, antibiotics, batteries, water, gas masks from the Israeli Defense Force and a big patch of land in Big Sur I can fly to." 

But none of that really answers the question, because it does not address the anxiety, behind what the world knows and doesn't know about Sam Altman. A features writer for NEW YORK MAGAZINE, Elizabeth Weil, has put the point this way: 

"How safe should we feel with Altman, given that this relatively young man ...  appears to be controlling how AI will enter our world?"

We will be hearing more of him, and of that question. 

    

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  1. Paul D. Van PeltDecember 1, 2023 at 8:31 AM

    Well, how safe we feel depends largely on how responsibly this person wields power...for as long as he may remain at the top of the heap. Altruism and power have valuable potential as allies; imminent risks as enemies. The old saw says: power corrupts...you know the latter part of that adage. We have watched wunderkinde come and go. As with other kinde, reviews have been mixed.

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