The explosive popularity of the chatbot ChatGPT has made it the fastest-growing consumer application in history, with over 100 million monthly active users in just two months since its launch. According to Sensor Tower data, it took TikTok about nine months to reach 100 million users globally, while Instagram took 30 months to reach the same milestone.
Without a doubt, ChatGPT has created a miracle, which has brought worldwide fame to OpenAI, the artificial intelligence laboratory that developed ChatGPT, as well as to Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI. Sam Altman has also been referred to as the father of ChatGPT by the media.
Who is the Founder of OpenAI? Sam Altman!
Recently, the American business media INSIDER revealed some interesting facts about Sam Altman. Apparently, he learned to code at the young age of 8 and is also a doomsday prepper who has a large collection of gold, guns, and gas masks. Before he founded OpenAI, Sam Altman was widely known in Silicon Valley as the president of the startup accelerator Y-Combinator. So, how did he achieve his success?
Sam Altman's Diverse Journey
According to reports, Sam Altman is 37 years old and grew up in St. Louis, Missouri, USA. He was a child prodigy and learned how to program and dismantle Macintosh computers when he was only 8 years old. This was around the same time that most children in China were still learning how to read and write in elementary school.
When Sam Altman was 16 years old, he came out to his parents as a gay man. This was not an easy thing for him to do, as he grew up in a small town of only 2,000 people in the Midwest. He was attending John Burroughs School, a private preparatory school in St. Louis, where he bravely came out to the entire community.
After attending Stanford University for two years, Sam Altman dropped out with two classmates to start a mobile app called Loopt. Loopt allowed users to share their location with friends and was one of the first eight companies in the Y Combinator startup accelerator, along with Reddit.
Although Loopt was once valued at $175 million, it did not achieve much success. In 2012, the founders sold Loopt for $43 million to Green Dot, a bank known for its prepaid cards, which was almost equal to the total amount of funding Loopt had received.
During the process of founding Loopt, Sam Altman also found love. He dated Nick Sivo, one of the co-founders of Loopt, for 9 years. Unfortunately, they broke up after selling the company.
Sam Altman For President at Y Combinator
After selling Loopt, Sam Altman founded a venture capital fund called Hydrazine Capital, raising $21 million including a large portion of the $5 million he received from Loopt and investments from billionaire entrepreneur and venture capitalist Peter Thiel.
Altman invested 75% of the funds into Y Combinator and led Reddit's Series B financing. At the age of 28 in 2014, Altman was chosen by Y Combinator co-founder Paul Graham to become the president of Y Combinator.
During his tenure as Y Combinator president, Altman taught a series of lectures titled "How to Start a Startup" at Stanford University in the fall of 2014. Altman was also selected for Forbes' 30 under 30 venture capital list in 2015, at the age of 29.
Altman shared some of his hobbies with two Y Combinator co-founders, including his love of racing and flying planes. He also once told the founder of startup Shypmate that he was "preparing for the end of the world" and warned of "deadly synthetic viruses", "AI attacking humans", or "war". Altman's mother, a dermatologist, said that he tends to keep a lot of things inside and can become very anxious.
Altman's brother Jack is the co-founder and CEO of Lattice, an employee management platform. In 2020, Sam Altman and his brothers launched the Apollo fund, which focuses on providing funding for "moonshot" companies.
In 2015, Altman co-founded OpenAI with Tesla CEO Elon Musk and others with the goal of ensuring that artificial intelligence will not eliminate humanity, including LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman and prominent investor Peter Thiel, who pledged to invest $1 billion.
In 2019, Altman stepped down from his position as president of Y Combinator to focus on his work with OpenAI, while continuing to serve as YC's chairman.
Google Level 3 Engineer Interview Lands $183K Salary
In 2019, OpenAI transformed into a "capped-profit" company and when asked about the company's revenue stream, Sam Altman admitted that they had no idea. During the same year, Microsoft invested $1 billion in OpenAI.
During Sam Altman's tenure as CEO, OpenAI launched popular generative AI tools such as DALL-E and ChatGPT, which create art and text based on the information provided to them. ChatGPT was released in November 2022 and gained over one million users within five days, as reported by Altman on Twitter. In January 2023, Microsoft invested billions of dollars in OpenAI, increasing the company's valuation to $29 billion.
ChatGPT passed a Google Level 3 Engineer coding interview and was offered an annual salary of $183,000. Google recently tested ChatGPT and other AI chatbots to determine their abilities to answer coding interview questions, and Google is considering adding it to their website. ChatGPT's concise and accurate answers to questions can save users time they would usually spend browsing Google links.
While ChatGPT's viral release gave OpenAI an advantage over other AI companies, its increasing usage has resulted in significant computational costs. However, the feedback from users is valuable in helping to train ChatGPT's responses.
Overall, OpenAI's success with ChatGPT and DALL-E has led to increased investment from Microsoft and highlights the growing importance of generative AI in the tech industry.
ChatGPT Subscription Plan Expected to Yield $200M Revenue Annually
OpenAI has launched a subscription service for ChatGPT, its text generating AI that can produce human-like articles, poetry, emails, lyrics and more. The new service, ChatGPT Plus, is priced at $20 per month and offers universal access to ChatGPT, even during peak hours, faster response times and priority access to new features and improvements. OpenAI plans to invite people from the waitlist in the coming months and expand the service to more countries and regions.
Despite its success, OpenAI is under pressure to monetize ChatGPT and other products, having received billions of dollars in investment from Microsoft. OpenAI's 2023 revenue projection is $200 million, but it remains significantly less than the funding it has received. Nonetheless, OpenAI plans to improve and expand ChatGPT Plus based on user feedback and demand, with additional low-cost plans, commercial plans, and data packages also under consideration.
Search Engine VS. ChatGPT
Google is feeling threatened by the popularity of ChatGPT, and Google CEO Pichai has attended several meetings to address the threat ChatGPT poses to Google's search engine business. Google is concerned that if ChatGPT replaces the search engine, its advertising revenue business model will be greatly impacted, or even fundamentally overturned. To counter this, Google has recently invested nearly $400 million in the AI startup company Anthropic, seen as a competitor to ChatGPT. Anthropic's main team comes from OpenAI, with members who are dissatisfied with the company being invested in by Microsoft. However, Sam Altman downplays ChatGPT's ability to replace traditional search and doesn't consider it the most interesting development. "I don't think ChatGPT will replace search," says Sam Altman. "But I think someday an AI system might. But more than that, I'm interested in thinking about things beyond search. I don't remember what we did before the web search. I'm a little too young."
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