It is clear that Sam AltmanThe 39-year-old co-founder of Creator of ChatGPT OpenAIis looking ahead he was fired (and was quickly rehired) almost a year ago by the company he co-founded after the board accused him of not being “consistently honest.”
In one Tuesday's podcast episode of Life in Seven Songs from the San Francisco Standard, Altman said the hit “was this crazy traumatic thing to go through, and it was pretty public.”
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This follows an upbeat blog post that Altman published on Monday, “The Age of Intelligence” describing how he hopes AI will transform society in the coming decades, with “amazing triumphs – adjusting the climate, creating a space colony and discovering all of physics” becoming “commonplace”.
Although he's now one of the public faces behind the effort to change the AI future, his path to leadership wasn't always smooth—or safe.
Days after Altman was fired 10 months ago, 95% of OpenAI signed a letter threatening to leave if Altman was not reinstated. Meanwhile, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella offered Altman a job leading an advanced AI research group at Microsoft.
Altman ended up back inside the position of CEO of OpenAI less than a week after the initial shot.
“And I didn't have time — because there were so many pieces to take in — I didn't have time to deal with it or recover,” Altman said on the podcast. “And the first few months were just this crazy fugue. It took a lot out of me.”
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Back in the office, Altman said he still finds little reminders of that drama-filled day, whether they're old documents or lawyers' memos, but he took some positive lessons from the experience that are less obvious.
“I've learned a lot about gratitude,” Altman said. “There's just a great appreciation for the people around me and what I can do. I really appreciate the sense of duty and not turning your back on things, no matter how hard they are, if it's what you signed up for, and it what you feel committed to and what you think is important and that was a real growth moment for me and something I'm proud and happy about.
Sam Altman. Photo: Life in seven songs
Altman also shared on the podcast that he keeps an axe, a prehistoric stone tool, in his office as a reminder of how far humanity has come.
“I look at that thing a lot,” he said.
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In the Age of Intelligence post, Altman wrote that technology brought humanity from the Stone Age to the Agricultural Age to the Industrial Age. He declared that we could have superintelligence, or AI smarter than the brightest human minds, in “a few thousand days” and called the development “the most important fact in all of history so far.”
Although OpenAI is now worth $86 billion, the company is talking to investors to raise perhaps $6.5 billion at a $150 billion valuation, for Bloomberg.