Sam Altman may be the next household name in technology, but many Americans haven’t heard of him.
Outside of San Francisco, Altman may appear to be just another young tech CEO. He’s a Stanford University dropout who made a fortune selling a tech startup years ago. And he’s spent the last decade investing in and coaching other entrepreneurs. On Twitter, he gives upbeat and optimistic life advice, interspersed with references to line graphs.
But, thanks to OpenAI, Altman, 37, has risen to the top of the tech industry’s power rankings in the last three months. Altman is the CEO of the company that developed the popular artificial intelligence chatbot ChatGPT. The technology has caused rivals such as Google to panic, sparked fears of killer robots. And seemingly overnight reoriented the direction of technological innovation.
Step aside, Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg. Silicon Valley may have discovered its next superstar CEO.
“He is clear the man of the hour, which is all the more remarkable give his age,” said Oren Etzioni. An artificial intelligence expert who previously led the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence in Seattle.
Altman is already a household name in Northern California, and he’s about to become one everywhere else as he and OpenAI amass power at the cutting edge of artificial intelligence.
According to an Altman tweet, OpenAI, based in San Francisco, is still small by tech company standards, with 375 employees as of last month, but its size understates its and Altman’s influence.