Photo courtesy of Flickr / Tech Crunch.
OpenAI CEO and St. Louis native Sam Altman.
Move over Jack Dorsey, there's a new contender for the (we assume) highly coveted designation of top tech bro from St. Louis.
Sam Altman is the CEO of OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT. If you somehow missed the launch last November, the ChatGPT program can in seconds draft a work email, legal brief or any other piece of writing people were previously paid to do.
Some have said this is going to spare white-collar workers a lot of needless busy work. Other have said this is the end of all white-collar jobs forever.
However it shakes out, we'll have a St. Louisan to thank.
Altman, unsurprisingly, went to John Burroughs High School. In 2016 Altman told the New Yorker, “Growing up gay in the Midwest in the two-thousands was not the most awesome thing.” However, Altman told reporter Tad Friend that he found an outlet in AOL chatrooms, which he described as "transformative."
The New Yorker profile recounts how, in response to a Christian group boycotting a school assembly about sexuality at Burroughs, Altman decided to come out in front in of the entire school.
A Burroughs counselor later said of Altman, “What Sam did changed the school. It felt like someone had opened up a great big box full of all kinds of kids and let them out into the world.”
In 2015, along with household names like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, Altman founded OpenAI, a nonprofit organization intended to develop artificial intelligence responsibly.
Seven years later, OpenAI had developed a for-profit subsidiary that, in classic Silicon Valley fashion, released ChatGPT to the public with little to no thought as to its ramifications.
On a recent podcast, tech reporter Kevin Roose called the phenomenon that is ChatGPT "a total accident."
The short version of the story is that the ChatGPT we all love, fear or are annoyed by is actually ChatGPT 3.5. Engineers at OpenAI were hard at work on ChatGPT 4, which as its name suggests, was an update to ChatGPT 3. Then, last November, higher-ups at OpenAI decided to make the current 3.5 version available as a way to gather feedback for what would eventually be ChatGPT 4.
Roose reports that the response took its parent company by surprise. The bot now has 30 million registered users and 5 million daily users — incredible numbers for a product only two months old. By comparison, Instagram had 10 million users in its first year.
"There are people in the company uncomfortable with how fast things like ChatGPT are coming into existence and maybe worry that the company is cutting some corners," Roose says.
Roose's colleague Casey Newton called OpenAI not expecting ChatGPT to be a big deal a classic example of "tech people living in a bubble."
Some have theorized that it will be in AI's best interest to develop in a way that is useful to humans, sort of like how dogs co-evolved with us homo sapiens. But of course numerous film franchises have been built around the idea that this AI stuff comes back to seriously bite us in the ass.
According to that New Yorker profile, if the latter scenario plays out, rendering us all in a Mad Max-style hellscape, at least Altman himself will be well-situated.
“I try not to think about it too much,” the New Yorker quotes Altman saying of various ways in which civilization could crumble. “But 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 for all his current bounty, it's clear Altman hasn't forgotten the city of his youth.
In March 2020, Altman's pal Elon Musk was musing on Twitter about where he should open a new factory to produce the Tesla Cybertruck.
Tweeted Altman, "You should consider St. Louis! It'd be great for this."
Gotta love a tech bro who gives back (or at least tweets about us favorably).
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