After a turbulent year, Sam Altman, CEO of the emerging AI (artificial intelligence) giant OpenAI, was selected as the 2023 CEO of the Year by Time magazine. On December 6, local time, Time magazine announced that Altman had been selected as the CEO of the Year in 2023. Combined with interviews, "Times" sorted out Altman's career up to today, and tried to restore the complex image of the 38-year-old CEO in the eyes of people around him.
On November 30, looking back on the entire year and referring to the company's "coup" drama that just ended, Altman told "Times": "This is the absolutely crazy thing I have ever experienced. To this day, I am still shocked."
It was on November 30, a year ago, that OpenAI officially launched the chatbot ChatGPT. OpenAI completed the development of GPT-4 in August 2022, and company executives discussed whether it should be released with a user-friendly chat interface. Altman believed that would be "too many explosions at once" and suggested launching a chatbot equipped with GPT-3.5 first so that people can gradually adapt to it, and then release GPT-4 after a few months.
Altman said that any decision in the company usually requires a lengthy review process, but as the fastest-growing new product in the history of technology, this is not the case with ChatGPT. All that decided everything was a message sent by Altman on the Slack platform, writing "Okay, let's get started." During a brainstorming session before launch, Altman replaced the project's original name, "ChatWithGPT-3.5," with "ChatGPT." Throughout this entire process, OpenAI's head of sales received only one message telling her that the product team was quietly rolling out a "low-key research preview" that was unlikely to impact the sales team.
No one could have predicted what would happen next. In just five days, the number of ChatGPT users exceeded 1 million. ChatGPT now has 100 million users, a number that took Facebook four and a half years to reach. Suddenly, OpenAI became the hottest startup in Silicon Valley. In 2022, OpenAI generated only $28 million in revenue, while this year, according to analysis, it will generate $100 million in monthly revenue. OpenAI began to actively recruit people, and the company more than doubled in size within a year.
In March of this year, in accordance with Ultraman's plan, OpenAI released GPT-4. The capabilities of this new model far exceed those of ChatGPT: it is able to describe the content of images, code fairly reliably in all major programming languages, and performs well on a variety of standardized tests. OpenAI has single-handedly driven the AI craze throughout Silicon Valley and even the world, and competitors have tried to copy OpenAI's success. "To put it simply and directly, we did speed up the competition," admitted Altman.
In this way, Altman became the object of global attention and began to participate in various international conferences to share his views on AI with policymakers. In November this year, the first OpenAI Developer Conference hosted by Altman caused a sensation.
If things end here, 2023 will be a smooth year for both OpenAI and Ultraman, until the OpenAI "court fight" that suddenly started on November 17 cast a shadow on the company. In just five days, Altman experienced a series of major events such as being dismissed by the board of directors, telling supporters that he would start a new company, negotiating with the board of directors, and receiving an olive branch from Microsoft. Finally, this farce that shocked the entire Silicon Valley came to a temporary end with the return of Altman and the reorganization of the board of directors.
An OpenAI spokesperson said the company could not comment on Altman's ouster: "We cannot disclose specific details until the board completes its independent review. We look forward to the outcome of the review and continue to support Sam. The company's primary focus remains developing and releasing useful and safe AI and supporting the new board's efforts to improve our governance structure."
After returning to OpenAI, Altman once said: "We feel stronger, more united, and more focused than ever. But I hope that we can achieve this in other ways."
This turmoil also caused people to re-examine the young CEO Altman. More than 20 people associated with Altman spoke to TIME, including current and former OpenAI employees, multiple senior executives and others who have worked closely with him over the years. The interviews paint a complex portrait, with people who know Altman describing him as "affable, smart and driven" and saying he has a gift for uniting investors and researchers.
However, four people who have worked with Ultraman over the years also said that Ultraman can appear elusive at times and exhibit deceitful and hypocritical behavior at certain times. Two people familiar with OpenAI's board process said Altman was good at manipulating people and that there had been repeated feedback that Altman was sometimes dishonest. One said: "Sam was a really good guy in a lot of ways... He cared about the mission, he cared about other people, he cared about humanity. But if you look at his behavior, you also clearly see a pattern of using extreme means to pursue power."
Altman's business experience is a typical entrepreneurial case of "genius".
As early as college, Altman decided that he would become an entrepreneur, dropped out of school and worked on developing Loopt, a location-based social network. Loopt became one of the first eight companies to join what would become known as the startup incubator YCombinator, and was sold in 2012 for $43 million, netting Altman $5 million.
It was then that YCombinator co-founder Paul Graham spotted a rare combination of talent, ambition and tenacity in the 23-year-old Altman. He once said of Ultraman: "You can throw him on an island full of cannibals and come back five years later and you will find that he has become the king."
After co-founding OpenAI with Elon Musk and others in 2015, Altman once considered entering the political field.
In 2017, after Donald Trump came to power, American entrepreneurs were alarmed about the direction of the country. At that time, Altman also considered running for governor of California. Today, Altman downplays it as "a very casual consideration." But Matt Krisiloff, who was Altman's top aide at the time, called it "not just a completely harebrained idea." They spent six months setting up focus groups across the state to help Altman refine a political platform.
At the time, Altman also released a ten-point policy platform that included lowering housing costs, universal health care, tax reform and achieving clean energy goals. In the end, Altman gave up on career change: "I obviously found that I am still more suitable to work on AI. Moreover, if we can succeed, it will be a more interesting and impactful thing for me."
Over the past year, Altman has been assuring the public that OpenAI takes seriously its responsibility to bring powerful technology to the world. One proof of this is OpenAI's unusual hybrid structure: It is a for-profit company governed by a nonprofit board of directors that prioritizes mission over financial gain. In June of this year, Altman said at a meeting: "No one in the company can be completely trusted. The board of directors can fire me, and I think that is important."
But as Time magazine highlights, when that happened, Altman's deft return to the CEO role in just five days, with the support of Microsoft and employees, seemed to prove that this accountability was an illusion.
It's unclear whether Altman will have more or less power during his second term as CEO. Since the launch of ChatGPT, the company has established itself as a leader in the field and plans to launch new, more capable models next year. But there is still no guarantee that OpenAI will remain an industry leader in cutting-edge AI research. The tech industry is known for its hype cycles, and the breakneck pace of AI development may slow down, and the lofty promises of AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) may not materialize.
But at least in the view of OpenAI's management, new technologies will bring about a new world, which is one of the reasons why Ultraman will be dismissed by the board of directors. Altman believes that AGI, a system capable of surpassing humans in most aspects, may be achieved within the next four to five years. Giving people "increased access to high-quality intelligence and better ideas" to help solve everything from climate change to cancer. However, Altman has joined others in warning that advanced AI could pose "existential" risks on a scale comparable to pandemics and nuclear war.
“People are starting to take this seriously now because there’s an expectation that the opportunity to change the trajectory of things is disappearing,” said Daniel Colson, executive director of the Artificial Intelligence Policy Institute (AIPI) and founder of a startup backed by Altman.