Open AI and its CEO, who created ChatGPT, the fastest-growing app in history, are playing big. Meeting with leaders in 16 countries in three months, Sam Altman's goal is to collect $100 billion in investment and build Artificial General Intelligence with cognitive abilities like humans.
If there are those who have not heard of Sam Altman's name, they can be sure that they will hear it often from now on. Because the 38-year-old CEO of artificial intelligence company OpenAI is running towards becoming one of the most important players in the global order.
The first signals of Altman's awesome sprint came in May. It was not unusual for a CEO to be hosted like a world leader in a lobby tour with the top executives of his running mates DeepMind and Anthropic, against the legal limits that the European Union wanted to draw on artificial intelligence.
Samuel Harris Altman (born 1985) is an American entrepreneur, investor, and programmer. He was the co-founder of Loopt and is the current CEO of OpenAI. He was the president of Y Combinator and was briefly the CEO of Reddit.
Although, sitting across from Emmanuel Macron on the Elysee and Rishi Sunak on Downing Street 10, what he represented was not the commercial company he was the CEO of, but the whole concept of artificial intelligence. In this context, he made high-level contacts in Poland, Spain, and Germany, and met with European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen in Brussels. He even described these talks as a "diplomatic mission".
However, the first thing he forgot when he saw the difficulty was diplomacy, which did not suit the mission Sam Altman had set for himself. For example, he immediately raised his eyebrows at the possibility that the legislation was harsh, and he could unhesitatingly dodge the threat of stopping his company's service to Europe.
Post-European world tour
The number of countries Sam Altman visited in three months increased to 16. He was hosted by President Herzog in Israel, President Yoon Suk-yeol in South Korea, and Prime Minister Modi in India. He lobbied in countries such as Jordan, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates, as well as checking the pulse to gather investment.
In these conversations with the theme of “take your place here, do not miss the future”, he probably sounded more like a marketer with a box of happiness in his bag than a diplomat.
But is there happiness in those boxes or doomsday? Time will show that.
One thing is for sure, Sam Altman's persuasion. He is “a very influential preacher,” according to attendees at the meetings on his world tour. This talent must have contributed to his rapid rise in Silicon Valley.
He dropped out of Stanford and became an entrepreneur.
Jewish origin Sam Altman is one of those who made his own path just like Mark Zuckerberg. At the age of 8, he learned to program and disassemble a Mac computer. At the age of 16, he revealed his sexual identity to his parents and announced that he was gay after a Christian group boycotted the meeting about sexuality at his high school. "What he did change the school," Altman's college counselor Madelyn Gray told The New Yorker. "It was like opening a huge box full of all kinds of kids to the world," he said.
A freshman from Stanford University's computer science major to pursue his ideas, Altman's first success was when he sold Loopt, the mobile social networking app he founded in 2005 at the age of 20, for $43.4 million in 2012. After his Loopt adventure, he founded a venture fund called Hydrazine Capital and raised $21 million.
Forbes list and OpenAI adventure
It was in 2014 when he became the chairman of Y Combinator, the “start-up acceleration company” of which he was a partner in 2011. The total value of companies such as Airbnb, Dropbox, Reddit, Twitch, and Stripe, which the company finances and mentors, exceeded $ 65 billion in a short time.
In 2015, when Forbes entered the list of the 30 most successful entrepreneurs under the age of 30, he faced one of the most important turning points in his life. He served with Elon Musk on the first board of OpenAI, which was founded by 10 investors as a non-profit organization to conduct artificial intelligence research. He played an important role in the process of finding an investment of 1 billion dollars in 2019 and over 10 billion dollars in 2023 in the company, which he completely focused on, leaving his other work. At that time, Open AI had abandoned its non-profit structure and turned into a company. Under Altman's direction, the company focused more on developing the Large Language Model.
Throughout his career, whether to sell an idea or market the future, his greatest assistant was persuasion. While ChatGPT is spreading like a virus to the world today, it is obviously relying on this power again, but this time it will be difficult when everyone's eyes are on it.
That's exactly why he hired Sandro Gianella, one of Europe's leading lobbyists, last month. The first statement of Gianella, who was appointed as OpenAI's Head of European Policies and Partnerships, said, "I am honored to work on a technology that requires negotiations at the global level", explaining the importance of the issue.
The news that TIME magazine politely accused Altman of being "hypocritical" also coincided with this appointment. According to the documents obtained within the scope of freedom of information, Altman constantly mentioned the need for an arrangement for artificial intelligence during his visits to Europe, but on the one hand, he demanded "lightenings" that would benefit his company. This lobbying was successful, according to TIME, because the final text of the EU's Artificial Intelligence Act revealed that objections were accepted.
Perhaps we shouldn't judge Sam Altman for this contradiction, because that's the nature of his work, in a way. As he underlined; “Artificial intelligence may be an existential threat to humanity, but the benefits it will provide are enormous.”
We have progressed with Altman so far, let's look at the condition of the horse he is riding...
Application of records
OpenAI's chatbot ChatGPT, launched on November 30, 2022, has become the fastest-growing consumer application in history. It had 1 million users just 5 days after launch; Facebook reached the same number of users in 10 months and Twitter in 2 years. Two months later, the number of active users exceeded 100 million. Again in terms of comparison; It took 9 months for TikTok to reach 100 million users and 2.5 years for Instagram.
ChatGPT, whose monthly traffic is estimated at 1.8 billion visits today, has also rapidly multiplied the value of OpenAI. After the $300 million share sale in April, the company reached a valuation of $27-29 billion, while global consulting firm McKinsey said in its June report that it predicts productive artificial intelligence to contribute up to $4.4 trillion per year to the global economy. According to the report, most of the value of AI technology will be seen in customer operations, marketing and sales, software engineering, research and development. It is expected that artificial intelligence will add $200 to $340 billion to the banking industry and $240 to $390 billion to the retail industry.
Bloomberg Intelligence's recent report, on the other hand, predicts that artificial intelligence technologies, which will have a volume of 40 billion dollars in 2022, will grow by 42% per year and will become a market of 1.3 trillion dollars by 2032.
Altman, who has no stake in OpenAI and whose personal wealth is unknown, is also closely interested in nuclear fusion, which aims to create a Sun-like energy source on Earth. In this context, he invested 375 million dollars in Helion Energy last year.
As you can see, Sam Altman's horse runs fast, very fast. Now comes the critical question: So where does it run?
When we bring the words artificial intelligence and fear together, the first scenario that comes to mind is a dystopia based on the idea that one day machines that can decide on their own will take action to destroy humanity.
Concerns are so strong that the US House of Representatives restricted the use of ChatGPT just last week, and the United Nations Security Council will hold a meeting on July 18 about the potential threats of artificial intelligence to international peace and security.
Shall we all be afraid?
Here, we will not go into technical details such as how the Great Language Model, which ChatGPT also uses, works, but we can say that there is no possibility of seizing humanity with the current structure of the software. But we must be open to all possibilities, as our “contradictory” CEO Altman warned: “ChatGPT 4 can't, but what if ChatGPT 9 does?”
Moreover, Sam Altman now has a bigger goal: Artificial General Intelligence. After going on a world tour to collect 100 billion dollars of investment, his name is A.G.I. There is enthusiasm to build this system, which is abbreviated as The A.G.I. itself, which is based on the assumption that machines will be equipped with the cognitive abilities that humans have, is not yet in existence, but even such an idea is enough to worry the experts very much.
The process is progressing so rapidly that no one can foresee the next step yet. Noam Chomsky, one of the greatest thinkers of our time, defines these concerns as unnecessary and underlines that the most obvious and immediate threat to humanity is climate change: “It is possible to reach a point where artificial intelligence can continue on its way independently. But this is such a remote possibility that it doesn't seem to be worth taking too seriously."
While I was composing this article in my head, I came across the images of the 21-day quarantine of the Apollo 11 crew, which returned to Earth after landing on the Moon in 1969. I couldn't help smiling while watching the astronauts, who were kept for 21 days in a special room with experimental mice, in case they brought a harmful pathogen from the Moon to our planet.
If we look at history, we see that every technological development, from electricity to the internet, has created ethical and security concerns. Moreover, these concerns are contagious and can be manipulated by malicious people. But what we do know is that technology has always inspired us in a positive way, with the exception of weapons of mass destruction.
Also maybe the other way around; it doesn't want to rule us, but we want it to rule us.
Our way of doing business will be rewritten
It has been said from the beginning that software developers will suffer the most with the integration of artificial intelligence into business life. It is claimed that he will leave doctors unemployed with his diagnoses and lawyers with his defenses. Consider architecture. Will there be a need for an architect when there is a machine that takes days to make static calculations and draw in seconds and deliver the project?
Here you will have to find a new way; just like programmers do. The software developers, who are said to be the first to lose their jobs, are currently the group that benefits most from the blessings of artificial intelligence. The fact that the application called Copilot, which is used to control the codes, has reached 1 million users and that 30 percent of the suggestions offered by the software is accepted by the software developers is an indication of this. Perhaps the secret is not to refuse and not be afraid. Accepting and adapting can open up new avenues for our professions, and even for humanity.
Once the genie is out of the bottle...
Neoliberalism, apart from its economic definition, is also considered a period of technological revolution. Capitalist economies cannot abandon the "knowledge-based" economy based on continuous innovation. Let's not expect it to be any different for artificial intelligence. No one will dare to lift such a valuable vehicle and throw it into a corner. The train has departed once and has no specific final stop. The most plausible seems to be to jump into one of the wagons.
The analogy from tech billionaire Marc Andreessen is good. Mealen says, “We have used our intelligence as a lever in the tens of thousands of years we have created modern life, and this time we have a tool that can be a lever for our intelligence.”
We can be involved in this revolution or we can stay out of it. We have the right to choose. While making a decision, let's keep in mind the two points that Sam Altman, whose persuasiveness we praise for lines, draws the most attention in his sales speeches:
Artificial intelligence will only work for you if you work together.
Artificial intelligence is inevitable, join before it's too late.
Has 'fantastic' fears
It is known that Altman loves racing cars and owns 5 cars, including two McLarens and an old Tesla. He also likes to charter planes and fly over California. He is prone to apocalyptic scenarios, and a bit sickly. A deadly synthetic virus is preparing for artificial intelligence or nuclear war to attack humans, he told the founders of the startup Shypmate in 2016. He says he tries not to think too much about these issues, but he has guns, potassium iodide, antibiotics, various batteries, water, and gas masks at hand.
According to his mother, he is one of those people who "put everything in". When he has a headache, he Googles it, then asks his mother for reassurance that he doesn't have meningitis or lymphoma...