Sam altman popped collar

Meet the guy taking the reins of the influential startup program Y Combinator from its longtime leader, Paul Graham. He talks a lot, to a lot of people.

We use cookies and other tracking technologies to improve your browsing experience on our site, show personalized content and targeted ads, analyze site traffic, and understand where our audiences come from. To learn more or opt-out, read our Cookie Policy. By Wednesday, he was reinstated to the role. The days in between were the most chaotic breakup in recent Silicon Valley history—and raise plenty of questions about where things go next. Why, just the other day—last Thursday, to be specific—Altman sat at a developer conference and described a recent experience that had left him positively vibrating with wonder.

Sam altman popped collar

There were certainly a lot of questions swirling around OpenAI for the past several months. Did Altman really have the experience needed to build OpenAI into a titan? How would it get its costs under control while simultaneously slashing costs for developers? Was OpenAI a consumer company, an enterprise company, or both? And how would it inevitably manage its complex relationship with its largest backer, Microsoft? But even with all of those questions, the one constant of this story so far is that no one knows exactly what happened. What it suggests to me is that the decision here seemed to be constrained to a very small group of people. The board no longer has confidence in his ability to continue leading OpenAI. But while Altman has become a larger-than-life figure in AI, Altman has always been a part of the broader Silicon Valley ethos dating well prior to the mobile boom that altered the trajectory of the Bay Area—and San Francisco. The company just a few weeks ago leased two buildings from Uber in Mission Bay —building out an office footprint of nearly , square feet. It feels like that is what makes this change such a stunning and important one—for the obvious reasons for OpenAI, and all the subtext behind it. It was also a classic, massively funded startup that burned capital for growth at all costs run by a former founder deeply entrenched in the Silicon Valley startup community. This is the same conference that Breed and many others hoped would mark a turning point for San Francisco, showing the world that it had become an epicenter for AI and would rebound from several years of struggling.

But even with all of those questions, the one constant of this story so far is that no one knows exactly what happened. Sometimes, the very people most familiar with a story are the ones most moved to try to explain things via shared fiction.

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His name is appearing in headlines around the world for his dramatic dismissal from the company he founded, OpenAI. It's perhaps due to the fact that in the past year, Sam Altman , the father of ChatGPT, has become the hottest face in the world of artificial intelligence, or AI. But his notoriety is nothing new: he has been in Silicon Valley's spotlight for nearly two decades already. Altman entered the tech world as a fresh college dropout in In the same vein as Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Mark Zuckerberg , the then twenty-year-old man quit his Stanford University degree in computer science to start a company that allowed users to share their geolocation called Loopt. With no academic commitments and the future of Loopt in his hands, Altman joined the Y Combinator YC - a major accelerator of technology start-ups that also helped launch the likes of Airbnb, Reddit, Dropbox and Coinbase - which helped launch him to stardom. Despite its flop, Loopt allowed Altman to make a name for himself in Silicon Valley. And two years later, he was picked as the successor of Y Combinator president, American computer scientist Paul Graham.

Sam altman popped collar

His Reddit ownership is another matter altogether. Altman, 38, is among the biggest Reddit shareholders, with control of 7. Like other insiders, Altman is restricted from selling Reddit shares for six months during the so-called lockup period. Altman declined to comment. Prior to the emergence of OpenAI in recent years, due most notably to the popularity of its ChatGPT chatbot, Altman was best known as a startup investor and as the president of Y Combinator, a position he exited in

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But the problem was, the idea of a hiring a CEO is something both Graham and Altman are diametrically opposed to. Sign in. Substack is the home for great writing. So, like, same, except exactly the opposite. Altman said he wants to focus on recruiting, to increase the diversity and quality of incoming founders and plant the seed for future applicants that may be years out. He talks a lot, to a lot of people. Reddit Pocket Flipboard Email. A guy who Graham was comparing to Bill Gates as early as Did Altman really have the experience needed to build OpenAI into a titan? The days in between were the most chaotic breakup in recent Silicon Valley history—and raise plenty of questions about where things go next.

His Reddit ownership is another matter altogether. Altman, 38, is among the biggest Reddit shareholders, with control of 7. Like other insiders, Altman is restricted from selling Reddit shares for six months during the so-called lockup period.

Nobody had ever heard of Loopt. But to the machines, it was all just background noise, some distant hum of human discord. And how would it inevitably manage its complex relationship with its largest backer, Microsoft? At the time, I was a teenage employee of an online chat company with Apple roots that had Sculley as a board member and investor, as well as a huge Apple dweeb who handled the return of Jobs like a Marvel fan glimpsing a bygone fav in a mid-credits scene. Because there really are a number of similarities between Altman and another Sam of recent yore—Bankman-Fried—whose fraud trial I spent my October observing. Sign up for the newsletter Today, Explained Understand the world with a daily explainer plus the most compelling stories of the day. Will its unruly user base revolt? He struck out. And both Sams ultimately became well-known and willing avatars for their respective nascent industries, always ready to don those little nude nub microphones they hand out at tech conference panels and opine about P values and the future of crypto or AI. Check your inbox for a welcome email.