Irrespective of where Sam Altman goes from here, he will be known as AI’s first champion

Sam Altman's role in launching ChatGPT and shaping AI regulation made him the AI industry's most prominent face

The sacking of Sam Altman, the charismatic CEO of Open AI and a leading voice in the field, from his role as CEO at OpenAI, has come as a big surprise for the tech world. The reason cited is a lack of candour in his communications with the board, though the actual rationale will only become evident in time. This development marks a significant shift in trajectory for Altman, OpenAI, and the field of AI in general.

At 38, Altman had become a personality of great prominence due to the pioneering work done by OpenAI. Since the release of ChatGPT in November 2022, and the rise in public awareness about the potentialities of AI, Altman has been on a whirlwind tour of engagement through world’s major capitals, industries, universities and more.

His charm offensive and efforts to be a spokesperson on the positives of AI have stimulated informed debate in the field and led to tangible changes in policy stances around the world. Thus, at this moment of his departure from one of the most influential organisations in recent memory, it would be useful to put his and OpenAI’s trajectory in perspective and reflect on the changes that might lie ahead.

Altman, like many tech CEO’s, was a dropout from Stanford in 2005. Thereafter, he developed a location-based social networking app called Loopt, and sold it for $43 million in 2006. In the years that followed, he was closely engaged with startup incubator Y Combinator, rising to become its President in 2014.

Altman And OpenAI

Then, in 2015, Open AI was founded by Altman, with the ambition of creating an artificial general intelligence (AGI). The firm was supposed to work towards maximising the societal benefit of AI, and financial considerations were ignored due to the non-profit nature of OpenAI. At that time, the firm operated by using its $1 billion endowment from tech luminaries such as Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman.

In 2019, the non-profit nature of OpenAI changed to a capped profit model, as the expense of training such powerful systems finally caught up with the firm. The firm also transformed thereafter due to its engagements with Microsoft, which offered it funding of $1 billion in that year, and offered its cloud computing resources to train OpenAI’s models.

This investment from Microsoft, a seminal paper on transformers in 2017, and inhouse breakthroughs in generative AI technology by OpenAI, all contributed to raise the firm to the top of the heap in generative AI capabilities by 2021-22.

As the capabilities of ChatGPT grew with scale, Microsoft doubled down on its investments in AI. For Microsoft, AI was a strategy to break into Google’s monopoly into the search engine market, while further refining its existing offerings.

Their mammoth $10 billion investment into Open AI was what made ChatGPT-4 possible, and it raised Microsoft to the leading AI firm across the tech industry. Altman oversaw this whole process of transition from nonprofit to capped profit, and from autonomy to partnership.

The AI Evangelist

By 2023, with ChatGPT’s runaway success making Altman the man of the hour, he embarked on a marathon 22-nation tour to speak about the optimism he has for AI, and to try to influence regulation of the space in various jurisdictions.

Meeting various leaders in the EU, UK, Japan, APEC nations, and India, he championed the idea of an international regulatory body for AI, modelled after the International Atomic Energy Agency. He also advocated for nuanced regulation – stringent for major AI firms like OpenAI to safeguard against risks, but lenient for smaller startups to foster innovation.

Overall, Altman oversaw the rise of OpenAI from a small innovator in the AI space to a $90 billion behemoth, operating at the cutting edge of AI. He has also steered the developmental pathway for AI towards generative models, which are now being considered foundational for the future.

Altman At The Crossroads

His departure, therefore, comes as a shock for tech observers, and will undoubtedly lead to talent attrition from OpenAI, and possible poaching of this talent by giants like Google, Meta, Amazon, and others. The industry, already in a major state of flux due to its nascency, could see other chaotic scenarios related to regulation too, due to this move by OpenAI’s board.

For Altman though, it seems very unlikely that he will completely vanish from the scene. As a young, pioneering individual with a tall reputation in the industry, his departure is certainly not the last that we will hear of him. Moreover, as a serial investor with over 12 investments in 2023 alone, he’s got many more avenues to expend his time and come up with fresh innovations.

However, even if this is the last that we hear of Altman in the mainstream headlines, he can always be remembered as someone who introduced the concept of “Intelligence as a service”, who embraced the idea of regularly releasing improvements so that the public isn’t blindsided, and one who led the charge in developing and releasing one of the most transformative technologies of this century.

Srimant Mishra has a computer science degree from VIT University, Vellore and a law degree from Utkal University, Bhubaneshwar. He is an engineer with a deep interest in the field of Artificial Intelligence. Views are personal, and do not represent the stand of this publication