OpenAI CEO Sam Altman boasts an expansive car collection but often hops in an Uber to get across town. The billionaire investor and former president of startup accelerator Y Combinator leans toward UberX, the cheapest option offered by Uber Technologies Inc.
Altman has catapulted to the forefront of mainstream media as his startup, OpenAI, has become one of the fastest-growing companies in history.
This has similarly brought investing in AI to the forefront as some of the largest tech companies in the world see substantial stock boosts after AI-based investments. For example, Microsoft Corp. is up 35% in the past six months. In the startups market, AI startups continue to see substantial traction from retail investors too. Startups like AvaWatz, who use AI to create collaborative teams of drones, have raised hundreds of thousands from retail investors.
Altman’s choice to rely on Uber also sheds light on the platform’s popularity as a convenient option for busy people who value every second of their time. Despite his access to a wide range of luxury vehicles, Altman sees benefits in the reliability and convenience of on-demand transportation.
He wrote a blog post in 2014 titled "Uber vs. Car Ownership" that outlined the benefits of Uber, especially when compared to per-mile costs of owning a car that includes rapid depreciation and maintenance. In the post, Altman discusses the charging costs for his Tesla (compared to Uber) but also says Uber will likely raise rates, which might change the equation. Similar to other successful people, Altman tries to maximize his time and says in the post, "This of course leaves out the huge intangible of how much nicer it is not to drive and instead work/text/think/whatever."
A History Of Artificial Intelligence (AI) Milestones
Altman and a group of others including Tesla Inc. CEO Elon Musk created OpenAI in late 2015. The company initially operated as a nonprofit but transitioned to a for-profit company in 2019. It announced GPT-3, a language model built on massive internet datasets in 2020. This model could answer questions, translate between different languages and create new text that made contextual sense within the user's query. During this time, Altman and team also announced an application programming interface (API) that became the basis for the firm's commercial-focused tech.
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His company presented DALL-E in 2021. It's a learning model that can generate new images and virtual artwork from language such as "a Renaissance-style painting of a garden gnome eating a carrot." OpenAI moved from a smaller tech firm to a sensation in late 2022 with its launch of ChatGPT, the most-used generative AI tool that's reshaping the world. In January, Microsoft Corp. announced a $10 billion investment in the company, sparking further interest in generative AI models and setting off a race for AI among the big tech players.
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