“AI is a rare example of an extremely hyped thing that almost everyone still underestimates the impact of in even the medium-term.”
Sam Altman is a prominent American entrepreneur and investor, more recently known for his work in artificial intelligence. He is the current CEO of OpenAI, a research laboratory dedicated to advancing artificial intelligence in a responsible, safe manner. Prior to his work at OpenAI, Altman co-founded the popular location-based social networking app Loopt. Altman also served as the president of Y Combinator, a startup accelerator that has funded successful companies such as Airbnb, Dropbox and Reddit, of which he served as CEO briefly in 2014.
Altman has been recognized for his work in the tech industry and has been named one of Fortune’s “40 Under 40” and Forbes’ “30 Under 30” in the field of venture capital. Altman is an advocate for using technology to improve people’s lives and has spoken on the importance of addressing issues such as income inequality and the ethical concerns surrounding AI. In 2021, he founded the Web3 startup Worldcoin, which offers cryptocurrency in return for iris scans. The idea behind Worldcoin was to push for wider adoption of cryptocurrencies, with hints at it being a foundation for universal basic income in the future.
In 2022, artificial intelligence came out of the shadows and into the limelight as users had widespread access to tools like AI art generators. The year also proved eventful for Altman’s OpenAI, as the company’s ChatGPT product took the world by storm in the winter. GPT stands for “generative pretrained transformer.” GPT-3.5 is an upgraded auto-regressive language product. The AI uses deep machine learning to generate human-quality text responses based on the prompts the user inputs. People are using it for anything from creating text copy to finding bugs in application coding. It officially launched for public beta testing on Nov. 30 and surpassed the 1 million user mark within five days.
Prior to the launch of GPT-3.5, OpenAI also launched DALL-E 2, the successor of DALL-E, a generative art tool that creates realistic images and art based on descriptions in natural language. DALL-E 2 had such an extensive waitlist that users were onboarded in batches of 1,000 each week.
Most importantly for the crypto space, 2022 was the year that Worldcoin took off. The initiative was created in late 2021, but in April 2022, it began to turn outward and became open-source. The following month, Worldcoin hosted a panel discussion at Devconnect in Amsterdam on the future of personhood and decentralized identity. It was also in 2022 that Worldcoin started to push its physical orb, which scans irises in exchange for its native cryptocurrency. According to its “master plan” that it tweeted out in September, Worldcoin aims to become a proof of humanity and identity platform for the whole planet and to distribute a token co-owned by “all unique individuals on earth and beyond.”
In 2023, Altman is expected to continue his work on advancing artificial intelligence through his various endeavors in the space via ongoing research and development in areas such as natural language processing, computer vision and robotics. However, this year may present OpenAI with the need to focus on the ethical and responsible use of AI, as it has done in the past with initiatives such as its “AI alignment” research. At the end of 2022, there was backlash on social media from artists and other creatives who felt the technology exploited their work. Additionally, there are hints that OpenAI will work on integrating artificial intelligence with robotics, allowing machines to better understand and interact with their environment.
ChatGPT, although introduced to the world late in 2022, already has major predictions for its growth and acceleration in 2023. OpenAI projects that by the final quarter of 2023, it will cross 1 billion users. Altman’s other project, Worldcoin, has a similar prediction, as it too aims to hit 1 billion users by the end of the year. Worldcoin calls its onboarding process an act of verifying “proof of human,” which it highlights is necessary in a digital world filled with so many bots. At the beginning of the year, it reported that it had already processed 1 million sign-ups.
