Sam Altman, 39, co-founder of ChatGPT’s developer OpenAI, is clearly still looking forward after being fired (and quickly rehired) by the company he co-founded almost a year ago after the company’s board of directors accused him of being “not consistently forthright.”
Speaking on the San Francisco Standard’s “Life in Seven Songs” podcast on Tuesday, Altman said the shocking firing was “a very traumatic event to go through, and it happened in such a public way.”
Related: Former OpenAI board member reveals why CEO Sam Altman was fired
This follows an optimistic blog post Altman published on Monday, “The Age of Intelligence,” in which he said he expects AI will transform society over the next few decades, making “amazing achievements like fixing the climate, building space colonies, and discovering every bit of physics” “commonplace.”
He’s now one of the driving forces behind efforts to change the future with AI, but his path to leadership wasn’t always smooth or sure.
Days after Altman was fired 10 months ago, 95% of OpenAI signed a letter threatening to resign if Altman was not reinstated, while Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella offered him a job leading Microsoft’s advanced AI research group.
Altman returned to his position as CEO of OpenAI less than a week after his initial firing.
“And I had to deal with so many issues and I didn’t have time to process it or recover,” Altman said on the podcast. “Those first few months were just crazy and frantic and exhausting.”
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Back in his office, Altman said he still had small reminders of that drama-filled day, like old documents and lawyers’ notes, but he also learned some positive, if less tangible, lessons from the experience.
“I learned a lot about gratitude,” Altman said. “Just a sense of gratitude for the people around me and the things I get to do. I really value a sense of duty. If it’s something that you signed up for, if it’s something that you feel passionate about, if it’s something that you think is important, you shouldn’t turn your back on things no matter how hard they are. And that was a real growth moment for me and something that I’m proud and happy about.”
Sam Altman. Photo credit: Life in Seven Songs
Altman also said on the podcast that he keeps a prehistoric stone tool, a hatchet, in his office as a reminder of how far humanity has come.
“I stare at it a lot,” he said.
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In his “Intelligence Age” post, Altman wrote that technology has taken humanity from the Stone Age to the Agrarian Age to the Industrial Age. He said that superintelligence — an AI smarter than the brightest human mind — could be born “within a few thousand days,” calling the development “the most important thing in the entire history of mankind.”
OpenAI is currently valued at $86 billion, but Bloomberg reports that the company is in talks with investors to potentially raise $6.5 billion at a valuation of $150 billion.
