Sam Altman, a college dropout turned billionaire, has become one of the most influential figures in the tech world. His journey began with Looped, a mobile app founded alongside his classmates, which was the first company funded by Y Combinator. The app met reasonable success before being sold for $43 million. Moving beyond Looped, Altman ventured into investing and became a partner at Y Combinator, where under his leadership, the accelerator saw a significant expansion, investing in a plethora of promising startups, with a combined company valuation surpassing $100 billion.

Sam Altman's interest in advanced technology led him to artificial intelligence, an area he identified as the future long before it reached its current prominence. Co-founding OpenAI with Elon Musk, Altman sought to ensure that AI serves humanity universally. Despite initial challenges, such as Elon Musk's departure and financial constraints, Altman forged a strategic partnership with Microsoft. This collaboration transformed OpenAI, leading to groundbreaking advancements, including GPT-3 and DALL-E, culminating in the launch of ChatGPT, the fastest-growing product ever.

Main takeaways from the video:

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Key Vocabularies and Common Phrases:

1. Trajectory [trəˈdʒɛktəri] - (n.) The path followed by a projectile flying or an object moving under the action of given forces.

However, what Sam did next would change the Trajectory of his life.

2. Prodigy [ˈprɒdɪdʒi] - (n.) A person, especially a young one, endowed with exceptional qualities or abilities.

But he wasn't the only Prodigy at Stanford.

3. Monopoly [məˈnɑːpəli] - (n.) Exclusive control of a commodity or service in a particular market.

Essentially, Google had a Monopoly on the best AI engineers.

4. Ruthless [ˈruːθləs] - (adj.) Having or showing no pity or compassion for others.

This Ruthless investing strategy attracted the attention of the billionaire Mark Andreessen.

5. Intuition [ˌɪntjuˈɪʃən] - (n.) The ability to understand something immediately, without the need for conscious reasoning.

The wild success of ChatGPT not only proved that Sam Altman's Intuition is freakishly good...

6. Adrenaline [əˈdrɛnəlɪn] - (n.) A hormone produced by the adrenal glands that increases the rate of blood circulation.

However, he hated the VC life because it didn't give him the same kind of adrenaline as running his own company.

7. Aggregates [ˈæɡrɪɡəts] - (v.) Forms or groups into a cluster.

This open doors approach resulted in aggregates over 40,000 applications a year, which is a sickening amount of interviews.

8. Tsunami [tsuːˈnɑːmi] - (n.) A long high sea wave caused by an earthquake or other disturbance.

AI was a tsunami. And Sam was more than ready to write it out.

9. Displacement [dɪsˈpleɪsmənt] - (n.) The removal or lowering in rank or position.

Perhaps the most obvious is job displacement.

10. Pessimistic [ˌpɛsɪˈmɪstɪk] - (adj.) Tending to see the worst aspect of things or believe that the worst will happen.

However, Sam thought that most people were too pessimistic about AI...

From College Dropout To Billion-Dollar Visionary: Sam Altman's Journey

I'm Sam Altman. I'm the co-founder and CEO of Loot. This is Sam Altman. He's only 19 here, and he just dropped out of college. Little did he know that one day he would change the world. I think history belongs to the doers. Sam Altman is the CEO of OpenAI. He holds investments in over 400 companies, and his decisions literally decide the future of humanity. One billionaire described him as having such a force of will that he's going to get whatever he wants. So how did he become so powerful? How did he go from a broke college student to the founder of the world's fastest-growing company? This is the story of Sam Altman.

I think people have terrible risk calculus, absolutely delusional level of self-confidence. But basically, I thought it would go exactly like this. You see a lot of entrepreneurs shoot themselves in the foot. They're just not aggressive enough. Sam Altman was born in 1985. As the youngest of three siblings, he got his first computer when he was eight. But the crazy part is that he already knew how to program it. Sam went to a Prestigious private school, and there he was, a talented debater, which refined his communication skills, an essential trait of a great CEO.

His first side hustle was building websites for local businesses and non-profits. However, what Sam did next would change the Trajectory of his life. With his work ethic and intelligence, he got himself into Stanford, one of the best colleges for ambitious sharks like Sam. But he wasn't the only Prodigy at Stanford. Two other future billionaires were there at that time. Evan Spiegel, the founder of Snapchat, and Kevin Systrom, the founder of Instagram.

During one summer, Sam Otto Portman almost became an intern at Goldman Sachs. But he later changed his mind because he found investment banking super boring. At this point, he was already two years deep into Stanford. But despite being a great student, Sam knew he was wasting his time. And so, at the age of just 19, he dropped out and convinced two other classmates to drop out with him. He founded his first startup, Looped, a mobile app that connected users based on their location.

Looped caught the attention of Paul Graham, a Silicon Valley billionaire and the creator of Y Combinator. Paul Graham immediately recognized the potential of young Sam and called him the best founder in the Bay Area, putting him on the same level as the world's greatest leaders, such as Sergey Brin, Larry Page, and Steve Jobs. Sam Altman's looped was the first ever company to be founded by Y Combinator, alongside startups like Reddit. Each founder received $6,000, which doesn't sound like a lot, but for broke college students, that's everything.

At its peak, Looped reached a $175 million valuation, but it struggled to grow further. So in 2012, Sam Altman decided to sell the company for $43 million. This was one of the biggest acquisitions of a social networking app at the time, and Sam walked away with a cool $5 million in his pocket. With millions in the bank and nothing to do, Sam decided to travel the world, race supercars, and fly airplanes all across California. Typical millionaire stuff. He liked racing cars so much that he even bought two McLarens.

Most people in his position would buy a nice house in San Fran and retire. But Sam isn't most people. He was hungry for more, and so he returned to the valley and became a venture capitalist. However, he hated the VC life because it didn't give him the same kind of adrenaline as running his own company. That's when Paul Graham gave him an offer he couldn't refuse. He told Sam that he could join Y Combinator as a partner. Not only would this allow him to learn firsthand from Paul Graham, but Sam could also do what he loved most, build new startups.

This is where his work ethic really started to shine. He was so good at recognizing promising startups that after just three years of being a partner, Paul Graham decided to make him president of Y Combinator. You've made him the president of Y Combinator? Yeah, he is gonna be the boss. Under Sam Altman's leadership, YC prospered. His strategy was to invest in startups, working on promising and world-changing ideas. Basically, no boring ideas allowed. YC massively increased the number of companies they invested in.

This Ruthless investing strategy attracted the attention of the billionaire Mark Andreessen. Altman's business moves impressed him so much that he said, under Sam, the level of Y Combinator's ambition has gone up ten x. The craziest part is that these are the words of a competitor because Andreessen has his own VC firm. Just goes to show how respected Sam Altman is. He wanted the best deals possible. And so he began interviewing everyone. While other investors only talked to people who had connections in the startup world, YC started doing the exact opposite.

As long as you had a business idea, you could get an interview. This open doors approach resulted in over 40,000 applications a year, which is a sickening amount of interviews. But, hey, the strategy worked because under Altman's leadership, YC portfolio grew to a combined valuation of over $100 billion. Now you're probably thinking, David, why is Sam Altman so good at investing? Well, here are his top three investing principles. Number one, focus on the founders. Number two, solve real problems. And number three, think long term.

Despite having an incredible career at Y Combinator, Sam Altman was looking for the next big thing. He knew his potential was greater than simply being a startup investor. He was still hungry for more. And in February of 2014, he found what he was looking for. He spotted the next big wave, and that was artificial intelligence. But this wasn't just a mere wave. AI was a tsunami. And Sam was more than ready to write it out. Today, it's kinda obvious, but back then, it was considered a failed science.

However, Sam thought that most people were too pessimistic about AI, and he knew that it would be the biggest development in technology ever. And so Sam decided to go all in. He teamed up with Elon Musk to start a new AI company. However, they quickly ran into an issue. See, back then, the industry was very different. There weren't hundreds of different businesses like there are today. Instead, 75% of all talent was at Google. Essentially, Google had a Monopoly on the best AI engineers.

When OpenAI was created, it did shift things into it from a Unipolar world, where Google and DeepMind controlled three-quarters of all AI talent. But that wasn't gonna stop Sam and Elon from launching their own company. So they organized a private dinner and invited the best AI people they could get their hands on. The mission of the company was to ensure that artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity. And with Sam Altman as the CEO, OpenAI went on a hiring spree. They made a list of the ten best researchers and were able to hire nine of them.

That's because OpenAI offered really good salaries. The best people are so much better than the pretty good people. Taking a page from Sam Altman's book, Im gonna ask you a question. Do you fall into the category of best people? And would you like to join me in building the biggest AI channel on YouTube? If so, fill out my hiring form first link in the description.

Hiring great engineers was only the first of many problems Sam, Altman and OpenAI had to overcome. By far, the biggest issue the company faced was money. Turns out that it's really hard to attract capital as a non-profit organization. Luckily, they had an ultra-rich individual as one of their founders. Yeah, I'm talking about Elon Musk, who promised to contribute $1 billion.

So that's the money problem solved, right? Not quite. Things didn't go as planned. Elon and Sam had some disagreements over the company's future, which resulted in Elon leaving OpenAI in 2018. This was a true low point for OpenAI. Not only were they running out of money again, but they lost one of their most important founders.

Sam Altman did all he could to attract new capital and talented, but every single investor turned him down. OpenAI simply needed too much money for a non-profit. This left Sam with only one option. Pack his bag, hop on a flight to Seattle and meet with Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft.

The result of that meeting, we are very excited to announce our strategic partnership with OpenAI. This change from a non-profit status was badly criticized by the public. Some argue that it goes directly against the original mission of the company. To be fair, OpenAI has capped the amount of profit that investors can make. However, that cap is 100 x the investment, which isn't far from being completely uncapped.

The reason Sam Altman chose to partner with Microsoft wasn't just because they were willing to put up the billion dollars, but also because Sam likes Satya Nadella. I think most CEO's are either great leaders or great managers. And from what I have observed with Satya, he is both.

With the support of a trillion-dollar company, OpenAI was in a better place than ever. And this is where the team really started to shine. In 2018, GPT-1 released it was okay, but it wasn't mind-blowing or anything. The year after that, Sam Altman decided to step down from the position of chairman at Y Combinator and to fully focus on OpenAI.

This was a really hard decision to make. He's been there for over seven years, and that company gave him everything from funding his first startup to helping him grow as a leader, to eventually having him as the president. However, Sam knew that if he wanted OpenAI to achieve its fullest potential, he needed to go all in. And it clearly paid off.

That same year, OpenAI released the GPT-2 language model. It was significantly better than GPT-1. In fact, GPT-2 was so good that it even impressed Jeffrey Hinton, the godfather of artificial intelligence. GPT-2 which was one of the earlier language models, amazed me.

But the biggest breakthrough was yet to come. In 2020, OpenAI released its best product, GPT-3, it could generate new text, summarize existing text, and even translate to all kinds of languages. Another huge breakthrough was the creation of DALL-E. The first version was released in 2021, and it proved to the world that AI wasn't just good at text. DALL-E demonstrated impressive creativity. It can generate images in all kinds of styles, including cartoons, photos, and even abstract art.

As mind blowing as DALL-E was, it was only the beginning. OpenAI's next product would literally change the world. Sam Altman had the idea to take GPT-3 and put it into a simple chatbot. However, most of the OpenAI engineers, including Craig Brockman himself, thought that developing a chatbot for the masses wasn't worth the time and energy.

However, Sam was convinced that it's going to work. And boy, work it did. Chat GPT became the fastest-growing product in history, reaching over 100 million users in less than two months. Think about that for a second. Most people don't realize what this means. The AI revolution is here. Chat GPT provided a user-friendly interface that even the least tech-savvy people could use.

The wild success of Chad GPT not only proved that Sam Altman's Intuition is freakishly good, but it also cemented his name in the history of AI. But who really is he? So far, we've only talked about his professional life. So what does his personal life look like? Believe it or not, Sam is a doomsday prepper.

He owns a nuclear bunker with a stash of gold, guns and gas masks. However, his underground bunker isn't the only controversial part of his life. In 2017, he wrote a blog post pointing out how political correctness and censorship was crushing the intellectual spirit of San Francisco. And I couldn't agree more.

Sam Altman also has an impressive personal portfolio, which consists of over 400 companies. Now that's what I call Diversification. Some of his best investments include Airbnb, Stripe, Reddit, Asana, and Pinterest. Sam is a passionate reader, saying he reads over 100 books a year.

He also supported the effective Altruism movement. However, after the whole FTX situation, effective Altruism is effectively a meme. Even though Sam Altman is already one of the most successful people on earth, he is pushing harder than ever. In 2023, he convinced Microsoft to give OpenAI another 10 billion to play with, making OpenAI worth over $30 billion. At this rate, the company might hit a trillion-dollar market cap soon.

Another massive development was the release of GPT-4, which can only be described as scary good. It's already better than most humans at most things. For example, it's better than 90% of doctors. GPT-4 scores 90% on the US Moe. It's a 90% performing. Most doctors don't score 90% on the boards. GPT is an ace doctor.

But with great power comes great responsibility, and there are some serious risks involved with AI. Perhaps the most obvious is job displacement. The skill sets of millions of people are becoming basically useless. When these large language models can do it better, faster, and cheaper, the best thing you can do is to learn as much as possible about AI.

So if you want to stay ahead, make sure to subscribe. By far, the biggest issue of all is the problem of alignment. We have to make sure that AI has the same goals as we do because if we don't, it's very likely that the human race will not survive. Right now, all of the major research labs, including OpenAI, aren't giving this problem enough attention.

However, Sam Altman is optimistic. I think that AI has the potential to eliminate nearly all human suffering in the next couple of decades. I think we can have a world of abundance. We can eliminate poverty over time, we can probably cure a whole lot of diseases. There are all these wonderful things that technology can do.

The reason why Sam has achieved so much in his life is because he is a great leader. This allowed him to become one of the most powerful people alive. He's in control of a company with the most advanced artificial intelligence on the planet, and it still feels like Sam Altman is just getting started.

Innovation, Entrepreneurship, Technology, Sam Altman, Y Combinator, OpenAI