• 6 months ago
How Sam Altman's failure with Loopt launched his future path to success.
Transcript
00:00 It's okay if you fail, and if you do fail, you'll not be in much different of a place
00:03 than you are today and you can go try the next thing.
00:06 You've probably heard of Sam Altman, the billionaire CEO of OpenAI.
00:10 OpenAI is the parent company of Chats GPT, which has quickly become one of the most known
00:14 names in artificial intelligence.
00:15 But there's a lot more to Altman than AI chatbots.
00:18 Altman has been making waves in big tech since he was a teenager.
00:21 At 19, he launched Looped, a social media site that pioneered real-time location sharing.
00:26 It allowed users to update their friends back in 2005.
00:29 Looped would go on to partner with most major phone carriers, including Verizon, Sprint,
00:33 and AT&T, but it never built the massive user base that Twitter and Facebook had.
00:37 It may have been simply ahead of its time.
00:39 The failure was just really the beginning of Altman.
00:41 After Looped was acquired by Green Dot Capital in 2012, Altman used some of his profits to
00:46 essentially become the leader of the modern internet.
00:48 His work at Startup Accelerator, Y Combinator, Bankworld, Reddit, Stripe, and Airbnb, all
00:53 companies that redefined how we interact, pay, and travel.
00:57 While OpenAI initially struggled with funding, organization, and its central purpose, it
01:02 ultimately went on to launch ChachiBT.
01:04 In the AI arms race, it now dominates big tech.
01:08 Altman was catapulted into the public spotlight for the good and the bad.
01:11 Some, including Elon Musk, have claimed Altman abandoned the principle of openness that founded
01:17 OpenAI in favor of chasing profits.
01:20 Altman made headlines in 2023 when OpenAI's board voted to fire him for a lack of candor
01:25 and hindering the company's governance.
01:28 He denied the claim.
01:29 OpenAI's staff threatened to quit, and Altman was ultimately reinstated as CEO.
01:33 So calling Altman a hero or a villain may be a matter of perspective, but there's no
01:37 denying his status as a disruptor.
01:39 -

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