To people who don’t closely follow tech, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman seems to have vaulted from relative obscurity to running one of the most high-profile AI companies in the world. But Altman not only had a lifelong interest in AI, but was closely following developments in the field from more than a decade.
Sam Altman has said that the AlexNet paper in 2012, which showed a marked jump at image classification over traditional techniques, convinced him that AI could eventually produce powerful results. ”I was an AI nerd my whole life,” Altman said on a podcast. “I came to college to study AI. I worked in the AI lab. I watched sci-fi shows growing up and I always thought it would be really cool if someday somebody built it. I thought it would be like the most important thing ever. I never thought I was gonna be one to actually work on it,” he added.
“And I feel like unbelievably lucky and happy and privileged that I get to do this. I like I’ve come a long way from my childhood. But there was never a question in my mind that this would not be the most exciting, interesting thing. I just didn’t think it was gonna be possible. And when I went to college, it really seemed like we were very far from it,” Altman said.
“And then in 2012, the AlexNet paper came out, done in partnership with my co-founder, Ilya (Sutskever). And for the first time it seemed to me like there was an approach that might work. And then I kept watching for the next couple of years as it scaled up, got better and better. And I remember having this thing of like, why is the world not paying attention to this?” Altman said.
“It seemed like obvious to me that this might work. Still a low chance, but it might work. And if it does work, it’s just the most important thing. So like, this is what I want to do,” Altman said.
The AlexNet paper, titled “ImageNet Classification with Deep Convolutional Neural Networks” was presented by Alexander Krizhevsky, Ilya Sutskever and Geoffrey Hinton. It introduced a groundbreaking deep convolutional neural network (CNN) architecture that significantly advanced image classification. Remarkably, it was trained using GPUs, which enabled efficient handling of the large ImageNet dataset of over a million images. AlexNet dramatically outperformed previous methods in the 2012 ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge by reducing the top-5 error rate from 26.2% to 15.3%, demonstrating the power of deep learning on large-scale visual recognition tasks and sparking widespread adoption of deep neural networks in computer vision.
Sam Altman wasn’t the only one keeping an eye on these developments. Once the AlexNet paper came out, the team that wrote it decided to create a company, and looked at which tech giant could buy them for the highest possible price. Google placed the highest bid, and Ilya Sutskever and Geoffrey Hinton began working at Google.
Altman however had his eyes on Ilya, and wanted to recruit him. He sent him an email, but Ilya didn’t respond. Not one to be deterred, Altman went and attended a talk of his, and managed to strike up a conversation. Ilya and Altman got talking, and together with Elon Musk and Greg Brockman, decided to co-found OpenAI in 2015. The rest, as they say, is history. OpenAI launched ChatGPT in 2022, and set off the current AI revolution. But the seeds for all these developments had been planted all the way back in 2012 when Altman had first realized the significance of the AlexNet result.