Sam Altman Is Throwing a Fundraiser for Andrew Yang in San Francisco

Table Of Content

• Security
• Sam Altman was at F1 spectacle in Las Vegas when he found out he was fired from OpenAI: WSJ
• San Francisco's 'Yang Gang' is having lunch at Sam Altman's house to raise funds for presidential candidate Andrew Yang
• Watch: US House takes next step toward impeaching Biden
• Sam Altman has a coyote problem at his $27 million San Francisco home
• Other Houses Owned by Sam Altman

John was recognized by Harvard Business Review for his leadership; by BostonInno in 2014 as a top 50 on Fire in Boston; Boston Chamber with a TOYL (Ten Outstanding Young Leaders) Award in 2006. In his free time, John is a passionate photographer and an accomplished triathlete (qualified for the worlds and 4x nationals). The closed-door, members-only event, planned for Monday night after House votes, comes as Washington tries to figure out how, if at all, to create rules for and regulate the rapidly moving AI industry.

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Altman purchased the 950-acre property in late 2020 for $15.7 million through an LLC, according to real-estate records reviewed by BI. The estate comprises five homes and vineyards in a picturesque Northern California landscape. He joins a roster of Silicon Valley titans with Hawaii estates, including Mark Zuckerberg, whose property purchases on the island of Kauai have sparked controversy, and Larry Ellison, who owns most of the island of Lanai. Marc Benioff, Jeff Bezos, and Peter Thiel have also scooped up sizable properties on the islands.

Sam Altman was at F1 spectacle in Las Vegas when he found out he was fired from OpenAI: WSJ

But it also determined that Altman’s “conduct did not mandate removal,” OpenAI said. The actions are a way for the San Francisco artificial intelligence company to show investors and customers that it is trying to move past the internal conflicts that nearly destroyed it last year and made global headlines. “Artificial intelligence urgently needs rules and safeguards to address its immense promise and pitfalls,” Blumenthal said in a statement. “This hearing begins our Subcommittee’s work in overseeing and illuminating AI’s advanced algorithms and powerful technology." The closed-door, members-only event, planned for Monday night after House votes, comes as Washington tries to figure out how, if at all, to create rules for and regulate the rapidly moving AI industry.

Sam Altman and the OpenAI chip odyssey - TechHQ

Sam Altman and the OpenAI chip odyssey.

Posted: Wed, 24 Jan 2024 08:00:00 GMT [source]

San Francisco's 'Yang Gang' is having lunch at Sam Altman's house to raise funds for presidential candidate Andrew Yang

But he is also the product of a strange, sprawling online community that began to worry, around the same time Mr. Altman came to the Valley, that artificial intelligence would one day destroy the world. Called rationalists or effective altruists, members of this movement were instrumental in the creation of OpenAI. He is very much a product of the Silicon Valley that grew so swiftly and so gleefully in the mid-2010s. As president of Y Combinator, the Silicon Valley start-up accelerator and seed investor, from 2014 to 2019, he advised an endless stream of new companies — and was shrewd enough to personally invest in several that became household names, including Airbnb, Reddit and Stripe. He takes pride in recognizing when a technology is about to reach exponential growth — and then riding that curve into the future. Before Sam Altman became the face of AI, the tech whiz went on an $85 million, 18-month real estate shopping spree — including splurging $43 million on a Hawaii estate located next to the home of the island’s first king, according to a report.

Perhaps the only time Altman suggested he has an abode in Hawaii was in a tweet last April, where he showed a photo of himself wake-surfing off the coast of Kailua-Kona. Altman’s family office, like many other Silicon Valley tech moguls’, likely managed the transactions, though it’s particularly private, with many details about its operations and staff members kept under tight lock and key. Presumably, that family office is Altman’s, as her name appears as a manager on paperwork for other businesses owned by the OpenAI chief, according to Insider. And the San Francisco home just serves as Altman's weekday residence — his weekend residence is a $15.7 million working ranch in Napa, a 950-acre property that has vineyards and five homes.

House lawmakers to host bipartisan dinner with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman

Microsoft invested billions of dollars in the startup and helped provide the computing power to run its AI systems. Nadella wrote on X, formerly Twitter, that he was “extremely excited” to bring Altman and Brockman and looked “forward to getting to know” Shear and the rest of the management team. John's deep curiosity and penchant for problem-solving led him to a diverse set of roles spanning many fields and interests. John was a VP at Meta, a Y-Combinator augmented reality startup based in Silicon Valley. John's also served as the Head of Innovation and New Ventures at the MIT Media Lab's Camera Culture Group, and the Managing Director of Emerging Worlds SIG, where he led the launch of collaborative innovation centers in Mumbai, Nashik, and Hyderabad.

Family offices are entities established to manage the finances and investments of wealthy individuals, wrangling everything from real estate and yachts to philanthropy. He has launched several investment vehicles over the years, including one with his brothers, Jack and Max, named Apollo Projects, and another entity titled Altman Family LLC. Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said that while AI could bring immense benefits to the US, implementing AI-based tech improperly could have consequences. "A failure to deploy AI in a safe and secure and responsible manner when it comes to critical infrastructure can be devastating," Mayorkas said. Some have been critical of Altman’s relentless push for progress in the face of advanced AI’s potential dangers. Altman himself signed, last year, a letter describing AI as an extinction risk for humanity; testifying before Congress, he said that “if this technology goes wrong, it can go quite wrong.” But he’s skeptical that slowing progress is the way to mitigate those threats.

He said companies should be required to get a license to operate and conduct a series of tests before releasing new AI models. But there are boundless other ways that machine learning is being deployed across the modern economy. Recommendation algorithms on social media rely on AI, as do programs that analyze large data sets or weather patterns. Much of the discussion focused on generative AI, which can produce images, audio and text that seem human-crafted. OpenAI has driven many of these developments by introducing products like ChatGPT, which can converse or produce human-like, but not always accurate, blocks of text, as well as DALL-E, which can produce fantastical or eerily realistic images from simple text prompts.

By Mr. Altman’s own admission, YC grew increasingly concerned he was spreading himself too thin. Kelly Sims, a partner with the venture capital firm Thrive Capital who worked with Mr. Altman as a board adviser to OpenAI, said it was like he was constantly arguing with himself. Mr. Altman, a slim, boyish-looking, 37-year-old entrepreneur and investor from the suburbs of St. Louis, sits calmly in the middle of it all. As chief executive of OpenAI, he somehow embodies each of these seemingly contradictory views, hoping to balance the myriad possibilities as he moves this strange, powerful, flawed technology into the future. In a March post on Serralta’s blog, called Raising Travelers, she wrote that she stayed at a Kailua-Kona property owned by “a friend” while vacationing in Hawaii, according to Insider. However, at the time of The Post’s story, Raising Travelers appears to have been stripped from the internet.

President Biden signed a sweeping executive order to guide the development of artificial intelligence, seeking to contain its perils and maximize its possibilities. In the absence of regulations, “companies decide how a technology is rolled out,” Laux said. Altman believes that although new technology can be shocking initially, society adapts quickly.

As the CEO of OpenAI, his salary is just $58,333, according to IRS filings, and his equity stake in the company is so small that it's "immaterial," he's said. He's made more than 400 investments in nine years, BI previously reported, in companies across diverse fields such as commercial flights and brain implants. While detailed information about the interior of Sam Altman’s residences remains elusive, a couple of photos on his public profiles provide intriguing glimpses into the spaces he calls home.

Mr. Altman also told me that he had asked one particularly homophobic teacher to post a “Safe Space” sign just to troll the guy. Georgeann Kepchar, who taught the school’s Advanced Placement computer science course, saw Mr. Altman as one of her most talented computer science students — and one with a rare knack for pushing people in new directions. “The hype over these systems — even if everything we hope for is right long term — is totally out of control for the short term,” he told me on a recent afternoon. There is time, he said, to better understand how these systems will ultimately change the world. And yet, when people act as if Mr. Altman has nearly realized his long-held vision, he pushes back.

To learn more about how DHS uses AI technologies to protect the homeland, visit the Artificial Intelligence at DHS webpage. But Gary Marcus, a New York University professor who testified alongside Altman and Montgomery, warned that a new agency created to police AI would risk being captured by the industry it’s supposed to regulate. IBM’s chief privacy and trust officer, Christina Montgomery, focused on a risk-based approach and called for “precision regulation” on how AI tools are used, rather than how they’re developed. Sam Altman, one of tech's most influential investors, is throwing an invite-only luncheon at his San Francisco home next week to raise funds for Yang, an entrepreneur whose uncommon policy ideas has earned him a fan base — or "Yang Gang" — in tech's heartland. An OpenAI spokeswoman didn’t immediately reply to an email Monday seeking comment. A Microsoft representative said the company would not be commenting beyond Nadella’s statement.