Yesterday morning everyone’s attention was drawn to one piece of news. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella announced that Altman would be joining the tech giant to lead a new advanced artificial intelligence research team.

And even though Sam Altman’s name has become the most commented on for a few days, few of you actually know who he is and what his contributions to artificial intelligence are.

Let’s get to know the founder of ChatGPT a little better and understand what significance he has in the field of technology. 10 things you need to know about Sam Altman, presented by News Ablive.

• Samuel Harris Altman was born into a Jewish family on April 22, 1985. He grew up in St. Louis, Missouri, USA. He got his first computer when he was only eight years old.
• He chose to go to Stanford University to study computer science, but dropped out after one year. In 2005, he decided to pursue other things.
• At the age of 19, he co-founded the location-based social media app, Loopt. He raised $30 million from venture capital funds, but the company failed to get on its feet. Loopt was eventually purchased by Green Dot Corporation for $43.4 million in 2012.
• In 2011, Loopt joined Y Combinator as a part-time partner. Within 3 years, he became president of Y Combinator.
• In 2015, he joined Combinator. Altman made Forbes’ “30 under 30” list.
• In 2016, he became the president of YC Group which comprised Y Combinator and other units. He then decided to focus on the AI research lab OpenAI in 2019 and hence stepped down from the president of the YC Group to just holding a chair on its board.
• In 2019, he co-founded Tools for Humanity, a company that built a cryptocurrency-based global iris-based biometric system, called Worldcoin. However, the company drew flak after the publication of a 2022 report by MIT Technology Review which revealed that it exploited the indigent workers of low-income countries in order to expand its network.
• He then made the complete transition to OpenAI as a CEO and co-founder in 2020. The company had already received funding from tech giants such as Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, and others.
• He was named one of the 100 most influential people by Time Magazine in 2023 based on his work with OpenAI and his investments in startups such as Airbnb, Stripe, Pinterest, Reddit, etc.
• Fun fact, he was also the the CEO of our beloved Reddit for a short span of eight days in 2014 during the period when Yishan Wong stepped down and Steve Huffman returned as CEO.

On Friday, he achieved another rare milestone: induction into the Silicon Valley Engineers Council Hall of Fame.

The purpose of the council – a coalition of engineering societies, including the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, SAE International and the Association for Computing Machinery – is to promote engineering programs and improve community cohesion through science.

Past members of the Hall of Fame include such industry notables as Intel founders Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore, former Stanford University president and MIPS founder John Hennessy, and Google Distinguished Engineer and University of California at Berkeley Professor Emeritus David Patterson.

Recognition as an “Industry Leader”

“I am honored to be inducted into the Silicon Valley Hall of Fame. The work that goes into being recognized as part of the Hall of Fame is part of a great team effort. Many faculty and students were involved in stream processing research at Stanford, and a very large team at NVIDIA was involved in translating that research into GPUs. Now is a really exciting time to be a computer engineer.”

Accepting the award, Daly said:

“The future is bright with many more demanding applications waiting to be accelerated using the principles of stream processing and accelerated computing”

– he said.

His induction began with a video featuring colleagues and friends spanning his career at Caltech, MIT, Stanford and NVIDIA.

In the video, NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang described Daly as “an extraordinary scientist, engineer, leader and incredible human being.”

Fei-Fei Li, Stanford professor of computer science and co-director of the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI, speaks highly of Daly’s “journey from a world-class academic scientist and researcher to an industry leader” who led one of the “greatest digital AI revolutions of our time – both software and hardware.”

After the tribute video, Fred Barrez, chairman of the Hall of Fame committee and professor of mechanical engineering at San Jose State University, took the stage and said:

“This year’s award winner has made significant contributions not only to his profession, but to Silicon Valley and beyond.”

At the heart of the GPU revolution
As head of NVIDIA Research for nearly 15 years, Daly has built a team of more than 300 scientists worldwide, with groups spanning a wide range of topics including artificial intelligence, graphics, simulation, computer vision, self-driving cars and robotics.

Prior to joining NVIDIA, Daly developed cutting-edge engineering at some of the world’s top academic institutions. His development of streaming processing at Stanford led directly to GPU computing, and his contributions are responsible for much of the technology used in high-performance computing networks today.

The truth is that we are dependent on technology, social media and everything which lives in the industry. Sometimes all these gadgets and applications are a complete waste of time but also, there are some inventions which made our life better. The question is – who are the coders who created those inventions?

Larry Page and Sergey Brin

They met each other at Stanford University where they both studied computer science. Soon after graduation, they both started working on a search engine initially called Backrub. Their intention was to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” .

However, the search engine soon is being renamed and that’s how Google was born in 1998 and its first office was situated in a garage at Menlo Park, California. Its owner was Susan Wojcicki who was the 16th employee at the company and now a CEO of YouTube.

Now, Google is the most famous and usable search engine which is providing a lot of helpful tools and products to its users, making their work and life easier.

Mark Zuckerberg 

Probably when you hear this name you associate it with the most famous social media – Facebook. That’s because, as we all know, he is the creator of this platform. But have you ever asked yourself how Facebook was invented?

Well, Mark Zuckerberg was a student at Harvard University when he launched this social media in 2003, called “FaceMash” but a couple of months later it was renamed to “TheFacebook”. The change of the name was on 4th of February and actually this is the date when the platform was officially released.  Zuckerberg’s main goal was to create a website where people around the university could connect to each other easier. However, it turns out to be a social media platform, used by billions of people who enjoy all the features and options they are provided with.

Bill Gates

In 1975 Bill Gates, together with his friend Paul Allen, founded Microsoft which is a tech giant nowadays. In other words, this is the largest personal computer software company.

Actually, Bill Gates was a dropout of Harvard University where he studied as a pre-law student. However, he was more interested in computer science and he spent most of his time at the University’s computer center with the intention to improve his computing skills.

Now he is one of the richest men in the world and his company provides its users a colorful spectrum of products and features which are helpful for everyone using it. Microsoft is constantly working on its success and expanding and it seems that it has no intention to stop.

Margaret Heafield Hamilton

She was born in 1936 and she has contributed to NASA’s Apollo Program. Margaret had studied Mathematics and Philosophy at Earlham College in Richmond and it seemed that Mathematics played a crucial part in her life.

Margaret is one of the best female programmers and soon after moving to Boston with her husband – James Hamilton, she accepted a job at MIT where she started working on a software which was supposed to predict the weather.

Also, in the early 1960s she was working on a program which had to identify enemy aircraft. The intention behind this was to help the US air defense system.

Guido van Rossum

He is a Dutch computer programmer who is the creator of Python – one of the most famous programming languages. He named the language after a TV show called “Monty Python’s Flying Circus”. At first, he just wanted to find a hobby “project” to spend his weekend on but soon it turned out to be more than a project. Guido van Rossum worked for Google from 2005 to December 2012. Also, in 2013 he started working for Dropbox.

Rossum has received some awards and one of them is the Award for the Advancement of Free Software.

While the instructors could share their knowledge with hundreds, even thousands, of students at a time during lectures, when it came to homework, large-scale and high-quality feedback on student assignments seemed like an insurmountable task. Chris Piech, assistant professor of computer science and co-creator of Code In Place said:

“It was a free class anyone in the world could take, and we got a whole bunch of humans to help us teach it. But the one thing we couldn’t really do is scale the feedback. We can scale instruction. We can scale content. But we couldn’t really scale feedback.”

To solve this problem, Piech worked with Chelsea Finn, assistant professor of computer science and of electrical engineering, and PhD students Mike Wu and Alan Cheng to develop and test a first-of-its-kind artificial intelligence teaching tool capable of assisting educators in grading and providing meaningful, constructive feedback for a high volume of student assignments.

Their innovative tool, which is detailed in a Stanford AI Lab blogpost, exceeded their expectations.

Teaching the AI tool

In education, it can be difficult to get lots of data for a single problem, like hundreds of instructor comments on one homework question. Companies that market online coding courses are often similarly limited, and therefore rely on multiple-choice questions or generic error messages when reviewing students’ work. Finn said:

“This task is really hard for machine learning because you don’t have a ton of data. Assignments are changing all the time, and they’re open-ended, so we can’t just apply standard machine learning techniques.”

The answer to scaling up feedback was a unique method called meta-learning, by which a machine learning system can learn about many different problems with relatively small amounts of data.

“With a traditional machine learning tool for feedback, if an exam changed, you’d have to retrain it, but for meta-learning, the goal is to be able to do it for unseen problems, so you can generalize it to new exams and assignments as well,” said Wu, who has studied computer science education for over three years.

The group found it much easier to get a little bit of data, like 20 pieces of feedback, on a large variety of problems. Using data from previous iterations of Stanford computer science courses, they were able to achieve accuracy at or above human level on 15,000 student submissions; a task not possible just one year earlier, the researchers remarked.

A new report from the tech education resource company Switchup analyzed which boot camps can land people jobs at the Big Five companies: Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft. Switchup analyzed LinkedIn data of alumni from coding boot camps that hold jobs at the Big Five. It analyzed employment rates for 370 boot camps.

The number one coding Bootcamp attended by employees of the Big Five was Code Fellows. Eleven per cent of Code Fellows’ graduates are employed at the Big Five. This Bootcamp had about 2,000 alumni listed on LinkedIn. It had a similar percentage of alumni employed at Stanford University and was higher compared to Cornell University’s 9.44% and the University of California-Berkeley’s 8.68%.

The next best Bootcamp was Hackbright Academy (5.82%), followed by Hack Reactor (5.16%), Product School (4.94%), App Academy (4.71%), Coding Dojo (4.40%), Galvanize (3.98%), Fullstack Academy (3.19%), General Assembly (2.70%), and Udacity (2.39%).

According to Switchup, one of the biggest draws of coding boot camps over college is the price tag. The most expensive boot camps cost less than $30,000, while top universities can cost more than $250,000. Sung Rhee, founder and CEO of Optimal, the parent company of Switchup, wrote in a post:

“Overall, our findings showed coding boot camps offered competitive employment results compared to computer science degrees from top universities, at around 10% of the cost.”

What is more, the survey found that certain prestigious universities, including Stanford University, Cornell University, and University of California-Berkeley, had higher rates of employment at the Big Five, but overall, the average employment rates for computer science graduates and Bootcamp graduates were similar. The average percentage of alumni from a traditional college employed at a Big Five company was 6.60% and the percentage for Bootcamp alumni was 6.03%.