AI: On Tech Origin Stories, Christmas Day 2023

...mythologizing the Tech Men and their Movements

It’s the Biggest Birthday celebration for over two and a half billion people in the world.

And more of the eight billion souls will join in wishing each other and every one a “Merry Christmas”. I’d like to do the same for you all: A Merry Christmas indeed to you and yours.

But Christ’s origin story and celebration highlights a core human need to mythologize movements and their founders who dent our lives. It’s certainly true in technology. We’ve all internalized and mythologized origin stories of Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Marc Andreessen, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, and of course the Google lads, Larry Page and Sergei Brin. And so many more like Jensen Huang of Nvidia also this year.

From the PC as a random starting point, to the Internet, and now of course the AI Tech Wave.

The men of the current era (and unfortunately, they’re still mostly men for now), are a continuation of this trend. This time Sam Altman is the ‘poster boy’ of the moment as evidenced by Christmas Eve articles on his origin story, how he got here, and where does he and we all go from here. He’s certainly had a drama filled year to say the least.

And a mythology that keeps growing over his exponential years in Silicon Valley. As the Washington Post highlights in “How Sam Altman took over Silicon Valley”:

“For almost a decade, Altman, 38, has been one of the tech world’s foremost fireballs of investment energy. He won devotion — and dollars — from prominent investors, including his key early mentors, Thiel and Paul Graham, a founder of Y Combinator, the tech start-up incubator that Altman would come to run.

“You could parachute him into an island full of cannibals and come back in five years and he’d be the king,” Graham wrote in 2008.”

“When Altman was in college, Graham said, within three minutes of meeting him, “I remember thinking ‘Ah, so this is what Bill Gates must have been like when he was 19.’” What Graham saw was not a deep knowledge of technology but rather “toughness, adaptability, determination.… Those are the qualities you need to win.”

The stories on how he ended up leading OpenAI in 2015 is a mythology even deeper that involves Larry Page of Google and Elon Musk of well, seemingly everything over an all night fireside chat at a California wine country resort in July 2015.

This New York Times piece is a good place to get a good taste of it if you missed it a few weeks ago.

The broader point of course is the AI movement that is the core subject at hand. And this site is to focus on that in these early days. I’ve had the pleasure of penning over two hundred daily posts this year on this exponential technology journey. And am appreciative that you’ve joined me on this long trip.

In the end, the big movements around the tech waves are the stories that ultimately do change the lives of billions, mostly for the better. The PC, the Internet, Social Media, and now AI are part of these ongoing tech ‘S Curves’. These are the Origin stories that ultimately matter the most.

So much to look forward to next year and beyond on AI innovations and investments. But on this day of celebrating an important birthday, I wanted to take a beat and celebrate other technology origin stories that are moving our world to whatever’s ahead.

Merry Christmas again. Stay tuned.

(NOTE: The discussions here are for information purposes only, and not meant as investment advice at any time. Thanks for joining us here)