Korean-American OpenAI Chairman's Wife Accompanied by DALL·E 2 Product Manager
Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI who sparked the generative artificial intelligence (AI) boom, is drawing attention as he visits Korea accompanied by Koreans.
On the 9th, Altman visited Korea for the first time. In the morning, he held a dialogue with Lee Young, Minister of SMEs and Startups, at the Grand Ballroom of the 63 Building, followed by a meeting with domestic startups and the press. In the afternoon, he held a dialogue event attended by about 1,000 domestic AI developers, researchers, entrepreneurs, founders, and university students. This event was arranged after Altman announced in March that he would tour major cities worldwide, including Seoul.
Unlike other countries, a large number of OpenAI executives accompanied him on this visit. Previously, Altman either traveled alone or was accompanied by only a few executives.
Greg Brockman, Chairman of OpenAI, and his spouse (left) and Joanne Zhang, OpenAI Product Manager (right) [Photo by Twitter]
Among those accompanying him were Koreans. Anna, the wife of Greg Brockman, co-founder and chairman of OpenAI, was born in Korea. Little is known about Anna, but she married Chairman Brockman in 2018. The couple is known to have a strong interest in Korea.
Joanne Jang, OpenAI Product Manager, is also of Korean descent. Manager Jang studied applied mathematics and computer science at Stanford University, which Sam Altman dropped out of. She has a strong interest in AI and applications, having worked at Dropbox and Google. At Google, she was responsible for natural language understanding of the AI assistant system 'Google Assistant.' She later joined OpenAI and is currently the product lead for the image generation AI 'DALL·E.'
The presence of key OpenAI executives visiting Korea is also notable. Chairman Brockman is one of the core executives of OpenAI along with CEO Altman and co-founder Ilya Sutskever. Brockman studied mathematics and computer engineering at Harvard University and computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), but dropped out of both. This was to join the payment startup Stripe as a founding member in 2010. This is similar to Altman dropping out of university to found the location-based social networking service (SNS) 'Loopt.' In 2013, Brockman became CTO of Stripe and grew the company into a leading U.S. fintech firm and a unicorn valued at over 100 trillion won. He later joined OpenAI in 2015. It is known that the startup accelerator Y Combinator, once led by Altman, invested in Stripe, establishing their connection.
Brad Lightcap, OpenAI Chief Operating Officer (COO), also accompanied the group. He is also in charge of investments for the venture capital (VC) 'OpenAI Startup Fund,' established by OpenAI last year. He has invested in small semiconductor chip manufacturer 'Atomic Semi' and AI developer for robot manipulation 'Covariant.' This has raised interest in the possibility of OpenAI investing in or collaborating with domestic AI startups.
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