Silicon Valley wunderkind invests $180 million in longevity research

Who we're talking about: Sam Altman, a 37-year-old Silicon Valley CEO. Altman was a wunderkind entrepreneur who became CEO of the investment fund Y Combinator before he turned 30.

Today, Altman is the CEO of OpenAI, which he co-founded with the second-richest man in the world, Elon Musk. OpenAI is the organization behind ChatGPT, the incredible AI chatbot released last October, which has Google, Facebook, and Microsoft scrambling to keep up.

And the news is: Altman just invested $180 million of his own money into a little-known longevity startup, Retro Biosciences. The stated goal of Retro Biosciences is to add 10 years to average human lifespan.

At this point, Retro is being secretive about how they plan to do that, but they do say they are "starting with cellular reprogramming, autophagy & plasma-inspired therapeutics."

Why this is a big deal: Altman joins a growing list of absurdly rich people — including Amazon's Jeff Bezos, Twitter's Jack Dorsey, and PayPal's Peter Thiel — who have invested or donated unimaginable sums of money to longevity research.

It's another sign of how hot the longevity field is becoming. It's also making me hopeful that in the next few years, or maybe sooner, some of this massive investment will start to pay off with revolutionary new treatments for long youthspan.