Sam Altman

Samuel Harris Altman (born April 22, 1985) is an American entrepreneur and investor best known as the CEO of OpenAI since 2019 (he was briefly fired and reinstated in November 2023).

Altman is considered to be one of the leading figures of the AI boom.

He dropped out of Stanford University after two years and founded Loopt, a mobile social networking service, raising more than $30million in venture capital.

Samuel Harris Altman was born on April 22, 1985, in Chicago, Illinois, into a Jewish family, and he grew up in St. Louis, Missouri.

His mother is a dermatologist, while his father was a real estate broker.

Altman is the eldest of four siblings—brothers Jack and Max and sister Annie.

At the age of eight he received his first computer, an Apple Macintosh.

He attended John Burroughs School, a private school in Ladue, Missouri.

In 2005, after two years at Stanford University studying computer science, he dropped out without earning a bachelor's degree.

In 2005, at the age of 19, Altman co-founded Loopt, a location-based social networking mobile application.

As CEO, Altman raised more than $30million in venture capital for the company; however, Loopt failed to gain traction with enough users.

In 2011 Altman joined Y Combinator, a startup accelerator, and was its president from 2014 to 2019.

Altman became a partner at Y Combinator, a startup accelerator that invests in a wide range of startups, in 2011, initially working there on a part-time basis.

In March 2012, it was acquired by the Green Dot Corporation for $43.4million.

The following month, Altman co-founded Hydrazine Capital with his brother Jack Altman.

In February 2014, Altman was named president of YCombinator by co-founder Paul Graham.

In a 2014 blog post, Altman said that the total valuation of YCombinator companies had surpassed $65billion, including Airbnb, Dropbox, Zenefits and Stripe.

In October 2015, Altman announced YCContinuity, a $700million equity fund investing in YCcompanies as they matured.

A week earlier, Altman had introduced YCombinator Research, a non-profit research lab, and donated $10million to fund it.

YC Research has thus far announced research on basic income, the future of computing, education and building new cities.

When OpenAI launched in 2015, it had raised $1billion.

In September 2016, Altman announced his expanded role as president of YCGroup, which included YCombinator and other units.

Altman said that he hoped to expand YCombinator to fund 1,000 new companies per year.

He also tried to expand the types of companies funded by YC, especially "hard technology" companies.

In March 2019, YCannounced Altman's transition from the president of the company to a less hands-on role as chairman of the board, for him to focus on OpenAI.

This decision came shortly after YC announced it would be moving its headquarters to San Francisco.

Altman co-founded Tools For Humanity in 2019, a company which builds and distributes systems designed to scan people's eyes to provide authentication and verify proof of personhood to counter fraud.

People who agree to have their eyes scanned are compensated with a cryptocurrency called Worldcoin.

Tools For Humanity describes its cryptocurrency as similar to universal basic income.

Altman has several other investments, including "Humane," the world's first wearable computer powered by AI, "Retro Biosciences," a research company aiming to extend human life by 10 years, and "Helion Energy," an American fusion research company.

OpenAI was initially funded by Altman, Greg Brockman, Elon Musk, Jessica Livingston, Peter Thiel, Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, Infosys and YCResearch.

In March 2019, Sam Altman left Y Combinator to focus full-time on OpenAI as CEO.

By the summer of 2019, he had helped raise $1 billion from Microsoft.

Altman testified before the United States Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology and the Law on 16 May 2023 about issues of AI oversight.

After the success of ChatGPT, Altman made a world tour in May 2023, where he visited 22 countries and met multiple leaders and diplomats, including British prime minister Rishi Sunak, French president Emmanuel Macron, Spanish prime minister Pedro Sánchez, German chancellor Olaf Scholz, Indian prime minister Narendra Modi, South Korean president Yoon Suk-yeol and Israeli president Isaac Herzog.

He stood for a photo with European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen.

On Friday November 17, 2023, OpenAI's board, composed of researcher Helen Toner, Quora CEO Adam D'Angelo, AI governance advocate Tasha McCauley, and most prominently in the firing, OpenAI co-founder and chief scientist Ilya Sutskyver, announced that they had made the decision to remove Altman as CEO and Greg Brockman from the board, both of whom were co-founders.

The announcement cited that Altman "was not consistently candid in his communications" in a public announcement on the OpenAI blog.

As of early 2020, he was no longer affiliated with YC.

It was later reported that Altman was fired from YC and had appointed himself chairman without authorization.