Sam Altman

Overview

Hailing from Chicago and born in 1985, Sam Altman is best known as the leader of OpenAI—the company behind ChatGPT that is arguably the most influential organization in the AI space. Before OpenAI and after dropping out of Stanford in 2005, Altman founded the location-sharing startup Loopt, which was among famed startup accelerator Y Combinator's first batch of companies. While Loopt never became a household name, Altman eventually returned to Y Combinator as its president in 2014.

OpenAI was conceived when Altman invited a star-studded guest list of tech leaders (including Elon Musk) to dinner at a Silicon Valley hotel in 2015. The group discussed countering Google in the race to achieve systems with human-level cognition (also known as artificial general intelligence), and ended up committing a reported $1B to launch the effort.

OpenAI came to prominence in late 2022 with the release of ChatGPT, which would become the fastest-growing consumer app in history by February 2023. However, amid fears over how quickly the technology was advancing, OpenAI's board abruptly fired Altman in late 2023. In just four days, he returned to OpenAI as CEO and reconstituted the board, where he has remained since.

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