Sam Altman

Samuel Harris Altman was born in Chicago in 1985 and grew up in St Louis, Missouri, in a liberal Jewish family. He received his first Macintosh at the age of eight, studied computer science at Stanford from 2003, then dropped out to found Loopt in 2005, a mobile geolocation app that was part of the very first Y Combinator cohort run by Paul Graham. Loopt was sold in 2012 for 43 million dollars. Altman became president of Y Combinator in 2014, developed the YC Research programme and backed hundreds of startups — including Airbnb, Dropbox, Stripe and Reddit, of which he was briefly chief executive in 2014. In December 2015 he co-founded the non-profit OpenAI with Elon Musk, Ilya Sutskever, Greg Brockman and others, with an initial billion-dollar pledge and the stated ambition of developing beneficial artificial general intelligence. He left Y Combinator in 2019 to run full-time the new capped entity OpenAI LP, backed by a major partnership agreement with Microsoft. Under his leadership OpenAI released GPT-2 in 2019, GPT-3 in 2020, DALL·E and Codex in 2021, then ChatGPT on 30 November 2022 — reaching a hundred million users within two months — and GPT-4 in March 2023. In November 2023 Altman was briefly dismissed by the OpenAI board before being reinstated five days later following a massive revolt by staff and an ultimatum from Microsoft, OpenAI's principal commercial partner. In parallel he invests in Helion Energy (nuclear fusion), the biotech start-up Retro Biosciences, and the Worldcoin project launched in 2023, which offers a digital identity based on iris biometrics. OpenAI released GPT-4o in 2024 and then o1, its first reasoning model, the same year. On this site Altman embodies the generative-AI period, a direct heir of Geoffrey Hinton's work and that of his students, and an extension of the mobile-cloud platforms built by Larry Page's Google and Steve Jobs's App Store, on which ChatGPT and its successors are distributed.