Samuel Harris Altman, also known as Sam Altman, is an American entrepreneur and investor who is considered one of the key figures in the AI industry. He has been the CEO of OpenAI since 2019, although he was briefly fired and then reinstated in November 2023. Before his role at OpenAI, Altman served as the president of Y Combinator from 2014 to 2019.
OpenAI is a research organization based in the United States that focuses on researching artificial intelligence with the goal of developing it into a safe and beneficial technology. This refers to highly autonomous systems that can surpass human capabilities in economically valuable tasks. OpenAI has made significant advancements in large language models, advanced image generation models, and has previously released open-source models.
OpenAI, initially supported by Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, Elon Musk, Jessica Livingston, Peter Thiel, Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, Infosys, and YC Research, raised a total of $1 billion when it was launched in 2015. In March 2019, Altman transitioned from Y Combinator to become the CEO of OpenAI and played a key role in securing an additional $1 billion from Microsoft by the summer of 2019.
Before Open AI, Altman co-founded Loopt, a location-based mobile application for social networking, at the age of 19 in 2005. As CEO, he successfully raised over $30 million in venture capital for the company. Following this, Altman went on to co-found Hydrazine Capital with his brother, Jack Altman.
In 2011, Altman joined Y Combinator as a partner, initially working part-time. He was later appointed as the president of Y Combinator in February 2014 by co-founder Paul Graham. In a blog post that year, Altman mentioned that the combined valuation of Y Combinator companies had exceeded $65 billion, including notable names like Airbnb, Dropbox, Zenefits, and Stripe.
Sam Altman was born on April 22, 1985, in Chicago, Illinois, into a Jewish family. He grew up in St. Louis, Missouri and is the eldest of four siblings, including brothers Jack and Max, and sister Annie. At the age of eight, he received his first computer, an Apple Macintosh. Altman attended John Burroughs School in Ladue, Missouri. After studying computer science at Stanford University for two years, he dropped out without earning a bachelor's degree in 2005.
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