Sam Altman

Samuel Harris Altman was born on April 22, 1985, in Chicago, Illinois, to a Jewish family. Raised in St. Louis, Missouri, he showed early entrepreneurial drive, dropping out of Stanford University after two years to co-found Loopt, a mobile social networking service, in 2005 at age 19. Loopt raised over $30 million in venture capital before being acquired in 2012. In 2011, Altman joined Y Combinator (YC), a prominent startup accelerator, as a partner and was promoted to president in February 2014. Under his leadership until 2019, YC invested in over 5,000 companies, including DoorDash, Airbnb, Instacart, Twitch, and Reddit, with the collective value of YC companies exceeding $65 billion by late 2015. In December 2015, while still at YC, Altman co-founded OpenAI as a nonprofit AI research lab with Elon Musk, Greg Brockman, Peter Thiel, and others, securing $1 billion in funding to develop AI benefiting humanity. Altman became OpenAI's full-time CEO in 2019, transitioning it to a 'capped-profit' model to fund massive compute needs for artificial general intelligence (AGI). Key releases under him included GPT-3 (2020), DALL-E (2021), and ChatGPT (2022), attracting $13 billion from Microsoft by 2023.