Sam Altman
CEO of OpenAI.
Education
- - John Burroughs School
- computer science - University studying
Overview
Samuel Harris Altman is an American entrepreneur and investor best known as the chief executive officer of OpenAI since 2019 (he was briefly dismissed and reinstated in November 2023) He is also the chairman of clean energy companies Oklo Inc. and Helion Energy.
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 $30 million in venture capital. In 2011, Altman joined Y Combinator, a startup accelerator, and was its president from 2014 to 2019.
OpenAI was initially funded by Altman, Greg Brockman, Elon Musk, Jessica Livingston, Peter Thiel, Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, Infosys and YC Research. When OpenAI launched in 2015, it had raised $1 billion. In March 2019, 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 May 16, 2023, about issues of AI oversight. After the success of ChatGPT, the company's chatbot application, Altman made a world tour in May 2023, during which 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.
Early Life
Sam Altman was born on 22 April 1985 (age 38 years)in Chicago, Illinois, United States.
since 2019 (he was briefly dismissed and reinstated in November 2023). He is also the chairman of clean energy companies Oklo Inc. and Helion Energy.
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 $30 million in venture capital. In 2011, Altman joined Y Combinator, a startup accelerator, and was its president from 2014 to 2019.
Altman was born on April 22, 1985, in Chicago, Illinois, into a Jewish family, and 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. At the age of eight, he received his first computer, an Apple Macintosh, and began to learn how to code and take apart computer hardware. 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.
Career
- OpenAI, Inc. - CEO
