Sam Altman

Samuel Harris Altman (born April 22, 1985) is an American entrepreneur and investor who has been the chief executive officer (CEO) of the artificial intelligence company OpenAI since 2019. Altman attended Stanford University for two years before he dropped out and co-founded Loopt, a geosocial networking application for smartphones. Loopt was acquired by Green Dot Corporation for $43.4 million in March 2012.[1] In 2011, Altman joined Y Combinator, a technology startup accelerator and venture capital firm, and was the company's president from 2014 to 2019.[2] He is a billionaire, due to investments in over 400 companies including Reddit, Worldcoin, Helion Energy and Instacart. Altman co-founded OpenAI in 2015 and became its CEO in 2019, a role that made him a prominent figure of the AI boom. He supervised the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022. In 2023, he was ousted by the organization's board of directors for not being "consistently candid".[3][4] The move was met with significant backlash from employees and investors, resulting in Altman's reinstatement five days later and the formation of a new board. Altman was born in Chicago on April 22, 1985,[5] to a Jewish American family. His mother, Connie Gibstine, is a dermatologist, and his father, Jerry Altman, was a real estate broker.[6][7] He is the eldest of four siblings: he has two brothers, Max and Jack; and a sister, Ann.[8] His paternal great-grandfather was born in Płock, Poland.[9] In 1989, the Altman family moved to Jerry's hometown of Clayton, Missouri.[10] At eight, Altman received his first computer—an Apple Macintosh—and began learning how to code and disassemble and examine computer hardware.[11][12] He attended John Burroughs School, a private institution in Ladue, Missouri.[13] In 2005, after studying computer science for two years at Stanford University in Stanford, California, he dropped out without earning a bachelor's degree.[14][15]