Sam Altman
AI · Startups · AI Policy · b. 1985 · American
OpenAI's CEO and chief evangelist for the AGI thesis - architect of the ChatGPT moment and the most consequential AI fundraising in history.
Biography
Altman co-founded OpenAI in 2015 with Musk, Sutskever, and others, became its CEO in 2019, and turned ChatGPT's November 2022 launch into the fastest consumer-product adoption ever recorded. After being briefly fired by the OpenAI board in November 2023, he returned within days and has since led capital raises positioning OpenAI as a planetary-scale compute and product company.
Affiliations
OpenAI
CEO · 2019–present
Y Combinator
President · 2014–2019
Major contributions
OpenAI commercial strategy
Architected the capped-profit, Microsoft-partnered structure.
ChatGPT launch
Forced AI into the consumer mainstream.
Compute industrial policy
Pushing trillion-dollar-scale chip and energy buildouts.
Major works
Moore's Law for Everything (essay)
2021
Planning for AGI and Beyond (OpenAI blog)
2023
The Intelligence Age (essay)
2024
Awards & honors
- Time 100 Most Influential People · 2023
Intellectual lineage
Influences
- Paul Graham
- Peter Thiel
Influenced
- -
Timeline
2014
Became President of Y Combinator.
2015
Co-founded OpenAI.
2019
Became OpenAI CEO; closed Microsoft investment.
2022
Launched ChatGPT.
2023
Briefly fired and reinstated by the OpenAI board.
Notable positions
- AGI is achievable and will arrive sooner than most expect.
- Abundance economics will redefine work and wealth.
- Compute, energy, and chips are the binding constraints.
Related entities
Other scientists
Geoffrey Hinton
The 'Godfather of Deep Learning' whose backpropagation work made modern neural networks possible - and who left Google in 2023 to warn about AI risks.
Open profile
Yann LeCun
Architect of convolutional networks and Meta's chief AI scientist - the field's loudest skeptic of LLM-only paths to general intelligence.
Open profile
Yoshua Bengio
Deep-learning pioneer who pivoted his career toward AI safety governance after the rise of GPT-class models.
Open profile
Demis Hassabis
Neuroscientist turned chess prodigy turned CEO of Google DeepMind - driving AI from games (AlphaGo) to protein folding (AlphaFold) toward AGI.
Open profile
Ilya Sutskever
Co-inventor of AlexNet and Seq2Seq, co-founder of OpenAI, and now founder of a single-product superintelligence-safety lab.
Open profile
Fei-Fei Li
Creator of ImageNet - the dataset that catalyzed the deep-learning revolution - and a leading voice for human-centered AI.
Open profile