Sam Altman
Samuel Harris "Sam" Altman (born April 22, 1985) is an American entrepreneur and investor, best known as the co-founder and CEO of OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT. He previously served as president of the startup accelerator Y Combinator from 2014 to 2019.
Early career
Altman briefly studied computer science at Stanford University before dropping out in 2005 to co-found Loopt, a location-based social networking service. Loopt was acquired by Green Dot Corporation in 2012 for roughly $43 million.
Y Combinator
Altman joined Y Combinator as a part-time partner in 2011 and was named president in 2014, succeeding Paul Graham. Under his leadership, YC expanded its batch sizes, launched YC Research, and backed companies including Airbnb, Stripe, Dropbox, Reddit, and Instacart. He stepped down as president in 2019 to focus on OpenAI.
OpenAI
Altman co-founded OpenAI in December 2015 alongside Elon Musk, Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, and others, originally as a non-profit AI research lab. He became CEO of OpenAI LP (the capped-profit arm) in 2019. Under his tenure OpenAI released:
- GPT-3 (2020)
- DALL·E (2021)
- ChatGPT (November 2022) — the fastest-growing consumer software product in history at launch
- GPT-4 (2023) and subsequent frontier models
In November 2023, Altman was briefly ousted by OpenAI's board before being reinstated as CEO within days following pushback from employees, investors, and Microsoft.
Notable quote
"You can skip all the parties, all the conferences, all the press, all the tweets. Build a great product and get users and win."
Posted to Twitter on August 10, 2015, in a thread arguing that the degree to which people brag about their connections is inversely proportional to both the strength of those connections and the amount of impressive work they've done. See original tweet.