Sam Altman
Sam Altman runs OpenAI and was fired and reinstated in a single weekend. Born in Chicago in 1985 and raised in St Louis, he dropped out of Stanford after two years to found Loopt, a location-sharing service that raised a great deal and sold for little. He became president of Y Combinator in 2014 at twenty-eight and ran it for five years, funding several thousand startups. He co-founded OpenAI in 2015 with Elon Musk and others as a non-profit, on the stated reasoning that artificial general intelligence was coming and had better be developed by people who took the risks seriously. The structure changed in 2019 into a capped-profit subsidiary under non-profit control, because training frontier models required capital on a scale philanthropy could not supply. Microsoft invested a billion dollars and eventually around thirteen. ChatGPT launched in November 2022 as a low-key research preview and reached a hundred million users in two months, the fastest adoption of any consumer product recorded. In November 2023 the non-profit board fired him, saying he had not been consistently candid. Almost all of the company's employees signed a letter threatening to leave; Microsoft offered to hire them; and he was back within five days with a reconstituted board. He has testified to Congress asking to be regulated, warned about the technology's risks in public, and pursued capital and compute at a scale that critics say contradicts both. He also funds nuclear fusion, longevity research and universal basic income trials. The non-profit control structure he built has been the subject of litigation from Musk and of scrutiny from state regulators.
- Lived: 1985 CE – ?
- Nationality: American
- Roles: entrepreneur, executive
