Sam Altman is a prominent American entrepreneur and investor, best known as the former President of Y Combinator, a startup accelerator and venture capital firm, and as the founder of OpenAI, a leading artificial intelligence research organization. Altman was born on April 22, 1985, in Chicago, Illinois, and grew up in St. Louis, Missouri.
Altman’s interest in technology started at an early age, and he taught himself to code while still in high school. He went on to study computer science at Stanford University, where he became involved in the startup scene and launched his first company, Loopt, a location-based social networking app, in 2005. Loopt quickly gained popularity and raised over $30 million in funding before being acquired by Green Dot Corporation in 2012.
After the acquisition, Altman joined the Green Dot team and worked as the company’s Chief Scientist for a year before leaving to start his next venture, a payments company called CardSpring. CardSpring was acquired by Twitter in 2014, and Altman joined Twitter as an executive for a short time before leaving to focus on his work at Y Combinator.
Altman became the President of Y Combinator in 2014, succeeding co-founder Paul Graham. Under his leadership, Y Combinator grew significantly and expanded its operations to include international locations in China and India. Altman also increased the size of the Y Combinator funding rounds and helped launch several successful startups, including Airbnb, Dropbox, and Reddit.
In 2015, Altman co-founded OpenAI with Elon Musk, Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, John Schulman, and Wojciech Zaremba. OpenAI is a non-profit research organization focused on advancing artificial intelligence in a way that benefits humanity. The organization has made significant contributions to the field of AI, including developing the widely-used language model GPT-3.
In addition to his work at Y Combinator and OpenAI, Altman is also an active investor and advisor to several startups, including Airbnb, Stripe, and Reddit. He is known for his outspoken views on entrepreneurship, politics, and social issues, and has been featured in numerous publications and media outlets, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and CNBC.
Altman stepped down as President of Y Combinator in 2019 to focus on his work at OpenAI, where he currently serves as the CEO. Under his leadership, OpenAI has continued to make significant contributions to the field of AI, including developing cutting-edge models for natural language processing and computer vision. Altman is widely recognized as a leading figure in the tech industry and a champion of ethical AI development.
