Sam Altman

Sam Altman is an investor and entrepreneur. He is the founder of companies OpenAI, Hydrazine Capital, Loopt, Tools for Humanity, AltC Acquisition Corp., and Apollo. Altman served as the president of Y Combinator from 2014 to 2019.

Altman was born on April 22, 1985 in Chicago, Illinois. He was raised in St. Louis, Missouri, where he attended the John Burroughs School. Altman studied computer science at Stanford University but dropped out in 2005 to found Loopt. Altman was awarded an honorary doctor of engineering degree from the University of Waterloo in 2017.

Loopt was first founded under the name Radiate in 2005 by Altman, Nick Sivo, and Alok Deshpande. Loopt was a location-sharing service for mobile phone users. With Loopt, a mobile user's location was automatically updated in real-time through their current global positioning system (GPS) coordinates and displayed on a map viewable by participating mobile contacts. Users could also share other "on-the-go" information, such as messages and photos. To get the app installed on mobile phones, Loopt first developed a deal with mobile carrier Sprint, and later other carriers, including AT&T, Verizon, Metro PCS, T-Mobile, and Boost Mobile. By the end of December 2008, Loopt was available through all major carriers in the US. However, Loopt failed to stay popular over time. In 2012, Loopt was acquired by Green Dot Corporation for $43.4 million. By this time, Loopt was reportedly down to only 500 daily active users, a figure that Altman claimed was "off by 100 times." In July 2010, Altman reported "hundreds of thousands" of daily active users and 4 million total users.

Hydrazine Capital is an early-stage venture investment firm founded in 2012 by Altman and his brother, Jack Altman. The firm's first fund raised $21 million. A significant amount of the fund came from Peter Thiel and Altman's proceeds from the sale of Loopt. In 2016, Hydrazine's value was reported to have grown "tenfold" since its founding. Hydrazine Capital has made investments in ValueBase, Zenefits, BuildZoom, Verbling, and Soylent.

Altman first began working with Y Combinator in 2011 as a part-time partner. In February 2014, he took over as the president of Y Combinator, succeeding previous leader Paul Graham. In 2016, as a result of some internal restructuring, Altman became president of YC Group, which included Y Combinator, YC Continuity, and YC Research. YC Continuity is a fund focused on growth-stage companies. YC Research was a nonprofit research lab. As of June 2020, YC Research is no longer part of Y Combinator. It is now known as OpenResearch. During his time as president at Y Combinator, Altman achieved higher diversity among admitted start-up founders and more than tripled the number of start-ups that Y Combinator processes in a batch. Altman stepped down as president in May 2019 to focus more on his company OpenAI. He remains involved with Y Combinator as a chairman.

Altman briefly served as interim CEO of Reddit for eight days in November 2014 between CEOs Yishan Wong and Ellen Pao.

OpenAI was founded in December 2015 by Altman, Elon Musk, Greg Brockman, Pamela Vagata, Ilya Sutskever, Trevor Blackwell, Vicki Cheung, Andrej Karpathy, Durk Kingma, John Schulman, and Wojciech Zaremba. OpenAI is an artificial intelligence (AI) research company known for creating ChatGPT, a conversational language model. OpenAI was originally founded as a nonprofit organization. Upon its founding, OpenAI said its goal was "to advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return." It was founded with a donation of $1 billion from Altman, Musk, Brockman, Reid Hoffman, Jessica Livingston, Peter Thiel, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Infosys, and YC Research.

OpenAI spent its first few years of operation training its neural networks in an attempt to build a product, but progress was slow, and there wasn't a clear end in sight. By 2017, the cofounders were lacking confidence that the company would survive the year. Altman stated, “Nothing was working, and Google had everything: all the talent, all the people, all the money." In early 2018, cofounder Elon Musk told Altman that he believed OpenAI had "fallen fatally behind Google" and wished to take control of the organization. The proposition was rejected by Altman and OpenAI's other cofounders, and Musk left OpenAI in February 2018. The publicly given reason for his departure was a conflict of interest with his company Tesla, which was developing its own AI technology.

In June 2018, OpenAI released its first iteration of its GPT series, GPT-1. It was trained with the text of over 7,000 books. GPT-2 was announced in February 2019. This version showed significant improvement in the transformer's ability to produce coherent, multi-paragraph text. It had been trained with more than 8 million web pages. GPT-2's official launch was delayed until November 2019 due to fears of potential abuse after OpenAI discovered its ability to generate fake and harmful content. Instead, OpenAI released a lesser version of GPT-2 with a citation of its charter, which notes that “safety and security concerns will reduce our traditional publishing in the future.” Jack Clark, the policy director of OpenAI, stated that OpenAI's priority is “not enabling malicious or abusive uses of the technology." The decision to delay GPT-2's full release was met with backlash by some and accusations of the company closing off its research.

On March 11, 2019, OpenAI announced it would begin operating under OpenAI LP, a new "capped-profit" company acting as a hybrid of for-profit and nonprofit organizations. The change was born out of a need to "invest billions of dollars in upcoming years into large-scale cloud compute, attracting and retaining talented people, and building AI supercomputers." OpenAI's new structure caps economic returns for employees and investors, with excesses going to OpenAI Nonprofit (the original OpenAI entity.) In May 2019, Altman took over as OpenAI's CEO.

GPT-3 was released in June 2020. Its advanced text-generation capabilities enabled its use in the drafting of emails, articles, poetry, and programming code. It also achieved the ability to answer factual questions and translate between languages. On November 30, 2022, OpenAI launched ChatGPT, a conversational language model powered by the improved GPT-3.5. ChatGPT responds to a user's prompts. It can answer questions and generate content upon request like articles, essays, jokes, situational advice, and poetry. The model's responses sometimes contain factual inaccuracies, as its answers are based on a memory of text patterns from a synthesis of all the texts it was trained on. Altman has distinguished it from a search engine by calling it a "reasoning engine." ChatGPT quickly went viral, attracting one million users in five days. After nine weeks, ChatGPT had 100 million monthly users, making it the fastest-growing consumer application in history.

GPT-4 was released in March 2023 with limited accessibility to paid subscribers of ChatGPT Plus, who were able to access it with a usage cap. A waitlist for its API was created, which was released to paying customers in July 2023. GPT-4 was trained by a team of over 100 people on a data set of unprecedented size, which included images as well as text. OpenAI policy director Sandhini Agarwal stated that GPT-4 was noticeably better than its predecessors at giving insidious answers. These behaviors were toned down by human volunteers rating its responses. GPT's answers are provided based on its memory of text patterns from a synthesis of all the texts it was trained on. Altman has distinguished it from a search engine by calling it a "reasoning engine." OpenAI continuously works to improve its GPT series using a technique called adversarial training. Through this method, multiple chatbots are pitted against each other, with one initiating adversarial text and forcing the other to produce unwanted responses. Successful attacks are added to ChatGPT’s training data in hopes of it learning to ignore similar future attacks.

The overarching and sometimes nefarious capabilities of ChatGPT, as well as AI as a whole, have sparked conversations about the safety of humanity's future. In May 2023, Altman signed a letter written by the Center for AI Safety that discussed the risk of human extinction as a result of AI technology. On May 16, 2023, Altman testified before the United States Senate in a panel hearing regarding the legal oversight of AI. He urged lawmakers to create regulations and safeguards around the parameters of AI, stating, “We think that regulatory intervention by governments will be critical to mitigate the risks of increasingly powerful models.”

On November 17, 2023, the Board of Directors of OpenAI announced the departure of Sam Altman from the company. On November 19, 2023, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella announced that Sam Altman would be joining Microsoft to lead a new advanced AI research team. On November 22, 2023, OpenAI reached "an agreement in principle for Sam Altman to return to OpenAI as CEO with a new initial board of Bret Taylor (Chair), Larry Summers, and Adam D'Angelo."

Altman cofounded Tools for Humanity with Alex Blania and Max Novendstern in 2019. Tools for Humanity is the creator of the project Worldcoin. First announced in June 2021, Worldcoin originated as a way to digitally verify a person's identity for the purpose of a universal basic income (UBI) system. Worldcoin launched on July 24, 2023. Worldcoin uses a small scanning device called the Orb to scan a user's eye to create their unique digital identity, called a World ID. This allows humans to be distinguished from AI-powered beings on the internet. Worldcoin also developed a cryptocurrency token and a payments app. Tokens were first issued to eligible people taking part in Worldcoin's beta launch. The initial coin supply is capped at 10 billion. Worldcoin aims to scale operations across twenty countries and hopes to eventually distribute 50,000 of its orbs worldwide to gain billions of new sign-ups. Worldcoin has raised privacy concerns regarding its collection of personal information, as well as criticism for deceptive marketing practices. As of August 2023, over 2 million people have registered with Worldcoin.

Project Covalence was launched in June 2020 by Altman, Mark Fishman, and TrialSpark. It was a platform that provided the technology, clinical operations, and logistical support needed to rapidly launch and run COVID-19 clinical trials. The project collaborated with several biopharma companies and organizations. Project Covalence was shut down in summer 2021 after multiple COVID-19 vaccines and therapies were authorized.

Apollo, also called Apollo Projects, is an investment fund founded in June 2020 by Altman and his two brothers, Jack Altman and Max Altman. Apollo was launched with the purpose of funding start-up "moonshots," a term for companies pursuing forward-thinking deep technologies. Apollo has funded companies including Marvin, Journey Colab, ExcepGen, 44.01, Planetary Technologies, and Terraformation.

AltC Acquisition Corp. is a special-purpose acquisition company founded by Altman and Michael Klein through Klein's Churchill Capital franchise in July 2021. Altman serves as AltC's CEO. In July 2023, AltC merged with the nuclear energy company Oklo.

Altman has invested in companies including Patreon, Instacart, Neuralink, Change.org, Lattice, Codecademy, TrialSpark, Rain Neuromorphics, ZeroDown, HelixNano, Meter, Nautilus Labs, Clever, Quartzy, Coalition, Gusto, 1910 Genetics, Spring Discovery, Alt, Beacon AI, Custora, Stripe, Cerebras, Magrathea, Uncommon, Reserve, and Wevorce.

In 2008, Altman was named one of the "Best Young Entrepreneurs in Technology" by BusinessWeek. In 2015, he was named the top investor under 30 by Forbes. In September 2017, GLAAD honored Altman with the Ric Weiland Award. The award recognizes tech industry innovators who advance LGBTQ acceptance. Time recognized Altman multiple times in 2023. In April 2023, he was listed on the TIME100 list, which honors the 100 most influential people of the year. In June 2023, Altman was featured on the cover of Time in honor of OpenAI, which was on that year's TIME100 Most Influential Companies list. In September 2023, Altman was honored on the new TIME100 AI list, which honors the 100 most influential people involved with artificial intelligence.

Altman is a proponent of universal basic income (UBI). While serving as president of Y Combinator, Altman helped launch a basic income study in Oakland, California in 2016. Through his company OpenAI, Altman has donated to organizations pursuing UBI pilot programs, including UBI Charitable and OpenResearch.