Textbook of AI

1985–, Entrepreneur; CEO of OpenAI

Sam Altman is an American technology entrepreneur and the CEO of OpenAI since 2019 (with a brief interruption in November 2023). He co-founded OpenAI in 2015 with Elon Musk, Ilya Sutskever, Greg Brockman, John Schulman, Wojciech Zaremba and others as a non-profit research organisation aiming to develop safe artificial general intelligence; the organisation transitioned to a "capped- profit" structure in 2019 and Altman became CEO. Under his leadership OpenAI shipped GPT-3 (2020), DALL-E (2021), Codex (2021), ChatGPT (2022), GPT-4 (2023) and o1 (2024), among others.

Before OpenAI, Altman ran Y Combinator from 2014 to 2019, the most prominent startup accelerator of its era, where he funded and advised hundreds of companies. He was briefly removed as OpenAI CEO by the board on 17 November 2023 in what became known as the OpenAI board crisis; nearly all OpenAI employees signed a letter threatening to resign, Microsoft offered to hire the entire team, and Altman was reinstated within five days.

Altman has been a significant public figure in AI policy debates, advocating for international coordination on advanced-AI development while pursuing aggressive scaling at OpenAI. He has been criticised for inconsistent messaging on AI safety and for the organisation's drift from its founding non-profit mission.