Sam Altman · Entrepreneur

Co-founded OpenAI in 2015 (with Musk and others) to ensure AGI benefits all of humanity. Shipped GPT-2/3/4, ChatGPT (2022), DALL·E, Sora and GPT-4o.

ChatGPT reached 100M users within two months — one of the fastest-growing consumer apps ever — igniting the global generative-AI wave.

Led the multibillion-dollar Microsoft partnership and compute build-out, built the API platform and developer ecosystem, and after a brief November 2023 departure returned and reset the governance structure.

Led the world’s most influential startup accelerator — grew batch sizes, launched the YC Continuity growth fund and Startup School, strengthened the alumni network, and incubated OpenAI internally. A partner from 2011.

An active early-stage investor and former chairman of Reddit; made large bets on fusion company Helion, longevity biotech Retro Biosciences, and identity network Worldcoin (Tools for Humanity).

Founded the location-based social app Loopt at Stanford — Y Combinator’s first batch, tens of millions raised; acquired by Green Dot in 2012.

Turned LLMs into a product anyone can use; 100M users in two months, igniting the generative-AI wave.

Multimodal model with major gains in reasoning and professional tasks.

Text-to-image model that popularized AI-generated visuals.

Text-to-video model extending the frontier of generative AI.

Opened model capabilities via API, spawning a wide AI app ecosystem.

Studied computer science; left after two years to build a company full-time.