Sam Altman
CEO · OpenAI
Co-founder and CEO of OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT and the GPT model family.
Who Is Sam Altman
Sam Altman is the co-founder and chief executive of OpenAI, the research lab whose release of ChatGPT in late 2022 brought generative AI into mainstream use. Before OpenAI he was president of Y Combinator, the startup accelerator that backed companies like Airbnb, Stripe, and Dropbox.
What He Built
Altman co-founded OpenAI in 2015 as a nonprofit research lab and later restructured it into a capped-profit company to raise the capital needed for large-scale model training. Under his leadership OpenAI shipped the GPT series, ChatGPT, DALL·E, and a developer API that turned the lab into a platform used by millions of products.
Why He Matters
Altman is the most visible spokesperson for the commercial AI era. His decisions on model release cadence, safety policy, pricing, and partnerships — most notably the deep alliance with Microsoft — shape how the rest of the industry moves. He is also a prominent voice in debates over AI regulation, compute scaling, and the economics of artificial general intelligence.