Life and career journey Sam Altman, CEO OpenAI
Altman's leadership as CEO, OpenAI released popular generative AI tools to the public, including DALL-E and ChatGPT. Photo: Reuters
- Forbes has just included OpenAI CEO Sam Altman on its list of billionaires. Altman's name has become known since OpenAI has become increasingly popular in the world. Here's how the entrepreneur started his career journey and ended up leading the most talked about AI company.
2024 is shaping up to be a big year for Sam Altman. He was added to Forbes' list of billionaires in April. This 38 year old CEO has actually been known in Silicon Valley for a long time. However, the rest of the world only got to know it through the success of the Artificial Intelligence (AI) chatbot, ChatGPT, which was launched in 2022. Although the Microsoft-backed company has grown rapidly over the past two years, Forbes attributes Altman's billionaire status to his other investments.
Before the AI boom, Altman spent years as president of startup accelerator Y Combinator, owned shares in Reddit, invested in a nuclear fusion startup known as Helion, and more.
Sam Altman's life and career journey
- Altman grew up in St. Louis Louis, Missouri. He learned how to program and disassemble a Macintosh computer when he was 8 years old.
- Altman admitted that he was gay to his parents when he was 16 years old. He attended John Burroughs School.
- He came out to the entire school community as gay after a Christian group boycotted a school event discussing sexuality.
- Altman studied computer science at Stanford University for two years before he and two classmates dropped out to work full time on their mobile app, Loopt.
- Loopt is part of the first cohort of eight companies in Y Combinator's startup accelerator. Altman and his team earn USD 6,000 per founder.
- Loopt eventually reached a valuation of USD 175 million, but did not attract enough interest from investors, so its founders sold it for USD 43 million in 2012.