Tracing the rise of OpenAI CEO and prolific venture investor Sam Altman, who remains staunch in his belief that artificial general intelligence (AGI) will be able to do anything that humans can.
By Nichola Marie
“Altman’s ability to balance leadership in technological innovation with a strategic investment approach has solidified his position as a billionaire and a transformative figure in tech with a proven track record,” notes ‘Newsweek’ of the tech billionaire whose prominence in the tech world has been consistently increasing. CEO of the artificial intelligence (AI) research lab OpenAI, Altman is considered one of the leading figures of the AI boom. His popularity has soared after the launch of ChatGPT, an artificial intelligence chatbot from OpenAI that enables users to “converse” with it in a way that mimics natural conversation. The intuitive, easy-to-use, and free tool has already gained enormous popularity as an alternative to traditional search engines and as a tool for AI writing, among other things.
Altman’s company is planning to release a boosted agent dubbed Operator, which is supposedly capable of writing code and even booking travel.
As Altman is fond of pointing out, artificial general intelligence (AGI) will be able to do anything that humans can.
Learning From Poker
Often compared to tech visionaries, including Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, Altman was born on April 22, 1985 in Chicago, Illinois, US, into a Jewish family. He was the eldest of four siblings born to a mother who was a dermatologist and a real estate broker father. Moving as a young boy to the suburbs of St Louis, Missouri, his aptitude for numbers and computing became apparent at an early age.
Attending the elite prep school John Burroughs, he went on to study computer science at Stanford University. However, two years later, he dropped out. Later he would reveal that he did so because he had learnt more by playing poker with classmates than he did by attending lectures by professors! Poker, he told ‘The New York Times’ in 2023, taught him “how to notice patterns in people over time, and how to make decisions with very imperfect information,” dubbing it a “great game.”
Altman was just 19 when he founded Loopt in 2005, an app that allowed users to share their location with friends. Loopt was one of the earliest companies to acquire funding from Y Combinator, a start-up accelerator. Though Loopt failed to attract users even though it tied up with wireless carriers such as Sprint, it went on to be acquired by banking company Green Dot for a cool $43 million in 2012.
Altman’s entrepreneurial journey continued and a year after he began working part-time as a partner at Y Combinator in 2011, he founded the venture fund Hydrazine Capital with his brother Max Altman in 2012. In 2014, he accepted the position of president of Y Combinator offered by the company’s founders Paul Graham and Jessica Livingston.
OpenAI & Clash Of Beliefs
With Altman as president, Y Combinator became widely known for being the ideal place for start-up founders to learn to build a successful company. His tenure saw the combined valuation of Y Combinator companies surpass $65 billion. When Altman relinquished his position in 2019, Y Combinator had helped around 1,900 companies, including Airbnb and Reddit.
From the year 2015, Altman, along with Tesla CEO Elon Musk, was already serving as a Co-Chair of OpenAI, a nonprofit organisation to develop AI for the benefit of humanity. The organisation had started with a funding of $1 billion provided by Altman, Musk, entrepreneur Peter Thiel, and others.
OpenAI aimed to recognise the power of artificial intelligence and how that power would be used. In 2019, Altman famously compared the work of OpenAI to the Manhattan Project, which developed the first atomic bomb, calling it “the level of ambition we aspire to.”
He is also known to draw attention to the fact that he and J Robert Oppenheimer, the American theoretical physicist who served as the director of the Manhattan Project’s Los Alamos Laboratory during World War II, share a birthday.
The path for OpenAI turned stormy when, in 2018, Musk declared that he should run OpenAI so it could catch up with Google. Altman was not in favour of this, which resulted in Musk leaving OpenAI. This put the organisation in a tight spot as its work had been funded by Musk. In order to fulfill the large amount of computer resources needed for AI development, OpenAI created a for-profit company to fund its work. It would, however, be controlled by the nonprofit board.
The for-profit part of OpenAI then partnered with Microsoft to use its cloud computing service, Azure. Microsoft integrated OpenAI software into its project and also controlled 49% of OpenAI.
OpenAI’s Stunning Progress
OpenAI went on to make good progress with large language models (LLMs). OpenAI’s LLMs, which use the GPT (Generative Pre-training Transformer) architecture, serve as the foundation of two popular products. These include DALL-E, introduced in 2021, which takes a user’s prompt to generate images; and ChatGPT in 2022, widely popularising AI and the possibility of AGI, winning it more than one million users within just five days, impressed by its quick responses on any subject combined with its command of written English.
After a few rocky patches, Altman continues to be the CEO of OpenAI. The company is worth around $80 billion.
Wealth Stats
Altman has no equity in OpenAI. He has repeatedly said he doesn’t own equity in the company because he already had enough money. “I am paid enough for health insurance; I have no equity in OpenAI,” he testified in a Senate hearing. “I’m doing this because I love it.”
His wealth comes from his investments. Last year, Altman’s fortune was pegged at more than $2 billion. His assets mainly consist of money invested in venture capital funds and startups, including stakes in Stripe, Reddit and nuclear fusion firm Helion. He also owns stakes in closely held companies including Elon Musk’s Neuralink Corp.
Altman committed to giving away most of his wealth by signing the Giving Pledge in May 2024.
Backing Stargate
Altman, along with Oracle founder Larry Ellison and SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son, joined US President Trump, fresh off his inauguration, as he unveiled a massive $500 billion investment in artificial intelligence infrastructure in the US. It is funded through a joint venture called the Stargate Project, backed by Japanese conglomerate Softbank, cloud giant Oracle, and generative AI pioneer OpenAI.
Dubbed the “largest AI infrastructure project in history” by Trump, the new joint venture will deploy $100 billion ‘immediately’ and the goal is to increase it to $500 billion in AI projects like data centres and physical campuses.
Thanking Trump for his role in formulating the initiative, Altman said, “I think this will be the most important project of this era.” He added, “We will see diseases get cured at an unprecedented rate. We will be amazed at how quickly we’re curing this cancer and that one — and heart disease.”
Honours Galore
In 2023, Altman was named one of the 100 most influential people in the world and CEO of the Year by ‘Time’ magazine. He was also on ‘Time’s’ list of the 100 most influential people in AI in 2023 and in 2024. Other awards he has won include Best Young Entrepreneurs in Technology by ‘Businessweek’, and top investor under 30 by ‘Forbes’ magazine.
It’s Personal
Altman was at prep school, aged 17, when he announced to a school assembly that he was gay. In support of gay students, he encouraged teachers to post ‘Safe Space’ placards in their classrooms. In 2024, Altman married his longtime boyfriend Oliver Mulherin, an Australian software engineer. The couple live together in San Francisco, where much of the artificial intelligence industry is based, though they frequently travel to Altman’s residence in Napa. The couple is said to be expecting a child.
Skills For The Future
Asked during a recent episode of Adam Grant’s ‘Re:Thinking’ podcast, what skills his yet-to-beborn child would need to focus on to thrive in the AI-filled future, Altman replied that it wouldn’t be intelligence – “My kid is never gonna grow up being smarter than AI,” he responded, noting that children in the future will only know a world with AI in it. Maintaining that human ability will still be valued, he explained, “but it will not be raw, intellectual horsepower to the same degree.” According to Altman, the key to future success is not sheer IQ. “Figuring out what questions to ask will be more important than figuring out the answer,” he believes.
