Sam Altman

Sam Altman grew up in St. Louis, as Altman told the Senate Commerce Committee in 2025. Altman went on to study computer science at Stanford University and, while there, worked in the university's AI lab.24

Altman's founding story began with Loopt, which Y Combinator funded in 2005, in the very first batch of startups the accelerator backed, with Altman as co-founder and chief executive officer. Y Combinator's company directory describes Loopt as an interoperable social-mapping service that let people use their location to discover the real world around them. Loopt was acquired by Green Dot in 2012.465

Altman became a part-time partner at Y Combinator in 2011. In February 2014, Y Combinator co-founder Paul Graham announced that Altman would become president of Y Combinator starting with the next batch, calling Altman one of the smartest people Graham knew and someone who understands startups better than perhaps anyone Graham knew. Altman led the early-stage startup accelerator as president from 2014 to 2019.461

In 2015, Altman co-founded OpenAI as a nonprofit research lab with the mission to build general-purpose artificial intelligence that benefits all humanity. Altman has recalled that the founders started out around a kitchen table, wondering how to get started, at a time when AI was a niche tool for researchers rather than for the general public. A 2016 Senate hearing record describes the young organization as chaired by Altman and Elon Musk, and a 2018 Stanford program listed Altman as co-chair of OpenAI.1234

OpenAI's early public milestones included the GPT-2 family of language models in 2019 and the GPT-3 family in 2020. In early 2022, OpenAI launched a research preview of DALL·E 2, an AI system that can create realistic images and art from a description in natural language.1

In 2022 OpenAI was, in Altman's words, a quiet research lab working on what became ChatGPT, which launched on November 30, 2022. In March 2023, OpenAI released GPT-4, which Altman described to the Senate as OpenAI's most advanced system, producing more useful, more creative, more collaborative, and more accurate outputs than previous OpenAI products.71

On May 16, 2023, Altman testified before the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology, and the Law, describing OpenAI's work and calling for regulations that incentivize AI safety while ensuring that people are able to access the technology's many benefits. Altman returned to the Senate on May 8, 2025, telling the Commerce Committee that scientists at U.S. national laboratories, including Oak Ridge, Los Alamos, Argonne, the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, and Pacific Northwest, were using OpenAI's reasoning models to accelerate breakthroughs in areas like energy.12

Altman writes often about an optimistic future. In "The Intelligence Age" (September 2024), Altman predicted that within the next couple of decades people will be able to do things that would have seemed like magic to their grandparents, and that everyone's lives can be better than anyone's life is now. In "Reflections", Altman wrote that OpenAI was now confident it knew how to build AGI as traditionally understood and was beginning to aim beyond it, toward superintelligence.87

In "The Gentle Singularity", Altman argued that intelligence too cheap to meter is well within grasp, and in "Abundant Intelligence" set out a vision of a factory that can produce a gigawatt of new AI infrastructure every week. Altman joined in announcing the Stargate Project for American AI infrastructure in 2025, telling senators that "infrastructure is destiny."9102