Sam Altman

Sam Altman (born 1985) is the CEO of OpenAI and, since ChatGPT’s launch in November 2022, the most recognizable executive of the AI era. A St. Louis-born Stanford dropout, he co-founded the location app Loopt, ran the startup accelerator Y Combinator from 2014 to 2019, and co-founded OpenAI in 2015 — originally as a nonprofit research lab — becoming its CEO in 2019.

Selling the Intelligence Age

Altman’s case for AI has been made in a series of manifesto-like blog posts. In “The Intelligence Age” (September 2024) he predicted superintelligence within “a few thousand days” and framed AI as the next rung on a ladder of compounding human progress. In “The Gentle Singularity” (June 2025) he declared humanity “past the event horizon,” arguing the takeoff toward digital superintelligence had already begun — and that, so far, it was manageable, even mundane. Under his leadership OpenAI shipped GPT-4, Sora, and successive frontier models while raising capital at valuations in the hundreds of billions.

His tenure has not lacked drama. In November 2023 OpenAI’s board abruptly fired him, citing a loss of trust; within five days, after employee revolt and investor pressure, he was reinstated — an episode that also involved co-founder Ilya Sutskever. Critics accuse him of hype, of steering a nonprofit toward commercial empire, and of talking up risks he continues to build toward; he has testified before Congress in favor of AI regulation while lobbying against rules he considers stifling.

Through it all his stance has been unambiguous: AI is the most important technology of our time, its benefits — from scientific discovery to cheap, universal intelligence — will vastly outweigh its harms, and the way through is forward.