Sam Altman
Chief executive, OpenAI
Loopt and Y Combinator
Sam Altman's first company was Loopt, a mobile location start-up that was part of Y Combinator's first funded batch in 2005[1][2]. In March 2012 the banking company Green Dot agreed to acquire Loopt for $43.4 million in cash, including $9.8 million set aside for retention payments to key employees[1]. Loopt's 30 employees became Green Dot's Silicon Valley mobile product development team[1].
Altman joined Y Combinator as a partner in 2011[3]. In February 2014 Paul Graham announced that Altman would become president of Y Combinator, writing that YC needed to grow and that Altman was suited to lead that growth[2]. He was the second president of the accelerator after Graham[3]. During his tenure YC expanded the size of its cohorts and began writing larger cheques to portfolio companies[3]. In March 2019 he stepped down as president and moved into a chairman role, with other partners taking on his day-to-day responsibilities[3].
Co-founding and leading OpenAI
OpenAI was announced on 11 December 2015 as a non-profit artificial intelligence research company[4]. Altman and Elon Musk were its co-chairs, Ilya Sutskever was research director and Greg Brockman was chief technology officer[4]. The founding backers listed in the announcement included Altman, Brockman, Musk, Jessica Livingston, Peter Thiel, Amazon Web Services, Infosys and YC Research[4]. When he left the YC presidency in 2019, TechCrunch reported that he would focus on other efforts including OpenAI[3].
In his January 2025 essay Reflections, Altman wrote that OpenAI launched ChatGPT on 30 November 2022 after starting from a demo it had internally called "Chat With GPT-3.5"[5]. In the same essay he wrote that OpenAI had grown from about 100 million weekly active users to more than 300 million over the previous year[5]. He also wrote that the company had not expected to build a product company or to need so much capital when it started[5]. He described OpenAI's safety approach as releasing systems into the world iteratively and gradually, so that society has time to adapt[5].
AI infrastructure and Stargate
On 21 January 2025 Altman attended a White House event with SoftBank's Masayoshi Son and Oracle's Larry Ellison at which the Stargate Project was announced[9]. The companies said they expected to commit $100 billion to Stargate initially and up to $500 billion over the next four years, starting with a large data centre project in Texas[9]. Microsoft, Arm and Nvidia joined as technology partners[9].
In his September 2025 post Abundant Intelligence, Altman wrote that OpenAI wanted to build a factory able to produce a gigawatt of new AI infrastructure every week[8]. He wrote that the plan would take years and require work across chips, power, buildings and robotics, and that OpenAI wanted to build much of it in the United States[8].
On 1 June 2026 CNBC broadcast from OpenAI's $16 billion Stargate campus in Saline Township, Michigan, where it interviewed Altman as OpenAI's chief executive[10]. In that interview he said the industry had failed to explain how humans keep control of the future, and that people are right to be anxious about AI[10]. He also argued that AI competition with China should not be treated purely as a race in areas such as cyber security and biosecurity[10]. CNBC reported the same day that OpenAI was making Codex credits available to more than 400,000 eligible students in Michigan for the 2026 to 2027 academic year[10].
Essays and stated positions on AI
Altman publishes essays on his blog[5][6][7]. In Three Observations, published in February 2025, he wrote that the intelligence of an AI model roughly equals the log of the resources used to train and run it[6]. In the same essay he wrote that the cost of using a given level of AI falls about tenfold every 12 months, citing a drop of about 150 times in token prices from GPT-4 in early 2023 to GPT-4o in mid-2024[6]. He described future AI software engineering agents as something like a junior virtual co-worker that would need a lot of human supervision[6].
In The Gentle Singularity, published in June 2025, he wrote that 2025 had brought agents that do real cognitive work, that 2026 would likely see systems that can produce novel insights, and that 2027 may see robots that do tasks in the real world[7]. He wrote that in the 2030s intelligence and energy are likely to become abundant[7].
Energy is a recurring theme in his writing. In a November 2021 post he wrote that he had first invested in the fusion company Helion in 2014 and was increasing his investment, and that cheaper energy would lower the cost of much else[11].
Known for
- Co-founding and leading OpenAI
- President of Y Combinator, 2014 to 2019
- Co-founding Loopt
- The Stargate AI infrastructure project
- Essays including The Gentle Singularity
Sources
- Y Combinator blog: Loopt (YC S05) acquired by Green Dot for $43.4M, March 2012 — checked 6 Nov 2026
- Y Combinator blog (Paul Graham): Sam Altman for President, February 2014 — checked 6 Nov 2026
- TechCrunch: Y Combinator president Sam Altman is stepping down, March 2019 — checked 6 Nov 2026
- TechCrunch: Nonprofit OpenAI launches with backing from Elon Musk and Sam Altman, December 2015 — checked 6 Nov 2026
- Sam Altman's blog: Reflections, January 2025 — checked 6 Nov 2026
- Sam Altman's blog: Three Observations, February 2025 — checked 6 Nov 2026
- Sam Altman's blog: The Gentle Singularity, June 2025 — checked 6 Nov 2026
- Sam Altman's blog: Abundant Intelligence, September 2025 — checked 6 Nov 2026
- TechCrunch: OpenAI teams up with SoftBank and Oracle on $500B data center project, January 2025 — checked 6 Nov 2026
- CNBC: Stargate live updates from Michigan, June 2026 — checked 6 Nov 2026
- Sam Altman's blog: Helion, November 2021 — checked 6 Nov 2026