Sam Altman

American entrepreneur, co-founder and chief executive of OpenAIOpenAI, prop. n.: The American company that makes ChatGPT and the GPT models. It began in 2015 as a nonprofit research lab and is now a for-profit company overseen by a nonprofit foundation.. A Stanford dropout who had co-founded the location-sharing startup Loopt (2005), he was president of the accelerator Y Combinator (2014–2019) when he co-founded OpenAI as a nonprofit laboratory in 2015 with Elon MuskElon Musk, prop. n.: A South African-born American entrepreneur who runs Tesla and SpaceX, co-founded OpenAI, founded the AI company xAI, and has long warned that AI could endanger humanity., Greg BrockmanGreg Brockman, prop. n.: An American engineer who helped start OpenAI in 2015 and became its president, after serving as the first technology chief of the payments company Stripe., Ilya SutskeverIlya Sutskever, prop. n.: A Russian-born Israeli-Canadian computer scientist who co-built the AlexNet image recognizer, helped found OpenAI and lead its research until 2024, and now heads the startup Safe Superintelligence Inc. and others; he became its chief executive in 2019 as it formed a capped-profit arm funded largely by Microsoft. Under him OpenAI released ChatGPTChatGPT, prop. n.: OpenAI's AI chatbot, released free to the public in November 2022, which answers questions, writes and converses in everyday language. Its sudden popularity began the current AI boom. (2022), which set off the generative-AI boom, followed by GPT-4GPT-4, prop. n.: OpenAI's 2023 language model, a big step up from the one behind the first ChatGPT. It scored well on many professional and academic exams and could also read images. and reasoning models. On 17 November 2023 the board removed him, saying he had not been consistently candid; he was reinstated five days later after most staff threatened to resign (see OpenAI leadership crisis (2023)OpenAI leadership crisis (2023), n.: The five days in November 2023 when OpenAI's board fired chief executive Sam Altman, nearly all staff threatened to quit, and he returned with a new board.). He then led the StargateStargate, prop. n.: A giant venture announced in 2025 by OpenAI, SoftBank and Oracle to build data centers in the United States for training and running AI, with a pledged $500 billion. data-center venture (2025) and OpenAI's 2025 conversion into a public benefit corporation controlled by a nonprofit foundation. In May 2026 a jury rejected, as filed too late, Musk's lawsuit accusing him and OpenAI of abandoning its founding mission.