The most publicly visible figure in the AI industry, Altman has positioned OpenAI as both a safety-conscious lab and an aggressive commercial entity. His navigation of the November 2023 board crisis — fired and reinstated within five days — and the subsequent Stargate announcement with Trump define his political and commercial strategy.
Samuel Harris Altman was born on April 22, 1985, in Chicago. He attended Stanford but dropped out to found Loopt, a location-sharing startup, in 2005. He became president of Y Combinator in 2014 before co-founding OpenAI with Elon Musk, Greg Brockman and others in 2015. His firing by the OpenAI board in November 2023 — and reinstatement four days later after investor pressure — was the most dramatic governance crisis in Silicon Valley in years.
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