The rise of Sam Altman, the OpenAI billionaire CEO who’s just signed a deal with Apple

“Growing up gay in the Midwest in the two-thousands was not the most awesome thing,” he told The New Yorker. “And finding AOL chat rooms was transformative. Secrets are bad when you’re eleven or twelve.”

Altman came out as gay to the whole community after a Christian group boycotted an assembly at his school that was about sexuality.

“What Sam did changed the school,” his college counselor, Madelyn Gray, told The New Yorker. “It felt like someone had opened up a great big box full of all kinds of kids and let them out into the world.”

The $43 million sale price was close to how much it had raised from investors, The Wall Street Journal reported. The company was acquired by Green Dot, a banking company known for prepaid cards.

One of Loopt’s cofounders, Nick Sivo, and Altman dated for nine years, but they broke up after they sold the company.

While he was YC president, Altman taught a lecture series at Stanford called “How to Start a Startup,” in the fall of 2014. The next year, Altman was featured on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list for venture capital at 29 years old.

In April (the same month he made Forbes’ billionaire list,) Altman was spotted in Napa, California driving an ultra-rare Swedish supercar. The Koenigsegg Regera is seriously fast, able to go from zero to 250 miles per hour in less than 30 seconds. There are only 80 of these cars known to exist, and they can cost up to $4.65 million. 

He once told two YC founders that he likes racing cars and had five, including two McLarens and an old Tesla, according to The New Yorker. He’s said he likes racing cars and renting planes to fly all over California.

Separately, he told the founders of the startup Shypmate that “I prep for survival,” and warned of either a “lethal synthetic virus,” AI attacking humans, or nuclear war.

“I try not to think about it too much,” Altman told the founders in 2016. “But I have guns, gold, potassium iodide, antibiotics, batteries, water, gas masks from the Israeli Defense Force, and a big patch of land in Big Sur I can fly to.”

Altman’s mom is a dermatologist and told The New Yorker, “Sam does keep an awful lot tied up inside. He’ll call and say he has a headache—and he’ll have Googled it, so there’s some cyber-chondria in there, too. I have to reassure him that he doesn’t have meningitis or lymphoma, that it’s just stress.”

Their goal for the non-profit artificial intelligence company was to make sure AI doesn’t wipe out humans.

“We discussed what is the best thing we can do to ensure the future is good?” Elon Musk told The New York Times in 2015. “We could sit on the sidelines or we can encourage regulatory oversight, or we could participate with the right structure with people who care deeply about developing A.I. in a way that is safe and is beneficial to humanity.”

Some of Silicon Valley’s most prominent names pledged $1 billion to OpenAI along with Altman and Musk, including Reid Hoffman, the cofounder of LinkedIn, and Thiel.

At a StrictlyVC event in 2019, Altman was asked how OpenAI planned to make a profit, and he said the “honest answer is we have no idea.”

Altman said OpenAI had “never made any revenue” and that it had “no current plans to make revenue.” 

“We have no idea how we may one day generate revenue,” he said at the time, according to TechCrunch.

Altman flew to Seattle to meet with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, where he demonstrated OpenAI’s AI models for him, WSJ reported.  The pair announced their business partnership on LinkedIn.

It wanted to give everyone in the world access to crypto by scanning their iris with an orb. The company was started in 2020, but stopped operating in a few countries in 2022 due to logistics issues, Bloomberg reported. In January, Worldcoin tweeted that it had reached 1 million people and has onboarded over 150,000 first-time crypto users.

A few days after its launch, Altman said that it “is incredibly limited, but good enough at some things to create a misleading impression of greatness.” Altman posted that ChatGPT was “great” for “fun creative inspiration,” but “not such a good idea” to look up facts.

ChatGPT recently began testing a paid version of ChatGPT called “ChatGPT Professional” that is supposed to give better access to the bot. In December, Altman posted that OpenAI “will have to monetize it somehow at some point; the compute costs are eye-watering.”

“Helion is more than an investment to me,” Altman told TechCrunch. “It’s the other thing beside OpenAI that I spend a lot of time on. I’m just super excited about what’s going to happen there.”

He told TechCrunch that he’s “happy there’s a fusion race,” to build a low-cost fusion energy system that can eventually power the Earth.

“If AGI is successfully created, this technology could help us elevate humanity by increasing abundance, turbocharging the global economy, and aiding in the discovery of new scientific knowledge that changes the limits of possibility,” Altman wrote on OpenAI’s blog.

Despite its potential, Altman said artificial general intelligence comes with “serious risk of misuse, drastic accidents, and societal disruption.” But instead of stopping its development, Altman said “society and the developers of AGI have to figure out how to get it right.”

Altman went on to share the principles that OpenAI “care about most,” including “the benefits of, access to, and governance of AGI to be widely and fairly shared.”

In a blog post, the company said it hoped the option to turn off chat history “provides an easier way to manage your data than our existing opt-out process.”

When a user turns off their chat history, new conversations will be kept for 30 days for OpenAI to review them for abuse, then are permanently deleted.

The app, which is free, can answer text-based and spoken questions using Whisper, another OpenAI product that is a speech-recognition model. Users who have a subscription to ChatGPT Plus can also access it through the app.

Altman made it clear that he doesn’t believe humans should try to be friends with AI in an interview during Wall Street Journal’s Tech Live event.

“I personally really have deep misgivings about this vision of the future where everyone is super close to AI friends, and not more so with their human friends,” Altman said.

After a chaotic weekend over his firing, Altman and OpenAI announced that he would return to the tech company as CEO.

“We have reached an agreement in principle for Sam Altman to return to OpenAI as CEO with a new initial board of Bret Taylor (Chair), Larry Summers, and Adam D’Angelo,” the company wrote on X.

In February, OpenAI unveiled Sora to the public. The program — named after the Japanese word for “sky” — creates up to 0ne-minute long videos from text prompts. 

“We’re teaching AI to understand and simulate the physical world in motion, with the goal of training models that help people solve problems that require real-world interaction,” OpenAI wrote in Sora’s announcement.

Sora is still in the midst of risk and harm assessments by red teamers, but Altman is already showing off its capabilities on social media, and the company is reportedly shopping the tool around to Hollywood.

During its “Spring Update” on May 13, OpenAI announced GPT-4o, an updated version of its large language model that powers ChatGPT. OpenAI CTO Mira Murati made the announcement, and Altman didn’t make an appearance despite actively promoting the event on X. 

Altman might’ve been absent from the presentation, but the demonstrations of ChatGPT’s voice and video capabilities created buzz online. It also led to Altman and his company being called out by actor Scarlett Johansson, who alleged that the OpenAI chatbot Sky’s voice sounded “eerily similar” to her own after she declined a partnership.

Altman’s post on X referencing a movie in which Johansson voices someone’s virtual girlfriend was quickly called into question, and the company soon said that it would not move forward with the voice heard in the demo.

After much debate about how it would enter the AI arms race, Apple announced at WWDC 2024 that it would partner with OpenAI to close the gap between it and its rivals.

Although Bloomberg reported that Apple isn’t paying OpenAI in cash, the tech titan’s solid installed base of over two billion users means more people may use ChatGPT if it comes integrated with Siri. According to the presentation, Siri will be able to handle more complex requests with help from ChatGPT.

Altman was spotted attending WWDC the day the partnership was announced and speaking to high-ranking Apple employees ahead of the keynote. 

Correction: February 2, 2023 — An earlier version of this story defined AGI incorrectly and listed the incorrect age at which Altman was named president of Y Combinator. AGI in this context stands for artificial general intelligence. Altman became president of Y Combinator at 28, not 31.