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In the world of technology and entrepreneurship, you can hear about many personalities who changed the course of the world and had a major imprint on the history of technology, and even its future, and what it is today.
When talking about artificial intelligence, we cannot overlook the name of Sam Altman, who excelled in the field of investments and entrepreneurship. From paid to charitable work, he also contributed to the establishment of many companies and research centers, the most famous of which was Open AI. What is the story of this man, why is he considered one of the figures who changed the course of technology in the world, and what is his relationship with Open AI?
Who is Sam Altman?
He is an American businessman born in Chicago. He was born on April 22, 1985, and is best known for being the president of YCombinator, from 2014 to 2019, in addition to being the CEO of OpenAI starting from 2019.
Altman was born into an educated family, his mother is a dermatologist. His father was a real estate broker. He has four brothers and is the eldest son among them. Sam attended a private school in Ladue, Missouri, where he grew up.
At the age of eight, he got his first computer, an Apple Macintosh, and from here his educational and professional career began. He also joined Stanford University to study computer science, but after two years he left and did not obtain any degree from it.
His professional life
Sam Altman’s career began when he was 19 years old, when he co-founded the location-based social networking application called Loopt in 2005, earning approximately $30 million from it.
Y Combinator Company
In 2011, Sam Altman joined Y Combinator, which provides support for startups, but he did not devote himself to working there full-time. After a short period in 2014, he was appointed president of the company, making him fully responsible for managing the company.
Hydrazine Capital Company
Altman and Ryan Cohen then co-founded the venture capital firm Hydrazine Capital in 2012, which is also a financial investment firm serving 6 states. This company is located in California and invests in many areas, including education, enterprise programs, consumer networks, and many others.
Financial Support Fund and Y Combinator Research Laboratory
In 2015, Altman announced YC Continuity, a $700 million equity fund that seeks to support companies that join YCombinator with money, technical advice, or even strategic guidance.
Altman served as president of the company, later moving to the position of chairman of the board in 2019. Shortly before that, Altman announced a non-profit research laboratory called Y Combinator Research, and then donated $10 million to fund it.
In 2019, Altman co-founded Tools for Humanity, a company specializing in authentication security technology based on eye scanning to verify identity.
His story with OpenAI
In 2015, Sam Altman partnered with Tesla CEO Elon Musk and a group of other venture capitalists; In establishing OpenAI, which began a non-profit research center and organization concerned with the development of artificial intelligence.
The company started with $1 billion in funding, and then due to a lack of resources, OpenAI created a for-profit company to fill the gaps and secure the necessary funding for the research center. The profitable part of OpenAI entered into a partnership with Microsoft, valued at one billion dollars, by Microsoft, and the shares of Microsoft and other financiers amounted to 49%, while the shares of OpenAI itself amounted to 49%.
The number of people who founded OpenAI was 6 people: Sam Altman, Wojciech Zaremba, John Shulman, Ilya Sutskever, Greg Brockman, and Elon Musk. They are the ones who financed it, along with Peter Thiel, Amazon Web Service, and Microsoft.
The company’s most prominent invention was the GBT chatbot, which gave Altman and the company wide fame.
In 2023, OpenAI’s board of directors decided to dismiss Altman from the company as CEO, and until now the reasons for his dismissal remain unclear. Two days after his dismissal, Microsoft announced that Altman would join it.
But Altman was so beloved by his employees at OpenAI that two days or so after he was removed by the board of directors, the company’s employees (about 700 out of 750) threatened that they would submit a collective resignation if Altman did not return to the company. Shortly thereafter, the company announced that it would bring back Altman as CEO.
1 out of 100
Altman also took over as CEO of Reddit for eight days, following the resignation of its previous CEO.
He also contributed to many charitable works. During the Covid-19 pandemic, Altman co-founded the Covalence project, which aims to promote clinical trials to study and evaluate the efficiency of medical treatments. He did this in collaboration with the clinical trial company TrailSpark. He also later obtained a doctorate in engineering from the University of Waterloo in 2017.
He was chosen as one of the 100 most influential people in the world in Time magazine, and one of the best CEOs in Forbes magazine.
In the midst of the technology and innovation revolution that the world has witnessed and is still continuing, the personality of Sam Altman has emerged as a brilliant and exceptional personality who has had a significant impact on the entrepreneurial and technological scene.
