Sam Altman

Samuel Harris Altman is the Chief Executive of OpenAI, the San Francisco-based AI research company he co-founded with Elon Musk, Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, Wojciech Zaremba, and John Schulman in December 2015. Before OpenAI, Altman served as President of Y Combinator from 2014 to 2019, overseeing the most influential startup accelerator in Silicon Valley and shaping the careers of founders at Airbnb, Dropbox, Stripe, and hundreds of other companies. His trajectory from YC to OpenAI represents one of the most deliberate pivots from supporting the startup ecosystem to directly competing within it at scale.

Under Altman's leadership, OpenAI launched ChatGPT in November 2022, which reached 100 million users in two months — faster than any consumer application previously recorded. The company subsequently launched GPT-4, Sora (an AI video generation model), and a succession of o-series reasoning models, raising capital at valuations exceeding $150 billion by 2025. In November 2023, Altman was briefly dismissed by the OpenAI board, only to be reinstated within five days after a near-complete staff walkout; the episode triggered a governance restructuring that converted OpenAI from a non-profit-controlled entity to a public-benefit corporation structure. He was also briefly a board observer at Microsoft, OpenAI's primary infrastructure partner.

In the media-AI context, Altman told Bloomberg he 'felt terrible' informing Disney's Josh D'Amaro that OpenAI was reallocating Sora resources away from consumer video towards robotics and autonomous software, effectively ending a planned $1 billion Disney investment in OpenAI. That reallocation decision illustrates the tension inside OpenAI between serving existing media and enterprise partnerships and pursuing the robotic and agentic systems that Altman has identified as the company's long-term frontier. His decisions on which products OpenAI prioritises carry direct consequences for content-industry deals, publisher licensing negotiations, and the pace at which AI replaces or displaces human creative labour.