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Samuel Harris Biography & Facts

Samuel Harris Altman (born April 22, 1985) is an American entrepreneur and investor best known as the CEO of OpenAI since 2019 (he was briefly fired and reinstated in November 2023). He is also CEO of AltC Acquisition Corp since 2021. Altman is considered to be one of the leading figures of the AI boom. He dropped out of Stanford University after two years and founded Loopt, a mobile social networking service, raising more than $30 million in venture capital. In 2011, Altman joined Y Combinator, a startup accelerator, and was its president from 2014 to 2019. Early life and education Altman was born on April 22, 1985, in Chicago, Illinois, into a Jewish family, and grew up in St. Louis, Missouri. His mother is a dermatologist, while his father was a real estate broker. Altman is the eldest of four siblings. At the age of eight, he received his first computer, an Apple Macintosh, and began to learn how to code and take apart computer hardware. He attended John Burroughs School, a private school in Ladue, Missouri. In 2005, after two years at Stanford University studying computer science, he dropped out without earning a bachelor's degree. Career Early career In 2005, at the age of 19, Altman co-founded Loopt, a location-based social networking mobile application. As CEO, Altman raised more than $30 million in venture capital for the company, including an initial investment of $5 million from Patrick Chung of Xfund and his team at NEA, which was later followed by investments from Sequoia Capital and Y Combinator. In March 2012, after Loopt failed to gain traction with enough users, the company was acquired by the Green Dot Corporation for $43.4 million. The following month, Altman co-founded Hydrazine Capital with his brother, Jack Altman, which is still in operation. Altman became a partner at Y Combinator, a startup accelerator that invests in a wide range of startups, in 2011, initially working there on a part-time basis. In February 2014, Altman was named president of Y Combinator by co-founder Paul Graham. In a 2014 blog post, Altman said that the total valuation of Y Combinator companies had surpassed $65 billion, including Airbnb, Dropbox, Zenefits and Stripe. In September 2016, Altman announced his expanded role as president of YC Group, which included Y Combinator and other units. Altman said that he hoped to expand Y Combinator to fund 1,000 new companies per year. He also tried to expand the types of companies funded by YC, especially "hard technology" companies. In October 2015, Altman announced YC Continuity, a $700 million equity fund investing in YC companies as they matured. A week earlier, Altman had introduced Y Combinator Research, a non-profit research lab, and donated $10 million to fund it. In March 2019, YC announced Altman's transition from the president of the company to a less hands-on role as chairman of the board, for him to focus on OpenAI. This decision came shortly after YC announced it would be moving its headquarters to San Francisco. As of early 2020, he was no longer affiliated with YC. It was later reported that Altman was fired from YC and had appointed himself chairman without authorization. Altman co-founded Tools For Humanity in 2019, a company which builds and distributes systems designed to scan people's eyes to provide authentication and verify proof of personhood to counter fraud. People who agree to have their eyes scanned are compensated with a cryptocurrency called Worldcoin. Tools For Humanity describes its cryptocurrency as similar to universal basic income. Altman has several other investments, including "Humane," the world's first wearable computer powered by AI, "Retro Biosciences," a research company aiming to extend human life by 10 years, and "Helion Energy," an American fusion research company. OpenAI OpenAI was initially funded by Altman, Greg Brockman, Elon Musk, Jessica Livingston, Peter Thiel, Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, Infosys and YC Research. When OpenAI launched in 2015, it had raised $1 billion. In March 2019, Altman left Y Combinator to focus full-time on OpenAI as CEO. By the summer of 2019, he had helped raise $1 billion from Microsoft. Altman testified before the United States Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology and the Law on May 16 2023 about issues of AI oversight. After the success of ChatGPT, the company's chatbot application, Altman made a world tour in May 2023, where he visited 22 countries and met multiple leaders and diplomats, including British prime minister Rishi Sunak, French president Emmanuel Macron, Spanish prime minister Pedro Sánchez, German chancellor Olaf Scholz, Indian prime minister Narendra Modi, South Korean president Yoon Suk-yeol and Israeli president Isaac Herzog. He stood for a photo with European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen. Removal and reinstatement as CEO On Friday, November 17, 2023, OpenAI's board, composed of researcher Helen Toner, Quora CEO Adam D'Angelo, AI governance advocate Tasha McCauley, and most prominently in the firing, OpenAI co-founder and chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, announced that they had made the decision to remove Altman as CEO and Greg Brockman from the board, both of whom were co-founders. The announcement cited that Altman "was not consistently candid in his communications" in a public announcement on the OpenAI blog. In response, Brockman resigned from his role as President of OpenAI. The day after Altman was removed, The Verge reported that Altman and the board were in talks to bring him back to OpenAI. On November 20, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella announced that Altman would be joining Microsoft to lead a new advanced AI research team. Two days later, OpenAI employees published an open letter to the board threatening to leave OpenAI and join Microsoft, where all employees had been promised jobs, unless all board members step down and reinstate Altman as CEO. 505 employees initially signed, which later grew to over 700 out of 770 total employees. This included Ilya Sutskever, who had previously advocated for firing Altman, but now had apologized stating on Twitter, "I regret my participation in the board's actions." Late in the night on November 20, OpenAI announced that they had reached an "agreement in principle" for Altman to return as CEO and Brockman to return as president. The current board was to resign, other than D'Angelo, who was kept to represent the views of the previous board. On March 8, 2024, OpenAI announced that Altman would rejoin the Board of Directors after a review by law firm WilmerHale. Other endeavors For eight days in 2014, Altman was the CEO of Reddit, a social media company after CEO Yishan Wong resigned. He announced the return of Steve Huffman as CEO on July 10, 2015. He remained on its board until 2022. Altman invested in multiple rounds of funding Reddit, in 2014, 2015, and 2021. Prior to Reddit's initial public offering in 2024, Altman was listed as its third-largest .... Discover the Samuel Harris popular books. Find the top 100 most popular Samuel Harris books.