Who is Sam Altman, Times ‘CEO of the Year’ 2023?

Times Magazine has chosen Sam Altman as its ‘CEO of the Year’ for 2023. Announced on December 6, 2023, the award recognises Altman's exceptional leadership and achievements in the business world. He is the CEO of the trailblazing artificial intelligence (AI) company, OpenAI, and has been instrumental in driving its success.

Sam Altman is TIME's 2023 CEO of the Year https://t.co/dQEMMseSQE pic.twitter.com/60SCXykduU

— TIME (@TIME) December 6, 2023

Early Life and Education

Sam Altman was born on April 22, 1985, in Chicago, Illinois, to a Jewish family. Altman grew up in the suburbs of St. Louis, Missouri, and showed an early interest in technology and entrepreneurship. He attended Stanford University, where he studied computer science and dropped out after 2 years. The decision to drop out of the Ivy League school was driven by his desire to pursue his entrepreneurial ambitions.

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Career

In 2005, the year he dropped out, he co-founded a location-based social networking platform with Nick Sivo called Loopt. Loopt collected more than $300 million in financing; however, it did not gain popularity with the users and was eventually acquired by Green Dot Corporation in 2012. Altman then went on to become the partner of Y Combinator, a prestigious startup accelerator, and also co-founded Hydrazine Capital, with Jack Altman, his brother. 

Open AI

Sam Altman and Greg Brockman launched Open AI in 2015, which was then funded by him as well as Elon Musk, Brockman, Jessica Livingston, Peter Thiel, Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, Infosys, and YC Research. 

In 2019, OpenAI changed to a capped profit model. In 2021, OpenAI released ChatGPT, the Large Language Model (LLM) that completely changed the digital landscape. Microsoft also bought 49% of the shares of the company and it was their $10 billion investment that led to the development of GPT-4. 

OpenAI's board, including researchers Helen Toner, Quora CEO Adam D'Angelo, AI governance advocate Tasha McCauley, and chief scientist Ilya Sutskyver, removed CEO Altman and co-founder Greg Brockman on November 17, 2023. Three days after the firing, Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella announced that Altman would be leading a team working on advanced AI at Microsoft. Following his announcement, OpenAI employees started resigning from the company. Reportedly, more than 700 employees resigned after Altman was fired. 

Only a few days after being fired by the board for unknown reasons, Altman returned to his position as CEO of OpenAI on 22 November.