Co-founder and CEO of OpenAI
Sam Altman
Sam Altman is the co-founder and CEO of OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT. He previously served as president of startup accelerator Y Combinator.
About Sam Altman
Sam Altman is the co-founder and CEO of OpenAI, an artificial intelligence research and deployment company whose products include ChatGPT and DALL·E. He helped establish OpenAI in 2015 as a nonprofit research laboratory.
Before focusing on OpenAI, Altman served as president of Y Combinator from 2014 to 2019. His public work includes discussions of AI deployment, governance, safety, and the economic effects of increasingly capable AI systems.
Mentioned in our coverage
231 articles name Sam Altman, excluding author credits.
Page 8 of 20
- Pace the Frontier Goes Cross-Partisan: Baker, Burry, Trump, and Harris React →
Three days after Dario Amodei's "Pace the Frontier" essay, the debate jumped from AI labs into markets and national politics. Investor Michael Burry called the pacing warnings "self-serving hype tied to IPOs," AI researcher Gary Marcus voiced similar doubt, Palantir CTO Shyam Sankar cast AI safety as ideological overreach, President Trump dismissed the whole premise as a "hoax" — first in a post, then live on a call to the All-In Summit with Jensen Huang on stage — and Kamala Harris called for Congress to pass a law slowing frontier AI down. Here's who said what, and why it now matters more than the essay itself.
- Sam Altman Promises a "Big Ship Week" Before DevDay 2026 →
On September 15, 2026, Sam Altman posted "big 🚢 this week and then for devday 🚢🚢🚢🚢🚢🚢" — a six-emoji tease that landed one day after he publicly committed OpenAI to writing safety cases before frontier training runs and framed pacing as "not stopping." Replies ranged from DevDay-level excitement to open confusion about what's actually shipping. Here's what the timing says, and what it means for anyone building on OpenAI's stack heading into DevDay on September 29.
- Elon Musk Reposts Wait But Why's 2015 AI Intelligence Curve — Why It Went Viral Again →
On September 14, 2026, Elon Musk reposted Tim Urban''s decade-old Wait But Why cartoon where machine intelligence stays flat, then shoots past human and Einstein levels while stick figures go from "Haha adorable monkey tricks" to "The fuck??" Musk called it on target and said AI is improving rapidly — the same exponential-curve story he has used for years, now landing against GPT-6 Astra, pacing debates, and fresh AGI declarations. Here is what the image actually argues, what changed since 2015, and how to read the repost without mistaking a meme for a measurement.
- Is "Pacing the Frontier" Really About Safety — Or a Plateau in Disguise? →
Three frontier labs published safety-pacing documents within two weeks of each other in September 2026. The official story is caution winning out over speed. A less flattering explanation fits the same facts just as well — pretraining data is running out, public launches are throttled versions of internal demos, and Anthropic needs a clean investor story for its IPO. This is opinion and pattern-matching, not a leaked memo — here's what's verifiable and what's speculation.