Sam Altman at TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco in 2019. Photo: TechCrunch / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0
Sam Altman, the chief executive of OpenAI, was born in Chicago on April 22, 1985, according to his Wikipedia biography. His family moved to Clayton, Missouri, outside St. Louis, in 1989, and he grew up there in the Midwest. He attended Wydown Middle School and briefly Clayton High School before transferring to The John Burroughs School, a private school in Ladue.
By 2025, Altman had become one of the best-known faces of the artificial intelligence industry. His path there ran through a startup, a venture accelerator and a research lab that grew into a household name.
Loopt and Stanford
Altman studied computer science at Stanford University for two years before leaving in 2005 without a degree. That year, at 19, he co-founded Loopt, a location-based social app, and served as its chief executive. Green Dot Corporation acquired Loopt in March 2012 for $43.4 million.
Y Combinator
Altman joined Y Combinator, the Silicon Valley startup accelerator, as a partner in 2011. In February 2014 he became its president, succeeding Paul Graham. He stepped back from the role in March 2019 to concentrate on OpenAI.
OpenAI and ChatGPT
Altman co-founded OpenAI in 2015, when it was organized as a nonprofit. He became its chief executive in 2019, the same year he left Y Combinator.
The product that carried OpenAI beyond technical circles was ChatGPT, a chatbot released to the public on Nov. 30, 2022. The first version ran on a model called GPT-3.5 and let anyone type a question or request in plain language and get a written answer. Reports put the free preview at more than a million sign-ups within its first five days. By about January 2023, roughly two months after launch, it had reached an estimated 100 million monthly active users, a pace of adoption that few consumer software products had matched.
OpenAI followed with GPT-4 in March 2023 and GPT-5 in August 2025. Over that span, chatbots of this kind spread into schools, workplaces and software development, and rival companies released their own versions. Altman became a prominent public voice for the technology.
The timeline is compact. Altman went from Stanford dropout to startup chief executive at 19, sold that company at 26, led Y Combinator from 2014 to 2019, and took over OpenAI as the lab was preparing the work that would become ChatGPT. Each step came with a larger public profile than the one before it, and by the time GPT-5 arrived in August 2025 his name was familiar well beyond the technology press.
Other ventures
Outside OpenAI, Altman has been associated with other companies, among them Worldcoin, Helion Energy and Oklo, which Wikipedia covers in more detail.
For readers in Evanston, the Chicago birthplace is a small local footnote in a career otherwise centered in California. Still, the Midwest roots, from Chicago to the St. Louis suburbs, are part of the biography of someone whose products now reach people in communities far from Silicon Valley, the North Shore included.
Biographical details are drawn from Wikipedia’s entries on Sam Altman and ChatGPT.
Daniel Okafor covers business, startups and the Innovators section for The Evanston Edge.
