Sam Altman

Sam Altman is the celebrity CEO face of the AI boom. The OpenAI cofounder and CEO has transformed a once obscure nonprofit research lab into a household brand now valued at $300 billion—the highest valuation a private tech company has ever achieved. As the AI arms race heats up, with deep-pocketed rivals like Meta and Google pouring huge sums into infrastructure and talent, Altman’s ambitious mission to achieve artificial superintelligence continues to set the pace. Business leaders and government officials seek Altman’s views about AI’s likely impacts—and on the colossal investments the technology demands. OpenAI’s Stargate project announced in January, though slow to get off the ground so far, aims to invest $500 billion in the coming years to create a global network of data centers in partnership with Japan’s SoftBank Group and others. And Altman’s recent alliance with former Apple design boss Jony Ive has the potential to reinvent the way we use technology by creating a new class of devices for the AI age. In the meantime, OpenAI’s signature product, ChatGPT, has attracted more than 780 million active weekly users, and its enterprise products are used by most of the Fortune 500.