Sam Altman is leading us into the future with OpenAI

Since launching to the public last fall, ChatGPT has revolutionized the way we work. The advanced chatbot from research lab OpenAI can answer almost any question through its conversational model: it can help you draft a professional email, suggest ideas for the next plot point in your novel, put a complex concept in simple terms — the list goes on. And we owe its existence in no small part to Sam Altman, the 38-year-old openly gay CEO of OpenAI.

Altman’s career began back in 2005, when he dropped out of Stanford University after two years in its computer science program. The then 19-year-old co-founded Loopt, a location-based social network, and ran it through its acquisition in 2012. He next worked at startup accelerator Y Combinator, and in 2014 he became its president. But even while running Y Combinator, Altman was dreaming up the future of artificial intelligence: in 2015, he co-founded OpenAI, and by 2020, he’d left Y Combinator to focus all his attention on the company as its CEO.

In 2019, Altman told Queerty that he’d been dreaming of working on a project like OpenAI since he was a freshman in college.

“I don’t know exactly how AI is going to play out,” Altman said. “But I think some version of it is maximizing human potential and minimizing human suffering. When you have an agent that you can ask to do anything, and as long as it doesn’t harm or impede somebody else’s free will, it will do that: that’s an incredible superpower.”

Part of Altman’s passion for technology came from discovering the magic of the internet while in elementary school, he said, something he has in common with plenty of queer folks.

“A lot of LGBTQ people had experiences like I had, like the internet was really formative for us,” Altman said. “I met many of my friends and I learned way more on the internet than I ever learned in school, I think.”

The internet was also where Altman first came out as gay. “I remember like it was yesterday, with such clarity, the first time I told people online. I was 12,” he recalled. “And what a terrifying but electrifying thing that just sort of cemented the power of the internet to me, because I never could have told people in person. It was just outside the realm of possibility. But I found this community as a very young teenager, and that was awesome. I will be forever grateful to the internet as this abstract concept for that. That made a huge difference in my life.”

Altman did eventually come out as gay off of the internet, too, as a 17-year-old senior at the college preparatory John Burroughs School — one not known for its progressive attitude toward queer people, particularly not when Altman attended in the early 2000s. But Altman fought to change the school’s culture, he told the New York Times, individually asking his teachers to post “safe space” signs in their classrooms in support of LGBTQ+ students, even (and especially) his most homophobic instructors.

Altman continues to operate with pride, though he told Queerty he’s never let his sexuality define him or hold him back as he’s ascended through the ranks of the tech world.

“I don’t know whether or not there is a glass ceiling for gay people in this field,” Altman said. “But I do know that I decided right when I started out I was never going to spend time thinking about that. And I was going to make every career decision as if there weren’t. That’s a mindset that’s hard to have every time you feel a setback, but easy to have you sort of step back and look at your career as a whole.”