Sam Altman is returning as OpenAI’s CEO, ending a days-long power struggle that began with his firing late Friday afternoon.
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00:00 It took less than five days for Sam Altman to be fired from and then reinstated as OpenAI's
00:04 CEO.
00:05 Nearly all of OpenAI's staff had threatened to quit after Altman was originally ousted
00:09 and several executives like President Greg Brockman left in protest to his firing.
00:14 After negotiations on Tuesday, Altman was brought back as CEO with a new board.
00:18 But who is the 38-year-old startup founder?
00:20 Well, he's a college dropout from Missouri.
00:22 In 2005, he left Stanford University to work on his first startup, Looped, a location sharing
00:27 app.
00:28 It wasn't as successful as Altman hoped and he sold it to Green Dot for about $43 million
00:31 in 2012.
00:32 He took the $5 million he made from the sale and put it into his own VC firm, Hydrazine
00:36 Capital, backed by Peter Thiel.
00:38 In 2014, Paul Graham chose Altman to serve as president for his company, Y Combinator.
00:43 Altman did that for five years before leaving in 2019 to run OpenAI full-time, which he
00:47 founded in 2015 with Elon Musk, Greg Brockman, and Ilyas Zatsever.
00:51 And four years ago, Altman took over as CEO.
00:54 Since then, he has transformed OpenAI into a leader in AI innovation with over $13 billion
00:59 in funding from Microsoft alone.