Dear Readers,

At eight years old, he took apart an Apple Macintosh, at 37, he launched the fastest-growing consumer app in history. Today, we're kicking off a brand-new series profiling the most consequential figures in artificial intelligence, and there's no better place to start than with Sam Altman. From Stanford dropout to the man steering OpenAI through billion-dollar bets, boardroom coups, and the race toward superintelligence, his story is a masterclass in what happens when relentless ambition meets a once-in-a-century technological shift. This is the first installment — Dario Amodei, Elon Musk, and others will follow in the weeks ahead, so buckle up and dive in.

All the best,

“The rate of technological progress will keep accelerating, and it will continue to be the case that people are capable of adapting to almost anything. There will be very hard parts like whole classes of jobs going away, but on the other hand the world will be getting so much richer so quickly that we’ll be able to seriously entertain new policy ideas we never could before. We probably won’t adopt a new social contract all at once, but when we look back in a few decades, the gradual changes will have amounted to something big.”

— Sam Altman

At 40 years old, Sam Altman has already lived several careers worth of ambition. He dropped out of Stanford, built and sold a startup, ran the world's most influential startup accelerator, and now leads the company at the center of the AI revolution. His trajectory reads less like a résumé and more like a blueprint for what relentless conviction can produce when paired with extraordinary timing.

To understand how OpenAI became one of the most important companies in the world and to gain an understanding of its future, it is necessary to understand the story of its CEO.

Here's the story of how Sam Altman became the most consequential figure in artificial intelligence - and what he's betting on next.