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When I received an email saying I had been accepted into the university of my choice for a Ph.D. program, I cried.
Furthering my education had always been an important goal for me, but it was one I didn't achieve easily. I battled Graves' disease through my early college years, which meant I was in and out of the classroom. I constantly played catch-up, and never thought I'd graduate. Understandably, the thought of enrolling in a Ph.D. economics program was a dream come true.
I'm a forward thinker, so I started imagining my interactions with my professors and what kind of thesis I'd work on. Although the annual tuition fees would put a great dent in my pocket, I was determined to work for it. I would have to strike a balance between school, family, and side hustles.
But then I got an offer I couldn't refuse.
While I was still planning for my program that was meant to begin in early fall, I met a friend who talked to me about a startup company he started and was taking off faster than he could keep up. It was exhilarating, and he thought I'd benefit from the experience.
The company wanted to disrupt financial access in underserved economies, and it was doing everything from product development and data modeling to pitching investors.
This friend had always been a dreamer and succeeded in most things he put his mind to. As he assured me, the startup wouldn't be an exception, especially because he had channeled all his savings toward it.
However, he wanted to bring me on board because I had an analytical background in economics. To be honest, the pay he suggested wasn't great, but the opportunity was stellar with potential for growth in skills and finances. My role would involve leveraging my skills in data analysis and understanding market dynamics.
He suggested I take some time to think about it.
I went back home and spent the majority of my time online looking through the company pages and comparing them to others that were thriving in the same field. It looked promising, and I wanted to be part of something great.
However, the team required someone who would work in the office full time, and logically, I wouldn't be able to be present for classes and work at the same time.
After a lot of back and forth, I thought working for the company was a one-time opportunity, and I was leaning toward it.
I looked up deferral programs and decided to consult with my school to seek their opinion on deferring my course for a year or two and then rejoining. The department didn't have deferrals, and the dean advised against it.
But the faculty told me that I could reapply a year later. I thought, if I was accepted once, I could be accepted again, so I started working for the startup.
Everything was great in the first half of my work year. We embraced a team spirit, brought a few clients on board, and were on a steady path to growth. However, somewhere in the middle, we lost the plot.
We struggled to fit some of the company's products into a market that wasn't ready, and, most importantly, we faced a severe lack of funding.
After a long time of trying everything we could, the startup folded.
I had mixed feelings about turning down school. In some ways, I feel like a failure. I was depressed and sunk deep into hopelessness. I haven't reapplied to my Ph.D. program yet, and I'm not sure I will anytime soon.
In hindsight, walking away from an opportunity to further my studies so I could join a startup was a risk, but it was also a rewarding experience in itself. I gained immense experience and made connections I wouldn't have made in academia.
I learned what it means to build something from the ground up, even if it doesn't work out.
Antoine Mutin for BI
At 26, Kevin Choi got a diagnosis that changed his life: glaucoma.
It's a progressive eye disease that damages the optic nerve, often without symptoms until it's too late. By the time doctors caught it, Choi had lost half his vision.
An engineer by training — and a former rifleman in South Korea's Marine Corps — Choi thought he had a solid handle on his health.
"I was really frustrated I didn't notice that," he said.
The 2016 diagnosis still gives him "panic." But it also sparked something big.
That year, Choi teamed up with his doctor, a vitreoretinal surgeon, to cofound Mediwhale, a South Korea-based healthtech startup.
Their mission is to use AI to catch diseases before symptoms show up and cause irreversible harm.
"I'm the person who feels the value of that the most," Choi said.
The tech can screen for cardiovascular, kidney, and eye diseases through non-invasive retinal scans.
Mediwhale's technology is primarily used in South Korea, and hospitals in Dubai, Italy, and Malaysia have also adopted it.
Mediwhale said in September that it had raised $12 million in its Series A2 funding round, led by Korea Development Bank.
Antoine Mutin for BI
Choi believes AI is most powerful in the earliest stage of care: screening.
AI, he said, can help healthcare providers make faster, smarter decisions — the kind that can mean the difference between early intervention and irreversible harm.
In some conditions, "speed is the most important," Choi said. That's true for "silent killers" like heart and kidney disease, and progressive conditions like glaucoma — all of which often show no early symptoms but, unchecked, can lead to permanent damage.
For patients with chronic conditions like diabetes or obesity, the stakes are even higher. Early complications can lead to dementia, liver disease, heart problems, or kidney failure.
The earlier these risks are spotted, the more options doctors — and patients — have.
Choi said Mediwhale's AI makes it easier to triage by flagging who's low-risk, who needs monitoring, and who should see a doctor immediately.
Screening patients at the first point of contact doesn't require "very deep knowledge," Choi said. That kind of quick, low-friction risk assessment is where AI shines.
Mediwhale's tool lets patients bypass traditional procedures — including blood tests, CT scans, and ultrasounds — when screening for cardiovascular and kidney risks.
Choi also said that when patients see their risks visualized through retinal scans, they tend to take it more seriously.
Antoine Mutin for BI
Despite his belief in AI's power, Choi is clear: It's not a replacement for doctors.
Patients want to hear a human doctor's opinion and reassurance.
Choi also said that medicine is often messier than a clean dataset. While AI is "brilliant at solving defined problems," it lacks the ability to navigate nuance.
"Medicine often requires a different dimension of decision-making," he said.
For example: How will a specific treatment affect someone's life? Will they follow through? How is their emotional state affecting their condition? These are all variables that algorithms still struggle to read, but doctors can pick up. These insights "go beyond simple data points," Choi said.
And when patients push back — say, hesitating to start a new medication — doctors are trained to both understand why and guide them.
They are able to "navigate patients' irrational behaviours while still grounding decisions in quantitative data," he said.
"These are complex decision-making processes that extend far beyond simply processing information."
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OpenAI CEO Sam Altman had an eventful 2024, and 2025 is shaping up to be just as big.
While the 39-year-old entrepreneur has been a household name in Silicon Valley for years now, the rest of the world has gotten to know him more recently through the success of OpenAI's AI chatbot, ChatGPT, which launched in 2022.
So far this year, Altman has tried to transform OpenAI into a for-profit company before backtracking in light of a lawsuit filed by OpenAI cofounder Elon Musk, while releasing the company's first "emotionally intelligent" model GPT-4.5, and planning for GPT-5.
Altman also unveiled a new partnership with longtime Apple designer Jony Ive, who, with his design firm LoveFrom, will take creative and design control of OpenAI. OpenAI is also acquiring Ive's hardware startup in a $6.5 billion deal.
This year also marked major milestones in Altman's personal life. Altman, who's married to Oliver Mulherin, announced the birth of his son in February.
In April 2024, Altman was added to Forbes' billionaires list. OpenAI launched GPT-4o — its newest large language model —the following month. In June, Apple CEO Tim Cook announced at Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference that the tech giant would partner with OpenAI to bring ChatGPT to iPhones.
Before the AI boom, Altman spent years as president of startup accelerator Y Combinator. He also owns stakes in Reddit, a nuclear fusion startup known as Helion, and other companies. In his free time, he races sports cars with his husband and preps for the apocalypse.
Here's a look at Altman's life and career so far.
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He learned how to program and take apart a Macintosh computer when he was 8 years old, according to The New Yorker. He attended John Burroughs School, a private, nonsectarian college-preparatory school in St. Louis.
Matt Weinberger/Business Insider
"Growing up gay in the Midwest in the two-thousands was not the most awesome thing," he told The New Yorker. "And finding AOL chat rooms was transformative. Secrets are bad when you're eleven or twelve."
Altman came out as gay after a Christian group boycotted an assembly at his school that was about sexuality.
"What Sam did changed the school," his college counselor, Madelyn Gray, told The New Yorker. "It felt like someone had opened up a great big box full of all kinds of kids and let them out into the world."
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The app shared a user's location with their friends. Loopt was part of the first group of eight companies at startup accelerator Y Combinator. Each startup got $6,000 per founder, and Loopt was in the same batch as Reddit, according to The Business of Business.
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The $43 million sale price was close to how much it had raised from investors, The Wall Street Journal reported. The company was acquired by Green Dot, a banking company known for prepaid cards.
One of Loopt's cofounders, Nick Sivo, and Altman dated for nine years, but they broke up after they sold the company.
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That included a large part of the $5 million he got from Loopt, and an investment from billionaire entrepreneur and venture capitalist Peter Thiel. Altman invested 75% of that money into YC companies and led Reddit's Series B fundraising round.
He told The New Yorker, "You want to invest in messy, somewhat broken companies. You can treat the warts on top, and because of the warts, the company will be hugely underpriced."
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While he was YC president, Altman taught a lecture series at Stanford called "How to Start a Startup." The next year, at 29, Altman was featured on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list for venture capital.
Drew Angerer/Getty
He chose a fission and a fusion startup for YC because he wanted to start a nuclear-energy company of his own. He invested his own money in both companies and served on their boards.
Mark Andreessen, cofounder of venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, told The New Yorker, "Under Sam, the level of YC's ambition has gone up 10x."
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In April (the same month he made Forbes' billionaire list), Altman was spotted in Napa, California, driving an ultra-rare Swedish supercar. The Koenigsegg Regera is seriously fast, able to go from zero to 250 miles per hour in less than 30 seconds. Only 80 of these cars are known to exist, and they can cost up to $4.65 million.
He once told two YC founders that he likes racing cars and had five, including two McLarens and an old Tesla, according to The New Yorker. He's said he likes racing cars and renting planes to fly all over California.
Separately, he told the founders of the startup Shypmate that, "I prep for survival," and warned of either a "lethal synthetic virus," AI attacking humans, or nuclear war.
"I try not to think about it too much," Altman told the founders in 2016. "But I have guns, gold, potassium iodide, antibiotics, batteries, water, gas masks from the Israeli Defense Force, and a big patch of land in Big Sur I can fly to."
Altman's mom is a dermatologist and told The New Yorker, "Sam does keep an awful lot tied up inside. He'll call and say he has a headache — and he'll have Googled it, so there's some cyber-chondria in there, too. I have to reassure him that he doesn't have meningitis or lymphoma, that it's just stress."
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Along with their brother Max, the Altmans launched a fund in 2020 called Apollo that is focused on funding "moonshot" companies. They're startups that are financially risky but could potentially pay off with a breakthrough development.
Michael Kovac/Getty Images for Vanity Fair
Their goal for the nonprofit artificial intelligence company was to make sure AI doesn't wipe out humans.
"We discussed what is the best thing we can do to ensure the future is good?" Musk told The New York Times in 2015. "We could sit on the sidelines or we can encourage regulatory oversight, or we could participate with the right structure with people who care deeply about developing A.I. in a way that is safe and is beneficial to humanity."
Some of Silicon Valley's most prominent names pledged $1 billion to OpenAI, including Reid Hoffman, the cofounder of LinkedIn, and Thiel.
@sama
At a StrictlyVC event in 2019, Altman was asked how OpenAI planned to make a profit, and he said the "honest answer is we have no idea."
Altman said OpenAI had "never made any revenue" and that it had "no current plans to make revenue."
"We have no idea how we may one day generate revenue," he said at the time, according to TechCrunch.
Skye Gould/Business Insider
"We want to increase our ability to raise capital while still serving our mission, and no pre-existing legal structure we know of strikes the right balance," OpenAI said on its blog. "Our solution is to create OpenAI LP as a hybrid of a for-profit and nonprofit — which we are calling a 'capped-profit' company."
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Altman flew to Seattle to meet with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, where he demonstrated OpenAI's AI models for him, The Wall Street Journal reported. The pair announced their business partnership on LinkedIn.
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Altman and OpenAI's former chief scientist, Ilya Sutskever, said the move to focus on large language models was the best way for the company to reach artificial general intelligence, or AGI, a system that has broad human-level cognitive abilities.
Marc Olivier Le Blanc/Worldcoin
The company, now just called World, aims to give everyone in the world access to crypto by scanning their iris with an orb. In January, World said it had reached 1 million people and has onboarded over 150,000 first-time crypto users.
OpenAI
Both DALL-E and ChatGPT are known as "generative" AI, meaning the bot creates its own artwork and text based on information it is fed.
After ChatGPT was released on November 30, Altman tweeted that it had reached over 1 million users in five days.
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A few days after its launch, Altman said that it "is incredibly limited, but good enough at some things to create a misleading impression of greatness." Altman posted that ChatGPT was "great" for "fun creative inspiration," but "not such a good idea" to look up facts.
ChatGPT then launched a paid version of ChatGPT called "ChatGPT Professional" to give better access to the bot. In December, Altman posted that OpenAI "will have to monetize it somehow at some point; the compute costs are eye-watering."
ChatGPT now has multiple models at different price levels.
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The value of Microsoft's investment was worth $10 billion. Before Microsoft's investment, other venture capitalists wanted to buy shares from OpenAI employees in a tender offer that valued the company at around $29 billion.
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"Helion is more than an investment to me," Altman told TechCrunch. "It's the other thing beside OpenAI that I spend a lot of time on. I'm just super excited about what's going to happen there."
He told TechCrunch that he's "happy there's a fusion race," to build a low-cost fusion energy system that can eventually power the Earth.
FLORENCE LO/Reuters
People who pay $20 a month for ChatGPT Plus get benefits such as access to the app even when traffic is high, faster responses from the bot, and first access to new features and ChatGPT improvements.
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"If AGI is successfully created, this technology could help us elevate humanity by increasing abundance, turbocharging the global economy, and aiding in the discovery of new scientific knowledge that changes the limits of possibility," Altman wrote on OpenAI's blog.
Despite its potential, Altman said artificial general intelligence comes with "serious risk of misuse, drastic accidents, and societal disruption." But instead of stopping its development, Altman said "society and the developers of AGI have to figure out how to get it right."
Altman went on to share the principles that OpenAI "care about most," including "the benefits of, access to, and governance of AGI to be widely and fairly shared."
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In an interview with ABC News, Altman said he thinks "people should be happy that we're a little bit scared" of generative AI systems as they develop.
Altman said he doesn't think AI systems should only be developed in a lab.
"You've got to get these products out into the world and make contact with reality, make our mistakes while the stakes are low," he said.
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In a blog post, the company said it hoped the option to turn off chat history "provides an easier way to manage your data than our existing opt-out process."
When a user turns off their chat history, new conversations will be kept for 30 days for OpenAI to review them for abuse, then are permanently deleted.
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Altman told lawmakers there should be an agency that grants licenses for companies that are working on AI models "above a certain scale of capabilities." He also said the agency should be able to revoke licenses from companies that don't follow safety rules.
"I think if this technology goes wrong, it can go quite wrong," Altman said. "And we want to be vocal about that, we want to work with the government to prevent that from happening."
Insider
The app, which is free, can answer text-based and spoken questions using Whisper, another OpenAI product that is a speech-recognition model. Users who have a subscription to ChatGPT Plus can also access it through the app.
Elizabeth Frantz/Reuters.
At the start of his trip, Altman told reporters in London that he was concerned about the EU's proposed AI Act, which focuses on regulating AI and protecting Europeans from AI risks.
"The details really matter," Altman said, according to the Financial Times. "We will try to comply, but if we can't comply, we will cease operating."
However, he shared on X later in the week that OpenAI is "excited to continue to operate here and of course have no plans to leave."
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Altman made it clear that he doesn't believe humans should try to be friends with AI in an interview during The Wall Street Journal's Tech Live event.
"I personally really have deep misgivings about this vision of the future where everyone is super close to AI friends, and not more so with their human friends," Altman said.
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In November, the OpenAI board of directors announced that Altman would be stepping down from his role as CEO and leaving the board, "effective immediately."
In a blog post, the board said it "no longer has confidence in his ability to continue leading OpenAI," and added that Altman was "not consistently candid in his communications."
"We are grateful for Sam's many contributions to the founding and growth of OpenAI," a statement from OpenAI's board says. "At the same time, we believe new leadership is necessary as we move forward."
Altman issued his own statement via a post on X.
"i loved my time at openai. it was transformative for me personally, and hopefully the world a little bit. most of all i loved working with such talented people," Altman wrote.
He added: "will have more to say about what's next later."
Markus Schreiber/AP
After a chaotic weekend, Altman and OpenAI announced that he would return to the tech company as CEO.
"We have reached an agreement in principle for Sam Altman to return to OpenAI as CEO with a new initial board of Bret Taylor (Chair), Larry Summers, and Adam D'Angelo," the company wrote on X.
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Altman married his partner Mulherin in January 2024.
An attendee of the wedding confirmed to Business Insider that the pictures the couple shared weren't AI-generated. His husband is an Australian software engineer who previously worked at Meta, according to his LinkedIn profile.
OpenAI
In February 2024, OpenAI unveiled Sora to the public. The program — named after the Japanese word for "sky" — created up to one-minute-long videos from text prompts.
"We're teaching AI to understand and simulate the physical world in motion, with the goal of training models that help people solve problems that require real-world interaction," OpenAI wrote in Sora's announcement.
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A few weeks after Forbes declared Altman a billionaire, he and his partner signed the Giving Pledge, vowing to give away most of their fortune.
"We would not be making this pledge if it weren't for the hard work, brilliance, generosity, and dedication to improve the world of many people that built the scaffolding of society that let us get here," the pledge letter read.
They continued: "There is nothing we can do except feel immense gratitude and commit to pay it forward, and do what we can to build the scaffolding up a little higher."
OpenAI
During its "Spring Update" on May 13, 2024, OpenAI announced GPT-4o, an updated version of its large language model that powers ChatGPT. OpenAI CTO Mira Murati made the announcement, and Altman didn't make an appearance despite actively promoting the event on X.
Altman might've been absent from the presentation, but the demonstrations of ChatGPT's voice and video capabilities created buzz online. It also led to Altman and his company being called out by actor Scarlett Johansson, who alleged that the OpenAI chatbot Sky's voice sounded "eerily similar" to her own after she declined a partnership.
Altman's post on X referencing a movie in which Johansson voices someone's virtual girlfriend was quickly called into question, and the company soon said that it would not move forward with the voice heard in the demo.
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After much debate about how it would enter the AI arms race, Apple announced at WWDC 2024 that it would partner with OpenAI to close the gap between it and its rivals.
Although Bloomberg reported that Apple isn't paying OpenAI in cash, the tech titan's solid installed base of over two billion users means more people may use ChatGPT if it comes integrated with Siri. According to the presentation, Siri will be able to handle more complex requests with help from ChatGPT.
Altman was spotted attending WWDC the day the partnership was announced and speaking to high-ranking Apple employees ahead of the keynote.
Riddhi Kanetkar / Business Insider
Altman confirmed reports that OpenAI was planning a corporate restructuring during a talk at Italian Tech Week in September 2024.
"Our board has been thinking about that for almost a year, independently, as we think about what it takes to get to our next stage," Altman said. "I think this is just about people being ready for new chapters of their lives and a new generation of leadership."
As part of those changes, Altman might finally get equity in OpenAI, which is now worth about $157 billion after it closed its most recent, $6.6 billion funding round.
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At OpenAI's developer conference, Dev Day, Altman said o1, OpenAI's latest set of AI models, which it says has "reasoning" abilities, represented a breakthrough toward artificial general intelligence.
While Altman said he believes AGI — a still hypothetical form of AI that can solve any task a human can — is still a ways away, there will be "very steep" progress over the next two years.
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On January 21, Altman joined Oracle CTO Larry Ellison, President Donald Trump, and SoftBank founder Masayoshi Son to announce a partnership to fund a $500 billion investment in US AI. The companies would form Stargate, a project that seeks to build US AI infrastructure and create jobs.
"Together these world-leading technology giants are announcing the formation of Stargate," Trump said, adding: "Put that name down in your books, because I think you're going to hear a lot about it."
Steve Granitz, Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/Getty Images
Though the pair founded OpenAI together, Altman's relationship with Musk has become increasingly tense over the years. Musk offered to run OpenAI, but his proposal was rejected, Semafor reported in 2023. He departed OpenAI in 2018 and went on to start xAI.
Since then, they've had heated exchanges, shared words of appreciation, and entered a legal battle. Musk sued Altman and OpenAI in March 2024, alleging the company violated its founding principles.
In an August 2024 lawsuit, Musk claimed he was "deceived" into cofounding OpenAI.
The most recent development in their feud is a $97.4 billion bid to buy the AI company by a group led by Musk. Altman declined, telling Sky News reporters at an AI summit in Paris, "The company is not for sale, neither is the mission."
welcome to the world, little guy!
— Sam Altman (@sama) February 22, 2025
he came early and is going to be in the nicu for awhile. he is doing well and it’s really nice to be in a little bubble taking care of him.
i have never felt such love. pic.twitter.com/wFF2FkKiMU
On February 22, Altman announced the birth of his son on social media. Altman said the newborn will be in the neonatal intensive care unit, or NICU, which offers medical treatment after birth, "for awhile."
"i have never felt such love," Altman said in his post.
JOEL SAGET / AFP
Altman introduced the new model in a post on X, where he described it as "the first model that feels like talking to a thoughtful person." He added that the model will be "giant" and "expensive," and Altman said it offers a "different kind of intelligence and there's a magic to it."
OpenAI released GPT-4.5 to pro tier users who pay $200 a month and developers in the API with plans to offer it to ChatGPT Plus, Team, and Edu users the following week.
In a blog post on May 5, OpenAI said it "was founded as a nonprofit, and is today overseen and controlled by that nonprofit. Going forward, it will continue to be overseen and controlled by that nonprofit."
It added that the "for-profit LLC, which has been under the nonprofit since 2019, will transition to a Public Benefit Corporation (PBC)—a purpose-driven company structure that has to consider the interests of both shareholders and the mission."
OpenAI also said that the nonprofit will continue to control the PBC and remain its largest shareholder. The new PBC will maintain OpenAI's same mission.
LoveFrom
Altman announced on May 21 that OpenAI was buying a hardware startup called io from Jony Ive, the former Apple exec who led the design of the iPhone and other iconic products. The deal is valued at nearly $6.5 billion, a spokesperson confirmed to BI.
Altman also noted that Ive, and his design firm LoveFrom, would be taking control of creative and design at OpenAI — a partnership that has been two years in the making.
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