Sam Altman has no public IQ score. No test result of his has ever been published, so every number you see online is a guess. IQ websites put him anywhere from about 135 to 170, and none of them rests on a test. The viral tier list that ranks AI leaders by IQ puts him on the bottom of its four rows. That's three rows below Ilya Sutskever, the board member who voted to fire him in 2023.
On November 3, 2026 I posted on LinkedIn that tier list and who sits where. Nobody measured anything: it's one account's opinion with 600,000 views. Here is what the list shows, what is actually on record about these people, and the one pattern in it worth keeping.
- Sam Altman's IQ has never been tested in public. The 135 to 170 estimates online come with no test behind them.
- The top tier includes Demis Hassabis, Ilya Sutskever, Geoffrey Hinton, Sergey Brin and Larry Page. Altman sits on the bottom row.
- Sutskever was one of four directors who removed Altman on November 17, 2023. Four days later, OpenAI agreed to bring him back.
- What is on record beats any IQ guess: two 2024 Nobel Prizes, a Turing Award and a 2300 chess rating.
- The pattern mostly holds: the people who built the models sit above the people who sell them. LeCun is the big exception.
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“AI's biggest names got ranked by IQ. It's brutal.”
What Is Sam Altman's IQ?
Nobody knows Sam Altman's IQ, because he has never published a test score. Sites like MyIQScores list him at 140 to 155, and posts on X go as high as 170. None of them cites a test. Riot IQ at least shows its working: it reads his Stanford admission and career and lands on 135 to 145.
Riot IQ also traced the viral 170 back to a single source called "DgFresh" with no method behind it. The rest work backwards from his career and pick a number that sounds right.
| Source | Estimate | Basis |
|---|---|---|
| Riot IQ | 135 to 145 | Career proxies: Stanford admission, Y Combinator, OpenAI |
| MyIQScores | 140 to 155 | Estimate, no test |
| CelebrityIQ | 155 | Estimate, no test |
| Scientific Place | 170 | Estimate, no test; Riot IQ traces the viral 170 to "DgFresh" |
That's a 35-point gap for one man. When four sites disagree by that much, none of them is measuring anything.
What is on record is his path. Altman studied computer science at Stanford for two years, then dropped out to co-found Loopt at 19. He became president of Y Combinator in February 2014 and has run OpenAI as CEO since 2019. That is a record of picking founders and closing rounds. It tells you nothing about a score on a timed test. My bet: his real edge is judging people, and no IQ test measures that.
Where Does Sam Altman Rank on the AI IQ Tier List?
Sam Altman sits in the bottom tier of four: Built Different, Genius, Elite and Sharp. The top tier includes Demis Hassabis, Ilya Sutskever, Geoffrey Hinton, Sergey Brin and Larry Page. Elon Musk and Dario Amodei sit in Genius. Mark Zuckerberg and Yann LeCun land in Elite. Sam Altman shares the Sharp row with Sundar Pichai, Satya Nadella and Mira Murati.
| Tier | Name | On record |
|---|---|---|
| Built Different | Demis Hassabis | 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry; chess master standard at 13, Elo 2300 |
| Built Different | Geoffrey Hinton | 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics; 2018 Turing Award |
| Built Different | Ilya Sutskever | Co-author of AlexNet (2012); OpenAI co-founder; CEO of Safe Superintelligence |
| Built Different | Sergey Brin, Larry Page | Co-founded Google |
| Genius | Elon Musk | OpenAI co-founder in 2015 |
| Genius | Dario Amodei | PhD from Princeton; Anthropic co-founder and CEO |
| Elite | Yann LeCun | 2018 Turing Award, with Hinton and Yoshua Bengio |
| Elite | Mark Zuckerberg | Founder and CEO of Meta |
| Sharp | Sam Altman | Stanford dropout; Y Combinator president 2014 to 2019; OpenAI CEO |
| Sharp | Sundar Pichai, Satya Nadella | CEOs of Google and Microsoft |
| Sharp | Mira Murati | OpenAI CTO and interim CEO in November 2023 |
The replies did the real work. The most liked one calls LeCun outside the top row a crime: he's the man who made convolutional networks work. The second says Dario Amodei belongs on top. Others ask where Jensen Huang went. The man selling chips to everyone on the list isn't on it.
Who Fired Sam Altman?
OpenAI's board fired Sam Altman on November 17, 2023. Four directors made the call: chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, Quora CEO Adam D'Angelo, entrepreneur Tasha McCauley and Helen Toner of Georgetown's Center for Security and Emerging Technology. Greg Brockman stepped down as chairman the same day. Mira Murati, then CTO, became interim CEO.
Why Was Sam Altman Fired?
OpenAI's board said Altman "was not consistently candid in his communications with the board" and that it no longer had confidence in him to lead OpenAI. The announcement gave no example.
Altman's firing lasted four days. On November 20, Sutskever posted: "I deeply regret my participation in the board's actions." More than 700 employees threatened to quit. On November 21, OpenAI agreed to bring Altman back as CEO with a new board of Bret Taylor, Larry Summers and Adam D'Angelo.
In March 2024 an outside review by WilmerHale found his conduct "did not mandate removal". It called the firing the result of "a breakdown in the relationship and loss of trust" between the old board and Altman.
Sutskever left OpenAI in May 2024 and announced Safe Superintelligence in June 2024. He has run it as CEO since co-founder Daniel Gross left at the end of June 2025. So the list puts the man who voted Altman out three rows above him, and today each one runs his own lab.
What Are Demis Hassabis's and Ilya Sutskever's IQs?
Demis Hassabis and Ilya Sutskever have no public IQ scores. MyIQScores guesses 168 for Hassabis and CelebrityIQ about 165 for Sutskever, again with no test. Dario Amodei has no public score either. The record says more than the guesses do. Sutskever has his own view of IQ. On X in April 2022 he wrote: "iq(heart) > iq(mind)".
Hassabis reached chess master standard at 13 with an Elo of 2300. In 2024 he shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry with John Jumper for AlphaFold, alongside David Baker. Sutskever built AlexNet in 2012 with Alex Krizhevsky and Geoffrey Hinton, the image result that set off the deep learning boom.
Hinton won the 2018 Turing Award with LeCun and Yoshua Bengio, then the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics with John Hopfield. These are results judged by peers over decades. One account's ranking can't compete with that.
Why Do the Builders Rank Above the Sellers?
The tier list puts the researchers who built the science above the CEOs who sell it. Up top: Hinton, Sutskever, Hassabis, plus Brin and Page with Google search. The bottom tier is people who run the companies and sell the product: Altman, Pichai, Nadella. The list ranks the work that is hard to fake higher. Not perfectly: LeCun built convolutional networks and still sits below Musk.
Buyers do the same thing in B2B. A technical buyer trusts the person who built the product more than any sales deck. That's why founder-led sales works so well early on: every hard question gets answered by someone who knows the code. My advice to a technical founder: keep the calls yourself and give the research, lists and follow-ups to agents.
If you're a technical founder still running your own sales, here is how we set up founder-led growth with agents doing the busywork.
One honest limit. The list measures nothing, and builders sell too: Hassabis runs Google DeepMind, a unit with products to ship. Use the tier list as a joke about status. When you judge someone, use the record.
Can You Measure an AI Leader's Intelligence?
You can't measure an AI leader's intelligence with an IQ number from a website. You can read what each person shipped, what peers awarded them, and which of their calls came true. The same rule works for model benchmarks: check who ran the test, on what, and how.
I wrote that checklist up in how to read an AGI benchmark without falling for the headline.
For the business side of the same race, see Anthropic vs OpenAI revenue.
And for what investors pay for Amodei's company, see Anthropic's market cap.
And whether that company makes money yet: is Anthropic profitable?
Frequently asked questions
What is Sam Altman's IQ?
Sam Altman's IQ is not public. He has never released a test score, and no verified result exists. Websites estimate 135 to 170 from his career at Stanford, Y Combinator and OpenAI, but none rests on a test. Treat any number you see as somebody's guess.
Who fired Sam Altman?
OpenAI's board fired him on November 17, 2023. The four directors were Ilya Sutskever, Adam D'Angelo, Tasha McCauley and Helen Toner. Sutskever said three days later that he regretted it. On November 21, OpenAI agreed to bring Altman back as CEO with a new board led by Bret Taylor.
Why was Sam Altman fired from OpenAI?
The board said he was not consistently candid in his communications with it, and that it had lost confidence in his leadership. It gave no specific example. A WilmerHale review ordered by the new board found in March 2024 that his conduct did not mandate removal.
Who is the smartest person in AI?
Nobody has measured it, so there is no fair answer. If you want a record instead of a guess, Geoffrey Hinton and Demis Hassabis both won 2024 Nobel Prizes. Hinton, Yann LeCun and Yoshua Bengio shared the 2018 Turing Award, computing's top prize.
Is Jensen Huang on the AI IQ tier list?
No. Nvidia's CEO is missing from the viral tier list, and several replies asked where he went. His company sells the chips most of these labs train their models on, which is why so many people noticed the gap.
Sources
OpenAI, OpenAI announces leadership transition, November 17, 2023.
Ilya Sutskever on X, "I deeply regret my participation in the board's actions", November 20, 2023.
OpenAI, Review completed: Altman, Brockman to continue to lead OpenAI, WilmerHale findings, March 2024.
NobelPrize.org, Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2024, Baker, Hassabis and Jumper.
NobelPrize.org, Nobel Prize in Physics 2024, Hopfield and Hinton.
ACM, 2018 A.M. Turing Award to Bengio, Hinton and LeCun.
NBC New York (CNBC), Ilya Sutskever becomes CEO of Safe Superintelligence, July 2025.
Wikipedia, Sam Altman, education and career, read November 3, 2026.
Wikipedia, Demis Hassabis, chess rating and education, read November 3, 2026.
Wikipedia, Removal of Sam Altman from OpenAI, employee letter and timeline, read November 3, 2026.
Ilya Sutskever on X, "iq(heart) > iq(mind)", April 9, 2022.
Riot IQ, What Is Sam Altman's IQ?, estimate of 135 to 145 from career proxies, read November 3, 2026.
MyIQScores, Sam Altman IQ estimate, 140 to 155, read November 3, 2026.
MyIQScores, Demis Hassabis IQ estimate, 168, read November 3, 2026.
CelebrityIQ, Ilya Sutskever IQ estimate, 165, read November 3, 2026.
CelebrityIQ, Sam Altman IQ score, 155, read November 3, 2026.
Scientific Place, Sam Altman's IQ, estimate of 170, read November 3, 2026.
Federico Donatone, AI's biggest names got ranked by IQ. It's brutal., LinkedIn, November 3, 2026.
