Altman is not an AI founder. He's a business owner and investor. He doesn't even have an undergrad degree! The actual AI founders are the ones building the tech, and OpenAI has chased many of them away.
There are a lot of smart people in the tech industry without undergrad degrees.
The problem is, in the current generation of tech workers, there's two kinds of people without degrees:
1) The grinder who has a knack for whatever part of the field that they work in and made their name through hard work and building a portfolio of work through practical experience
and
2) The (usually) guy who went to a college prep school, got into Stanford, and encountered a SV VC with exponentially more money than sense, who then told the 21-year-old that they were not a college student, but, in fact, Jesus Christ, and promised more money than the average person could comprehend to "pursue their dreams".
Altman falls into the latter category. Actually, a lot of the founder set does. I say (usually) guy because Elizabeth Holmes also falls into this category.
The facts are that AI has been driven by PhD level research. There are vanishingly few cases of people who have not studied the area in depth making serious contributions. The term "AI founder" is usually used to reference the people who have made the technical and mathematical advances, not the person who hired those individuals after the fact to commercialize it.
Altman is a tech founder and a business founder, but he is not an AI founder.