Sam Altman
31 statements across 7 episodes · 14 bullish · 3 bearish · 7 people on the record · first statement Feb 28, 2024 by Marc Andreessen · said 84 times in 34 episodes since 2019 · across every show →
On the record as a speaker too: Sam Altman's record, appearances and statements → this page counts the times other people say the name.
Mentions by year
brought up most by Erik Torenberg (12), Marc Andreessen (11), Noah Smith (8), Dwarkesh Patel (7), Steph Smith (6), Olivia Moore (4), Sherman Wu (3), Nathan Labenz (3)
tap a year for its mentions
2026 6 mentions in 2 episodes 3 per episode
2025 59 mentions in 25 episodes 2 per episode
- Dwarkesh Patel and Noah Smith on AGI and the Economy
- The Unicorn Founder Who Delegated Everything.
- How OpenAI Builds for 800 Million Weekly Users: Model Specialization and Fine-Tuning
- Sacks, Andreessen & Horowitz: How America Wins the AI Race Against China
- How Kong Was Born: APIs, Hustle, and the Future of AI Infrastructure
- Is AI Slowing Down? Nathan Labenz Says We're Asking the Wrong Question
- This Week in AI: GPT-5 Ships, 4o Pulled Back, Grok Imagine Goes Social
- AI Eats the World: Benedict Evans on the Next Platform Shift
- 17 more episodes that year, every mention in 2025 →
2024 11 mentions in 2 episodes 6 per episode
2023 3 mentions in 2 episodes 2 per episode
2022 3 mentions in 1 episode
2019 2 mentions in 2 episodes 1 per episode
Everything said about Sam Altman, oldest first
Feb 28, 2024 neutral
May 9, 2024 positive
Horowitz: Startups can build smart AI models cheaply via distillation
“There's this whole field of distillation where, you know, Sam can go build the biggest, smartest model in the world, and then you can walk up as a startup and kind of do a distilled version of it and get a model very, very smart at a lot less cost.”
Jan 28, 2025 positive
Aug 18, 2025
Oct 8, 2025
Altman: Rapid nuclear adoption depends on achieving radical cost advantages over alternatives
“So if nuclear gets radically cheap relative to anything else we can do, I'd expect there's a lot of political pressure to get the NRC to move quickly on it, and we'll find a way to build it fast. If it's around the same price as other sources, I expect the kin…”
Oct 8, 2025 negative
Oct 8, 2025 positive
Altman: Public awareness lags far behind actual AI model capabilities
“And now we're in this world where the capability overhang is so immense. Like most of the world still just thinks about what ChatGPT can do. And then you have, like, some nerds in Silicon Valley that are using codecs, and they're like, wow, those people have n…”
Oct 8, 2025 positive
Oct 8, 2025 positive
Oct 8, 2025 positive
Oct 8, 2025 negative
Oct 8, 2025 neutral
Oct 8, 2025 neutral
Oct 8, 2025
Oct 8, 2025
Altman: Generative AI IP Dispersal Will Lead to Varied Licensing Models
“So, so I think, like, if I had to guess, Some people will say that. Some people say absolutely not, but it doesn't have the music industry like thing of just a few people with all of the. It's more dispersed. And so people will just try many different setups h…”
Oct 8, 2025 bullish
Altman: OpenAI aims to be consumers' primary personal AI subscription
“We want to be people's personal AI subscription. I think most people will have one, some people will have several, and you'll use it in some first party consumer stuff with us, but you'll also log into a bunch of other services and you'll just, you'll use it f…”
Oct 8, 2025 positive
Oct 8, 2025 negative
Altman: AI regulation should strictly apply to superhuman frontier models
“The one thing I would like is as the models get, the thing I would most like is as the models get truly, like, extremely superhuman capable. I think those models and only those models are probably worth some sort of like very careful safety testing as the fron…”
Oct 8, 2025 bullish
Oct 8, 2025 neutral
Oct 8, 2025 positive
Oct 8, 2025 bullish
Altman: OpenAI Making Aggressive Infrastructure Bet Amid Unprecedented Research Confidence
“We have decided that it is time to go make a very aggressive infrastructure bet and We're like, I've never been more confident in the research roadmap in front of us, and also the economic value that will come from using those models.”
Oct 8, 2025
Altman predicts solar storage and advanced nuclear will dominate long-term energy
“In the long term, I expect it'll be, I don't know what the ratio, but the two dominant sources will be solar plus storage and nuclear. I think some combination of those two will win the future, like the long term future. And advanced nuclear, meaning SMRs fusi…”
Oct 8, 2025
Oct 8, 2025 bullish
Altman: Current LLMs can advance enough to automate AI research breakthroughs
“I think far enough that we can make something that will figure out the next breakthrough with the current technology. Like I, it's a very self-referential answer, but if LLMs can get, if LLM based stuff can get far enough that it can do like better research th…”
Oct 8, 2025
Altman: OpenAI Naively Assumed One AI Persona Fits All Users
“I think we just had a really naive thing, which, you know, like, It would sort of be unusual to think you could make something that would talk to billions of people and everybody wants to talk to the same person. And yet that was sort of our implicit assumptio…”
Oct 8, 2025
Altman: Industry gaming LLM search recommendations emerged in past year
“So this is a very sudden shift that has happened. We never used to hear about this, like, six months ago, 12 months ago. Certainly. And now, there's like, a real cottage industry that feels like it's sprouted up overnight. Trying to do this.”
Oct 8, 2025 positive
Oct 8, 2025 bullish
Altman: Text AI interfaces are nowhere near saturated
“What a chat interface can do for you, it's like nowhere near saturated, because you could ask a chat interface, like, please cure cancer. A model certainly can't do that yet. So I think the text interface style can go very far, even if for the chit chat use ca…”
Oct 16, 2025 neutral