OpenAI, every mention
92 scenes (2025), the whole family · ← back to OpenAI
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Verbatim, from the transcripts: the passages where OpenAI comes up
10 Years of Acquired (with Michael Lewis) · Acquired
- ▶ 1:08:00 Ben Gilbert OpenAI, Anthropic, Cursor Perplexity, Sierra, Replit, Vercel, hundreds of other AI startups, too.
- ▶ 2:19:59 David Rosenthal And part of that growth was that for the first time this year, a few merchants were able to sell on Black Friday directly inside ChatGPT, thanks to Shopify's partnership with OpenAI.
Trader Joe’s: Hawaiian shirts and counter positioning (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 2:06:05 Ben Gilbert OpenAI, Anthropic, Cursor, Perplexity, Sierra, Replit, Vercel, and hundreds of other AI startups rely on WorkOS as their auth solution.
Google Part III: The AI Company. Google is amazingly well-positioned... will they win in AI? (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 2:50 Ben Gilbert So think OpenAI and ChatGPT, Anthropic, NVIDIA hitting all-time highs.
- ▶ 6:39 David Rosenthal Ilya Sitzkever, founding chief scientist of OpenAI, who along with Jeff Hinton and Alex Korczewski had done the seminal AI work on AlexNet and just published that a few years before all three of them were Google employees, as was Dario…
- ▶ 47:28 David Rosenthal Future co-founder and chief scientist of OpenAI.
- ▶ 54:10 David Rosenthal Well, OpenAI wouldn't get founded for years.
- ▶ 54:16 Ben Gilbert What company slightly predated OpenAI, doing effectively the same mission?
- ▶ 1:01:36 David Rosenthal It turns out, though, not only was that description of what DeepMind was fairly accurate, this company and this purchase of it by Google was the butterfly flapping its wings equivalent moment that directly leads to OpenAI, ChatGPT,…
- ▶ 1:24:45 Ben Gilbert Has to be, given the OpenAI tie later.
- ▶ 1:27:57 David Rosenthal And that'll, um, come back up in a sec with another opponent here in OpenAI.
- ▶ 1:29:04 David Rosenthal Companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, Cursor, Perplexity, Sierra, Replit, Vercel, hundreds of other AI startups all rely on WorkOS as their auth solution.
- ▶ 1:34:39 David Rosenthal Of course, of AlexNet, and DNN Research, and Google, and about to become founding chief scientist of OpenAI.
- ▶ 1:35:56 David Rosenthal It was a group of seven or so researchers who left Google and joined Elon and Sam and Greg Brockman from Stripe who came over to create open AI.
- ▶ 1:36:17 David Rosenthal OpenAI was to, quote, advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return.
- ▶ 1:36:58 Ben Gilbert Founders Fund, of course, would go on to put massive amounts of money into OpenAI itself later as well.
- ▶ 1:37:36 David Rosenthal Well, in the first days, it was all hands on deck recruiting and hiring researchers, and there was the initial crew that came over, and then pretty quickly after that in early 2016, they get a big, big win when Dario Amadei leaves Google,…
- ▶ 1:38:04 David Rosenthal And he, along with Ilya, would run large parts of OpenAI for the next couple years before, of course, leaving to start Anthropic.
- ▶ 1:38:26 David Rosenthal Basically, the plan at OpenAI is, let's look at what's happening at DeepMind and show the research community that we can do, as a new lab, do the same incredible things that they're doing, and maybe even do them better.
- ▶ 1:39:15 Ben Gilbert They had a product called Universe, which was around training computers to play thousands of games from Atari games to open world games like Grand Theft Auto.
- ▶ 1:39:54 Ben Gilbert And I think Elon deserves a lot of credit for having his name and his time attached to OpenA at the beginning.
- ▶ 1:40:09 Ben Gilbert Okay, so that's what's going on over at OpenAI, doing a lot of DeepMind-like stuff.
- ▶ 1:40:26 Ben Gilbert Yeah, they bought DeepMind, but they had their talent rated, and I don't want you to get the wrong impression about where Google is sitting just because some people left to go to OpenAI.
- ▶ 1:50:19 David Rosenthal This is one of the great ironies and maddening things to OpenAI and Elon Musk is that OpenAI gets founded in 2015 with the goal of, hey, let's shake all this talent out of Google and level the playing field.
- ▶ 1:51:02 David Rosenthal So, somewhat paradoxically, during these years after the founding of OpenAI, yes, some amazing researchers are getting siphoned off from Google and Google Brain.
- ▶ 1:52:03 David Rosenthal But this paper and its publication would actually be what gave OpenAI the opportunity.
- ▶ 2:03:19 David Rosenthal AI startups, including OpenAI.
- ▶ 2:03:49 David Rosenthal So, speaking of seizing opportunities, what is going on at OpenAI during this time?
- ▶ 2:04:02 David Rosenthal Right after Google publishes the Transformer paper, in September of 2017, Elon gets really, really fed up with what's going on at OpenAI.
- ▶ 2:04:47 David Rosenthal OpenAI isn't cutting it.
- ▶ 2:04:48 David Rosenthal So he makes an ultimatum to Sam and the rest of the OpenAI board.
- ▶ 2:04:56 David Rosenthal I'm happy to take full control of OpenAI and we can merge this into Tesla.
- ▶ 2:05:07 Ben Gilbert But in Elon land, if he takes over as CEO of OpenAI, it almost doesn't matter.
- ▶ 2:05:36 David Rosenthal They don't reach a resolution, and by early 2018, Elon is out, along with him, the main source of OpenAI's funding.
- ▶ 2:05:56 David Rosenthal The sort of panic that this throws OpenAI into is the catalyst that makes them reach for the Transformer and say, all right, we gotta figure things out.
- ▶ 2:07:33 David Rosenthal So in June of 2018, OpenAI releases a paper describing how they have taken the transformer and developed a new approach
- ▶ 2:08:32 Ben Gilbert But from the very beginning, OpenAI seemed to be taking this more seriously given the cost of it would require betting the company if they continued down this path.
- ▶ 2:08:52 David Rosenthal Sam turns to one of the other board members of OpenAI, Reid Hoffman.
- ▶ 2:09:27 David Rosenthal And while they're there, they hash out a deal for Microsoft to invest one billion dollars into OpenAI in a combination of both cash and Azure cloud credits.
- ▶ 2:09:40 David Rosenthal And in return, Microsoft will get access to OpenAI's technology, get an exclusive license to OpenAI's technology for use in Microsoft's products.
- ▶ 2:09:51 David Rosenthal And the way that they will do this is OpenAI, the nonprofit, will create a captive for-profit entity called OpenAI LP controlled by the nonprofit OpenAI Inc.
- ▶ 2:09:51 David Rosenthal And the way that they will do this is OpenAI, the nonprofit, will create a captive for-profit entity called OpenAI LP controlled by the nonprofit OpenAI Inc.
- ▶ 2:10:14 David Rosenthal And thus the modern OpenAI for-profit, non-profit, question mark, is created.
- ▶ 2:11:28 David Rosenthal And this is the right time to talk about why, from OpenAI's perspective, Microsoft is the absolute perfect partner.
- ▶ 2:11:50 Ben Gilbert OpenAI is not going to go buy a bunch of NVIDIA GPUs and then build their own data center
- ▶ 2:12:08 Ben Gilbert But OpenAI needs to tie themselves to someone with the infrastructure.
- ▶ 2:12:34 Ben Gilbert I hesitate to say it out loud, but I think AWS was actually in the very first investment with Elon in open AI.
- ▶ 2:12:58 David Rosenthal The early open AI.
- ▶ 2:12:59 Ben Gilbert Anyway, Microsoft's open AI, they end up tying up.
- ▶ 2:13:15 David Rosenthal And this paves the way for the GPT era of open AI.
- ▶ 2:15:51 David Rosenthal So after the first Microsoft partnership, the first billion dollar investment, in 2019, OpenAI releases GPT-II, which is still early, but very promising, that can do a lot of things.
- ▶ 2:18:15 Ben Gilbert Yeah, so of any open AI technology.
- ▶ 2:18:35 David Rosenthal So after that, Microsoft invests another two billion dollars in OpenAI, which seemed like a lot of money at the time.
- ▶ 2:23:02 Ben Gilbert Realistically, it wasn't launchable, even if it was an open AI thing, because it was so bad.
- ▶ 2:25:30 David Rosenthal OpenAI didn't even really know.
- ▶ 2:25:38 Ben Gilbert So they've got the GPT 3.5.
- ▶ 2:25:44 David Rosenthal They've got 3.5.
- ▶ 2:27:18 Ben Gilbert So to say that OpenAI had any idea what was coming
- ▶ 2:27:27 David Rosenthal Ben Thompson loves to call OpenAI the accidental consumer tech company, right?
- ▶ 2:27:48 David Rosenthal So, Anthropic was working on what would become Claude, and rumors were out there, and people at OpenAI
- ▶ 2:28:07 David Rosenthal So I think that had something to do with the timing, but again, I don't think anybody, including open AI realized what was gonna happen, which is Ben, you alluded to it, but to give the actual numbers.
- ▶ 2:28:23 David Rosenthal OpenAI launches a research preview of an interface to the new GPT-three-point-five called ChatGPT.
- ▶ 2:32:50 Ben Gilbert Announces a new Bing powered by OpenAI, and Satya has a quote,
- ▶ 2:35:26 Ben Gilbert Before they can decide if it's a good idea to go try to out open AI open AI.
- ▶ 2:37:39 David Rosenthal Well, even before that, January 23, when OpenAI hits a hundred million registered users for ChatGPT, Microsoft announces they are investing another ten billion dollars in OpenAI.
- ▶ 2:38:05 David Rosenthal They now arguably own, obviously in retrospect here, they don't own OpenAI, but it seems at the time like,
- ▶ 2:38:14 David Rosenthal oh my God, Microsoft might now own OpenAI, which is our first true existential threat in our history as a company.
- ▶ 2:40:07 David Rosenthal But in March of 23, OpenAI comes out with GPT-IV, which is even better.
- ▶ 2:42:37 David Rosenthal Which, fast forward now into twenty-twenty-four after the absolute insanity that goes down at OpenAI in Thanksgiving twenty-twenty-three when Sam Altman gets fired over the weekend during Thanksgiving and then brought back by Monday when…
- ▶ 2:42:55 Ben Gilbert OpenAI loves Thanksgiving.
- ▶ 2:42:59 David Rosenthal They love Thanksgiving.
- ▶ 2:55:44 David Rosenthal I mean, I think if that had happened, DeepMind would not have gone down in the same way, and probably OpenAI would not have gotten founded.
- ▶ 2:56:01 David Rosenthal Yeah, seems more likely than not to me, that at a minimum, OpenAI would not exist.
- ▶ 3:16:14 Ben Gilbert That because tens of billions of dollars of funding have gone into companies like OpenAI and Anthropic and Perplexity, Google essentially has this new war to fight, and we're gonna leave it to the free market to do its thing where it…
- ▶ 3:17:33 Ben Gilbert There's the domino of Ilya leaving Google to start OpenAI, and the downstream effect is Google is not broken up.
- ▶ 3:30:22 David Rosenthal Open AI model.
- ▶ 3:33:25 David Rosenthal It's not clear to me that Gemini is any worse than OpenAI or Anthropics products.
- ▶ 3:46:38 David Rosenthal And that affects the OpenAIs and the Anthropics and the startups, too, but I think to a lesser degree.
- ▶ 3:46:56 David Rosenthal Well, I mean, given all the drama at OpenAI, I, I don't know that I've characterized them as, uh, acting like a mature company.
- ▶ 3:47:51 Ben Gilbert Gemini AI mode and AI overviews versus the competitive set of Anthropic, OpenAI, Perplexity, Grok, MetAI, etc.
- ▶ 4:03:34 David Rosenthal Also to Parmi Olson at Bloomberg for her book Supremacy about Deep Mind and Open AI, which was a main source for this episode.
Google Part II: Alphabet (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 33:11 David Rosenthal Oh yeah, also friend feed founder, Facebook CTO, co-CEO of Salesforce, chairman of OpenAI.
- ▶ 1:31:47 Ben Gilbert The smartest new companies like OpenAI, Figma, Atlassian, Brex, Notion, and Anthropic, plus hundreds of startups that you see and use every day, are using Statsig to build a bottoms-up data-driven product culture.
- ▶ 1:53:01 Ben Gilbert They sort of took the mantle from Microsoft and had not yet relinquished it to Facebook or later to the Stripe or OpenAI or Anthropic or any of the sort of companies we would talk about in the future as this, like, dense concentration of…
- ▶ 3:40:05 David Rosenthal His collaborator on the AlexNet paper, Ilya Sutskiver, founding scientist of OpenAI, Dario Amadei, co-founder with his sister of Anthropic, Andre Karpathy, until recently chief AI scientist at Tesla, Chris Ola, Noam Shazir, Ian Goodfellow,…
The Jamie Dimon Interview: How JP Morgan Became an $800 Billion Bank · Acquired
- ▶ 53:27 David Rosenthal Statsig is the tool of choice for product development teams at hundreds of great companies, including OpenAI, Notion, Rippling, Brex, Atlassian, and more.
Google Part I: Origins of Search. How the Best Business in Human History Happened (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 1:37:50 David Rosenthal Rather than building these tools themselves, companies like OpenAI, Figma, Atlassian, Brex, Notion, Anthropic, they're just using Statsig.
The Steve Ballmer Interview · Acquired
- ▶ 37:10 Steve Ballmer I mean, look, the analogy now is a little bit Microsoft working with open AI, you know, when the big company works with the new company.
- ▶ 1:01:54 David Rosenthal Today's best product teams like Notion, OpenAI, Rippling, and Figma are equally reliant on experimentation.
- ▶ 1:29:08 Steve Ballmer When was OpenAI actually founded?
- ▶ 1:41:14 Ben Gilbert And join customers like OpenAI, Granola, Runway, Supreme, Chick-fil-A, Ramp, PayPal, Under Armour, and NerdWallet.
TSMC · Acquired
- ▶ 1:42:50 David Rosenthal OpenAI, Figma, Atlassian, Vercel, Notion, tons more.