Sam Altman, every mention

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Verbatim, from the transcripts: the passages where Sam Altman comes up

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Google Part III: The AI Company. Google is amazingly well-positioned... will they win in AI? (Audio) · Acquired Oct 6, 2025 · 21 mentions

  • ▶ 26:43 Ben Gilbert Oh, Sam Altman looped.
  • ▶ 26:46 David Rosenthal Sam Altman.
  • ▶ 27:03 Ben Gilbert Sam presenting at the WWDC with Steve Jobs on stage with the double pop collar.
  • ▶ 1:32:01 David Rosenthal By two of the most leading figures in the Valley at the time, Elon Musk and Sam Altman.
  • ▶ 1:32:10 David Rosenthal Sam, of course, being president of Y Combinator at the time.
  • ▶ 1:33:01 David Rosenthal And the question and the pitch that Ilan and Sam have for these researchers gathered at this dinner is, what would it take to get you out of Google for you to leave?
  • ▶ 1:34:13 David Rosenthal And no one at the dinner was quite sure that these thinkers could be lured into a new startup, even if Musk and Malteman were behind it.
  • ▶ 1:34:49 David Rosenthal So the pitch that Ilan and Sam are making to these researchers is, let's start a new nonprofit AI research lab where we can do all this work out in the open.
  • ▶ 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.
  • ▶ 1:36:45 Ben Gilbert And that came from, famously, Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Reid Hoffman, Jessica Livingston, who I think most people don't realize was part of that initial tranche, and Peter Thiel.
  • ▶ 2:04:48 David Rosenthal So he makes an ultimatum to Sam and the rest of the OpenAI board.
  • ▶ 2:05:22 David Rosenthal And Sam and the rest of the board are like, no.
  • ▶ 2:06:11 Ben Gilbert I don't know if during this personal tension between Elon and Sam, if they had already decided to go all in on Transformers or not.
  • ▶ 2:08:52 David Rosenthal Sam turns to one of the other board members of OpenAI, Reid Hoffman.
  • ▶ 2:09:13 David Rosenthal In July of 2018, they set a meeting for Sam Altman and Satya Nadella to sit down while they're both at the Allen & Company Sun Valley Conference in Sun Valley, Idaho.
  • ▶ 2:10:06 David Rosenthal Reid Hoffman joins the board of this new structure, along with Sam, Ilya, Greg Brockman, Adam D'Angelo, and Tasha McCauley.
  • ▶ 2:11:14 Ben Gilbert But, this is all still pre-ChatGPT, this is just Sam lining up the financing he needs for what appears to be a very expensive scaling exercise they're about to embark on.
  • ▶ 2:13:04 Ben Gilbert Satya and Sam are on stage together talking about how this amazing partnership and marriage has come together and they're off to model training.
  • ▶ 2:25:51 Ben Gilbert And Sam just kind of says, we should make a chat bot.
  • ▶ 2:28:34 David Rosenthal That morning on the 30th, Sam Altman tweets, today we launched ChatGPT.
  • ▶ 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…

Meta (Audio) · Acquired Oct 28, 2024 · 1 mention

  • ▶ 3:07:53 Ben Gilbert Alex Schultz, who's now the CMO, gives this great talk, gosh, a decade ago at startup school with Sam Altman, and, uh, he makes the point, look, it's kind of a linear thing.

Nvidia Part III: The Dawn of the AI Era (2022-2023) (Audio) · Acquired Sep 6, 2023 · 7 mentions

  • ▶ 21:11 David Rosenthal So of course, those two shadowy figures are Elon Musk and Sam Altman, who at the time was president of Y Combinator.
  • ▶ 22:24 David Rosenthal There's one person who's intrigued by Elon and Sam's pitch.
  • ▶ 22:29 David Rosenthal And to quote an amazing Wired article from the time by Cade Metz that we will link to in our sources, quote, the trouble was so many of the people most qualified to solve all these AI problems were already working for Google and Facebook,…
  • ▶ 23:07 David Rosenthal So after the dinner, Ilya leaves Google and signs up to become, as we said, co-founder and chief scientist of a new independent AI non-profit research lab backed by Elon and Sam.
  • ▶ 45:58 David Rosenthal Yeah, and I believe this is mostly, if not all, due to Sam Altman's influence and taking over here.
  • ▶ 46:06 David Rosenthal So, you know, on the one hand, you can look at this sort of skeptically and say, okay, Sam, you took your nonprofit and you converted it into an entity worth thirty billion dollars today.
  • ▶ 46:29 David Rosenthal And Sam goes out and does these landmark deals with Microsoft.

Sessions: David Senra (Founders Podcast) · Acquired Mar 29, 2023 · 1 mention

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