Sam Altman

“Chat makes sense if you're the highest agency person in the world, which is Elon and Sam. But for the average consumer, like their ideal interface is TikTok. So we need to find something between chat and TikTok.”

“My guess is this was the right move for open AI. Like you go from someone that was both a partner and a competitor, right. And keeping them honest to someone that's now a direct competitor. And if it's only five percent anyway, Sam's losing no money. There's n…”

“When we got to GBT four, which was back in 20, 23, I think that very quickly after that, there was going to be much more disruption in software business being up for grabs right, right away than turned out to be. And the thing that I think I was wrong about a …”

“You know, like that is an example that has stuck in my head of like force of habit and the way people do things and changing behavior. It's just much harder than like the tech nerds realize.”

“The thing to me that feels most psychologically inconsistent about myself is that I have for 20 years been using computers the same way. I now have A magic thing called codex. So do you, so does everybody. That means I should completely be using my computer in…”

“The phase that we're in now reminds me of like smartphones before the iPhone. I was like an early adopter. I had like a Palm Trio in, you know, 2003 or four or whatever. You ever had a sidekick? I never had a sidekick. I thought they were super cool. I wanted …”

“You get this unbelievable set of learnings and pattern matching if you really study and watch companies as an investor that has been super helpful to me running openai but it's like it's the opposite normal direction so it's just like a very rare thing and i s…”

“Having done both, I think I can say it's like much, much, much harder to run a company than being an investor.”

“Like, I think this is, I think this will be one of the most important areas, even more important than automation of other tasks that AI can do just to help us understand more things.”

“We're finally at the moment where AI is solving novel math problems. It is discovering other stuff. It is, you know, you can argue about how good or not, I would say not very good, but it is writing poetry.”

“This is why I think, like, the world is, on the whole, not going to be that different. Even with superintelligence, like, people are still going to be very fundamentally wired to care about other people, to want to be around other people to interact with other…”

“Maybe the two big risks that I'm most worried about with AI, which are a little bit in tension. One is like a loss of control where, you know, AI somehow just becomes too powerful in a way that we can't guarantee the control we want. And the other is power get…”

“In, in terms of questions of just, like, you know, business and the world, for a long time in my career, Paul Graham and Peter Thiel have been two of the people that I have learned the most from about lots of different phases of my career and are still the two…”

“I don't even think I asked him before we launched HGPT, like, Hey, do you think we should launch this thing? But I knew what he would say. I knew it was still early. I knew it was still embarrassing. And I knew the right thing was to like, get it out and get i…”

“The thing that was really different about OpenAI than anything that I had pattern matching before is it was four and a half years from when we started the company to when we launched our first product.”

“One of the things that worked actually is during the Dota two days when we were trying to use RL to beat this video, beat people at a video game, we put up like a leaderboard and people could just see how different ideas were performing and what was You know, …”

“We also learned the incredible power of external demos for like an eminent person that the researchers really wanted to impress. And then we learned a bunch of things that like didn't work like fake deadlines.”

“I mean, it makes sense if like a Manhattan style project, if we did that for AI 10 years ago, well, fine, you know, do it because it's strategically important to the country. But today, given the size of them, I think the only reason you do it is For political…”

“It's the greatest fundraising story in the history of the world.”

“My take on this is it's actually a feature, not a bug. It's a feature of having insanely great talent. I think Sam is N of one at recruiting with really ambitious, talented people. And in a time when you can build anything, you should expect the churn.”

“I just think Sam Altman is someone who I would never, ever bet against, and I think he's the best politician in the world, and I think when he says something, he says it with intent, and when he says we should give five percent away to the administration, he's…”

“On the first part, I think we just, we're doing too many things. We're not focused enough, and they're actually all good things to do, but the trick is we're in this, like, unbelievable moment in history. Where you can only do the very few great things. So we …”

“Building one of these is like order of 10,000 construction workers going full time for a year and a half. The energy that flows through one of these things could power a small city.”

“I think probably the biggest return right now is creative software ideas to sort of squeeze more intelligence out of the units of compute that we have. And my sense is there's like orders of magnitude to go there.”

“I think Jalapeno and its successors are going to be a huge competitive advantage for us from that perspective.”

“I assume at some point we'll figure out optical computing, and that'll be a huge win of intelligence per watt.”

“I would rather people not to steal from us for sure. Maybe I'm feeling too confident right now about our progress and what's like the models that are coming. But this is not in like my top 10 list of worries.”

“For the thing that, to me, feels like, you know, Real AGI. I think very close, like not that much longer.”

“And for researchers, I suspect that although the current workflow of researcher Is it going to very much be automated? There will be new things in the spirit of research in the same way that there's new things in the spirit of software engineering, even though…”

“One, like a boring one, is that AI is just very jagged. It's like superhuman genius in some ways, like dumb toddler and others. And people have, so far, extremely complementary skills to AI.”

“Somehow most people seem to still really prefer interacting with a human. And I definitely would like much rather engage with a person than engage with an AI for almost everything.”

“I think the world wants to know about like the person that's going to be responsible for the decisions of a company and who they're going to hold accountable if they make bad ones and they don't really want an AI CEO.”

“I thought it was going to be weirder to live through the singularity than it turns out to be.”

“I have started just recently to experiment with what it means to like, let An AI kind of look at everything I'm looking at on my computer. I don't have this built yet. and I'm still trying to feel out like where the limits of my comfort and trust should be.”

“Compute, man. Let's imagine that we could build this product. This product that could just do exactly what I said for all your stuff.”

“My kids will never grow up in a world where they were smarter than computers.”

“When we first announced OpenAI, all of these, like, you know, giants of the field, these experts were saying, this is like insane. It's hypey. It's irresponsible. Really respected people like Yann LeCun or whatever, telling journalists like, oh, these guys are…”

“Josh Kushner. Absolute MVP investor. Unbelievable. Has like worked around the clock for what feels like years to help us. He's the only investor that I could point to that is. Proactively. Incredibly helpful all the time.”

“I plan to do this for the rest of my career, but it's like much harder than I have a way to explain to people.”

“The kind of, like, cult worship of the machine god states those people believe that, like, more is going to happen quickly than is going to happen. Eventually a lot will happen, but eventually a lot was gonna happen anyway.”

“One that I don't think gets much attention is how, how are we going to avoid cognitive atrophy?”

“In some sense, scaling laws are like the most hated prediction of all time. Everybody always wants to say I'm gonna run out, can't be like this, and yet it keeps going.”

“I think this is gonna be the best time in the world to do a startup, and it's gonna be quite amazing to see.”

“What took three months to build at the time that we, each company built over the whole YC startup, could now be done with, like, in, like, seven minutes by a coding agent”

“I think Paul Graham is probably the most important force in startups of the last few decades.”

“I bet there's some future trillionaires sitting in this room, and I would bet that the startups created today will be much more valuable, much more impactful than startups of the past”

“The world does not understand how to intuit exponentials, and so they missed this one.”

“Like, I think, I don't know if this is still gonna be true for the next 10 years. I suspect it will be, but the best thing you could do if you wanted to, like, find your people to do a startup with was to move to the Bay Area. You just, like, magic happened. Y…”

“I met Greg Brockman my co-founder, OpenAI, because I was a very early investor in Stripe when I was, like, I don't know, 22 or something, and they were, like, this was before they had, you know, like, real investors that could really help them, and they said, …”

“Here are the mistakes that OpenAI made, and we did make some big ones, of course, but these systems have gotten incredibly capable. So I think it's an alignment failure. I think it's a security failure. I think it's like a very serious thing, even though it's,…”

“Loss of control, accidents are not entirely theoretical things.”

“And that means that we have to, you know, be fairly quite reserved about not imposing our worldview about what we think people should or shouldn't do with AI, or even what we think the good ideas are, while still making sure that we can ensure enough of a safe…”

“I think there will, I think it will feel like the next six months is like maybe equivalent to the last two years of model progress, something like that.”

“It seems to me like the demand for sufficiently high quality intelligence at a sufficiently low price is effectively uncapped.”

“If that happens again, which I think it probably will, then in another six and a half years, the average person uses, let's say, five hundred billion tokens a month, and the token leader uses a quadrillion, or quadrillions of tokens a month.”

“One dystopia that I'm particularly nervous about 10 years from now is we overreact to AI safety, and so we say, look, everyone, you're gonna get a cure for cancer, you're gonna have material abundance, but you will have no freedom, you will have no agency, it …”

“The Johnny Ive acquisition thing, especially if it just turns out to be an Alexa, is like particularly interesting for this, because it was one step along that line of like, oh, I'm buying, I'm gonna pay a ton of money for Johnny Ive, because it will make rais…”

“Listen, if I had to breathe the tea leaves, hardware is probably on the bubble. This was one of Sam's initiatives that made sense when everything was working and OpenAI had an unassailable lead over, over its competitors, right? Now everything's, you know, we …”

“Sam Altman talked about windows, which is a really bad analogy because windows had network effects. He also talked about water companies and electricity companies, which are like completely the opposite. They're regulated utilities with crappy margins selling …”

“He's not a real company like Google or Open or Meta or someone who actually five percent is meaningful, and he's not even winning the pure AI race. It's an anthropic is.”