The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 37 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Altman: AI safety advocates asking humans to surrender autonomy are anti-human
“I think there are some people in the AI field who effectively say we're going to give the world a cure to all disease and we're going to make stuff really cheap in exchange for people giving up their autonomy and impact over the future and power and also in th…”
Altman: OpenAI Killed Sora to Reallocate Compute to Codex
“But last year, for example, we killed Sora. Which was, you know, good product, and fun, and cool, but used a lot of compute, and not as important as Codex, where we put the compute.”
Altman: Better AI will strengthen non-tech businesses offering authentic experiences
“The better AI gets, the more some businesses that have nothing to do with AI, I think will be harder to compete with because we'll really want these like authentic non-technological experiences, or we'll care more about Sports teams or whatever. So no, not, no…”
Altman: I was wrong to expect immediate software disruption after GPT-4
“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 …”
Altman: AI Is Currently in Its Pre-iPhone Era
“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 …”
Altman: AI compute is becoming the most expensive infrastructure project ever
“Finance what is probably already, or at least rapidly becoming the most expensive infrastructure project in history.”
Altman: OpenAI faced widespread intellectual criticism over AGI and LLM focus
“I mean, we just got, you know, hammered in the, by like all of the intellectual giants of the field for saying that we were going after AGI. And then when we started really focusing on large language models, we got hammered again saying this is completely ridi…”
Altman: AI scientific discovery will be more important than task automation
“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.”
Altman: AI is currently solving novel math problems and making discoveries
“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.”
Altman: Superintelligence will not fundamentally alter human social wiring
“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…”
Altman: The two biggest AI risks are control loss and centralized power
“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…”
Altman: Public deployment and customer feedback is how you make AI safe
“The way you do things is to put things out into the world, get feedback from real customers, see where they break, see where they don't break. That is the way you make a good product. That is also the way you make a safe product.”
Altman: AI will drive the greatest small-business creation boom in history
“And we are about to see the greatest boom in people starting smaller businesses that we have ever seen. I think AI is empowering that.”
Altman: OpenAI Should Be a Platform Company Rather Than a Product Company
“Actually, I think we should be more of a platform company than a product company.”
Altman: OpenAI Will Be Best Across the Entire Cost-Performance Curve
“At every point on the cost curve, cost performance curve, we will be the best.”
Altman: OpenAI Killed Its Web Browser 'Atlas' to Refocus Talent
“We killed our web browser called Atlas, which, again, I think was a great product, it was the best web browser, but not as important for us to focus on as somewhere else we could put that talent.”
Altman: OpenAI would not have been possible without YC's ecosystem changes
“So if we, you know, ran the clock back to 2000 four and then projected technology forward to 2016 but not anything else about the shape of
Startup ecosystem, what it meant to be an entrepreneur, how capital flowed, all of the, you know, who got to run companie…”
Altman: Running a company is much harder than investing
“Having done both, I think I can say it's like much, much, much harder to run a company than being an investor.”
Altman: ChatGPT has reached one billion users in under four years
“ChatGPT has only been out, like, less than four years. A billion people use it.”
Altman: AI products have neglected context in favor of raw intelligence
“So I think we've focused Correctly. So much on model intelligence that on the product side, we have not yet thought enough about what it means to give a model more context than any person could have and help advise that person on, on their big decisions.”
Altman: OpenAI launched ChatGPT knowing it was early and embarrassing
“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…”
Altman: Founders learn way more from success than from failure
“You learned some lessons from failure, but I think you learned way more from success.”
Altman: External demos for eminent guests motivate researchers better than fake deadlines
“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.”
Altman: Tobi Lütke gives the best cutting-edge AI feedback among large company CEOs
“He is the only person at the intersection of like CEO of a large company and extremely accurate detailed on the cutting edge feedback.”
Altman: Changing human habits is much harder than technologists realize
“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.”
Altman: I Still Manually Do Email and Tasks Despite Having Codex
“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…”
Altman: Creating and efficiently serving smart models makes everything else follow
“The most important thing that we can do is to create smart models and to be able to run them efficiently and abundantly for a lot of people. If we can get that right, I believe that everything else will follow.”
Altman: Managing research is the closest thing to startup investing
“So I used to be a startup investor, and the thing in my career that I have found closest to startup investing is managing a research program.”
Altman: DeepMind was one of only a few AGI efforts when OpenAI launched
“In late, late, when we were starting OpenAI, there were very few AGI efforts in the world. There was DeepMind, one or two others that I can think of. It was like a very non-consensus thing to do.”
Altman: Working as an investor first gives founders crucial decision pattern matching
“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…”
Altman: AI industry has failed at explaining technology benefits to public
“Like, we have not, as a field, done a very good job of explaining to people What the benefits are, and how the downsides can be mitigated, and we certainly have not done a good job.”
Altman: Paul Graham and Peter Thiel are sounding boards for non-obvious problems
“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…”
Altman: YC would rank among tech's most valuable companies by market cap created
“YC measured
By like traditional metrics and market cap created or whatever is one of the hand, would be one of the handful of most valuable tech companies.”
Altman: OpenAI's GPT series originated from its unsupervised sentiment neuron paper
“You know, what started as the unsupervised sentiment neuron paper turned into GPT-ONE and then eventually GPT-whatever.”
Altman: OpenAI took four and a half years to launch first product
“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.”
Altman: OpenAI used internal leaderboards to simulate missing customer signals
“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, …”