Sam Altman

“Myself and my amazing colleagues at the Information Broker story recently that Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, and Johnny Ive, the former Apple designer and designer of the iPhone, Have been deep in conversations about building a hardware device together that k…”

“He's not the guy who scales up your thousand person team to tackle these big issues, but he's very smart in terms of thinking 10 steps ahead, sort of.”

“The story's become Ilya, The fundamentalist versus Sam, the pragmatist who just wants to build a business, because the reality is Sam Altman, the founder, even as a, you know, private conference a year ago, not even a year ago, the story was not only is the o…”

“Sam is being painted by the media as like, The business person versus the fundamentalist, but he's like as fundamental as it gets. And so like, to me, it's very hard to like, imagine that being a healthy, stable situation for the future.”

“Sam Altman doesn't just lead OpenAI. He runs or, you know, is, is hugely involved in Helios, a big nuclear project, in WorldCoin, big crypto project, He is one of the most prolific investors in Silicon Valley, and he was pursuing two side projects in recent mo…”

“I just have so much reporting pointing to the fact that Sam knew he had problems with the board”

“Sam Altman is stronger as an executive having effectively left Rome and then having everyone vote him back in with their feet as employees and the board caving, right? He's now stronger than he's ever been as a leader because he basically is at the head of an …”

“Even in the plan, there's not enough natural resources to use the chips and like all of the things that is part of this plan. It's like not even possible, basically, and would diminish a lot of the other types of needs we have for all of these types of materia…”

“When you're like, I want seven trillion dollars, right? Like, that is the statement of a religious leader, not a disciplined business person.”

“All Sam Altman's doing is trying to one-up Elon Musk in absurdism, right, which is like, oh, like, we're gonna, like, list that we can do self-driving cars a decade before we can, or, like, we, at least, like, or we're gonna be like, we're going to Mars, even …”

“For that number to have been published in the Wall Street Journal, someone had to confirm it. A lot of people had to confirm it. Dave Morin: Yeah. Jessica Lessin: Probably two people had to confirm it, and it had to be in the meetings and so forth.”

“If Sam Altman hadn't gone back to OpenAI, this, he had a job offer to do exactly the same thing.”

“I gotta tell you, Sam Altman, our business is not as good a business as the high-margin software business. Still a good business, but it's probably not worth a hundred billion dollars.”

“I think he's a Elon style showman. I think he like, we can go on and on my criticism. Very clear about them.”

“I think it's very likely we've reported they're talking about converting to a B Corp, which is a company which would essentially completely liberate him from the nonprofit kind of overhang and the issues that had that board boot him.”

“I'm, like, I would say, like, equal on Sam Alvin, but then on OpenAI, I'm, like, it's kind of the same thing. It's, like, they've weathered it, but they haven't clearly won anything.”

“I mean, I, you know, you have people like Sam Altman on stage, you know, what now, 18 months ago saying we were 14 months from AGI and all the jobs were over, right?”

“If I'm in the seat, I don't bring him back, right? I say it's the ring of power. I threw it away.”

“Like, you know, and it's like, so it's very interesting to me that the story's become Ilya, The fundamentalist versus Sam, the pragmatist who just wants to build a business, because the reality is Sam Altman, the founder, even as a, you know, private conferenc…”

“I think I bring him back, but I create a new set of checks and balances that actually work to try to meet as many expectations as possible”

“My vote would be to put him back to vote him back in. And I would do that with the creation of a You know, if it's going to stay a non-profit or, you know, whatever, I would do a two-board structure.”

“I mean, I just have so much reporting pointing to the fact that Sam knew he had problems with the board, and then a lot of people were like, well, why didn't he do anything about it?”

“Algorithmic feeds are the first at scale misaligned AIs. And like, I couldn't agree more, right? Like we still haven't really figured out how to align a feed with true health for people.”

“Sam Altman's great innovation was fear marketing around, around, I a hundred percent agree with that and he's done a brilliant job if you just think about him as a marketer, right, from, like, from using that narrative to his advantage.”

“He's a great marketer, but he's not as good as Elon at this tete-a-tete.”

“Sam Altman sells AGI to get cheap capital, to build pretty basic AI. Elon sells Mars to get cheap capital. To build space internet and like more power to them, but it is all marketing.”

“Well, same moment, I think is thematically correct and just annoying, but like, I think it's like, it's one of those things where you're like, okay, I'm a simultaneously going to massively accelerate the problem of fake things on the internet. And then also at…”

“I think that Elon and Sam Altman lie, right? I think they say things they know to not be true, to Get people to do things. Right. And like, go on like with them. I just believe that from what I've seen, like, I think they're both way too smart to believe what …”

“There's no one who can raise, who can do it on the scale of Elon and Sam right now, or at least demonstrating it. And so I think that's actually the real point of threat or the reason that there's probably so much animosity is like, look, they're just too simi…”

“Sam Altman only has 10,000 followers right now, which, so it feels like it's like very not viral from a friending perspective.”

“Altman recently on a podcast referenced Instagram ads as maybe a not horrible advertising experience.”

“The other news was that ChatGPT is gonna work to more personalize this so that it can Add more or enable more erotica for its adult users. So I think Altman was actually saying they had gone too far in weeding out some content and that they're, you know, just …”

“I actually argue that for all of my gripes with Sam Altman, he actually has great etiquette.”

“We published a memo week or so ago, or details from a memo, quotes from a memo in which Sam Altman, ahead of the Gemini launch, but clearly when the team had been testing it, needed to rally his troops. And he said, the vibes are going to be tough out there. O…”

“To be clear, you actually cost Sam Altman money. You didn't pay Sam Altman.”

“I kind of think there's a 50% chance Sam Altman wrote that memo so people would not know their actual strategy.”

“Sam was very, very anxious about the piece. The board was anxious about the piece. So, yeah, from my point of view, it was sort of a nothing burger, but I say that as probably the person in the media who follows this story the most closely, so.”

“Ronan Farrow had been working on a profile of Sam Altman for, I think he said, 18 months. I caught wind of it a little over a year ago, just cause he was calling everyone, And the word on the street was that he was like probing some really serious allegations,…”

“Sam Altman and Greg Brockman attended jury selection. Highly unusual. No one ever attends jury selection.”

“It was revealed that Altman, because it was a nonprofit back then, was paid Greg ten million dollars out of his, like, own family office and kept it from Elon, and so all these sort of alliances were being formed beneath the surface, and it just seemed like a …”

“After Altman's latest testimony, the odds that Elon wins this thing have tanked, according to Polymarket and the prediction market.”

“Microsoft had a right of first refusal. On all new compute from OpenAI. And Sam was saying, we need more. And Amy Hood, the CFO of Microsoft and Satir were like we're not going to give you more right now. And they underestimated their needs and let them pursue…”

“Sam Altman today tweeted that enterprises who want to move to Codex can get their first two months of tokens free.”

“The AI hatred narrative is partially just what it is. It's also, let's be honest, it's because Sam Altman in particular, but everyone leaned into it as marketing. This is so scary. This is so powerful. This is going to be like, it was a very explicit strategy …”

“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.”

“Sam Altman trying to give five percent of the government to the government for regulatory capture and all this politics is so bad, right? Because all of a sudden it makes the game not a fair and open game that at least you can play with rules. It becomes a gam…”

“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…”

“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.”

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