How To Build The Future: Sam Altman

**Sam Altman** (0:00)
We said from the very beginning we were going to go after AGI, at a time when in the field you weren't allowed to say that, because that just seemed impossibly crazy.

**Garry Tan** (0:09)
I remember a rash of criticism for you guys at that moment.

**Sam Altman** (0:13)
We really wanted to push on that, and we were far less resourced than DeepMind and others, and so we said, okay, they're going to try a lot of things, and we've just got to pick one and really concentrate, and that's how we can win here. Most of the world still does not understand the value of a fairly extreme level of conviction on one bet. That's why I'm so excited for startups right now. It is because the world is still sleeping on all this to such an astonishing degree.

**Garry Tan** (0:43)
We have a real treat for you today. Sam Altman, thanks for joining us. Thanks, Garry. This is actually a reboot of your series, How To Build The Future, and so welcome back to the series that you started.

**Sam Altman** (0:54)
That was like eight years ago, I was just trying to think about that. Something like that.

**Garry Tan** (0:57)
That's wild.

**Sam Altman** (0:58)
I'm glad it's being rebooted.

**Garry Tan** (0:59)
That's right. Let's talk about your newest essay on the age of intelligence. Is this the best time ever to be starting a technology company?

**Sam Altman** (1:09)
Let's at least say it's the best time yet. Hopefully, there'll be even better times in the future. I sort of think with each successive major technological revolution, you've been able to do more than you could before. And I would expect the companies to be more amazing and impactful and everything else. So yeah, I think it's the best time yet. Big companies have the edge when things are like moving slowly and not that dynamic. And then when something like this or mobile or the internet or semiconductor revolution happens, or probably like back in the days of the industrial revolution, that was when upstarts had their have their edge. So yeah, this is like, and it's been a while since we've had one of these, so this is like pretty exciting.

**Garry Tan** (1:48)
In the essay, you actually say a really big thing, which is ASI, super intelligence, is actually thousands of days away.

**Sam Altman** (1:58)
Maybe. I mean, that's our hope, our guess, whatever. But that's a very wild statement. Yeah.

**Garry Tan** (2:05)
Tell us about it. I mean, that's big. That is really big.

**Sam Altman** (2:09)
I can see a path where the work we are doing just keeps compounding, and the rate of progress we've made over the last three years continues for the next three or six or nine or whatever.
Nine years would be like 3,500 days or whatever. If we can keep this rate of improvement or even increase it, that system will be quite capable of doing a lot of things. I think already even a system like O1 is capable of doing quite a lot of things. From just like a raw cognitive IQ on a closed end, well-defined task in a certain area, I'm like, O1 is like a very smart thing. And I think we're nowhere near the limit of progress.

**Garry Tan** (2:50)
I mean, that was an architecture shift that sort of unlocked a lot. And what I'm sort of hearing is that these things are going to compound.

**Sam Altman** (2:58)
We could hit some like unexpected wall or we could be missing something, but it looks to us like there's a lot of compounding in front of us still to happen.

**Garry Tan** (3:06)
I mean, this essay is probably the most techno-optimist of almost anything I've seen out there. Some of the things we get to look forward to, fixing the climate, establishing a space colony, the discovery of all of physics, near limitless intelligence and abundant energy.

**Sam Altman** (3:24)
I do think all of those things and probably a lot more we can't even imagine are maybe not that far away. And one of, and I think it's like tremendously exciting that we can talk about this even semi-seriously now. And one of the things that I always have loved the most about YC is it encourages slightly implausible degrees of techno-optimism and just a belief that like, ah, you can figure this out. And, you know, in a world that I think is like sort of consistently telling people, this is not going to work, you can't do this thing, you can't do that. I think that kind of early PG spirit of just encouraging founders to like think a little bit bigger, it is like, it is a special thing in the world.