In conversation with Sam Altman

**Jason Calacanis** (0:00)
I first met our next guest, Sam Altman, almost 20 years ago when he was working on a local mobile app called Looped, who were both backed by Sequoia Capital and, in fact, who were both in the first class of Sequoia Scouts. He did an investment in a little unknown fintech company called Stripe. I did Uber.
And in that tiny experiment of fun...

**Sam Altman** (0:19)
I've never heard that before.

**Jason Calacanis** (0:21)
It's possible. It's starting already.

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (0:24)
You should write a book, Jacob.

**Jason Calacanis** (0:44)
That tiny experimental fund that Sam and I were part of as Scouts is Sequoia's highest multiple returning fund. A couple of low-digit millions turned into over 200 million, I'm told.
Yeah, that's what I was told by Rulof, yeah. And he did a stint at Y Combinator where he was president from 2014 to 2019 In 2016, he co-founded OpenAI with the goal of ensuring that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity. In 2019, he left YC to join OpenAI full-time as CEO. Things got really interesting on November 30th of 2022 That's the day OpenAI launched ChatGPT. In January, 2023, Microsoft invested 10 billion. In November, 2023, over a crazy five-day span, Sam was fired from OpenAI. Everybody was going to go work at Microsoft. A bunch of heart emojis went viral on X slash Twitter, and people started speculating that the team had reached artificial general intelligence. The world was going to end, and suddenly, a couple days later, he was back to being the CEO of OpenAI.
In February, Sam was reportedly looking to raise $7 trillion for an AI chip project. This, after it was reported that Sam was looking to raise a billion from Masayoshi San to create an iPhone killer with Johnny Ive, the co-creator of the iPhone. All of this while ChatGPT has become better and better, and a household name is having a massive impact on how we work and how work is getting done, and it's reportedly the fastest product to hit 100 million users in history in just two months.
And check out OpenAI's insane revenue ramp up. They reportedly hit 2 billion in ARR last year. Welcome to the All-In Podcast, Sam Altman.

**Sam Altman** (2:24)
Thank you. Thank you, guys.

**Jason Calacanis** (2:26)
Sacks, you want to lead us off here?

**David Sacks** (2:27)
Okay, sure. I mean, I think the whole industry is waiting with bated breath for the release of GPT-5.
I guess it's been reported that it's launching sometime this summer, but that's a pretty big window. Can you narrow that down? I guess where are you in the release of GPT-5?

**Sam Altman** (2:44)
We take our time on releases of major new models, and I don't think we... I think it will be great when we do it, and I think we'll be thoughtful about how we do it. We may release it in a different way than we've released previous models. Also, I don't even know if we'll call it GPT-5. What I will say is, a lot of people have noticed how much better GPT-4 has gotten since we've released it, and particularly over the last few months. I think that's a better hint of what the world looks like, where it's not the 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, but you use an AI system, and the whole system just gets better and better fairly continuously.
I think that's both a better technological direction, I think that's easier for society to adapt to, but I assume that's where we'll head.

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (3:41)
Does that mean that there's not going to be long training cycles, and it's continuously retraining or training sub-models, Sam? Maybe you could just speak to us about what might change architecturally going forward with respect to large models.

**Sam Altman** (3:56)
Well, I mean, one thing that you could imagine is just that you keep training a model. That would seem like a reasonable thing to me.

**Jason Calacanis** (4:06)
You talked about releasing it differently this time. Are you thinking maybe releasing it to the paid users first, or a slower rollout to get the red teams tight since now there's so much at stake? You have so many customers actually paying, and you've got everybody watching everything you do.
You have to be more thoughtful now, yeah?

**Sam Altman** (4:26)
Well, GTK4 is still only available to the paid users, but one of the things that we really want to do is figure out how to make more advanced technology available to free users too. I think that's a super important part of our mission. And this idea that we build AI tools and make them super widely available, free or not that expensive, whatever it is, so that people can use them to go kind of invent the future rather than the magic AGI in the sky inventing the future and showing it down upon us.