Sam Altman - How to Make an Abundant Future

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (0:00)
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Hello and welcome everyone. I'm Patrick O'Shaughnessy and this is Invest Like the Best. This show is an open-ended exploration of markets, ideas, stories and strategies that will help you better invest both your time and your money. If you enjoy these conversations and want to go deeper, check out Colossus, our quarterly publication with in-depth profiles of the people shaping business and investing. You can find Colossus along with all of our podcasts at colossus.com.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:58)
Patrick O'Shaughnessy is the CEO of PositiveSum. All opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of PositiveSum. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions. Clients of PositiveSum may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast. To learn more, visit PSUMVC.

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (1:26)
My guest today is Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI. It's a conversation spanning the history, present, and future of OpenAI from the origin of ChatGPT through Codex hardware and their new jalapeno chip. We discussed the early decision to buy compute at scale that nobody felt was rational, Kimmy and distillation, the hugging face incident, and what it's like to raise kids who will grow up never knowing a world without abundant intelligence. Please enjoy my conversation with Sam Altman.
So Sam, you wrote a post that I thought was very simple and really interesting and a good place to start, which rounded to the last year has been really tough and that's somewhat my fault, and the next year is going to be maybe our best 12 months. I'd love you to reflect on both, maybe starting with why you said the first part and why you believe the second part.

**Sam Altman** (2:09)
On the first part, I think 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 unbelievable moment in history where you can only do the very few great things.
So we spread ourselves too thin and then made a bunch of difficult decisions to really refocus on having the best, most abundant, most cost-effective intelligence and empowering the world to build incredible things with that. Since doing that, I think our progress has been remarkable. And just given what we see in the pipeline, we'll be much more remarkable over the next 12 months and the quality of the models that we'll have, the products that we can build on that to really let people thrive with this technology in new ways. It should be pretty awesome.

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (2:51)
Was there a moment last year that something clicked for you that caused you to change directions or restack priorities or something?

**Sam Altman** (2:59)
If you go back to the beginning of 2025, just a year and a half ago, the big concern was companies like OpenAI are buying up so much compute. Is the revenue going to be there? Is the demand going to be there?
And so we were trying to think about a lot of things such that if the revenue growth took longer to materialize than we thought it might, we could have consumer apps and media and all these other things that could help us monetize the GPUs that we were signing up for. Again, it sounds ridiculous now because the revenue growth in the industry has been so steep but that was the big change. And then as soon as we realized like, okay, the model trajectory is growing so fast, there's such a clear economic return on these models. That was when we said we know what to focus on.

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (3:38)
I was reading some of your great old posts from prior to OpenAI.
And one of them is this notion of like, so much discussion of focus and the right amount of things to focus on. Is it one, is it five, is it three? How do you calibrate that in a business like this?

**Sam Altman** (3:52)
Fundamentally, our business is to sell AI that people will build incredible products and services for each other with.
And the components that I think of as going into that are, we have to train great models that work in all the ways people want to use them. So greater coding, greater other kinds of knowledge work, greater doing science like where the real economic value is. We have to produce or partner with these chips and systems, these hugely expensive racks that can do the AI computation. We have to find enough land power data center shells to be able to put those racks somewhere. And then eventually, or maybe pretty soon, we have to build robots that can automate that process to continue to drive the cost down, the cost of producing electricity, chips, the whole supply chain. And that kind of whole stack of making the best, the most abundant, the most useful AI that we can, and making it something like electricity that just seeps throughout the entire economy and empowers people, that's kind of what I think we have to focus on. Building every vertical application on top of that, trying to go like eat every startup, eat every company, no interest in doing that. We really want to just provide that platform.