Sam Altman: The Future of OpenAI, ChatGPT's Origins, and Building AI Hardware

**Sam Altman** (0:00)
We said, okay, we're gonna go for AGI. 99% of the world thought we were crazy, 1% of the world that really resonated with, you know, 10 or 20 years, unless something goes hugely wrong, we will have like unimaginable super intelligence. This is the best fucking time ever in the history of technology ever, period, to start a company.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:20)
Well, Sam, thank you so much for joining us, and thanks for all the inspiration. I mean, OpenAI itself is a true inspiration for any really, really ambitious person. Maybe we just start with that. I mean, what were some of the decisions early that seemed small, that turned out to be incredibly pivotal?

**Sam Altman** (0:42)
I mean, just deciding to do it was a big one. Like we got very close to not starting OpenAI.
AGI sounded crazy. I had Gary's job then, and we were, you know, there was like all of this other great stuff to do that would work. Like all these great startups, and AGI was like kind of a pipe dream. And also even if it was possible, DeepMind seemed like impossibly far ahead. And so we had this year over the course of 2015 where we were talking about starting it. And, you know, it was like kind of coin flippy. And I think this is the story of like many ambitious things where they seem so difficult, and there's such good reasons not to do them, that it really takes a core of people that like sit in a room, look each other in the eye and say, all right, let's do this. And those are like very important moments. And I think when in doubt, you should lean into them.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:32)
So there were just a billion things, a billion reasons why people might say, you shouldn't do it. I mean, off the bat, like even, one of the things you figured out was the scaling laws.

**Sam Altman** (1:42)
It's so hard to remember what it was like. Next year will be our 10 year anniversary. And so not, yeah, thank you.
But to like remember what the vibes were like about AI, 10 years ago, that was like way before the first language models that worked. We were trying to like play some video games and we had this little robotic hand that could sort of barely do a Rubik's Cube. And we had no ideas for products, no revenue, no really idea that we were ever going to have revenue. And we were like sitting around at conference tables and whiteboards, trying to come up with ideas for papers to write. It was such, it's like hard to explain now, because it looks so obvious now, how improbable it seemed at the time, and how the idea of ChatGBT was like completely in the realm of science fiction.

**SPEAKER_2** (2:34)
I mean, one of the things that really jumped out at me was you sort of rallied this idea that you should be working on AGI, and then simultaneously you found the smartest people in the world who were working on that thing.

**Sam Altman** (2:49)
That second part was sort of easier than it sounds. If you say we're going to do this crazy thing, and it's exciting, and it's important if it works, and other people aren't doing it, you can actually get a lot of people together. We said, okay, we're going to go for AGI. Ninety-nine percent of the world thought we were crazy, one percent of the world that really resonated with. Turned out there were a lot of smart people in that one percent, and there wasn't really anywhere else for them to go. So we were able to really concentrate the talent, and it was a mission that people cared about. So even though it seemed unlikely, if it worked, it seemed super valuable.
And we've observed this many times with startups. If you are doing the same thing as everyone else, it is very hard to concentrate talent, and it's very hard to get people to really believe in a mission. And if you're doing a one-of-one thing, you have a really nice tailwinder.

**SPEAKER_2** (3:42)
Okay, so some people in this room might be thinking, like, should I try to start an OpenAI scale thing off the bat? You know, you also worked on looped your first time around. You know, were there lessons from that?

**Sam Altman** (3:55)
OpenAI was not an OpenAI scale thing off the bat. OpenAI was like eight people in a room, and then it was 20 people in a room, and it was very unclear what to do, and we were just like trying to write a good research paper.