[David Senra]
I just brought up Tobi Lütke and the fact that I recorded with him previously. Why'd you say that you think he's one of the most interesting CEOs right now?

[Sam Altman]
One of the things that struck me the most about Tobi is in the very early days of AI, and then at every moment along the curve if it's developed, he has been the most forward-leaning CEO. He's in there writing the software himself. He is experimenting with it. He sends us extremely detailed feedback on the product offering, on the capabilities of the models. He was, before anybody else was saying this, he was like, "We are not an NPC company, and thus we are going to adopt agents. Otherwise, we're totally screwed. We're going to build it ourself." Every time I talk to him, he is at the edge of what anyone, CEO or not, is doing. He builds himself. He understands that he has a great deep feel, and he is always

[Sam Altman]
6,

[Sam Altman]
8 months ahead of any other CEO.

[David Senra]
Do you remember when he wrote, I think this was probably like a year and a half ago, maybe 2024, he wrote that letter saying that, "The 1st thing you have to do is see if AI can solve your problem." And then even back then, it was maybe, I don't know, 18 months, 24 months ago, people went crazy. They thought it was ridiculous.

[Sam Altman]
They thought it was ridiculous. This is my point. He's just consistently been ahead. He has been correct. He's leaned in. He's very no bullshit, so there's no hype. There's nothing other than, "Here's what it can really do right now. Here's what I think it'll be able to do soon. Here's how I'm going to push the company here." And just extremely deep understanding of where it's at.

[David Senra]
I never even thought of that, how much of a benefit it has to be for somebody in your position where you have somebody like that giving you intense and very direct and clear product feedback.

[Sam Altman]
A lot of people send product feedback. He is the only person at the intersection of CEO of a large company and extremely accurate, detailed, on-the-cutting-edge feedback.

[David Senra]
Yeah, he told me, I don't know if it was in the episode

[David Senra]
or if it was after, but he said he was very adamant. He's like, "We're going to look back in 2026." And I want actually your opinion on this. I don't even think I talked to you about this. "We're going to look back on 2026 as the year that every business was up for grabs." He said somebody was going to build the AI native version of Shopify, and he said, "And it's going to be me." And so at night, he is-

[Sam Altman]
Yes

[David Senra]
... clearly trying to rebuild. If you started from scratch, what would you do with the current technology?

[Sam Altman]
That was the other thing I was going to say about him is he does it himself. He is using these tools himself. He is writing software himself. He's trying the models himself. He is trying to reimagine his workflows himself. Most CEOs, when you get to that level, have teams of people that are managing teams of people that are trying to implement the thing, and they're trying to make you happy, and they're trying to smooth the rough edges. I think it's very hard to get the feel if you're not actually doing the thing, and he does it so hands-on all night long, as far as I can tell. I'm not sure if 2026 will be the year that every business feels up for grabs. I might disagree with him a little bit there. But

[Sam Altman]
I get the spirit of that, and I do understand that it feels like that's happening.

[David Senra]
Do you think that's even possible, whether it's 2026 or 2046?

[Sam Altman]
Obviously not literally every business. I think there are some things that are very anti-AI. The better AI gets, the more some businesses

[Sam Altman]
that have nothing to do with AI, I think, will be harder to compete with because we'll really want these

[Sam Altman]
authentic, non-technological experiences, or we'll care more about sports teams or whatever. So no, not everything, but I think there will be many software businesses that are very up for grabs.

[David Senra]
Would you disagree on the timeline then? What do you mean?

[Sam Altman]
Yeah, I disagree on the timeline. I think it's going to take a little bit longer.

[David Senra]
Okay. Can you say more about that?

[Sam Altman]
I love startups. I think startups are the coolest

[Sam Altman]
thing in the economy, and I've spent my career trying to really understand startups. And I thought

[Sam Altman]
when

[Sam Altman]
we got to GPT-4, which was back in 2023, I think, that very quickly after that, there was going to be much more disruption in software business being up for grabs right away than turned out to be. And the thing that...

[Sam Altman]
I think I was wrong about a few things, but one of them, in terms of the speed, one of them is the economy just has so much inertia. People keep doing the same things they're doing. They keep buying from the same company. They keep sort of wanting to use their tools in the same way. I think this is actually a positive in many ways, and it's going to make this big transition in front of us go smoother and slower, and I'm grateful for it. But I think it means we've all been too ambitious on timelines, even with this incredible technology. I think AI is one of the most incredible technologies humanity has ever invented. Society and the economy will adapt more slowly.

[David Senra]
Yeah, it's funny. We were talking before we started recording that there's all these parallels to history. Obviously, I read history for a living. When you were just talking, I wasn't even thinking about OpenAI and AI and Sam Altman. I was thinking of reading this biography of Larry Ellison in the '80s. He was just like, "Guys, this isn't a software problem, it's a people problem."

[Sam Altman]
Yeah.

[David Senra]
"We have to convince them. We can install software. They're not using it. We have to change their behavior. The technology is there. It's like we have to now adapt humans so they actually start using the technology."

[Sam Altman]
My own example of this was after Netflix came out and started shipping DVDs, even before they started streaming, it was amazing to me that people still went to Blockbuster. It was incredible to me. I would just watch this because I drove by a Blockbuster on my way to and from school, and it was amazing to me that people still did it. And

[Sam Altman]
that is an example that has stuck in my head of force of habit and the way people do things, and changing behavior is just much harder than the tech nerds realize.

[David Senra]
So if we go back to this uproar of Tobi writing that open letter or that letter to the people inside of his company, you're adopting this faster than anybody else because you're partially inventing them, right? Is there something where you're actually shocked at your own behavior where like, "I know there's a better way to do this. I'm even creating the product that could be better, and yet I still can't get over this habit, this force of habit?"

[Sam Altman]
100%.

[David Senra]
Okay.

[Sam Altman]
I love that. I don't think anyone's ever asked me this before. I have been waiting for this question. The thing to me that feels most psychologically inconsistent-

[Sam Altman]
About myself is that I have for 20 years been using computers the same way. I now have

[Sam Altman]
a magic thing called Codex,

[Sam Altman]
so do you, so does everybody, that means I should completely be using my computer in a different way. I should not be clicking around,

[Sam Altman]
pasting from one messaging app to another. I should not be scrolling mindlessly through my emails and trying to figure out which one is least painful for me to open and respond when I don't want to be dealing with it. I should not be keeping a to-do list and doing sort of these rote computer tasks in the same way that I have for so long. And yet, there's something in my mind that is encoded that doing this kind of stuff is what it means to work and what it means to be productive. And

[Sam Altman]
if you asked me, I would never say I like doing it that way. In fact, I would say the opposite, and I think I would mean it. But by revealed preference, I have a better way to do it now. I can do it faster. I can be using Codex for more of just my day-to-day, got to get through this stack of emails, got to do this stuff on my to-do list, got to deal with all these things. And I still do it that way, and it makes no sense other than I must secretly like it or feel good about it.

[David Senra]
What do you think has to change for you to actually adopt your own product in a more deep way?

[Sam Altman]
I don't really know. I mean, it's happening gradually, and this might be the right answer, which is these things have to happen gradually, and totally changing someone's ingrained habits and workflows is difficult.

[Sam Altman]
I think there are better products we can build with this technology that will make it more seamless to do that. But right now, it feels like

[Sam Altman]
we're all kind of straddling these 2 worlds of we still have a computer we can use the old way, and we have Codex that can use our computer in this amazing new way, and we're not sure which to use when for what. And I think this is mostly a product failure. The phase that we're in now reminds me of smartphones before the iPhone. I was an early adopter. I had a Palm Trio in 2003 or '4 or whatever it was.

[David Senra]
Did you ever have a Sidekick?

[Sam Altman]
I never had a Sidekick.

[David Senra]
Do you remember those?

[Sam Altman]
I thought they were super cool. I wanted one. I never had one. And a lot of the technology was there. It was missing multi-touch, but mostly it was missing

[Sam Altman]
the product ideas that made the iPhone the iPhone. And I feel like we are now in a world where we have all of the technological pieces, but we have not had the iPhone moment of completely changing how someone interfaces with technology.

[David Senra]
We were talking about Toby's. Toby's out here building these himself, right?

[David Senra]
We have a mutual friend in Josh Kushner. He says, he's like, "There's a big comparison to be made between the way that Steve Jobs thought and the way he ran his company to the way that he thinks that you do." He wasn't the one, obviously, writing the code. He wasn't building the hardware, but he's like, "I am patient 0. I am making products that I myself want to use." And essentially, everything that we saw with Apple is just basically what he wanted. There's this great story in one of the books where they were supposed to have a meeting on, I think one of the MacBook, the new MacBook laptops. And the team prepares this huge presentation for Steve, and they're really nervous because of his commanding presence. And he walks in, and they think it's going to be an hour meeting. He walks in, and he shows them the laptop, and he's like, "On, off." You press the button, it comes on. Press it off, immediately. And then he tries to open up the MacBook. There's a delay. He goes, "Make this," meaning the MacBook, "like that." And then walks out the room. That's the whole meeting. There's a lot of examples in the history of Apple like that. How do you approach it? How do you improve the product? Are you just doing it through your own needs? How do you think about this?

[Sam Altman]
Most of my effort right now is on research and compute. I would love to be able to spend more time on product. We have great people thinking about the product here, but the most important thing that we can do is to create smart models and to be able to run them efficiently and abundantly for a lot of people. If we can get that right, I believe that everything else will follow. Philosophically, I'm very inclined to say try to find the

[Sam Altman]
high leverage, difficult problem that will continue the exponential. And for us, this is models and compute. I also just think those are problems that naturally suit me.

[David Senra]
Why do they naturally suit you?

[Sam Altman]
To scale compute in the way that we're doing, this requires...

[Sam Altman]
It's a complex supply chain. There's a lot of interesting partnerships to figure out, which I like doing. There's interesting financial challenges of how you're going to

[Sam Altman]
finance what is probably already, or at least rapidly becoming, the most expensive infrastructure project in history. The technology questions that go into building out compute at this scale, from designing your own chip to the supply chain of fabs and people that make racks to sort of the power systems for these things, I've always been interested in energy, all come together. So there are a lot of problems that are interesting across technology, business, policy, supply chain, and logistics all together around building compute at this kind of scale. So I used to be a startup investor, and the thing in my career that I have found closest to startup investing is managing a research program.

[Sam Altman]
There are all these ways in which they're really different too. The average researcher and the average founder have,

[Sam Altman]
I think, on the surface, look different for obvious reasons. But there's a lot of similarities about how you find the non-consensus bets, how you decide where to have conviction, how you understand what exponential growth looks like, how you manage outlier talent, and how you identify it even more. This is the research building that we're in, and it's where I sit.

[David Senra]
Great. Say more about the parallels between what you learned in startup investing with doing research.

[Sam Altman]
One big one is the power law. So people talk about this all the time in investing, which is you have to kind of reprogram your brain because we don't seem naturally well-suited to think this way,

[Sam Altman]
where your best investment will outperform all of your other investments put together. Your second-best investment will outperform everything else put together after that. And- AI research, at least, is like that as well. When we started, people thought it was totally unlikely or almost impossible that AGI was possible.

[David Senra]
What year is this?

[Sam Altman]
2015.

[David Senra]
Okay.

[Sam Altman]
In 2015. I mean, we just got hammered by all of the intellectual giants of the field for saying that we were going after AGI. And then when we started really focusing on large language models, we got hammered again, saying, "This is completely ridiculous." And we understood,

[Sam Altman]
or I understood, at least from my kind of like startup background, and I think other people understood in other ways, this point of high-risk bets are okay as long as you take the ones where if they work, it's super valuable. And research looks this way. The kind of people that make great researchers are sort of non-consensus, fresh approach, high energy, sort of nonstandard is the word that keeps coming to mind people.

[David Senra]
You got to say more about nonstandard. Can you be more specific? Are they spiky?

[Sam Altman]
You don't want to fund a founder who has

[Sam Altman]
a very slightly different take

[Sam Altman]
on the same idea as the last 1,000 people you talked to, has tried to convince you and maybe convince themselves that somehow they're completely different and doing something totally new, but is mostly trying to fit in with the herd and be on the same track as everybody else and do what they're supposed to do, which is start a startup. And they've heard Peter Thiel say enough times that there's something that you're supposed to be doing different that they kind of try to emulate that, but they don't really mean it. It's very clear to me when you have someone who just thinks

[Sam Altman]
differently than most other people and is willing to stand by convictions that are

[Sam Altman]
very unpopular, may well be wrong, but if right, at least they're going to be really right, versus someone who is like a

[Sam Altman]
thin veneer on the same idea that everybody else has. In late 2015, when we were starting OpenAI, there were very few AGI efforts in the world. There was DeepMind,

[Sam Altman]
one or 2 others that I can think of. It was like a very non-consensus thing to do. In that same year,

[Sam Altman]
there were probably, to pick on it just because it

[Sam Altman]
came to mind, but there are other categories too, there were probably many, many thousands of founders starting photo-sharing apps. That was probably not as good of a thing to do. Today, a lot of people want to start AI labs. There are some handful of people, 2, 3, whatever, doing something completely new that actually wasn't possible until the AI got this good, but doesn't seem like a good idea yet. And that is the thing that,

[Sam Altman]
as a startup funder, I always wanted to fund and the thing that mostly worked for me. There's a similar thing for researchers. There were a lot of researchers that would chase whatever the last thing was that worked, and there were a small number of researchers that had high conviction towards a new idea. And

[Sam Altman]
I think we were and are the best research lab for those people.

[David Senra]
I remember talking to Demis about this a few months ago, and he thought, in terms of chasing after the way that you guys are, it's like there's the big 3 players, the money, the capital required. There's not going to be like a 4th bigger player. But he's like, "There's like this 10..." I forgot what the number was, I'll just make it up, say 10% chance that there's just some monk researcher that's going to approach it in a way that just this angle we've never even considered.

[Sam Altman]
Totally. I don't know how to put a number on it, but there is some chance.

[David Senra]
Yeah, I'm making the number up, but it was like a small percentage.

[Sam Altman]
There is some chance of that, for sure, and I love that. I think that's why stuff stays exciting.

[David Senra]
I want to tell you about the presenting sponsor of this podcast, Ramp. I have been reading a lot about SpaceX lately. SpaceX is one of the most valuable businesses in the world, and one of the main themes in the history of SpaceX is constantly attacking and questioning your cost. Ramp helps many of the most innovative businesses in the world do exactly that. The median company running on Ramp cuts their expenses by 5%. And one thing SpaceX has demonstrated is that a religious dedication to controlling costs can help actually increase revenue because you can pursue opportunities you couldn't otherwise. And we see that in the Ramp data, too. The median company running on Ramp also grows their revenue by 16%. So when you're running your business on Ramp and your competitors are not, you have a massive competitive advantage that compounds over time. Ramp is the only platform designed to make your finance team faster and happier. Many of the top founders and CEOs I know run their business on Ramp. I run my business on Ramp, and you should too. Go to ramp.com to learn how they can help your business save time, save money, and grow revenue. That is ramp.com. I found one of my all-time favorite quotes when I was reading the book "Zero to One." The quote says, "The single most powerful pattern I have noticed is that successful people find value in unexpected places, and they do this by thinking about business from 1st principles instead of formulas." That is exactly what Applovin has done with their advertising platform. Applovin connects you with over a billion potential new customers inside mobile games. Applovin allows you to capture undivided attention. Applovin ads are full-screen video ads that are watched for an average of 35 seconds. That is retention that blows other ad platforms out of the water. And you can launch on Applovin in minutes. You set the goal, and Applovin achieves it. There's no complex setup, no expertise needed, and Applovin scales quickly. They can put your ads in front of over a billion potential customers. Other businesses have seen immediate results, have scaled to hundreds of thousands of dollars of spend per day, and increased their revenue by millions. So you want to get started quickly before all of your competitors are on Applovin, and you can do that by going to applovin.com. That's applovin.com. Okay, so what is confusing to me, you went from founder- ... to investor, to back to founder. But why in 2015? What got you interested in artificial intelligence to begin with that you're saying, "Hey, this is such a non-consensus thing. People think I'm fucking crazy. I'm going to do it anyways."

[Sam Altman]
Well, I had been interested in AI my whole life. I was a very nerdy kid. I was the kind of kid that spent

[Sam Altman]
Friday nights playing on my computer and watching sci-fi, reading sci-fi. And I always thought that AI would be

[Sam Altman]
the most amazing, kind of craziest thing. I never thought I would actually get to work on it, but I always loved it. I even came to college sort of to study it. I worked in the AI lab the summer between my freshman and sophomore year, and nothing was working. In fact, very memorably, a professor told me, "You could try all of these things. There's all these directions. The one thing we know doesn't work is deep learning. We tried that for a long time. It's the kind of most guaranteed way to have a bad career." And I was an impressionable freshman in college or whatever. I assumed that was true, so pursued these other things. It was clear to me at the time, this is now kind of 2005, that AI was not working.

[Sam Altman]
And

[Sam Altman]
I happened to accidentally get into startups, but then very much fell in love with it, and so I wouldn't even call it a career detour because it was super helpful looking back and becoming a startup investor was great. The sort of normal career path in Silicon Valley is you're like a... Or not the normal. A common path is that you're a founder, and then you sort of semi-retire and you become an investor.

[David Senra]
We don't want that. I heard you say that you're going to work on this for the rest of your career.

[Sam Altman]
Yeah.

[David Senra]
Hopefully, you're going to come on the show multiple times. I'm going to hold you to this. We don't need more founders that retire and invest. We have enough investors.

[Sam Altman]
No, I don't want to. We have too many investors.

[David Senra]
Thank you. I want to talk to you about this.

[Sam Altman]
But what I was going to say is the fact that I got to go in the other direction, I was an investor 1st, and then I ran a company, is pretty unusual.

[David Senra]
Very unusual.

[Sam Altman]
And I'm super grateful for it because you get this unbelievable

[Sam Altman]
set of learnings and pattern matching if you really study and watch companies as an investor that has been super helpful to me running OpenAI. But it's the opposite normal direction, so it's just a very rare thing, and I strongly recommend it.

[David Senra]
Why is it helpful?

[Sam Altman]
If you're running a company, you have faced some number of similar decisions in your past, some number of crux decisions, and you've seen what works and what doesn't. And if you have to make a high-stakes strategy shift or fire an executive in a really messy way, you have whatever your own limited previous experience was over the last 5 or 10 years that you've been doing it. But as an investor,

[Sam Altman]
you kind of watch all the crux moments. So you don't get the kind of

[Sam Altman]
operating practice that you do just day in and day out running a company, but you've seen a lot of the big

[Sam Altman]
crux moments, a lot. Kind of all day long you see those. So just the

[Sam Altman]
wealth of the dataset that I had there was awesome.

[David Senra]
So that plays in your head when you have a decision to make?

[Sam Altman]
Yeah.

[Sam Altman]
I'm like, "Oh, this is what happened when this company had a similar thing," or, "I saw this founder make this mistake," or, "This founder got it really right."

[David Senra]
We were talking about that you studied the Industrial Revolution. We were talking about some great biographies that we both read earlier. My friend Daniel Ek says this about me because I think the benefit of me doing this project, my other podcast called "Founders" for 10 years, is like... So he's like, "You're like an LLM trained on history's greatest entrepreneurs-

[Sam Altman]
Yeah

[David Senra]
... but with the temperature turned up because you're fucking crazy." Because I'm super passionate about it in a weird way to be obsessed with dead entrepreneurs. But it is helpful. It's like, oh, I'll be talking to a founder, and they'll talk about something they dealt with. I'm like, "Oh, well, Carnegie did this, and Rockefeller did this, and you might want to try this."

[Sam Altman]
And do you find that you have one big insight to all of that, or it's just for any given scenario, you have what all these people did and how it comes together?

[David Senra]
I think it's dependent on the personality of the founder.

[Sam Altman]
Yeah.

[David Senra]
Right? And so when I was reading, I've read your blog for years. I think you're a great writer. You're very succinct.

[Sam Altman]
Thank you.

[David Senra]
The brevity is just really appealing to me, and I love numbered lists. It's weird that we both write in the same way. And I feel like I'm reading your blog, and I'm like, "This is the exact conclusion that I would come to based on all the reading." And there's this handful of principles that could be applied, but it really depends on who the founder is and what they want to do. This is what I'm trying to understand. Let's go back to what we were just talking about. You're making a big jump because, from what I hear, you're one of the best investors of all time in Silicon Valley. You could just be rich and not really have to work because investors are kind of lazy.

[Sam Altman]
Oh, I've had other things. Yeah.

[David Senra]
I'm just kidding, by the way. Kind of not.

[Sam Altman]
No, it's pretty. Having done both, I think I can say it's much, much, much harder to run a company than be an investor.

[David Senra]
Exactly, and that's what people should be doing, in my opinion.

[Sam Altman]
I agree with you.

[David Senra]
So then you're like, "Fuck that. I'm going to not take the easy route. I'm going to do the hardest thing ever, the thing that people think is impossible, the thing you're made fun of."

[Sam Altman]
Yeah.

[David Senra]
I still need to understand. Okay, so you're into it as a kid. Why would it appeal to a kid? You were living in St. Louis at the time?

[Sam Altman]
Yeah, I was living in St. Louis.

[David Senra]
Why would AI appeal to you back then?

[Sam Altman]
Well, I think it appealed to every kind of computer nerd. I don't think it's that unusual about me. It just felt impossible. I think most people would say, "Of course, that'd be the coolest thing ever, but it's totally impossible." I think the weird thing about me was like, "Okay, let's try." But I think everybody would think it's awesome and something to go for.

[David Senra]
So wait, that was a personality trait of yours as a kid, that when people told you-

[Sam Altman]
I think even as a kid

[David Senra]
... that you couldn't do something, your initial response was resistance?

[Sam Altman]
Not resistance, but like, "Are you sure? Why not? Let's try. Let's see what happens. Maybe I can. Maybe we can." I was a very optimistic kid, and also the more something seemed impossible, the more intrigued I was. The idea that we could invent a technology that would let us do everything else, that would just empower people in this way that no other single technology could, that always seemed innately incredibly appealing to me. It's like, I want that thing. I want to be able to do everything else. I think another thing that I kind of as a personality trait as long as I remember is, you know- It is interesting to really give people a lot more power, a lot more ability. In some sense, this is the whole arc of technology, and I was for sure always a technology nerd. But AI is the strongest version of that I can imagine.

[David Senra]
What did you think that it would enable back then? Like, when you were a kid, like, "This seems like a cool technology. I want to do X. I can't do X unless AI is invented."

[Sam Altman]
It's always hard to remember how much of this is the stuff that I actually thought at the time versus like how much-

[David Senra]
Or what you're trying to build right now.

[Sam Altman]
Yeah, like how much my current work has colored my memories of it. For sure,

[Sam Altman]
as a kid, I was very into robots.

[Sam Altman]
We had a robots club in my school,

[Sam Altman]
and

[Sam Altman]
the robots at the time were laughably... I even remember at summer camp, we had this little turtle that you could control with a computer on the floor or on the table, and I thought that was just the coolest thing. There's something about physical stuff moving, controlled by a computer, that I always thought was amazing. Now, I am extremely interested in what AI can do to advance scientific discovery.

[Sam Altman]
In my memory as an adult, I think I thought that was cool as a kid too, but it feels just implausible, and I assume that's an example of where the memories have gotten more colored. But now the fact that we can have AI go discover new physics and cure diseases and what it's already doing for math, I think this will be one of the most important areas, even more important than automation of other tasks that AI can do just to help us understand more things. We were talking earlier about this book, "The Beginning of Infinity," and

[Sam Altman]
rereading that book from today's vantage point, I'm like, "Man, AI is really going to help us do this important thing of understanding everything or as much as we can." I was definitely interested in the sort of Star Trek version of huge prosperity and abundance and what AI could do to drive that. Maybe the memory of being interested in science is more real. I also loved science and just this idea that we could,

[Sam Altman]
because we were smart, we could figure out how to understand the world and

[Sam Altman]
make predictions and do things that we couldn't without this deep understanding. I don't know. That seems innately awesome.

[David Senra]
It's interesting how consistent over time what humans want from AI, because something you're describing is very similar. I just reread the biography of Claude Shannon for the 2nd time, and I had forgotten because I hadn't read the book in maybe 5 years, and I forgot that him and Alan Turing used to meet every day for coffee when they were both at Bell Labs. This is like 1940s.

[Sam Altman]
Yeah.

[David Senra]
And they would just talk about AI.

[Sam Altman]
Yeah.

[David Senra]
And they were both obsessed with their... They thought it was inevitable back then, and they thought it was going to happen in like 15 years from there, so like 1955, that we're going to have computers, which didn't exist, right? They had the analog versions, that are going to be smarter than humans, and that anybody that thought that wasn't going to occur, they thought was absolutely ridiculous. And they're like, "Well, what would you want the computer to do?" He's like, "Solve math problems, write poetry, cure diseases." You hear this over and over again.

[Sam Altman]
I have read a bunch of things that those guys wrote at the time, and I am so sad they are not here to see it, because they were so right about everything. We're finally at the moment where AI is solving novel math problems. It is discovering other stuff. You can argue about how good or not. I would say not very good, but it is writing poetry. It's here to what these guys, I think they would have said, "All right, you've done it. This is it. We've got it." And that would have been so cool.

[David Senra]
Yeah, this is the weird thing where everybody's just like, "Oh, it'll never do X." I talked to people in the music industry. It's like, "It's never going to make great music." And then they're like, "Well, do you think it's going to make a podcast?" I was like, "Of course it's going to. It's going to do everything that we can do, at least to, I would say,

[David Senra]
even right now, better than what we can do." It's a very bizarre thing where it's like, it will never surpass what is happening at this current point that I happen to be alive.

[Sam Altman]
There's a deep human psychological flaw there. But here is, I think, a more interesting question. Let's say it does make a great podcast. Two AIs are having a more interesting conversation than you and I are.

[Sam Altman]
Do you think people will care, or will they want the one with the real people because we're all obsessed with people and the fact that it's not real people?

[David Senra]
Yeah, for this is more interesting. It's like, oh, these 2 people that I may be predisposed to like or dislike are having a conversation that's interesting to me. I think for strict reference, maybe my other podcast where I'm just saying, "Hey, this is some interesting ideas I read in this book," that could maybe get disrupted over other cases, but especially for people that were born before this happened. Maybe it's different for your son.

[Sam Altman]
Maybe.

[David Senra]
But for me, it's just like, I think humans are going to always be drawn to humans.

[Sam Altman]
I really deeply believe that. I think there's a lot of other jobs that could face significant transition, but stuff that's about people, stuff that's about people's connection to people and people liking other people, that stuff feels like it gets more valuable in a post-AI world, not less.

[David Senra]
I may be actually the wrong person to talk about this, though, because I kind of deeply desire, even though my entire work is digital, it's broadcast all over the world, it's just like I deeply desire more

[David Senra]
of an analog life. I like reading physical books.

[Sam Altman]
I do too.

[David Senra]
Like when I was talking to Kelly, I was like, "I don't want to get on Zoom. Call me, or we'll talk in person."

[Sam Altman]
Yeah.

[David Senra]
I like physical shit. I don't like-

[Sam Altman]
That's interesting. I'm like that too.

[David Senra]
Yeah.

[Sam Altman]
I don't read e-books.

[David Senra]
Yeah.

[Sam Altman]
I don't like Zoom meetings. I like to be with people in the real world.

[David Senra]
I definitely think there's a subset of weirdos, and there's probably a lot of them that live in this city, that don't like humans and only want to communicate with computers, but it's just like, I think that's a tiny percentage of humanity.

[Sam Altman]
I think it's a tiny percentage of humanity. This is why I think the world is, on the whole, not going to be that different, even with super intelligence. People are still going to be very fundamentally wired to care about other people, to want to be around other people,

[Sam Altman]
to interact with other people. And there will be some people who just get obsessed with the models and just think humans are

[Sam Altman]
in the way or a

[Sam Altman]
danger to be contended with or whatever. And for most people, it'll be the whole point.

[David Senra]
I think it's very important that when we do find people like that, to them be called out and make sure they don't acquire power.

[Sam Altman]
I certainly agree with that. Maybe the 2 big risks that I'm most worried about with AI, which are a little bit in tension, one is a loss of control. Where AI somehow just becomes too powerful in a way that we can't guarantee control of it. And the other is power gets too centralized, where you have one company or model or person with too much power. And in both of these, the fundamental thing is,

[Sam Altman]
I think it's a very anti-human position for either of these things to happen. The right approach is to say, "We want people deeply in control of the future. We want people deeply empowered." People are the whole point of this all. We are not going to sit here and

[Sam Altman]
gradually hand over control to an AI model because we don't trust or like people. And

[Sam Altman]
it's a very misanthropic thing to say we're going to just put all of our trust in this model and let it have all the power and decision-making over the world. But I think there are some people in the world who think that's the right outcome. There's another version of this, which is,

[Sam Altman]
because we don't trust people, we have to

[Sam Altman]
limit who gets access to this technology and how they can use it, and all of these terrible things could happen. And out of fear of those, we are going to concentrate power in the hands of a few companies, and we're

[Sam Altman]
not going to let other people use this, but we'll give them some benefits. My caricature of this is,

[Sam Altman]
I think there are some people in the AI field who effectively say, "We're going to give the world a cure to all diseases, and we're going to make stuff really cheap in exchange for people giving up their autonomy and impact over the future and power, and also in the name of safety, and also just absolutely rampant inequality." There will be people that have access to huge amounts of wealth and power, and other people just get a pretty good everything. And this is a terrible sales pitch. It's a very anti-human sales pitch that somehow

[Sam Altman]
people feel willing to make.

[David Senra]
Why do you think they feel willing to make that?

[Sam Altman]
I think it's fear and power.

[Sam Altman]
When people talk about the risks of AI, I think there are a lot of

[Sam Altman]
people who are so nervous about the magnitude of those risks and get so taken by that and feel the need to protect the world from that,

[Sam Altman]
that they're like, "We should trade off a lot of liberty for safety here because this is unlike other risks we've seen." But then I think that also ends up

[Sam Altman]
kind of like a way to justify a lot of power-seeking behavior.

[David Senra]
Everything when I read, like when I was just saying what Claude Shannon was saying or Alan Turing, at least in the books that I've read, it's more of an optimistic, like, "We're going to invent things that make our lives better and can do things for us."

[Sam Altman]
You are totally right that if you go back to the Claude Shannon, Alan Turing era,

[Sam Altman]
they talked about how wonderful AGI would be and all the things that it would do.

[Sam Altman]
And when we started, we really had a lot of pressure from the doomers. Now,

[Sam Altman]
the part of the doomers that I agree with is that this is a powerful technology and we should err on the side of safety, and we should act with caution at each level of technology. The part of the doomers that I don't agree with is that it's an unsolvable problem. If you go back to the beginning of OpenAI, I think there would have been 2 widely held

[Sam Altman]
opinions. Number one,

[Sam Altman]
not at all, and certainly not in 10 years, were we going to build something that was very AGI-like. And then conditioned on if we did,

[Sam Altman]
we certainly were not going to be able to make it safe. If you had an AI that was smarter in many ways than a lot of the smartest people,

[Sam Altman]
most of the smartest people, then the doomers would say, "Surely at that point, the world would have been destroyed. The alignment thing would have failed." And there were just these very confidently held positions about what would have happened. A decade on, we have built something that I think most people would say at the time would have said is very AGI-like. And

[Sam Altman]
a lot of good things have happened, and the kind of crazy bad predictions of the world ending have not happened. So I think that should update people's

[Sam Altman]
predictions about the future. There are still higher stakes challenges in front of us to solve, but our approach, this is another thing I learned from startups, of

[Sam Altman]
the way you do things is to put things out into the world, get feedback from real customers, see where they break, see where they don't break. That is the way you make a good product. That is also the way you make a safe product. And we have made way more progress on AI safety than I think most people thought we would when we started.

[David Senra]
Why? Because there's a billion people using your products on a weekly basis?

[Sam Altman]
And each time we get a new level of model, we put it out in the world and we see what works, what doesn't work, where people need us to relax the guardrails because they have good things they want to use it for, where we have alignment failures, where we have safety systems failures. ChatGPT has only been out less than 4 years. A billion people use it and sensitive, important stuff. And the fact that we can deliver something that is broadly considered safe, of course there's issues with it. In that short of a timeframe with such a powerful technology, I think there is no way we could have done that in an ivory tower. And this is how I believe you build good,

[Sam Altman]
safe, robust, useful technology and products, and I think is a great learning of Y Combinator. And it would have seemed to most of the AI safety people totally impossible to get to this stage and still have the level of safety guarantees we have. Now,

[Sam Altman]
I do think it gets harder from here, but I don't think you're going to solve it by disconnecting yourself from reality.

[David Senra]
Why does it get harder from here?

[David Senra]
Because the smartest people in the world are as about as smart as the smartest models in the world, and that's going to flip right now?

[Sam Altman]
Yeah, directionally I think that's right. I think that the

[Sam Altman]
models are just so incredibly capable and improving on such a steep trajectory that the unknown unknowns-

[Sam Altman]
Maybe they don't get harder

[Sam Altman]
relatively, but from an absolute perspective, they seem harder. And I think we'll have to make a bunch of difficult decisions about

[Sam Altman]
when we delay development, when we sort of

[Sam Altman]
say, "Okay, you know what? Let's have contact with reality now," or, "Let's wait longer to really study this more." So I was talking to someone recently,

[Sam Altman]
and something that stuck in my mind is that the

[Sam Altman]
FAA has helped make flying incredibly safe. Flying on the surface seems like this

[Sam Altman]
extremely dangerous thing, and you probably get on an airplane without giving it much thought. And this was certainly...

[Sam Altman]
Airplanes are not that old in the long trajectory of human history, and this was certainly not the case at the beginning of airplanes. They have extremely robust accident reporting, extremely clear-eyed.

[Sam Altman]
They never try to

[Sam Altman]
hand wave over something. They want to extract as much information as possible. And in some sense,

[Sam Altman]
I think with any new technology, an approach like that

[Sam Altman]
works very well and is often underappreciated. So when we started deploying our models, when we said, "We're going to put ChatGPT out in the world," we know the model's imperfect. We know it hallucinates. We know it can do these other things. But we also know that

[Sam Altman]
the world's got to experience this technology, and we've got to learn how to make it safe, and we got to put the power in people's hands. We cannot just use this to impose our worldview. We cannot use this to go sit in a lab and try to think through all the impacts, which won't work anyway because society and the models are going to co-evolve. We have to all do this together as this

[Sam Altman]
joint product, and then

[Sam Altman]
we'll do very good accident recording. We will study when something goes wrong. We will put out a very clear postmortem. We will learn as much as we can. We will not only improve our own technology and products, but we'll try to share those learnings with other people building AI. I think that's worked surprisingly well so far, and that was good examples from the history of technology, good examples from startups.

[David Senra]
Deel is how the best founders turn the world into their talent pool. I've been studying how history's greatest founders operate for a decade, and one thing they all have in common is they understand that recruiting and hiring the very best talent is your most important priority. A players recognize other A players, which is why top companies like Ramp, Shopify, ElevenLabs, Uber, and DoorDash all use Deel. Many of the top founders I know have personally invested in Deel after using their product, and what they discovered is that Deel is the best company in the world at building infrastructure for global hiring. Deel will help your business hire, pay, and manage any worker anywhere in the world so you can retain the best talent anywhere and spend the rest of your time focusing on what you do best, delivering value to your customers. The founder of ElevenLabs has a great description of the value Deel can give your company. He said, "We built ElevenLabs to break down language and communication barriers. With Deel enabling us to hire and support exceptional talent anywhere, we can accelerate our innovation and bring more voices, stories, and ideas to every corner of the world." Deel is trusted by over 40,000 businesses. Learn how they can help your business today by going to deel.com/senra. That is deel.com/senra. One thing that has to be disorienting for you, because it doesn't make any sense to me. Essentially, what I focus on is just entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship, right? So all the podcasts I make are for the benefit of entrepreneurs. I'm glad other people listen, but it's heavily focused on just trying to serve, trying to find useful information, whether it's in a biography of a dead entrepreneur or talking to somebody like you, that other entrepreneurs can benefit from this conversation, right? Or any of the podcasts that I make. So in that, there's not a lot of... Entrepreneurs love AI. But I'm trying to figure out if you can help me reconcile. It's like everybody uses AI, everybody hates AI. What the hell is going on there?

[Sam Altman]
Well, people are always afraid of rapid socioeconomic change. We talked about the Industrial Revolution earlier. I love reading about previous technological revolutions too. And people did not have universally warm and fuzzy feelings to the change that was happening throughout the Industrial Revolution. I think that's probably a good feature of human society, that we have some built-in inertia. We have some skepticism of rapid change. I think that probably helps

[Sam Altman]
society in times of turmoil or in times of

[Sam Altman]
localized craziness or whatever.

[Sam Altman]
So some of it is probably good, and I think a feature of human biology, which I believe in never trying to fight too hard. I also think a lot of the people building AI have been off saying, "There's a 25% chance we're going to destroy the world, and yeah, we're going to race ahead to do it because otherwise those bad guys will do it first." Or, "Man, this thing is going to be really terrible, and there's going to be 50% of the jobs are going to go away in the next year, and we hope you all are okay, but it seems really scary." We have not, as a field, done a very good job of explaining to people what the benefits are and how the downsides can be mitigated, and we certainly have not done a good job, even if people have had answers like saying, "Well, there's going to be universal basic income," or, "Work will be optional," or whatever.

[Sam Altman]
There's been very little

[Sam Altman]
discussion from people about how and why it's important that people have more power and personal freedom in the world, not less. And that matters a lot to most people. The ability of people to influence their own future and collectively to design kind of where society is going to go and the autonomy that comes with that, very important. And I don't think a lot of people in the AI field,

[Sam Altman]
they feel it for themselves, but they don't spend much time thinking about it, reflecting on it, acknowledging how important that is to other people. And

[Sam Altman]
so to go back to that characterization of the sales pitch, I don't even know if that's a word, from earlier.

[David Senra]
It is.

[Sam Altman]
The, "Dear peasants, we will bequeath upon you these gifts of a cure for cancer and material wealth and some things and great entertainment." And- You stop complaining and we'll make all the decisions about the future and just trust us. You know, we'll be benevolent dictators. Not good. Not good. As a lover of entrepreneurs and sort of like a student of what has

[Sam Altman]
made

[Sam Altman]
this incredible economic miracle of recent centuries work,

[Sam Altman]
really empowering people to go do new stuff and to push on the things they believe in and to have the freedom to create companies and invent technology and sort of pursue ideas and, like, the system around that, that makes that happen, there is, like, nothing I believe in more strongly. And I think even if people don't see themselves as an entrepreneur ever, if they may never want to start a big company, they do understand how important that is. And then when you hear people kind of implicitly or explicitly saying there's going to be less of that with AI because a small number of people are going to have the power, but they're going to make great decisions and keep everybody safe, I think that's very scary to them. I also think that even if maybe most people don't want to start really big companies, a lot of people want to start smaller companies, and that has been hard. That has been something that has required a fair amount of privilege and luck and resources to be able to do. And we are about to see the greatest boom in people starting smaller businesses that we have ever seen. I think AI is empowering that. Now, for some reason, the field, including us, has not talked about that enough, even though we see all these signs of it and it's great, and we have not built enough products to accelerate that, but I think we're going to see a lot more of that.

[David Senra]
It's funny. We talked about Tobi Lütke earlier. At the end of the conversation, and I think that's in the episode, he mentioned something I didn't think about. He's like, "Oh, yeah, you and me are in the same business." He's like, "We're both trying to create more entrepreneurs." He's building infrastructure for entrepreneurs. I'm building educational and inspirational podcasts for them. And the crazy thing with what you just said is just like, not only I think out of any new industry, it's not that as an industry, the AI industry, which it's doing the worst job I've probably ever seen. And I think part of it is just the ability. You guys have to get out there and talk about the stuff that you're seeing and educate. There's this great book called "The Intel Trinity," and it talks the story of Intel. And it's called "The Trinity" because the 3 main players are Bob Noyce, Andy Grove, and Gordon Moore. And when they... There's a great story in the book that I never forgot. They go from inventing, I think, the integrated circuit to the microprocessor, and they realized that that technology was so important and it would scare their potential customers. So they went out, they stopped, those 3 people stopped doing what they're doing and went out and started educating-

[Sam Altman]
Yeah

[David Senra]
... potential customers, investors, the entire country. And they said at one time they were putting on more classes than, like, the local community college had in their entire course catalog. That's how much they made it a top priority. It's like, "We're going to get out and educate about this new technology." And it's just like, well, why isn't anybody in AI doing that?

[Sam Altman]
I mean, no excuses. We should be doing more. I think we've, like, tried versions of this. We haven't gotten it quite right.

[David Senra]
Well, you're doing it right now.

[Sam Altman]
Oh.

[David Senra]
Like, this is one of the points of reason I wanted to talk to you about.

[Sam Altman]
Yeah.

[David Senra]
Because, like, I use AI all the time. I think it's fascinating. But you have such, like, this... You have a view that makes mine look like

[David Senra]
the view of an ant. Like, there's so much stuff in your head that I want to, like, get out and be like, "Hey, you have all this context." It's like, and you're inventing this incredible technology. I would love to know how other people are using it. Actually, before we even get to other people, I heard you say something that was interesting that I think ties to what you just said about kind of like, we're inventing technology, the technology's increasing rapidly, but the adoption should be slow and deliberate. And I heard you on another podcast saying, "Hey, I'm even considering, like, how much should I let AI see every single thing that's on my computer?" You want to talk about that?

[Sam Altman]
With the latest generation of the models, I don't want to say that they feel smart enough because I think we should always aspire for them to get smarter, but they're pretty smart. And I feel more limited at this point by the amount of useful context the AI has on me. Like, I want the AI to know as much as it can to help me. I want it to be doing things I can't or don't want to do on my own. Like,

[Sam Altman]
I'm not going to read every

[Sam Altman]
post on our internal Slack. I'm not going to go read every story a customer has to tell about where ChatGPT worked for them or failed them. I can't. And then there's, like, other stuff of, like, I just, you know,

[Sam Altman]
I probably could read more research papers than I do, but, like, oh, it's, like, takes a lot of mental energy and, you know? But I would love to have an AI agent that is constantly trying to be helpful to me and that can

[Sam Altman]
look at and understand more context than I can or that I have time for or energy for to do on my own

[Sam Altman]
and can help bring that context to bear and give me good advice when I have to make a decision. So

[Sam Altman]
I think we focused correctly so much on model intelligence that on the product side, we have not yet thought enough about what it means to give a model more context than any person could have and help advise that person on their big decisions. My sense is we are

[Sam Altman]
just on the precipice of being able to see

[Sam Altman]
a very different way of working with AI on an axis where people just can't get this good. There are plenty of, like, very smart people, but there is no one that can read, like, you know, tens of thousands of pages of context in some small number of seconds and really, like, use that accurately. And this is something that AI can do that just is going to be very new and an incredible supplement. You've read all these biographies. There are probably times where you vaguely remember something that if you could remember a specific anecdote from one of them, it would, like, really help an entrepreneur in one moment for that particular entrepreneur, right, when you were talking to them. But maybe you forgot it or maybe you don't remember it exactly right.

[David Senra]
I built my own AI tool-

[Sam Altman]
There you go

[David Senra]
... so I use it internally. So you know what it is? It's only trained on... Since 2018, I've kept every single note and highlight from every single book that I've ever used into this database, and I would search it for that. And then when- ... the work that you guys do came out. Then I added, so I have it trained on that, then every note, every highlight, and then all the transcripts from my episodes of "Founders." I use this thing every single day.

[Sam Altman]
That's awesome.

[David Senra]
To make every single episode. So I'm working on Claude Shannon, right? The Claude Shannon episode came out, I don't know, 2 or 3 weeks ago, whenever it was, and I'm asking questions about all. I was like, "Hey, what did Bob Noyce say about this?" Or, "What did Rockefeller do about this?" And I made the episode. I read the book. I took the note. I don't remember it-

[Sam Altman]
Yeah

[David Senra]
... because it was 7 years ago. It's incredible.

[Sam Altman]
Yeah.

[David Senra]
This is what I mean. I was like, "It's fucking awesome."

[Sam Altman]
That is so cool.

[David Senra]
Let's get into how you think about running the company, right? So you're spending your time. You said your main focus is getting more compute and then research, right?

[Sam Altman]
Yeah.

[David Senra]
Okay.

[David Senra]
So you want the models to be the best in the world, but how do you think about, do you have to build your own products? Now, you built Codex, right? I don't even know the fucking product lines. Where's all the revenue coming from?

[Sam Altman]
Actually, I think we should be more of a platform company than a product company.

[David Senra]
Okay.

[Sam Altman]
We will build products, of course. But the products-

[David Senra]
Well, how many products you have? Let's back up. How many products do you have now?

[Sam Altman]
We just merged ChatGPT and Codex together.

[David Senra]
Okay.

[Sam Altman]
So we used to have ChatGPT, Codex, and the API.

[David Senra]
Okay.

[Sam Altman]
And Codex,

[Sam Altman]
unfortunately named, but that was not just coding. It could do any kind of work, which confused people.

[David Senra]
I'm confused by that.

[Sam Altman]
Yes.

[David Senra]
Okay.

[Sam Altman]
As were many other people. What I think most people want is the single interface to their own personal or their company's AGI that can help them with whatever they need, and then the ability with an API to build anything they want on top of it. And

[Sam Altman]
that is the platform that we should offer to the world. We're going to sell great AI. At every

[Sam Altman]
point on the cost performance curve, we will be the best. You want really high-end AI to discover science, that's great. You want really inexpensive AI to do a massive amount of volume of work that maybe doesn't require genius-level intelligence, we got you covered there too.

[Sam Altman]
And thinking about this as a sort of, people talk about different ways, a new utility, a new commodity, whatever you want to call it. People want to use a lot of AI, and they want it at a low cost, and they want it to be fast and to work well and have their context and be smooth. We got you. And then there's a single product, which is, I need to ask the AI something. Eventually, maybe it's the AI should proactively offer me things. But you will have this interface, which started as a chatbot and now also has coding agents, and I think at some point will feel like a more persistent agent to this AI that is running on whatever you need it to run on. But that's it. I don't think we should go build every product category. I don't think we should go try to compete with all of our customers. I don't think we should try to subsume the entire economy. I think we should offer this platform and try to have 100 100000 new businesses and 8 1000000000 people use it in all kinds of new ways. So one kind of direct interface to the product, one API for people to use however they want. Those eventually come more and more together too, and then it's all about what people do with it, build on top of it, whatever else.

[David Senra]
What mistakes did you make to have to learn that? I feel like

[David Senra]
you've had to kill some good ideas-

[Sam Altman]
Yes

[David Senra]
... in sacrifice of going after the great with your full intensity and focus.

[Sam Altman]
Yeah. I think killing the good ideas, sacrificing the good ideas to go after the great ideas is the hardest lesson for any entrepreneur or business to learn. It sucks to kill good ideas. And no matter how much you think you're going to do it,

[Sam Altman]
people, everyone,

[Sam Altman]
maybe just by the nature of who chooses to be an entrepreneur, seems to do terrible at this. I'm terrible at this. I know I'm bad at this. But last year, for example, we killed Sora,

[Sam Altman]
which was good product and fun and cool, but used a lot of compute and not as important as Codex, where we put the compute.

[Sam Altman]
We killed our web browser called Atlas, which again, I think was a great product. I think it was the best web browser, but not as important for us to focus on as somewhere else we could put that talent. In a world of limited compute, limited people, limited resources,

[Sam Altman]
we thought really hard and we said, "You know what? The

[Sam Altman]
general intelligence for knowledge work and eventually for science is the most important thing we can do." Anything that goes into making that upstream of generating that intelligence,

[Sam Altman]
building our own chip, building our own data centers,

[Sam Altman]
writing good infrastructure software, certainly training models, obviously, that's all really important. But then let's just offer this AI as a service and get people to

[Sam Altman]
use it for intellectual pursuit, for work, for scientific discovery, to be more productive in their personal life, and let's have the kind of

[Sam Altman]
flexible general platform and not do a lot of other things.

[David Senra]
Anybody engaged in complicated work, and you've got to be towards the top of the list of anybody alive right now, needs somebody to help organize their thoughts, right? It's extremely beneficial. You see this in every single biography. You see this in histories. You need somebody to talk to. There's actually a funny story of how extreme this can be. Charlie Munger has this thing called orangutan theory. You've ever heard of this?

[Sam Altman]
No.

[David Senra]
Where he said a relatively smart human could go in, sit down with an orangutan, tell him all his problems, tell him everything that's in his mind, and then the orangutan obviously says nothing else. The human leaves, and the human's better off. Just the idea of just being forced to put your thoughts into

[David Senra]
some kind of structure. Now, obviously, with a very intelligent partner. Munger played this role for Buffett. Buffett's one of the most intelligent people who ever lived, greatest investor of all time, still needed to organize his thoughts to somebody else. You are going through, I can't think, you have almost like a singular lived experience, especially for somebody as young as you are. So I'm curious, who plays this role in your life? Who do you go to that can even-

[Sam Altman]
Yeah

[David Senra]
... remotely empathize with what the hell you're dealing with on a day-to-day basis?

[Sam Altman]
Kind of 3 categories here.

[Sam Altman]
One,

[Sam Altman]
a lot of the researchers that have been here forever, we've kind of all been through it together, and we've developed this set of shared language, intuition, standards, whatever you want to call it. And

[Sam Altman]
that I have not been able to replicate with anybody outside of the company. ... when it comes to the shape of what's happening and what might happen next and where the technology is likely to go. In terms of questions of just

[Sam Altman]
business and the world, for a long time in my career, Paul Graham and Peter Thiel have been 2 of the people that I have learned the most from

[Sam Altman]
about lots of different phases of my career and are still the 2 people that I go to if I really have

[Sam Altman]
a very non-obvious problem that I'm stuck on. And there, I have not found anyone else, after a lot of looking, that has the same kind of ability to just think in a super nonlinear way. Like, if what LLMs do are

[Sam Altman]
predicting what word comes next, those are 2 of the people that I can predict the least what word is going to come next,

[Sam Altman]
and that is a super valuable skill. You go with like a, "Oh, man, I feel really stuck and I've kind of thought through all these options," and someone that can tell you like, "Eh, I think none of those options are good. Here's this thing that now seems totally obvious and correct that you didn't think of." Just a completely different view that you haven't heard anywhere else.

[David Senra]
Is this more of a prompt for your own thinking as opposed to explicit advice, "Do X," for example?

[Sam Altman]
It's often like, "Here is a specific thing."

[David Senra]
Really?

[Sam Altman]
Yeah.

[David Senra]
So what would be an example that you could share from Peter? Peter's very fascinating to me.

[Sam Altman]
He is very fascinating.

[David Senra]
And it's actually who I thought of. The reason I thought of this question just now is because you're like, "We had to kill these good ideas for the great. We're cutting Atlas. We're compute-constrained. We have to focus, focus, focus." It's like that's something that is very obvious when you listen to him talk about the importance of focus and if you have something that's working, making it work better and going down this line, taking an hour away from that to explore something else is too expensive. You should just go deeper on what's already working. There's a lot of value at the extremes.

[Sam Altman]
After we launched ChatGPT, it was sort of this weird thing because people didn't really know what to use it for. And it was growing super fast, but it felt

[Sam Altman]
very unstable or kind of almost like low-value growth. People were using it to...

[Sam Altman]
just because they were interested in talking to it and what they could do. And so there were a lot of people in the company who were like, "Ah, we got to figure out something else. This is not sustainable value." And we were talking to him about this list of 5 or 6 other things that we could focus on instead. This is maybe 2 months after ChatGPT launched, something like that.

[Sam Altman]
And

[Sam Altman]
he was like, "It's an obvious mistake to do anything but this, besides the fact that it's growing, which is rare and great." And it was not growing as fast then as it did start after. He's like, "The power of this is the power of the Google text box. It's like a text box you can type anything into, and it does the right thing. And the fact that it doesn't match the current Silicon Valley wisdom of you got to have feeds and you have to have a network effect and you have to have..." Because we had none of these things, and that's why everyone was worried. "You have to have a

[Sam Altman]
way that

[Sam Altman]
people are going to build up more con-" This is before we had memory. "People are going to build up more context. Are people going to get locked in? Are people going to have all..." He's like, "All that stuff, people have just been chasing the Google business model for 20 years, and this is the 1st thing that's come up. And clearly, the empty text box worked for Google, so why don't you just double down on that? It's growing. It's very flexible, and it has all of the signs other than it doesn't fit the current Silicon Valley wisdom." And I was like, "Okay."

[Sam Altman]
And so we went super hard on ChatGPT, and it was great.

[David Senra]
It was like a simple genius to what he just said.

[Sam Altman]
Sometimes there's more complexion yes, but that was an example of very important simple genius.

[David Senra]
What about some advice that Paul Graham or some guidance or a direction he kind of pushed you in?

[Sam Altman]
When you just said that, this is like a meme for many YC founders,

[Sam Altman]
where you would go see him for office hours and he would say, "You know what you should do?" And he would shake his hand, his finger like this. "You know what you should do? You know what you should do?" And sometimes the thing that came after that was great. Sometimes the thing that came after that was terrible. But the important thing

[Sam Altman]
was

[Sam Altman]
there is

[Sam Altman]
a

[Sam Altman]
creativity and open landscape and just a, "Let's try a lot of things." We talked about the spirit of iterative deployment, and we talked about

[Sam Altman]
how in the same way startups... He really, I think, pushed the startup ecosystem into this world of you got to

[Sam Altman]
ship a V1 you're embarrassed of early, and it doesn't matter if it can be much better. You'll get it much, much better because of the feedback to customers. I don't even think I asked him before we launched ChatGPT, like, "Hey, do you think we should launch this thing?" But I knew what he would say. I knew it was still early. I knew it was still embarrassing, and I knew the right thing was to get it out and get it in front of people.

[David Senra]
So wait, your mental model of Paul Graham is so complete you don't even have to call him?

[Sam Altman]
No, just in this one case. That's the one where you would say there's certainty.

[David Senra]
Let me tell you something funny. Right before he died, a few months before he died, I went to Charlie Munger's house and had dinner with him, and I was like, "How often do you talk to Buffett?" He goes, "Never." I go, "What?" He goes, "We talk every day for hours and hours. Buffett can just pretend to pick up the phone call to call me, and he already knows what I'm going to say." That obviously comes after 65 years of working closely together, but I thought it was hilarious.

[Sam Altman]
That is hilarious. That is really a funny story. No, there's many times that I couldn't predict what he's going to say, that's why I think it's valuable. But in terms of the launch when you're embarrassed of the product, I know what he's going to say there. That one,

[Sam Altman]
that has been,

[Sam Altman]
I won't say the most valuable piece of tactical YC advice, but it's been up there. I'm astonished looking back at

[Sam Altman]
all of my data points of YC founders over the years, how much the moving fast and being iterative correlates with success.

[David Senra]
Okay. You've mentioned YC way too many times in this conversation. I have to explore this because we talked before. It's like, listen, I'm not a journalist. I'm an enthusiast. I don't have a list of questions.

[Sam Altman]
Yeah.

[David Senra]
I'm like, I have a world-class founder across from me. I want to know what the hell is in this person's mind, and I want to extract information out selfishly for me. So,

[David Senra]
I'm shocked at how much you reference it in conversations, like how impactful going through YC and then running YC, so being affiliate with them is clearly on your life. Can you expound on this?

[Sam Altman]
There is some band that wasn't that successful. They didn't sell that many albums, I mean, but they influenced all of the musicians that came after.

[David Senra]
I think it's called The Band. Literally, Rick Rubin told this story.

[Sam Altman]
It might be The Velvet Underground, but you know the idea I'm getting at.

[David Senra]
Yes.

[Sam Altman]
Whether it's called The Band or whatever. Yeah. It's not fair to talk about YC in this way because YC measured by traditional metrics and market cap created or whatever would be one of the handful of most valuable tech companies. But the degree to which YC totally influenced everything that has happened in the last 20 years of the tech industry and startups, entrepreneurship, whatever, I think is only sort of understood. OpenAI is an example of that, not just from how we have shipped our products in the world, but the philosophy of how we run our research lab. I think if you go talk to many of the other

[Sam Altman]
people running this generation of large tech companies, they would tell you similar stories, even if they didn't go through YC.

[David Senra]
But what's happening there? Is it an operating system that YC is giving you because you hear, "Do these 5 things," or whatever, or is it more like a philosophy of building companies? This is the confusing part for me as an outsider.

[Sam Altman]
I think it's 2 major things. I mean, there is some of the operating system of what to do, but I think it was the philosophy of how to run companies, the idea of iterative deployment and technical people in charge, and sort of being willing to bet on

[Sam Altman]
young people with a lot of energy and ambition, but maybe less experience throughout all levels of a company. And then it was also the

[Sam Altman]
related change to the whole ecosystem that happened in the pre-YC tech ecosystem. So if we ran the clock back to 2004 and then projected technology forward to 2016,

[Sam Altman]
but not anything else about the shape of

[Sam Altman]
startup ecosystem, what it meant to be an entrepreneur, how capital flowed, who got to run companies, all of those things, I do not think OpenAI would have been possible. I think the changes that YC induced in the whole ecosystem, more leverage going to founders, young technical founders having the ability to raise lots of capital, the ability to sort of work on ambitious things without a very proven resume, I don't think OpenAI would have been possible. So this is kind of like a big change.

[David Senra]
Is this all tied to the fact that you think there was a benefit in you going from founder to investor for a long period of time, back to founder?

[Sam Altman]
There are all those benefits too, and I wouldn't say I really went from founder to investor to founder, because the 1st time I was a founder didn't really work out that well. So, still started a company.

[David Senra]
You learn some lessons from failure-

[Sam Altman]
Yeah

[David Senra]
... but I think you learn way more from success.

[Sam Altman]
No, you got to hold on. We're not moving on from that. You got to say more about that. There's some, I can't believe, I think it's "Anna Karenina," some great Russian novel, I'm very embarrassed not to know this, starts with all unhappy families are unhappy in their own way. All happy families are the same.

[David Senra]
Yeah.

[Sam Altman]
That explains why it jumped into memory.

[Sam Altman]
But I think this is really true. When I look at the lessons of where I have failed at something, I learn something generic about grit and determination and something not to do. But

[Sam Altman]
most things don't work, so there's a lot of reasons why things don't work, and I think it's harder to put together the correct causation.

[Sam Altman]
And

[Sam Altman]
when I've had something really work,

[Sam Altman]
when I understand what parts of Y Combinator really worked or what parts of OpenAI really worked, trying to apply those lessons going forward has been much more helpful to me than trying to apply the anti-lessons of what didn't work.

[Sam Altman]
And so, you should, of course, learn as much as you can from every data point, so learn from the failures, learn from the successes. But

[Sam Altman]
in my own experience,

[Sam Altman]
when I have tried to apply those lessons,

[Sam Altman]
the lessons I learned from success were very good, and I should have applied those more. And the lessons I learned from failure were either fairly generic and I kind of already knew them, or got in the way of something else. And I think this is generally

[Sam Altman]
true for a lot of people.

[David Senra]
Yeah, but isn't it like we already kind of know what we should do or what we should avoid, but it's like the reminder, the constant reminder. So, the best description of my other podcast founders I ever heard is it's church for entrepreneurs. If you really think about it, I used to drop in on Sundays, and I should go back to doing that. But it's like, really, I'm just telling the same... It's the same personality type has appeared throughout history.

[Sam Altman]
Yeah.

[David Senra]
It's just like, now this person happens to be building ships, and this person built technology, but, and they live in different times.

[Sam Altman]
It's the same personality, that's for sure.

[David Senra]
I'm kind of obsessed with this idea of things that last for a long period of time.

[Sam Altman]
Yeah.

[David Senra]
And the best companies can last a long time, but not as long as cities, and cities and countries don't last as long as religions.

[Sam Altman]
Yeah.

[David Senra]
So out of all the manmade things, what has lasted longer? I would say I can't think of anything other than religion. It might be another answer. So then I started studying. I grew up, my mom was a fundamentalist Christian, so I was forced to go to church my entire life. And I just started analyzing, like, what do all the main religions in the world have in common? It's just like, oh, we have a shared base of knowledge, usually some kind of book.

[Sam Altman]
Yeah.

[David Senra]
Right? We meet with like-minded fellow believers at regular intervals. And it's not like I go to church on Sunday, it's like, "Okay, we talked about Jesus last week, but let's talk about this other guy." It's like, no, I go back to these same books and the same stories over and over again. So I read your blog, and you even said this, something about when YC ended. It's like you're repeating the same thing, you're telling it to them all the time, and then they leave the church-

[Sam Altman]
Yeah

[David Senra]
... to- ... for this analogy, and then they stop doing the same thing.

[Sam Altman]
Yeah.

[David Senra]
It's like-

[Sam Altman]
100%

[David Senra]
... it's not even the lessons. It's like the constant reminder that this is important.

[Sam Altman]
I extremely strongly agree with that,

[Sam Altman]
but I think it is

[Sam Altman]
better to be reminded of the thing, like talk to your users more, ship products earlier, get more feedback, hold a higher bar for who you recruit and who you hire, and more quickly-

[David Senra]
This is what I mean

[Sam Altman]
... but it's the positives that I think are good.

[David Senra]
You have one of the greatest tweets I have saved on my phone. You're like, "Skip the conferences, the fucking dinners, everything else. Just essentially make the product and sell the product."

[Sam Altman]
Yeah.

[David Senra]
If you're not making it and you're not selling it, that's all you actually have to do. And I think it's like, again, it goes back to that simple genius. So then this is the other part that I find most fascinating because somebody asked me yesterday, they're like, "What's your..." Usually there's some kind of historical equivalent for every founder I meet that I can be like, "Oh, that guy's kind of like Vanderbilt. That guy's like Rockefeller, Ludwig, or any of these people." And it's like, "What's your historical equivalent for Sam?" I was like, "There isn't. I can't think of one." Because I don't know him enough well. I don't understand how he thinks yet.

[Sam Altman]
What do you think now?

[David Senra]
Well, this is the first of hopefully 8 conversations, so I'll tell you in conversation 7.

[Sam Altman]
All right.

[David Senra]
But this is very rare. I just talked to Doug Leone, and he talked about one dude that he hired is the founder of Nubank, and he was a fucking like an associate in VC and then leaves and founds one of the most successful companies. I'm like, "I've never heard of that. Doug, have you? And did he dedicate his life to this?" He goes, "No, that's the only one." So again, it's very rare. Mostly people go from founder, sell their business, unfortunately, and then investor-

[Sam Altman]
Yeah

[David Senra]
... as opposed to run the business till you die-

[Sam Altman]
Yeah

[David Senra]
... which is my preferred method of things. What I'm curious about this is, like, when you just said, "I learn more from successes," right? Well, it's the successes because you were exposed to, what, 10,000 different companies in that decade or decade and a half that you were doing this. And you saw, obviously, maybe the half a dozen or the dozen that were the best in the world. So, are you taking their successes as well as instructive?

[Sam Altman]
Yes, totally. No, no.

[David Senra]
Okay.

[Sam Altman]
Totally. And I think people do... You're an incredible student, but there's a lot of pretty good students of entrepreneurialism and entrepreneurism, and people, I think, often try to go look for those lessons of the things that really worked. And as you said, it's kind of the same thing over and over again, like done in different industries, but you have to be reminded of it a lot, and it's unglamorous.

[David Senra]
I had no understanding going into this conversation. I think I have a slightly better understanding going into this. I told you before we started this is just for my own edification. But even the people that influenced you, where it's just like Peter Thiel saying, "No, dummy." He's obviously going to say, "No, dummy, this is working. Why are you doing anything else but the thing that is working?" So there's got to be examples where you're like, "Hey, I've given this advice to other founders a 1000000 times," and then you catch yourself, "Oh, shit. I'm not even applying my own advice at this point in time."

[Sam Altman]
Totally. Yeah. I'll give many examples of that. I think it's also instructive to, like,

[Sam Altman]
what was the new thing? What didn't you have the advice for?

[David Senra]
Mm-hmm.

[Sam Altman]
And the thing that was really different about OpenAI than anything that I had pattern matching before is it was four and a half years from when we started the company to when we launched our 1st product.

[David Senra]
The opposite of YC advice, right?

[Sam Altman]
Yes.

[David Senra]
Okay.

[Sam Altman]
Yes.

[Sam Altman]
And although there were all these ways which managing a research team was similar to selecting and advising founders,

[Sam Altman]
learning what it...

[Sam Altman]
To whatever degree we learned it, because I don't think we did it perfectly, like how you manage through this part of the world where you don't have the external signal from customers

[Sam Altman]
and you're just trying to do what would normally be the catastrophic startup advice of not

[Sam Altman]
shipping a product for four and a half years, that was very difficult. And we tried all of these things about how we

[Sam Altman]
replaced the signal of do customers actually like the product for is our research actually working? One of the things that worked actually is during the

[Sam Altman]
Dota 2 days when we were trying to use RL to beat people at a video game, we put up a leaderboard, and people could just see how different ideas were performing and that was objective and real, and people wanted to go up that. But we had to try all of these things to

[Sam Altman]
basically simulate

[Sam Altman]
end users, and that was a totally interesting new problem I had no pattern matching for.

[David Senra]
How did you work your way through that? What was your thinking? Like, how'd you do this?

[Sam Altman]
We asked a bunch of people who had been at great research labs of the past, and it had been... OpenAI started at sort of a time when everybody in Silicon Valley, as their vanity project, including me, wanted to start a research lab. And there were all these books about the heyday of Bell Labs or Xerox PARC that were very popular. Everybody was talking about this. It was a huge amount of discussion. In fact, I even see one of the books over there about

[Sam Altman]
Bell Labs. But there was not a ton of people that had in living memory how to actually do it. So we talked a lot to Alan Kay. We talked to a handful of other people, and we got some advice from them about what made a really good research lab, and some of it was really good. Some of it didn't translate as well to the current moment.

[David Senra]
Well, you also didn't have this giant monopolistic profit

[David Senra]
printing machine. Like, Bell Labs was spun out independently. Polaroid did a lot more research when they had essentially a monopoly on its photography. I just read the biography of the founder of Honda, right? The guy created the most successful

[David Senra]
motor vehicle of all time, the Honda Cub, and sold uninterrupted for 60 years, millions of fucking vehicles. And his whole thing, he arrived at the same conclusion Bell Labs did, that he thought the research and development had to actually be separate. It was spun out of the company and had separate ownership-

[Sam Altman]
Yeah

[David Senra]
... just like Bell Labs did.

[Sam Altman]
We did not have that. In fact-

[David Senra]
No, you did not have...

[Sam Altman]
When I think back to those early days, I mostly feel like I was trying and failing to raise money. That's my dominant memory of the early days of OpenAI.

[Sam Altman]
So much effort, so frustrating. I wish we had some sort of cash machine like that. I remember one of my clearest memories of all of OpenAI. So- I'm not coming in 2015, but the 1st day was right after New Year's in 2016. And 12 of us or 11 of us showed up at Greg Brockman's apartment, like 9:00, 9:30 on a Monday or Tuesday morning, something like that. Let's say it's January 4th, and everybody's there, and it had been this big effort, and everybody walks in with a lot of excitement. It feels like the 1st day of school, whatever.

[Sam Altman]
And then very quickly, people look around the room, and they're sort of like, "Well, what do we do now?"

[Sam Altman]
Someone says, "Okay, we should get a whiteboard." Greg gets someone to go off and find a whiteboard. Whiteboard comes.

[Sam Altman]
Look around again, "What are we supposed to do now?" And you just feel the energy in the room collapse.

[Sam Altman]
And none of us know what to do. It was not like building a product startup. It was not like, "Let's build this product and let's talk to customers." It's like, "Okay, we've said we want to make AGI. Maybe we should write some papers." "Okay, let's write some papers." "Maybe we should think about some ideas." "Okay, let's think about some ideas." Everybody's got their moments of, "I have no idea what I'm doing." That was one of mine. We have just launched this thing. None of us have any idea what we're going to do. So we did what we knew how to do, and eventually we figured out a lot of things didn't work. Eventually, we figured out a

[Sam Altman]
kind of rhythm for making and then evaluating research bets.

[Sam Altman]
And

[Sam Altman]
far from perfect, obviously, but we did find a gradient that we could kind of progress along, and we figured out how to get

[Sam Altman]
the resources that very smart people needed and how to make sure that we were not completely getting lost in the wilderness. And

[Sam Altman]
over

[Sam Altman]
some number of years,

[Sam Altman]
mostly chaotic stumbling, we eventually made most of the big discoveries. What started as the unsupervised sentiment neuron paper

[Sam Altman]
turned into GPT-1 and then eventually GPT whatever. The scaling laws work that gave us the confidence

[Sam Altman]
not only by the compute, but the understanding about how to scale up our models sort of came together, and through many other things too. Through this process, we learned things like that idea of leaderboards

[Sam Altman]
that worked. We also learned the incredible power of external demos

[Sam Altman]
for an eminent person that the researchers really wanted to impress. And then we learned a bunch of things that didn't work, like fake deadlines.

[David Senra]
That has to be so disorienting to live through that experience. You're at 12 people in an apartment, don't even have a whiteboard, don't know what to do. Fast-forward a decade, you have a billion people using-

[Sam Altman]
Very strange experience.

[David Senra]
Do you keep a journal?

[Sam Altman]
When my kid was born, my 1st kid, I would get home at the end of the day and be rocking him to sleep and just talk to a kid or whatever. So I was just like, "Need to come up with things to talk about." So I would just tell him about my day and what we were struggling with and kind of what I was worried about and what was happening. It was kind of fun for me to do, and I was like, "This is sort of interesting, and someday it'll be interesting for him to have this." So I started writing him. Every Sunday, I would write him a letter. I would talk just to talk, and then I would write it down. I only ever did 8 of them or something.

[David Senra]
How many kids do you have?

[Sam Altman]
2.

[David Senra]
Okay. Bezos has this great line about building Amazon. He's like, "We're trying to do stuff that we can tell our grandkids about that we're proud of," right? And those things are hard. The fact that you were writing to your son-

[Sam Altman]
Oh, man.

[David Senra]
... keep writing the letters. And if you don't do that, this is real quick, just because I've read enough books about this, most time, guess what? Founders don't write autobiographies when they're 40. They write them when they're 70 and they're looking back and they wish they could do it again, and so much has been lost to the sands of time. They all repeat this. They're like, "I wish I journaled." So even if you don't do it, you have enough resources. What I would do, have a book written, even if it's for internal purposes only. You ever read "The Little Kingdom" by Michael Moritz?

[Sam Altman]
I never read it.

[David Senra]
Oh, you have to. It's like the first six-year history of Apple written by Michael Moritz.

[Sam Altman]
Isn't it crazy that he wrote that book?

[David Senra]
He's a phenomenal writer.

[Sam Altman]
He is a great writer. Beautiful writer.

[David Senra]
Crazy writer winds up being one of the best venture capitalists of all time, I guess. But the point is that book ends. Steve hasn't even kicked out of Apple yet. So you get what actually happened. You're going to want this. You might not want it now, but you're damn sure going to want it when you're 60 or 70.

[Sam Altman]
The thing that was so interesting was the mindset of writing to your kid. You really can't hide behind anything. I really care what my kid's going to think about me, so this thing happened, didn't feel great about it, better do it differently next week. It was a very interesting, extremely interesting mental framework. Maybe I'll find some way to do it again.

[David Senra]
Not maybe, you're going to do it.

[Sam Altman]
Okay.

[David Senra]
Sam, thanks for taking the time. This was awesome, man.

[Sam Altman]
Thank you.

[David Senra]
Appreciate it.

[David Senra]
I hope you enjoyed this episode. Please remember to subscribe wherever you're listening and leave a review, and make sure you listen to my other podcast, "Founders." For almost a decade, I've obsessively read over 400 biographies of history's greatest entrepreneurs, searching for ideas that you can use in your work. Most of the guests you hear on this show 1st found me through "Founders."