OpenAI acted on AI scaling before larger rivals did

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 33:28

   and rules and everything else when you're thinking about the business world i think you build your company differently than almost anyone else is able to build companies is willing to build companies what allows you to do that actually every big company is pretty different i don't think this is a unique thing i think just like if you make a list of the 20 biggest tech companies or whatever they're all like shockingly different from each other in terms of their strategy and how they operate and their culture and i think we are quite different than everybody else but that's not a deep insight what do you think your like superpower is i think we did a really good job of a principled conviction on something that no one else believed even though it was the obvious thing one should believe and then putting together all of the

2. 34:14

   pieces and the talent around that to sort of make it happen what allowed you to kind of have that conviction that where other people just didn't um i have thought about this a lot i do not know it seemed so clearly obvious to all of us that i was more worried that we were drinking our own kool-aid than everybody else was wrong but with the benefit of hindsight we were clearly right and i don't understand the like deep mental block and lack of conviction from everybody else it's very strange i i have i have spent a lot of time trying to understand this did you find any explanation in your you know man's search for why or no um i mean there's all the obvious stuff about like groupthink and like the big transformations just come don't come along that often and exponential curves don't stay powerful for so long for so often but like you know maybe between 2016 and 2018

3. 35:25

   we had to get really lucky and it required like a lot of great belief but then by 2019 certainly by 2020 we shouldn't have really gotten to exist google should have just run away with it yeah i think jeff bezos called it like a business miracle that they built aws and then didn't have any serious competition for like seven years and i feel like opening eye is like another business miracle there's clearly something here about why big companies get sclerotic and set in their ways and it helps them in a lot of ways too but this is like i mean this is wonderful i think it's great that The big companies don't stay the only dominant forces forever.

4. 36:02

   That'd be really bad. But there's clearly something where these business miracles happen and they shouldn't. Is that right? Or should they? Well, I think it's great for the world that they do. Right. But to go back and explain in 2019 why OpenAI was like allowed by the giants with huge amounts of capital and talent and everything else to do what we've done. It's like hard to explain. Why did Microsoft give you the money?

5. 36:30

   um that i think is easier to explain which is google had deep mind and microsoft did not have an ai bet and you know big companies feel like they should have something in play in all of the major areas of technology was it kind of like they think it's going to be big but then underestimated how big it would be i think it's been like great for them i don't know if we've added one trillion two trillion dollars or whatever market cap to microsoft but i think it's been a lot um and i I think they have gotten incredible technology and cloud growth and will continue to.

6. 36:58

   So, yeah, I'm sure it's bigger than I thought it was going to be. But I think they made a good bet and have done super well with it. And I'm very happy about that. There's been different versions of OpenAI.