How To Build The Future: Sam Altman

I'm like, oh, one is like a very smart thing. And I think we're nowhere near the limit of progress. I mean, that was an architecture shift that sort of unlocked a lot. And what I'm sort of hearing is that these things are going to compound. We could hit some like unexpected wall or we could be missing something. But it looks to us like there's a lot of compounding in front of us still to happen. I mean, this essay is probably the most techno-optimist of almost anything I've seen out there. Some of the things we get to look forward to, fixing the climate, establishing a space colony, the discovery of all of physics, near limitless intelligence, and abundant energy.

I do think all of those things, and probably a lot more we can't even imagine, are maybe not that far away. And one of, and I think it's like tremendously exciting that we can talk about this even semi-seriously now. One of the things that I always have loved most about YC is it encourages slightly implausible degrees of techno-optimism and just a belief that like, ah, you can figure this out. And, you know, in a world that I think is like sort of consistently telling people, this is not going to work, you can't do this thing, you can't do that. I think the kind of early PG spirit of just encouraging founders to like think.

a little bit bigger is like it is a special thing in the world the abundant energy thing seems like a pretty big deal you know there's sort of path a and path b you know if we do achieve abundant energy seems like this is a real unlock almost any work not just you know knowledge work but actually like real physical work yeah could be unlocked with robotics and with language and intelligence on tap like there's a real age of abundance i think these are like the key to in the two key inputs to everything else that we want there's a lot of other stuff of course that matters but the unlock that would happen if we could just get truly abundant intelligence truly abundant energy what we'd be able to make happen in the world like both like come up with better ideas more quickly and then also like make them happen in in the physical world like to say nothing of it'd be nice to be able to run lots of AI and that takes energy too. I think that would be a huge unlock. And the fact that it's, I'm not sure it to be whether, like whether to be surprised that it's all happening at the same time, or if this is just like the natural effect of an increasing rate of technological progress, but it's certainly a very exciting time to be alive and great time

to do a startup. Well, so we sort of walked through this age of abundance, you know, maybe robots can actually manufacture, do anything, almost all physical labor can then result in material progress, not just for the most wealthy, but for everyone. You know, what happens if we don't unleash unlimited energy, if, you know, there's some physical law that prevents us from exactly that? Solar plus storage is on a good enough trajectory that even if we don't get a big nuclear breakthrough we would be like okay-ish but for sure it seems that driving the cost of energy down the abundance of it up has like a very direct impact on quality of life and eventually we'll solve every problem in physics so we're going to figure this out it's just a question of when and we deserve it uh there's you know someday we'll be talking not about fusion or whatever, but about the Dyson sphere. And that'll be awesome too.

Yeah. This is a point in time, whatever feels like abundant energy to us will feel like not nearly enough to our great grandchildren. And there's a big universe out there with a lot of matter. Yeah. I wanted to switch gears a little bit to sort of your earlier, you were mentioning Paul Graham, who brought us all together, really created Y Combinator. He likes to tell the story of how, you know, how you got into YC was actually you were a Stanford freshman. And he said, you know what, this is the very first YC batch in 2005. And he said, you know what, you're a freshman and YC will still be here next time. You should just wait. And you said, I'm a sophomore and I'm coming. And you're widely known in our community as, you know, one of the most formidable people.

Yeah. Obviously, you went on to create Looped, sell that, go to Green Dot, and then we ended up getting to work together at YC. Talk to me about the early days of YC research. One of the really cool things that you brought to YC was this experimentation. I remember you coming back to partner rooms and talking about some of the rooms that you were getting to sit in with the Larry and Sergeys of the world. and that, you know, AI was sort of at the tip of everyone's tongue because it felt so close, and yet it was, you know, that was 10 years ago.

The thing I always thought would be the coolest retirement job was to get to, like, run a research lab. And it was not specific to AI at that time. When we started talking about YC Research, well, not only was it going to, it did end up funding, like, a bunch of different efforts. and I wish I could tell the story of like if I was obvious that AI was gonna work and be the thing but like we tried a lot of bad things too. Around that time I read a few books on like the history of Xerox Park and Bell Labs and stuff and I think there were a lot of people like it was in the era of Silicon Valley at the time that we need to like have good research labs again and I just thought it would be so cool to do. And it was sort of similar to what YC does in that you're going to allocate capital to smart people and sometimes it's going to work and sometimes it's not going to. And I just wanted to try it. AI for sure was having a mini moment. This was like kind of late 2014, 2015, early 2016 was like this super intelligence discussion, like the book superintelligence was happening.

Bostrom, yep. Yeah. The DeepMind had had a few impressive results, but a little bit of a different direction. I had been an AI nerd forever, so I was like, oh, it'd be so cool to try to do something, but it's very hard to say. Was ImageNet out yet? ImageNet was out. Yeah. Yeah. For a while at that point. So you could tell if it was a hot dog or not. You could sometimes. Yeah, that was getting there, yeah. you know how did you identify the initial people you wanted involved in you know yc research and open ai i mean greg greg brockman was early in retrospect it feels like this movie montage and there were like all of these like you know at the beginning of like the bank eyes movie when you're like driving around to find the people and whatever and they're like you son of a bitch i'm in right right like ilia i like heard he was really smart and then i watched some video of his. And he's extremely smart, like true, true, genuine genius and visionary. But also he has this incredible presence. And so I watched this video of his on YouTube or something. I was like, I got to meet that guy. And I emailed him and he didn't respond. So I just like went to some conference he was speaking at and we met up. And then after that, we started talking a bunch.

And then like Greg, I had known a little bit from the early Stripe days. What was that conversation like, though? It's like, I really like what your ideas about AI and I want to start a lab. Yes.

For deep learning models, for a lot of other things, I think it's a very underappreciated property and thing to go after. And I think it's, you know, when in doubt, if you have something that seems like it's getting better with scale, I think you should scale it up. I think people want things to be, you know, less is more, but actually... More is more. More is more. We believed in that. We wanted to push on it. I think one thing that is not maybe that well understood about OpenAI is we had just this... Even when we were like pretty unknown, we had a crazy talented team of researchers.

You know, if you have like the smartest people in the world, you can push on something really hard. Yeah, and they're motivated. And or you created sort of one of the sole places in the world where they could do that. Like one of the stories I heard is just even getting access to compute resources. even today is this crazy thing and embedded in some of the criticism from maybe the elders of the industry at the moment was sort of that, you know, you're going to waste a lot of resources and somehow that's going to result in an AI winter. Like people won't give resources anymore. It's funny. People were never sure if we were going to waste resources or if we were doing something kind of vaguely immoral by putting in too much resources and you were supposed to spread it across lots of bets rather than like conviction on one. Most of the world still does not understand the value of like a fairly extreme level of conviction on one bet. And so we said, okay, we have this evidence. We believe in this thing. We're gonna, at a time when like the normal thing was we're gonna spread against this bet and that bet and that bet. You're a definite optimist.

You're a definite optimist. And I think across like many of the successful YC startups, you see a version of that again and again. Yeah, that sounds right. When the world gives you sort of push back and the pushback doesn't make sense to you, you should do it anyway. Totally. One of the many things that I'm very grateful about getting exposure to from the world of startups is how many times you see that again and again and again. And before, I think before YC, I really had this deep belief that somewhere in the world, there were adults in charge, adults in the room, and they knew what was going on. And someone had pushing back on you, they probably knew what was going on. And the degree to which I now understand that, you know, to pick up the earlier phrase, you can just do stuff. You can just try stuff.

No one has all the answers. There are no like adults in the room that are going to magically tell you exactly what to do. And you just kind of have to like iterate quickly and find your way.

that was not so obvious at the time yeah it sounded like there was a a key insight around positive or negative sentiment around ngp1 even before gpt1 oh before he i think the paper was

called the unsupervised sentiment neuron and i think alec did it alone by the way alec is this unbelievable outlier of a human. And so he did this incredible work, which was just looking at, he noticed there was one neuron that was flipping positive or negative sentiment as it was doing these generative Amazon reviews, I think. Other researchers might have hyped it up more or made a bigger deal out of it or whatever, but it was Alex, so it took people a while to, I think, fully internalize what a big deal it was. And he then did GPT-1 and somebody else scaled it up into GPT-2. But it was off of this insight that there was something amazing happening where, and at the time, unsupervised learning was just not really working. So he noticed this one really interesting property, which is there was a neuron that was flipping positive or negative with sentiment. And yeah, that led to the GPT series. I guess one of the things that Jake

obviously, one of the craziest AI labs ever to be created, you started at 19 at YC with a company called Looped, which was basically Find My Friends geolocation, you know, probably, what, 15 years before Apple ended up making it. Too early in any case, yeah. Yeah. What drew you to that particular idea i was like interested in mobile phones and i wanted to do something that got to like use mobile phone this was when like mobile was just starting it was like you know still three years or two years before the iphone but it was clear that carrying around computers in our pockets was somehow a very big deal i mean that's hard to believe now that there was a moment when phones were actually literally you just they were just a phone they were an actual phone yeah yeah i mean i try not to use it as an actual phone ever really i still remember the first phone i got that had internet on it and it was this horrible like text-based mostly text-based browser it was really slow you could like you know do like you could so painfully and so slowly

check your email um but i was like a i don't know in high school sometime in high school when i got a phone that could do that versus like just text and call and i was like hooked right then yeah I was like, this is not a phone. This is like a computer we can carry. And we're stuck with a dial pad for this accident of history. But this is going to be awesome. And I mean, now you have billions of people who they don't have a computer. Like to us growing up, you know, that actually was your first computer. This is a replica or like another copy of my first computer, which is a Mac LC2. Yeah. So this is what a computer was to us growing up.

and the idea that you would carry this little black mirror like kind of we've come a long way unconscionable back then yeah so you know even then you like technology and what was going to come was sort of in your brain yeah i was like a real i mean i still am a real tech nerd yeah but i always that was what i spent my friday nights thinking about and then uh one of the harder parts of it was we didn't have the app store the iphone didn't exist uh you ended up being a big part of that launch, I think. A small part, but yes, we dig it to be a little part of it.

Like I think about the people that made that computer and I don't know them. You know, there are many of them probably long retired, but I am so grateful to them. Yeah. And some people worked super hard to make this thing at the limits of technology. I got a copy of that on my eighth birthday and it totally changed my life. And the lives of a lot of other people too. They worked super hard. They never like got a thank you from me but I feel it to them very deeply. And it's really nice to get to like add our brick to that long road of progress. Yeah. It's been a great year for OpenAI, not without some drama. Always. Yeah. We're good at that.

What did you learn from, you know, sort of the ouster last fall? And how do you feel about some of the, you know, departures? I mean, teams do evolve, but how are you doing, man? Tired, but good. Yeah. It's, we've kind of like speed run, like medium size or even kind of like pretty big sized tech company arc that would normally take like a decade and two years like chat gpt is less than two years old yeah and and there's like a lot of painful stuff that comes with that um and there are you know any company as it scales goes through management teams at some rate uh and you have to sort of the people who are really good at the zero to one phase are not necessarily people that are good at the one to ten or the ten to the hundred phase we've also kind of like changed what we're going to be made plenty of mistakes along the way done a few things really right and that comes with a lot of change and I think the goal of the company the immersion AGI or whatever however you want to think about it is like just keep making the best decisions we can at every stage but it does lead to a lot of change I hope that we are heading towards a period now of more calm, but I'm sure there will be other periods in the future where

things are very dynamic again. So I guess, how does OpenAI actually work right now? You know, I mean, the quality and like the pace that you're pushing right now, I think is like beyond world class compared to a lot of the other, you know, really established software players like who came before this is the first time ever where i felt like we actually know what to do like i think from here to building an agi will still take a huge amount of work there are some known unknowns but i think we basically know what to go what to go do and it'll take a while it'll be hard but that's tremendously exciting i also think on the product side there's more to figure out but roughly we know what to shoot at and what we want to optimize for that's a really exciting time and when you have that clarity i think you can go pretty fast yeah if you're willing to say we're going to do these few things we're going to try to do them very well and our research path is fairly clear our infrastructure path is fairly clear our product path is getting clearer you can orient around that super well we for a long time did not have that we were a true research lab and even when you know that it's hard to act with the conviction on it

because there's so many other good things you'd like to do but the degree to which you can get everybody aligned and pointed at the same thing is a significant determinant in how fast you can move I mean sounds like we went from level one to level Well, too, very recently, and that was really powerful. And then we actually just had our O1 hackathon at YC. Yeah, that was so impressive. That was super fun. And then weirdly, one of the people who won, I think they came in third, was Camfer. And so CAD CAM startup, you know, did YC recently last year or two. And they were able to, during the hackathon, build something that would iteratively improve an airfoil from something that wouldn't fly to literally something that had a competitive amount of lift. And I mean, that sort

excited for um or any kid I'm more excited for that then congratulations I've ever been incredible yeah probably that that's but that's gonna be really that's the thing I've like most excited for ever in life yeah it changes your life completely so I cannot wait well here's to building that better world for you know our kids and really hopefully the whole world there's a lot of fun Thanks for hanging out, Sam.

Thank you.