We said, "Okay, we're going to go for AGI." 99% of the world thought we were crazy. 1% of the world they really resonated with. You know, in 10 or 20 years, unless something goes hugely wrong, we'll have like unimaginable super intelligence. This is the best time ever in the history of technology ever, period, to start a company.
Well, Sam, thank you so much for joining us and thanks for all the inspiration. I mean, OpenAI itself is a true inspiration for any really really ambitious person. Maybe we just start with that. I mean, what were some of the decisions early that seemed small that turned out to be incredibly pivotal?
I mean, just deciding to do it was a big one. Like there we got very close to not starting OpenAI. AGI sounded crazy. I was I had Gary's job then and we were you know there was like all this other great stuff to do that would work all these great startups and AGI was like kind of a pipe dream and also even if it was possible deep mind seemed like impossibly far ahead and so we had this year over the course of 2015 where we were talking about starting it and you know it was like kind of coin flippy and I think this is the the story of like many ambitious things where they seem so difficult and there's such good reasons not to do them that really takes a core of people that like sit in a room, look each other in the eye and say, "All right, let's do this." And those are like very important moments and I think when in doubt, you should lean into them.
So, there were just a billion things, a billion reasons why people might say you shouldn't do it. I mean, off the bat, like even you one of the things you figured out was the scaling laws. It's so hard to remember what it was like. Next year will be our 10 year anniversary and so not not Yeah. Thank you. But to to like remember what the vibes were like about AI 10 years ago, that was like way before the first language models that worked. We were trying to like play video games and we had this little robotic hand that could sort of barely do a Rubik's cube and we had no ideas for products, no revenue, no really idea that we were ever going to have revenue. And we were like sitting around at conference tables and whiteboards trying to come up with ideas for papers to write. It it was such it's it's like hard to explain now because it looks so obvious now how improbable it seemed at the time and how the idea of ChatGPT was like completely in the realm of science fiction.
I mean, one of the things that really jumped out at me was you sort of, you know, rallied this idea that you should be working on AGI and then simultaneously you found the smartest people in the world who were working on that thing. That second part was sort of easier than it sounds. If if you say we're going to like do this crazy thing and it's and it's exciting and it's important if it works and other people aren't doing it, you can actually like get a lot of people together. And so we were we said, "Okay, we're going to go for AGI." 99% of the world thought we were crazy. 1% of the world that really resonated with. Turned out there were a lot of smart people in that 1% and you could get like there wasn't really anywhere else for them to go. So we were able to really concentrate the talent and it was a mission that people cared about. So even though it seemed unlikely, if it worked, it it seemed super valuable. And we've observed this many times with startups. If you are doing the same thing as everyone else, it is very hard to concentrate talent and it's very hard to get people to like really believe in a mission. And if you're doing like a one-of-one thing, you you have a really nice tailwind there.
Okay. So, some people in this room might be thinking like, should I try to start an OpenAI scale thing off the bat? You know, you you also worked on Loop your first time around. You know, were there lessons from that?
OpenAI was not an OpenAI scale thing off the bat. OpenAI was like eight people in a room and then it was 20 people in a room and it was very unclear what to do and we were just like trying to write a good research paper. So the the things that eventually become really big do not start off that way. I think it's important to like dream that it could be big if it works. Nothing big starts that way. and and and Venode Kla has this quote that I've always liked which is there's a very big difference between a Z million dollar startup and a zero billion dollar startup but they both have zero dollars of revenue. They're both like a few people sitting in a room and you're both trying to they're both just trying to get the first thing to work. So the only the only advice I have about trying to start something big is pick pick a market where it seems like there's some version of the future where it could be big if it works. But other than that, it's like one dumb foot in front of the other for a long time.
How people use ChatGPT has changed a lot. How people use your API has changed a lot. What surprises you the most with the latest models like 03 and what emergent behaviors or use cases are standing out to you right now?
I think we're in a really interesting time. We haven't been in one of these for a while. But like right now we're in an interesting time where the the product overhang relative to what the models like what the models are capable of is here the products that people have figured out to build is way down here. There's a huge even if the models got no better which of course they will there's a huge amount of new stuff to build. And also like last week 03 cost five times as much as it did this week and that's going to keep going. I think people will be astonished at how much the price per performance falls. We have an open source model coming out soon. I think people are going to be Yeah, I don't want to like steal the team's glory and pre-announce this, but I think you all will be astonished. I think it will be like much better than you're hoping for and the ability to like use it to run incredibly powerful models locally is gonna like really really surprise people on what's possible. But so you have this world where like the model capability has gone into like a kind of new like a very new realm. The cost of the APIs are going to keep falling quite dramatically. The open source models are going to be super great and I think we have not yet seen the level of new product innovation that the reasoning models are capable of which makes sense they're pretty new but this is like an exceptional time to go build a company that takes advantage of this sort of new thing that exists this sort of new square on a periodic table that no one has built with yet. So only in the last month I think have we really started to see startups that are saying okay like reasoning models are different you know the whole interaction model is different and really building for that.
I mean for me even memory has turned into it feels like I'm talking to someone who knows me which is interesting.
Yeah me memory is my favorite feature that we've launched this year. I don't think most people at OpenAI would say that because and we've launched a lot of stuff but I love memory and ChatGPT. And I think it points to where we will hopefully go with the product which is you will have this like entity that gets to know you that connects to all your stuff and that is like proactively helping you. It'll it won't just be like you send a message and it sends you one back. But it'll like be running all the time. It'll be looking at your stuff. It'll know when to send you a message. It'll know when to go do something on your behalf. You'll have, you know, special new devices and it'll be integrated on every other service you use and you'll just have this thing running with you throughout your life. I think memory is the first time where people can sort of see that coming.
Back in the day you tweeted a little bit about her where, you know, when is that coming? Can you give us an alpha leak around that?
I think gradually is the answer. No, no. If I had a date in mind, I would probably just be excited and tell you. But like it's a little bit here with memory, right? It'll be a little more here when it's persistently running in the background and sending you stuff. It'll be a lot more here when we ship the first new device. But I think the key of her is not the little piece of hardware. It's that this thing got to a point where it could run in the background and feel like a sort of AI companion.
I guess we're starting to see the power of LLMs with integrations into your real data. You know, I've heard rumors that MCP is coming to OpenAI. I think today. Yeah. Oh, today. I think so. Fantastic. What has been surprising about the actual integrations? Like have you been seeing people actually operating on their core database?
You know, at YC we actually have that agent infrastructure internally and we use it all the time. Definitely people are starting to use ChatGPT as this like operating system with everything with their whole lives in it. And integrating into as many data sources as possible is important. Devices that are always with you, like new kinds of web browsers, the connection to all data sources, memory, and then a model that's persistently running. You put all that together, I I think you get to like a pretty powerful place.
Do you think that'll be in the cloud in the future, or will it be on our desktop or some mix of both?
Some mix of all of that. Definitely people will run local models for some things like man, if we could push like half the ChatGPT workload onto your local devices, no one would be happier than us. Like our cloud. We I think we will run the like largest and most expensive piece of infrastructure in the world pretty soon. So, if we could push some of that off, that'd be great. But a lot of it will run on the cloud.
Is it surprising to you how hard it is to get compute?
I mean, we've gotten really good at it, but it is we we went from like a no a zero like no ChatGPT.com didn't exist two and a half years ago to like the fifth biggest website in the world. It'll be the third at some point, hopefully someday the first if our current growth rates continue. And I think doing that is just hard no matter what. Like that's you usually get longer than we've gotten to to scale up a like infrastructure to for a new company. But you know, there's like a lot of people that want to help.
Well, it's incredible incredible work that you guys have been doing. We're seeing reasoning models like 03 and 04 mini evolve in parallel with multimodal models like 40. What happens when these two threads converge? And what's the vision for GPT5 and beyond?
I mean, we we we won't get all the way here with GPT5, but eventually we do want one integrated model that can like reason when it needs to and generate like real-time video when it needs to do that. If you ask a question, you could imagine it thinking super hard, doing some research, writing a bunch of code just in time for like a brand new app only for you to use or kind of like rendering live video that you can interact with. So I think that will feel like a real new kind of computer interface. That AI sort of somewhat already does, but when we get to a model that has like true complete multimodality, like perfect video, perfect coding, everything and deep reasoning, that will that will feel like quite powerful.
It seems like that might be a hop step over to the embodied aspect. You know, that's having vision, having speech, and having reasoning is a hop step to, you know, yeah, basically the robot we want.
Our our our strategy has been nail that first and then make sure we can connect that to a robot. But the time for the robot is coming soon. I think I am very excited about a world where when you sign up for like the highest tier of the ChatGPT subscription, we send you a free humanoid robot too. I mean that future is going to be pretty wild being able to have robots that do real work in the real world. I think we're not that far away now. The mechanical engineering of robots is been quite difficult and and the sort of AI for the cognitive part has been quite difficult too but it feels within grasp and I think in a few years robots will start to do super useful stuff making a billion robots is still going to take a while but I don't know I'm interested in the question of how many robots do you need to fully automate the supply chain like if you make a million humanoid robots the old-fashioned way can they run the entire supply chain drive the mining equipment like drive the container ships run the you know foundries and make the new robots and then maybe like you actually can get a lot of robots in the world quickly but the demand for human robots in the world will be far more than we know how to think about with the current supply chain.
I guess when you were sitting in my seat, one of the things you led was you know a lot more investment into hard tech at YC. Sitting here where we are geopolitically, you know, what what do we need to do to make sure that America can actually have manufacturing in industrial capacity, you know, we can't even build precision screws and large sheet metal without crazy cost overruns. You know, how what can we do to make sure that happens here?
There are all of these answers that people throw around and have thrown around the same things for a while and it clearly hasn't worked. So, I think all of the policy is worth trying, but my instinct is we need to try something new. We shouldn't keep trying the same failed stuff. And you know, like AI and robotics does give us a new possibility of a way to bring manufacturing back here and to bring sort of these complex industries here in a really important new way. And I would say that's at least worth trying.
Yeah. What does defensibility look like here? You know, one of the classic questions is, you know, how do I start a startup that doesn't get run over by OpenAI? That's sort of the number one question that's in our chat.
We don't want to run you over. Look, we're going to do our thing hopefully very well. We are going to try to make the best super assistant out of ChatGPT that we can. We're gonna add the things that we think we need to add to that. But that is like one small part of the opportunity in front of us. And it makes us sad when people are like, I'm going to start a new startup and I'm going to like make a version of ChatGPT because we think we're going to do that pretty well and we have like, you know, kind of a big head start, but there is so much more space to go after and there are so many incredible other companies that have been built using our platform. We would like to make it easier for you all. We would like to do more things like finally now you can imagine that ChatGPT could drive a lot of traffic to new startups and that there's like a new kind of app or agent or whatever you want to call it store that we could do inside of ChatGPT and drive traffic to new startups to help. You could imagine that we could do like a sign-in with OpenAI and people could bring their, you know, personalized model and easily connect it to a new startup and that would probably help in a bunch of ways. So we want to be a platform for other people to build stuff. Our advice is like don't build our core you know chat assistant. But there is another problem which is and this is the same for every every kind of like moment that I've seen in startup history. People get excited about the same thing at the same time. And so rather than go build the thing that you have thought of that is not everybody what else is doing, we are like very social creatures and we get very influenced by what other people are doing. And I bet if Gary listed off the five ideas that he hears most often of what people want to build with AI, like half the room would raise their hands for working on one of those five. And and the I there is hopefully in this room the person who's going to start a company that is like much bigger than OpenAI someday and I would bet that person is not working on any of the five. So it is hard to build something defensible if everybody else is trying to do the same thing. Sometimes it works. It's not impossible. But the best the most enduring companies are usually not doing the same thing as everybody else. And that gives you time to figure out what the great product is, how to build the technology before you have to answer the defensibility question. It took us a long time to figure out how to answer the defensibility question for ChatGPT. We had built this thing and for a long time the only defensibility was like we had the only product out in the market. And then we kind of like be a brand that started to be well-known and now we have things like memory and connections, a whole bunch of other stuff that really is defensible. But you know that was like a fair criticism of us for a long time. We didn't have any defensibility strategy. We just like had the only good thing out there and then you have some window before which you have to build defensibility.
One of the things we've talked about in the past is that we both are big followers of Peter Thiel in that he talks a lot about being contrarian but right. I think that you've Peter is a genius. Absolutely. And you found you've been contrarian in really fundamental ways. I mean going back you know to the beginning of the conversation people thought oh this idea that the scaling laws are valuable today it's you know taken as basic truth but it was exactly the opposite of ground truth not that many years ago when you got that push back you know what did you and your team feel did you say you know f*** I won't do what you tell me you know I'm going I'm going to push back against you know getting push back means that this is a contrarian area and we're going to bet here and we're going to be right.
It is hard to have conviction in the face of a lot of other people telling you you're wrong. And I think people who don't who say it's easy are not being honest. It gets easier over time. But like I remember one time I can say this one because it got publicized in early not early a few years into OpenAI where Elon sent us this really mean email. We've been working together for a while and said we had a zero% chance of success. Like not zero. Zero that we were totally failing. We had showed him like GPT1 recently. He was like, "This is crap. It's not gonna work. Doesn't make sense." And I was really a hero of mine at the time. And I remember going home that night and being like, "What if he's right? Like this s*** sucks." You know, you're working so hard on this thing. Like you're pouring your life force into it. And you have these people who are smart and that you look up to and they say, "You are totally wrong." or you know this is just not never going to work or you don't have defensibility, someone's going to kill you, this is going to happen, that's going to happen. And I don't have a magic answer other than it's really tough and it gets significantly easier over time, but it's going to happen to all of you and you just like get knocked down and get back up and brush yourself off and try to keep going.
Let's talk AI agents. You know, that's sort of level three AGI. This is the year I think Greg Brockman talked about recently. This is the year of the agent. With tools like operator code interpreter, what kind of workflows do you think will disappear or appear that we just aren't ready for yet?
For a long time, ChatGPT was like a Google replacement. You could ask it something that was about as long as a Google query. You know, maybe like half an hour worth of Google queries it could assemble together. And that was still pretty good, but it didn't it it it still felt like a more advanced version of search. But now you start to see things where you can like really give a task to code interpreter for example or to deep research and you have this thing go off and do a bunch of stuff and come back to you with like a proposal. It's it's like a very junior employee that can work on something for like a short period of time. And if you think about how much of the work that the world does is work that can be done in front of a computer in like few hour chunks where you then have someone say like okay that was good enough or not. It's quite a lot. So I I think this is going to go this is part of that overhang we were talking about earlier but I think this is going to go quite far and I think with current 03 to say nothing of our next model you can build a lot of experiences like this.
How do you see the future of human computer interaction and interfaces and what are sort of the limitations of those interfaces that you know motivated you?
You know, one of the things that I think sci-fi got right is the idea of the interface almost melts away. Like voice interfaces today we think of as something that is kind of sucky because they don't work that well. But in theory, if you could say to a computer, "This is exactly what I want to happen today. And if there's any changes, if like I'm delayed, if you know something happens, I trust you to like go off and do all those things, but like I don't want to be interrupted. I don't want to think about it. And it just did it all and you trusted that it worked. That would be an interface that almost melted away except when it, you know, was like a super great human assistant needed to talk to you. But you would be like really thrilled. When I like use my phone today, I feel like I am like walking down Time Square in New York getting like bumped into by people. I love my phone. It's an incredible piece of technology, but it's like notification here, this thing happening, you know, this thing popping up, like bright colors, like all kinds of flashing things in me. It's just stressful. And I can imagine an interface where the computer mostly melts away. It does the stuff I need. But I really trust that it's going to do a great job of like surfacing information to me, making judgment calls about when not to, acting on my behalf when it should. And I'm I'm quite excited for that. I'm not going to like tell you what the new device is. Well, I'll tell you like one-on-one, but I'm not going to tell the room, but it's very like I I hope I hope we can sort of like show people a different way to have computers.
Is that one of the reasons why you brought on one of the greatest living designers on the planet, John, in Johnny Ivan, IO?
Yeah, he he is he is amazing. He he really lives up to all the hype. I I think we've only had kind of two big revolutions in computer interfaces really in the last like 50 years. So we had the you know keyboard and mouse and screen and then we had touch and phones and the opportunity to do a new one doesn't come along that often and I think AI really does totally open the playing field for something completely new and I think if you got to pick one person to bet on to figure that out he is the obvious bet.
Yeah. So one of the things that we've been debating at YC that you know don't know if this is good might be scary for a lot of software engineers who want to create B2B SaaS is this idea that what if in the future you had your you know underlying database you have an API layer that is you know your access control and enforces your business logic and then the interface is the LLM like your computer is literally you know the agent and you have just in time software. They're like complex flows. You're just going to go in and it'll code gen an artifact or, you know, a pain for you that like does that thing you wanted and it'll go in the file and it'll bring it back if you ever need it.
That's going to happen. Yeah. Look here here there are two ways you can look at this. First of all, assume you all are like starting startups or have started startups, think about starting startups. This is the best time ever in the history of technology ever, period, to start a company. Yeah, this is and but part of the reason it's the best is because like the ground is shaking and it's true there are a lot of these challenges. So on one hand you can look at something like that and say we have been a you know SaaS company and now like all of the code can just be generated right in time when someone needs it and what does that mean for us or you can look at it and say wow this is going to happen but it's going to happen to everybody and the way startups win is when they can iterate faster than big companies and they can do it at a much lower cost. Like big companies have a lot of advantages but they iterate very slowly and they you know if something is like very cheap then a lot of their big advantages go away. So you can look at this all of these problems one way or another. But the way I would recommend looking at them is everybody is going to face the same challenges and opportunities. But when the clock cycle of the industry changes this much startups almost always win and we've probably never seen it change this much. Act on it from that direction. I think you'll be in incredible shape.
Maybe you can invite me sometime to do a talk about like what the areas of defensibility that you can build over time are because I think that is the inherent question. People are like, "Oh, okay. You know, I'm a SaaS company. There's going to be just in time software." I think the question behind the question is like, "What are actual defensibility strategies?" So, that would be a fun talk someday, I guess.
You know, backstage at one of the last events we had you know, we were talking about the this there's this book that's sort of like the classic McKenzie, which is the seven powers. And I was just thinking about that like I never would have thought like the two of us technologists sitting around actually citing you know McKenzie consultants are known for. Feels so wrong.
Yeah. I don't know aesthetically it feels terrible but yes seven powers. I guess we're entering this age of intelligence. I love that essay of yours. What do you think this era will mean for you know how we live you know how we work and how do we create value for each other as a society?
You know, in some sense, the the whole arc of technology is one story, which is we discover more science, build better tools, all of society like builds the scaffolding a little bit higher. And we we have this more impressive tool chain. And the whole point of it is that one person can do way more than they could before. And this has been going on for a long long time. Each generation. Certainly I mean if you compare a person today from a person 100 or thousand years ago, one person is incredibly more capable and the kind of like social contract is that you put something, you know, you build the next layer of scaffolding. But what someone can do now with this new set of tools, with this, you know, this new layer that's been built in is pretty incredible. And I think the one of the things that will feel most different about these next 10 years versus these last 10 years is how much a single person or a small group of people with a lot of agency can get done. And that is a bigger deal than it sounds like because coordination costs are are huge. And when we can empower people with more knowledge, more tools, more resources, whatever, I think we won't just see like a little bit more stuff get built, but because of these kind of coordination costs across people, we'll see like a real stuff change. So I think the the amount that one person or small team get done, the satisfaction in doing that and and most importantly like the quality of stuff we'll all get for each other will be quite remarkable. When I think back about the OpenAI story, I often think about just the kind of key few tens of people that did the amazing work that led to what we all have now. But I try to remember that I always also have to think about like the tens of millions of people, maybe it's more throughout history that started like digging rocks out of the ground, figuring out how semiconductors work, building computers, building the internet, and on and on and on that let this small group be able to work at such a high level of impact that they never would have been able to do without the collective output of society.
Is it surprising to you to what degree? I mean, this room is you're preaching to the room of the converted, but this is awesome, by the way. I mean, this is like the collected set of people who are going to go create the future, but there's, you know, yeah, there's there's maybe like never been a gathering like this in one place before. This is this is very cool to see. But at the same time, you know, we're in some ways, this is the leading cutting edge of all of society because there are seven and a half billion people who probably have, you know, have not even tried this stuff yet. And not only that, their main interaction with it is that it doesn't work, that it hallucinates. You know, what what do you have to say to the 3,000 people in front of you right now?
Just this is the the thin edge of the spear. We are literally teaching people and giving people this technology. First of all, that's like a great place to be in. One of the one of the most fun things about working at YC is you get to like live on the leading edge and you get to be around the people who are the advanced guard. And that's just like a fun way to live your life and you get to see what's coming and, you know, hopefully have some small amount of input into shaping it. But I don't know. I think AI is like somewhat mainstream right now. I the the the negative the way that it's not is most people still think of AI as ChatGPT and a lot of people use ChatGPT but they use it like a a chatbot and they have not yet wrapped their head around what's what's coming next and probably you all have but I don't know it's like a great privilege to get to live a little bit in the future and you know go build stuff for everybody else coming along.
So, you're sort of one of the best people in the world at bringing together the smartest people. What are some of the hardest lessons you've had to learn about hiring? A lot of the people in this room like they have never managed a person before, let alone gotten someone to quit their, you know, six to seven figure job at some big company to come work on their revolution.
Hiring really smart people who are clearly really driven and really productive and can work as part of a team I think does get you 90% of the way there and the degree to which people focus on other things to hire for always surprises me. So I think you know given that we can't do the full 45 minutes right now really smart people driven curious self-motivated hardworking like good track record of accomplishment and can work really well as part of a team and sort of aligned with the company's vision and so everybody's at least going for the same the same direction that works pretty well.
I mean by strong track record do you mean the person who's like you know sort of been an administrator and had like the the you know top name at the top institution for 20 years or do you mean like because you you went the other way?
I I don't especially early in a startup I don't believe in hiring those people. There experience is valuable and there are times where you you really need that but I have not had success and to be frank like YC has not had that much success trying to start with like the very senior eminent administrator as one of the like you know as the first hire in a startup. I would I would take like young scrappy but clearly like get stuff done over the person who has like the extremely polished track record. There will come a time where you need some of those people later. But I don't know how you do it, but when I when I was like reading YC applications, I would like never look at the resume items. You know, you worked at like Google or went to this college. I never cared. I would always go right to like what's the most impressive stuff you've done? And then sometimes I would like not be convinced by that and go look at the resume. But that was always like a backup to me as a secondary thing. So sort of look look at what they've actually what they've coded, what they've built, like their velocity, how they think about problems and solve them. I see PB back there. He has this quote, I hope it's his quote because I've attributed to him a bunch of times of hire for slope, not y intercept. And I think that's just like unbelievably great advice.
Let's talk about being CEO of OpenAI. What are some of the hardest lessons there just overall?
I don't recommend it. No one single challenge would be that hard, but the number of things we have to do at the same time and the kind of like number of other big companies that are gunning for us in various ways, it's just like more context than I thought it was possible to handle at once and more sort of like switching from like big big decision to like totally unrelated but also huge decision.
Looking ahead 10 to 20 years, what are you sort of most personally excited about? You know, and what should people be building now to make that future possible? You know, there are people who are scientists, there are people who are software engineers, there are people who are I mean this is an all technical crowd.
Look, there there's a lot you know, in 10 or 20 years, unless something goes hugely wrong, we'll have like unimaginable super intelligence. And I'm very excited to see how that goes. Forced to pick one thing to just not leave it as like a vague answer. I think AI for science is what I'm personally most excited about. I I am a believer that to a first order approximation all long-term sustainable economic growth in the world like everything that leads to people's lives getting better is basically discovering new science and having reasonably good governance and institutions so that that science can get developed and shared with the world. But if we could vastly increase the rate of new scientific discovery with AI, I believe that would compound to just incredible increases and wonders for everyone's lives. So I think I'd pick that on that time frame.
I guess one of the things I've been always really impressed by is you know you were you you know personally recruited Helon to come do Y Combinator and they're doing incredible things over on the Fusion side. Was that something that you were thinking about even all the way back then or you know obviously energy and climate was sort of a part of you know, what everyone's worried about even back then.
But this is a little bit embarrassing. I've been obsessed with energy and AI as like the two the things that I thought would be the two most important things or at least the ones I was going to be most that I felt most passionate about for a long time. And and really like the two areas that I I knew I wanted to like concentrate time and capital towards. I I cannot recall ever thinking until like after starting OpenAI that they were going to be so obviously related that you know that that energy would be the eventually the fundamental limiter on how much intelligence we could have. And I don't know how I missed that because I usually am good at thinking about things like that but I I really did think of them as like very independent. You know, we were going to need AI to have all the ideas, energy to make all the stuff happen in the world. And I obviously right after starting OpenAI, I got obsessed with meaning energy for AI. But like pre-2015, I think I thought of them as orthogonal vectors.
I mean, you I'm sure you've seen that chart that you know, all the effective accelerationists in the room have seen around basically having a high standard of living like the sort of really it's I'm obsessed with this chart. I've been obsessed with that chart a long time. It's directly related to the amount of energy that any given person has access to.
Yeah. I I think this is one of the most amazing charts over a long like long long period of human history is the correlation of quality of life and abundance of energy and cost of energy. So that was that chart and charts like that were a significant reason that I got obsessed with energy in the first place. It it is it is just this like crazy high impact thing.
It sounds like it wasn't entirely interdependent. It was more you had twin interest, but you've literally woven them together.
I had like the one interest of like radical abundance and just like what what what were the kind of technological leverage points to just like make the future like wildly different and better and these is the two kind of key things for that. But not as not as much as the same vector. Now I think a lot about like how much energy can we actually build on Earth before we just heat the planet too much from running the GPUs and like how long can we go before we have to put all the GPUs in space. But at the time yeah I really thought of them differently.
I mean it seems like one of the defining beliefs that technologists uniquely ideally have that they believe that we can actually create that sort of abundance. You know, if you have intelligence on tap and then you have energy on tap, then how does that go? It's like, you know, all watched over by machines of loving grace.
I I've never been to one of those degrowth conferences in Europe or whatever. But I've always kind of wanted to go to one. This is the anti-degrowth. This is the anti-degrowth conference. Totally. But I would like love to be like sitting, you know, in the dark in the cold with no one pulling out their phones and just like talking about how horrible everything was and there was no hope. Like I would love to experience that mindset once because I've never felt it. And I think it is like it it is one of the movements that has been ever hardest for me to identify with. Obviously, this is like my crew and my world, but the the sort of like the optimism of startups of San Francisco, of the technology industry, of AI, of what all y'all y'all will do, like that is that is like the natural space my brain abides and it's very hard for me to really empathize with the other side of that, but I'm pretty sure we're right and they're wrong.
How do we get there though, right? You this incredible vision of technology actually creating for abundance for others. I mean you've already done so much but you know point us the way like you know how how else do we get there? How do we make it faster? You know does government play a role in this?
Almost just about five years ago like pretty much this week we put GPT3 into an API and people started playing with it and it was barely usable. It was quite embarrassing. And in five years we have gone from this like thing that could barely write a sentence to a thing that is like you know PhD level intelligence in most areas. Five more years I think we'll be able to maintain the same rate of progress. And I think if we do that if we also build out the infrastructure to serve that to people then everybody in this room will figure out how to take that technology and adapt it to what everybody needs. The the analogy I like most for AI is the transistor like the historical tech technical analogy. You know, some people figured out like a new really important scientific discovery and society, the economy, whatever you want to call it, just got to work, just did its thing. The magic of that just figured out how to make incredible value for people and really over a fairly short period of decades significantly ramp up quality of life. I think this will be even faster and steeper than that. But I think it'll go in directionally the same way. You know, we need to make the great technology, figure out the remaining scientific stuff, which I don't think there's much left. We need to figure out how to build out the infrastructure that you all will need to be able to service and then you all have got to go figure out what what people in the world need with this new magic.
So, let's flash back to 2005. The very first batch of Y Combinator. How did you hear about Paul Graham? You were reading his essays.
I was reading his essays. So, I'd heard about like he kind of had this cult following on the internet, but I heard about what was then called the summer founders program and now it's just called Y Combinator from Blake Ross who I lived in the same freshman dorm with and posted about it on Facebook. And then I think Paul said, "Oh, you're a freshman. You know that there's like another batch coming." And what did you reply to him by email with?
You know, funny you bring that up. I just dug up the email like a couple of days ago because I I felt I had been misquoted over time. I'm curious. And the the his telling of the story is I said like I'm a sophomore and I'm coming. But I wrote a much nicer thing than that. It was like oh maybe there was some misunderstanding. You know, actually I'm a sophomore and I can still make it and I would like love to if that's still okay to come the next day.
So I in some ways you know the wild thing is you're sitting in front of 3,000 people who kind of was you know they they are sitting where you were back in 2005. What would you say to you know the Sam Altman from that time you know given what you know all the things you've seen all the things you've learned since like what are the things that you're most surprised you didn't know that I mean it just took I mean you've been through it you know like you've you've done it.
I wish someone had like taught me the importance of like conviction and resilience over a long period of time. People don't really talk about how hard that is. It's like easy for a little while, but your reserves kind of like wear down on it and how to how to keep that going for a long period of time. Also just sort of like trust that it's eventually going to work out. Like obviously my first startup didn't work that well. I think a lot of people kind of give up after one failed startup, but startups don't work out all the time. And learning how to keep going through that, keep working through that is is I think really important. Developing like trust in your own instincts and increasing that trust as you refine your decision-making and instincts over time. I think that's really important. Kind of courage to work on stuff that is out of fashion but is what you believe and what you care about. I think that's really important. I had a kid recently and the thing everyone tells you when you have a kid is that it is the best thing you will ever do but also it is the hardest thing you will ever do. Like the the good parts are much better than you can imagine. The hard parts are much harder. That is all totally true. And that is also basically what I feel like being an entrepreneur is like the good parts are really great better than you think and the hard parts are like shockingly much harder than anyone can can express in a way that makes any sense to you and you have to just keep going.
Sam Altman. Everyone, thank you. Thank you.