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Showing posts with label Sam Altman. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Sam Altman. Show all posts

Wednesday, June 11, 2025

YC Is the New IBM — And That’s the Problem

The Plateau of Plenty: Why VCs Are the Seers of Our Time
Why OpenAI Has Failed Compared to Early Google
The Slow Descent of Apple: Missing the AI Wave Like Microsoft Missed Mobile
Beyond Full Self-Driving: The Smarter, Faster Path to Safer Transit


YC Is the New IBM — And That’s the Problem

Y Combinator is one of the most iconic institutions in the startup world. It has funded over 4,000 startups, including legendary names like Airbnb, Stripe, and Dropbox. It redefined what early-stage acceleration could mean. It made demo day a cultural event. It scaled.

But here’s the uncomfortable truth: Y Combinator never grew up. Yes, it scaled like a factory—like you used to make five ceramic cups and now you produce 50. But scale isn’t evolution. And YC hasn’t evolved for the era we’re in. It was designed for 2005, and it’s still running the same playbook in 2025.

Can the next OpenAI be born inside YC? The answer is clear: No. And here's why that matters.

The Myth of Scalability as Innovation

Y Combinator perfected the pipeline of churning out “fundable” startups, often with minimal innovation risk. You don’t go to YC to build a moonshot—you go to YC to get a bridge round and validation. The model optimizes for safe bets, not world-changing bets.

That’s why the biggest tech bets of the last decade didn’t come from YC:

  • OpenAI? Born out of an elite coalition of thinkers and capitalists, not a YC batch.

  • NVIDIA’s AI bet? Vision from within a hardware company with deep technical roots.

  • DeepMind? U.K.-based and far more academically anchored than YC-style hustle.

  • SpaceX? Elon didn't start it with $125k and a pitch deck.

YC didn’t—and perhaps couldn’t—incubate these.

The Platform Problem: YC Is Craigslist

YC today is like Craigslist. Once, it was everything—jobs, housing, gigs. But then a thousand verticals unbundled it: Airbnb took housing, LinkedIn took jobs, Uber took rides, and so on.

YC is waiting to be unbundled in the same way.

It is a generalist factory in a world now defined by the intersections of specialized, emerging technologies—AI + biotech, crypto + supply chain, robotics + mental health. These aren’t demo-day darlings. These are decade-long labs. These are fund-and-build platforms. They require long-term, infrastructure-level thinking.

The Old Playbook Can’t Win New Games

YC was built for Web 2.0. It flourished when minimal viable products and agile iterations could quickly lead to market traction. But the new wave of innovation doesn’t move in 3-month cycles. We’re entering a world of:

  • Pre-trained models that cost tens of millions

  • Deep tech that requires regulation-savvy founders

  • Climate tech with long feedback loops

  • Decentralized protocols with complex incentive engineering

What these ventures need is not YC’s playbook. They need patient capital, deep integration with research institutions, infrastructure support, cross-disciplinary expertise, and a new breed of founder networks.

YC Is IBM. Where’s the Next Apple?

In many ways, YC is IBM now—respected, still powerful, but stagnant. You know what that makes the opportunity? We need 100 new post-YCs. Each one laser-focused on a vertical. Each one optimized for depth, not breadth. Just like Airbnb pulled one vertical out of Craigslist and ran with it, the accelerators of the next decade will do the same with YC.

We’ll see:

  • An OpenAI-style research-to-commercialization lab for AGI

  • A biotech founder accelerator with embedded labs and FDA navigation

  • A climate moonshot studio building infrastructure, not MVPs

  • A sovereign-technology accelerator for deep geopolitical alignment

Each of these would make YC look like a hobby club for hustlers with slide decks.

Point Be Noted

Let’s not confuse ubiquity with relevance. YC’s continued dominance in the startup discourse is a legacy effect. Its true limitations are masked by volume. But volume is not vision. And in the AI era, in the climate era, in the post-scarcity, post-crypto, post-Web2 world, we need vision.

The most important companies of the next 20 years won’t come out of YC.

They will be born elsewhere—on new platforms, with new rules, under new accelerators that know how to build for complexity, capital intensity, and global impact.

YC lit the flame.

But it's time for a new fire.

Paul Graham's Favorite History Books
Paul Graham: The Shape of the Essay Field
Elon Musk's Leadership Mistakes At Tesla
Paul Graham’s Timeless Advice for Tech Startups: A Masterclass in Building the Future

Liquid Computing: The Future of Human-Tech Symbiosis
Velocity Money: Crypto, Karma, and the End of Traditional Economics
The Next Decade of Biotech: Convergence, Innovation, and Transformation
Beyond Motion: How Robots Will Redefine The Art Of Movement
ChatGPT For Business: A Workbook
Becoming an AI-First Organization
Quantum Computing: Applications And Implications
Challenges In AI Safety
AI-Era Social Network: Reimagined for Truth, Trust & Transformation

Paul Graham, Brad Feld, Me, BBC (2010)
United States to woo entrepreneurs with new visa law

100 Emergent Technologies Of The Recent Decades And Their Intersections
Skip the Landline: Why Perplexity AI Must Leap Boldly Into the Future
Prompts Are Thoughts
The Five Year Window: A Smarter Lens for Navigating the Future
Government Tech: The Next Great Leap in Nation-Building (GovTech)
Is Tesla Really a $25 Trillion Company Because of Optimus? A Deep Dive into Elon's Claim
AI-Era Social Network: The Facebook Killer That Looks Nothing Like Facebook
Why Thinking Big Is the Safest Bet in the Age of AI and Exponential Technologies
10 Trends In ClimateTech
Solve Drinking Water
Deep Ocean, Surface Of Mars: Colonization Prospects
Why Is Crypto Regulation Hard?
The Collision of Emerging Technologies: Where the Future of Tech Ignites
Unicorns, Elephants, And Plentiful Trillion Dollar Companies
The Physics: Bigger Rockets Are Harder To "Get Right"
Solugen: The Tesla of Chemicals—Why Isn’t It a Household Name Yet?
Software Ate the World. Now AI Is Eating Software.
Google vs. Google: The AI Disruption and the Innovator’s Dilemma

 

Y Combinator (YC) holds a 7% equity stake in each of its ~5,000 portfolio companies via its standard deal (ycombinator.com).

Industry estimates put the combined valuation of YC-backed startups at approximately:

Using those ranges:

  • At $600 billion total, YC’s 7% stake is worth:

    0.07×$600 billion=$42 billion0.07 \times \$600\,\text{billion} = \$42\,\text{billion}

  • At an upper estimate of $900 billion, YC’s stake would be:

    0.07×$900 billion=$63 billion0.07 \times \$900\,\text{billion} = \$63\,\text{billion}

๐Ÿ“Š Summary

Assumed Portfolio Valuation YC’s Stake (7%) Estimated Worth
$600B 7% $42 billion
$900B 7% $63 billion

So, YC’s 7% equity across its ~5,000 companies is likely worth between $42 billion and $63 billion, depending on how you calculate “total portfolio value.”


Opinion: First Lady Melania and Pope Leo are right — it’s “unum” time Unum doesn’t erase conflict or pretend we all agree. It’s not utopia. It’s the hard, daily work of choosing coexistence over chaos ..... a time when America — and the world — feels dangerously divided. ....... Unum means Jewish and Muslim Americans grieving side-by-side. It means a First Lady who grew up Catholic in Slovenia invoking a motto that speaks across American synagogues, mosques and churches alike. It means a Pope who spent years in Latin America calling for peace — not as an abstract dream, but as an urgent task. .......... In moments like these, we face two temptations. One is despair: to give up, to believe the divisions are too deep. The other is rage: to blame, punish and retreat into our tribes. ......... Pope Leo XIV said it plainly: “Be bridgebuilders, peace seekers, and companions on the journey.” That’s not just a prayer. It’s a plan. ......... Because in a world driven by algorithms that divide and outrage that sells, choosing Unum is radical. It means staying at the table when you’d rather storm out. It means believing that pluralism — people of different faiths, races, beliefs and stories — can still build a shared life. ......... belonging isn’t partisan. It’s American. It always has been.

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Tuesday, June 10, 2025

Why OpenAI Has Failed Compared to Early Google




OpenAI's decision to charge for ChatGPT (e.g., with its ChatGPT Plus plan) contrasts sharply with Google's early strategy of offering its most powerful product—search—entirely free to users while monetizing elsewhere. Here's a critique of that approach and 10 monetization strategies OpenAI could pursue to make ChatGPT universally free without sacrificing profitability.

Argument: Why OpenAI Has Failed Compared to Early Google

Early Google’s success lay in:

  • Making core functionality free to all, regardless of geography or wealth.

  • Building market dominance and network effects through universal access.

  • Monetizing adjacent activity—especially through Google Ads and search data analytics.

OpenAI, in contrast, has:

  • Gated its most powerful features (GPT-4, code interpreter, memory) behind a paywall.

  • Risked slowing down global adoption, especially in the Global South and among low-income users.

  • Created friction at a time when it could have accelerated ubiquity.

This is a strategic failure in the platform era: AI dominance depends not just on performance, but on mass adoption, ecosystem growth, and data feedback loops. A free ChatGPT tier with GPT-4 access would be a better moat than subscriptions.

10 Monetization Alternatives So OpenAI Could Offer ChatGPT for Free

1. Sponsored AI Responses (AdGPT)

Like Google Search ads, inject sponsored answers into ChatGPT results—clearly labeled.

  • Example: "Looking for running shoes?" —> Paid recommendation from Nike.

  • This preserves the core free experience while enabling intent-based monetization.

2. AI-Native Shopping & Recommendations Engine

Let brands pay to be discoverable through ChatGPT when users express buying intent.

  • OpenAI could power a new kind of “AI Shopping Assistant” like Amazon+Google fused.

  • Revenue from affiliate commissions, brand placements, and product integrations.

3. Data & Analytics API for Enterprises

Monetize anonymized trend data or allow brands to query user sentiment/interest over time.

  • Think: OpenAI as the Nielsen/Comscore of the AI era.

  • Sell insights—not user data, but patterns.

4. AI Agents Marketplace Cut

Let developers and companies build agents on GPT infrastructure and take a revenue share.

  • Just as Apple earns 30% from the App Store, OpenAI could host a “GPT Agent Store.”

5. Monetize API and Tooling for Enterprise, Keep User Access Free

Keep API and DevTool pricing for large orgs (as it does now), but make ChatGPT itself free.

  • Microsoft, Salesforce, Notion, etc., are paying. End users shouldn’t have to.

6. Hardware & Embedded Licensing (GPT in Devices)

Charge device makers (phones, cars, TVs) to embed GPT natively.

  • Example: A “GPT Inside” chip-like model—OEMs pay per unit to include OpenAI smarts.

7. Enterprise ChatGPT Pro with Private Data Enclaves

Offer premium, secure ChatGPT services to enterprises who want full control over context, memory, and models.

  • High-margin B2B SaaS; subsidizes free public use.

8. Co-branded ChatGPT Assistants for Influencers & Brands

Imagine “MrBeastGPT” or “NikeGPT.” OpenAI could charge for white-labeled assistants.

  • Revenue from licensing, brand partnerships, and co-marketing campaigns.

9. Education Platform Licensing (GPTU)

Build a global AI-first education platform with GPT tutors and sell to institutions.

  • Governments and private schools pay; students access for free.

10. AI-Powered Search to Compete with Google/Bing (Ad Revenue)

Build or partner on a web search product where ChatGPT integrates results and ads.

  • Long-term play: eat into Google's ad monopoly.

  • Monetize through cost-per-click (CPC) search ads, not user subscriptions.

Conclusion

Google’s greatness stemmed from making its core product free and monetizing around it. OpenAI should do the same. Charging for ChatGPT limits reach, slows data loops, and shrinks its moat just when it should be expanding fast. By embracing these 10 monetization models—especially advertising, AI commerce, agents, and enterprise licensing—OpenAI can deliver universal access to AI while building an even larger business than subscriptions allow.

If Google could build a trillion-dollar empire without ever charging for Search, OpenAI can build the next trillion-dollar ecosystem by freeing ChatGPT.


Trump’s Default: The Mist Of Empire (novel)
The 20% Growth Revolution: Nepal’s Path to Prosperity Through Kalkiism
Rethinking Trade: A Blueprint for a Just and Thriving Global Economy
The $500 Billion Pivot: How the India-US Alliance Can Reshape Global Trade
Trump’s Trade War
Peace For Taiwan Is Possible
Formula For Peace In Ukraine
The Last Age of War, The First Age of Peace: Lord Kalki, Prophecies, and the Path to Global Redemption
AOC 2028: : The Future of American Progressivism

Liquid Computing: The Future of Human-Tech Symbiosis
Velocity Money: Crypto, Karma, and the End of Traditional Economics
The Next Decade of Biotech: Convergence, Innovation, and Transformation
Beyond Motion: How Robots Will Redefine The Art Of Movement
ChatGPT For Business: A Workbook
Becoming an AI-First Organization
Quantum Computing: Applications And Implications
Challenges In AI Safety
AI-Era Social Network: Reimagined for Truth, Trust & Transformation

Emptying 40% of NYC Is Not Logical: America Needs Common Sense Immigration Reform
ICE: Los Angeles, New York City
Thomas Jefferson’s Forgotten Vision: A Constitution for Every Generation
Components Of A Sane Southern Border
A Formula for Peace in Ukraine: A Practical Path Forward

Unfounded Fears Of Technology: 20 Examples
The Slow Descent of Apple: Missing the AI Wave Like Microsoft Missed Mobile

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Wednesday, May 21, 2025

The AI-Era Smartphone: Creating, Not Consuming—Connecting, Not Waiting





The AI-Era Smartphone: Creating, Not Consuming—Connecting, Not Waiting

The smartphone transformed the 21st century. It put the Internet in our pockets, turned billions into content creators, and made “there’s an app for that” the default response to any need.

But that model—tap an icon, download an app, use it in a predefined way—is now outdated. In the AI era, the smartphone must evolve. It must go from toolbox to toolsmith. From consumer gadget to creative companion. From being a node on a network to being the network itself.

Let’s reimagine the AI-native smartphone.

Create Apps Like You 3D Print Objects

You don’t download apps anymore. You design them on the fly. With natural language.

Want a habit tracker for a new morning routine? Just say:

“Create a simple app that reminds me to meditate at 7 a.m., track my sleep, and adjust my schedule if I work past 10 p.m.”

Boom. Your AI generates the UI, builds the logic, stores data, and evolves the app with your habits. All within seconds. The backend is AI. The frontend is dynamic. The interface adapts to your goals.

This is the 3D printing of software. The App Store is obsolete. The only store is your imagination.

Connectivity Everywhere, Always

Your AI phone has permanent, planetary Internet access. Not through traditional towers, but via low-Earth-orbit satellite networks like Starlink.

  • On a mountaintop? Online.

  • On a boat in the Indian Ocean? Online.

  • In-flight at 36,000 feet? Online.

  • Hiking in the Amazon? Still online.

No roaming. No SIM card switching. No “searching for signal.” The AI smartphone becomes a personal global network node—autonomous, persistent, and universal.

And it’s not just access—it’s bandwidth. Enough to stream, collaborate, and compute anywhere.

The AI Operating System: You Don’t Tap, You Converse

There are no more “apps” or “tabs.” You don’t launch, swipe, or refresh.

You say:

“Book me a flight for tomorrow to Istanbul, window seat, avoid long layovers. And find me a hotel within walking distance to Bosphorus cafes.”

Your AI does it all. Including checking your calendar, budgeting from your financial AI, and considering your jet lag profile.

Or:

“Generate a visual story from the last 50 pictures I took in Thailand, set it to lo-fi music, and post it on my travel blog with a reflective caption.”

One sentence. Infinite execution.

This is intent-driven computing. Your phone understands context, not clicks.

AI-Enhanced Hardware

  • Built-in neural processors to run personalized LLMs on-device

  • AR-ready camera systems for real-time translation, object recognition, and mixed-reality experiences

  • Mic + Sensor arrays that know your environment, mood, and stress levels

  • Energy-optimizing AI that learns your usage patterns and conserves power dynamically

  • Modular accessories that attach magnetically—thermal cameras, portable microscopes, even medical diagnostics tools

A Phone That Knows You Better Than You Know Yourself

Your AI OS doesn't just respond. It anticipates. It notices that you’re distracted after 11 p.m. and switches notifications to “focus mode.” It sees your step count drop and nudges you to take a walk. It senses emotional tone in your messages and offers reflective journaling prompts.

It's not a machine. It’s a mirror, a coach, a companion.

And it’s sovereign. Your data doesn’t leak. It’s stored privately, encrypted, with total transparency and consent.

Goodbye, Screen Addiction. Hello, Ambient Intelligence.

In the AI phone era, your screen disappears more often. You speak. You listen. You experience. Much of the computing happens in the background—in your earbuds, through your voice, or projected onto your smart glasses.

You don’t open Instagram to scroll. Your AI composes a highlight reel of your friends’ updates and reads them to you on your morning walk—like a social podcast curated just for you.

You aren’t addicted to screen time anymore. You’re empowered by mind time.

Final Thought: Your Phone Is Now a Platform for Life Itself

The AI-native smartphone is not just a smarter phone. It’s a portable personal infrastructure—a combination of network, assistant, lab, studio, studio audience, and second brain.

It is custom logic + global access + ambient cognition.
It is no apps, only intent.
It is no limits, only imagination.

Welcome to the phone that doesn’t just connect you to the Internet. It connects you to your potential.

Are you ready to carry your future in your pocket?




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Saturday, May 17, 2025

17: Sam Altman

Rethinking Trade: A Blueprint for a Just and Thriving Global Economy
The $500 Billion Pivot: How the India-US Alliance Can Reshape Global Trade
Trump’s Trade War
Peace For Taiwan Is Possible
Formula For Peace In Ukraine
The Last Age of War, The First Age of Peace: Lord Kalki, Prophecies, and the Path to Global Redemption
AOC 2028: : The Future of American Progressivism

Velocity Money: Crypto, Karma, and the End of Traditional Economics
The Next Decade of Biotech: Convergence, Innovation, and Transformation
Beyond Motion: How Robots Will Redefine The Art Of Movement
ChatGPT For Business: A Workbook
Becoming an AI-First Organization
Quantum Computing: Applications And Implications
Challenges In AI Safety
AI-Era Social Network: Reimagined for Truth, Trust & Transformation

Rethinking Trade: A Blueprint for a Just and Thriving Global Economy
The $500 Billion Pivot: How the India-US Alliance Can Reshape Global Trade
Trump’s Trade War
Peace For Taiwan Is Possible
Formula For Peace In Ukraine
The Last Age of War, The First Age of Peace: Lord Kalki, Prophecies, and the Path to Global Redemption
AOC 2028: : The Future of American Progressivism

Velocity Money: Crypto, Karma, and the End of Traditional Economics
The Next Decade of Biotech: Convergence, Innovation, and Transformation
Beyond Motion: How Robots Will Redefine The Art Of Movement
ChatGPT For Business: A Workbook
Becoming an AI-First Organization
Quantum Computing: Applications And Implications
Challenges In AI Safety
AI-Era Social Network: Reimagined for Truth, Trust & Transformation

Velocity Money: Crypto, Karma, and the End of Traditional Economics
The Next Decade of Biotech: Convergence, Innovation, and Transformation
Beyond Motion: How Robots Will Redefine The Art Of Movement
ChatGPT For Business: A Workbook
Becoming an AI-First Organization
Quantum Computing: Applications And Implications
Challenges In AI Safety
AI-Era Social Network: Reimagined for Truth, Trust & Transformation

Rethinking Trade: A Blueprint for a Just and Thriving Global Economy
The $500 Billion Pivot: How the India-US Alliance Can Reshape Global Trade
Trump’s Trade War
Peace For Taiwan Is Possible
Formula For Peace In Ukraine
The Last Age of War, The First Age of Peace: Lord Kalki, Prophecies, and the Path to Global Redemption
AOC 2028: : The Future of American Progressivism

Velocity Money: Crypto, Karma, and the End of Traditional Economics
The Next Decade of Biotech: Convergence, Innovation, and Transformation
Beyond Motion: How Robots Will Redefine The Art Of Movement
ChatGPT For Business: A Workbook
Becoming an AI-First Organization
Quantum Computing: Applications And Implications
Challenges In AI Safety
AI-Era Social Network: Reimagined for Truth, Trust & Transformation

Rethinking Trade: A Blueprint for a Just and Thriving Global Economy
The $500 Billion Pivot: How the India-US Alliance Can Reshape Global Trade
Trump’s Trade War
Peace For Taiwan Is Possible
Formula For Peace In Ukraine
The Last Age of War, The First Age of Peace: Lord Kalki, Prophecies, and the Path to Global Redemption
AOC 2028: : The Future of American Progressivism

Rethinking Trade: A Blueprint for a Just and Thriving Global Economy
The $500 Billion Pivot: How the India-US Alliance Can Reshape Global Trade
Trump’s Trade War
Peace For Taiwan Is Possible
Formula For Peace In Ukraine
The Last Age of War, The First Age of Peace: Lord Kalki, Prophecies, and the Path to Global Redemption
AOC 2028: : The Future of American Progressivism

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Monday, April 14, 2025

14: Sam Altman

Trump’s Trade War
Peace For Taiwan Is Possible

Trump’s Trade War
Peace For Taiwan Is Possible

Trump’s Trade War
Peace For Taiwan Is Possible

Trump’s Trade War
Peace For Taiwan Is Possible

Trump’s Trade War
Peace For Taiwan Is Possible

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Saturday, April 12, 2025

Pre-Training GPT-4.5

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Tuesday, January 21, 2025

21: Larry Ellison, Sam Altman, Masayoshi Son

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Sunday, January 05, 2025

5: Sam Altman



We started OpenAI almost nine years ago because we believed that AGI was possible, and that it could be the most impactful technology in human history. ......... These years have been the most rewarding, fun, best, interesting, exhausting, stressful, and—particularly for the last two—unpleasant years of my life so far. ......... Getting fired in public with no warning kicked off a really crazy few hours, and a pretty crazy few days. The “fog of war” was the strangest part. None of us were able to get satisfactory answers about what had happened, or why. ........ I appreciate the way so many people worked together to build a stronger system of governance for OpenAI that enables us to pursue our mission of ensuring that AGI benefits all of humanity. ............ The last two years have been like a decade at a normal company. When any company grows and evolves so fast, interests naturally diverge. And when any company in an important industry is in the lead, lots of people attack it for all sorts of reasons, especially when they are trying to compete with it. .......... when we started we had no idea we would have to build a product company; we thought we were just going to do great research. ......... We also had no idea we would need such a crazy amount of capital. There are new things we have to go build now that we didn’t understand a few years ago, and there will be new things in the future we can barely imagine now. ............ We believe in the importance of being world leaders on safety and alignment research, and in guiding that research with feedback from real world applications. ........... We are now confident we know how to build AGI as we have traditionally understood it. We believe that, in 2025, we may see the first AI agents “join the workforce” and materially change the output of companies. We continue to believe that iteratively putting great tools in the hands of people leads to great, broadly-distributed outcomes. ............. We are beginning to turn our aim beyond that, to superintelligence in the true sense of the word. We love our current products, but we are here for the glorious future. With superintelligence, we can do anything else.

Superintelligent tools could massively accelerate scientific discovery and innovation well beyond what we are capable of doing on our own, and in turn massively increase abundance and prosperity.

....... Ron Conway and Brian Chesky went so far above and beyond the call of duty that I’m not even sure how to describe it. I’ve of course heard stories about Ron’s ability and tenaciousness for years and I’ve spent a lot of time with Brian over the past couple of years getting a huge amount of help and advice. .......... They used their vast networks for everything needed and were able to navigate many complex situations. .......... I thought I knew what it looked like to support a founder and a company, and in some small sense I did. But I have never before seen, or even heard of, anything like what these guys did, and now I get more fully why they have the legendary status they do. They are different and both fully deserve their genuinely unique reputations, but they are similar in their remarkable ability to move mountains and help, and in their unwavering commitment in times of need. ............ I look forward to paying it forward.

Sam Altman Interview On Nov. 30, 2022, traffic to OpenAI’s website peaked at a number a little north of zero. It was a startup so small and sleepy that the owners didn’t bother tracking their web traffic. It was a quiet day, the last the company would ever know. Within two months, OpenAI was being pounded by more than 100 million visitors trying, and freaking out about, ChatGPT. .......... his relentless pursuit of artificial general intelligence—the still-theoretical next phase of AI, in which machines will be capable of performing any intellectual task a human can do. ........... Conservatively, I would say there were 20 founding dinners that year [2015], and then one ends up being entered into the canon, and everyone talks about that. The most important one to me personally was Ilya 1 and I at the Counter in Mountain View [California]. Just the two of us. ........... 2012 comes along. Ilya and others do AlexNet. 2 I keep watching the progress, and I’m like, “Man, deep learning seems real. Also, it seems like it scales. That’s a big, big deal. Someone should do something.” ............. It’s impossible to overstate how nonmainstream AGI was in 2014. People were afraid to talk to me, because I was saying I wanted to start an AGI effort. It was, like, cancelable. It could ruin your career. But a lot of people said there’s one person you really gotta talk to, and that was Ilya. So I stalked Ilya at a conference, got him in the hallway, and we talked. .............. The pitch was just come build AGI. ........ I cannot overstate how heretical it was at the time to say we’re gonna build AGI. So you filter out 99% of the world, and you only get the really talented, original thinkers. .......... if you’re building, like, the 10,000th photo-sharing app? Really hard to recruit talent. ........... Convince me no one else is doing it, and appeal to a small, really talented set? You can get them all. And they all wanna work together. So we had what at the time sounded like an audacious or maybe outlandish pitch, and it pushed away all of the senior experts in the field, and we got the ragtag, young, talented people who are good to start with. .............. People used to joke in those days that the only thing I would do was walk into a meeting and say, “Scale it up!” Which is not true, but that was kind of the thrust of that time period. ........... The rest of the company was like, “Why are you making us launch this? It’s a bad decision. It’s not ready.” I don't make a lot of “we’re gonna do this thing” decisions, but this was one of them. ............... And that started off a mad scramble to get a lot of compute 7—which we did not have at the time—because we had launched this with no business model or thoughts for a business model. I remember a meeting that December where I sort of said, “I’ll consider any idea for how we’re going to pay for this, but we can’t go on.” And there were some truly horrible ideas—and no good ones. So we just said, “Fine, we’re just gonna try a subscription, and we’ll figure it out later.” That just stuck. We launched with GPT-3.5, and we knew we had GPT-4 [coming] ............... It’s very unusual to have been a VC first and have had a pretty long VC career and then run a company. .............. And I knew I was both overwhelmed with gratitude and, like, “F---, I’m gonna get strapped to a rocket ship, and my life is gonna be totally different and not that fun.” I had a lot of gallows humor about it. My husband 8 tells funny stories from that period of how I would come home, and he’d be like, “This is so great!” And I was like, “This is just really bad. It’s bad for you, too. You just don’t realize it yet, but it’s really bad.” ................. It complicated my ability to live my life. But in the company, you can be a well-known CEO or not, people are just like, “Where’s my f---ing GPUs?” .............. come with me to the research meeting right after this, and you will see nothing but disrespect. Which is great. .............. that year was such an insane blur, from November of 2022 to November of 2023, I barely remember it. It literally felt like we built out an entire company from almost scratch in 12 months, and we did it in crazy public. One of my learnings, looking back, is everybody says they’re not going to screw up the relative ranking of important versus urgent, 9 and everybody gets tricked by urgent. So I would say the first moment when I was coldly staring at reality in the face—that this was not going to work—was about 12:05 p.m. on whatever that Friday afternoon was. ................ so they fired me at noon on a Friday. A bunch of other people quit Friday night. By late Friday night I was like, “We’re just going to go start a new AGI effort.” Later Friday night, some of the executive team was like, “Um, we think we might get this undone. Chill out, just wait.” .................. Saturday morning, two of the board members called and wanted to talk about me coming back. I was initially just supermad and said no. And then I was like, “OK, fine.” I really care about [OpenAI]. But I was like, “Only if the whole board quits.” I wish I had taken a different tack than that, but at the time it felt like a just thing to ask for. ............. There was this whole thing of, like, “Sam didn’t even tell the board that he was gonna launch ChatGPT.” ......... But what is true is I definitely was not like, “We’re gonna launch this thing that is gonna be a huge deal.” ............. It’s a crazy year, right? It’s a company that’s moving a million miles an hour in a lot of different ways. ............ But then very quickly it was over, and I had a complete mess on my hands. And it got worse every day. It was like another government investigation, another old board member leaking fake news to the press. And all those people that I feel like really f---ed me and f---ed the company were gone, and now I had to clean up their mess. .............. Once everything was cleared up, it was all fine, but in the first few days no one knew anything. And so I’d be walking down the hall, and [people] would avert their eyes. It was like I had a terminal cancer diagnosis. There was sympathy, empathy, but [no one] was sure what to say. ................ we do a three-hour executive team meeting on Mondays ............. yesterday and today, six one-on-ones with engineers. I’m going to the research meeting right after this. Tomorrow is a day where there’s a couple of big partnership meetings and a lot of compute meetings. .............. There’s five meetings on building up compute. I have three product brainstorm meetings tomorrow, and I’ve got a big dinner with a major hardware partner after. .......... A few things that are weekly rhythms, and then it’s mostly whatever comes up. ............ I’m not a big inspirational email writer, but lots of one-on-one, small-group meetings and then a lot of stuff over Slack. .............. I’m a big Slack user. You can get a lot of data in the muck. I mean, there’s nothing that’s as good as being in a meeting with a small research team for depth. But for breadth, man, you can get a lot that way. ............ You’ve put research in a different building from the rest of the company, a couple of miles away. .............. Research will still have its own area. Protecting the core of research is really critical to what we do. .............. Usually you get a very good product company and a very bad research lab. We’re very fortunate that the little product company we bolted on is the fastest-growing tech company maybe ever—certainly in a long time. But that could easily subsume the magic of research, and I do not intend to let that happen. .........................

when an AI system can do what very skilled humans in important jobs can do—I’d call that AGI.

.......... Can it start as a computer program and decide it wants to become a doctor? Can it do what the best people in the field can do or the 98th percentile? How autonomous is it? I don’t have deep, precise answers there yet, but if you could hire an AI as a remote employee to be a great software engineer, I think a lot of people would say, “OK, that’s AGI-ish.” .................... when I think about superintelligence, the key thing to me is, can this system rapidly increase the rate of scientific discovery that happens on planet Earth? ................. it was clear people were trying to use ChatGPT for search a lot, and that actually wasn’t something that we had in mind when we first launched it. ....................... since we’ve launched search in ChatGPT, I almost don’t use Google anymore. ........ Many people who work at OpenAI get really heartwarming emails when people are like, “I was sick for years, no doctor told me what I had. I finally put all my symptoms and test results into ChatGPT—it said I had this rare disease. I went to a doctor, and they gave me this thing, and I’m totally cured.” ............ Long term, as you think about a system that really just has incredible capability, there’s risks that are probably hard to precisely imagine and model. But I can simultaneously think that these risks are real and also believe that the only way to appropriately address them is to ship product and learn. .................. three potential roadblocks to progress: scaling the models, chip scarcity and energy scarcity .......... I think 2025 will be an incredible year. ............. He’s the president of the United States. I support any president. .......... The question was, will he abuse his political power of being co-president, or whatever he calls himself now, to mess with a business competitor? I don’t think he’ll do that. I genuinely don’t. May turn out to be proven wrong. ........... for all of the stories—people talk about how he berates people and blows up and whatever, I hadn’t experienced that. ............ The thing I really deeply agree with the president on is, it is wild how difficult it has become to build things in the United States. Power plants, data centers, any of that kind of stuff. I understand how bureaucratic cruft builds up, but it’s not helpful to the country in general. It’s particularly not helpful when you think about what needs to happen for the US to lead AI. And the US really needs to lead AI.

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