Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
· Sam Altman
[00:00:00] S1: When we launched GPT-3, we were trying to make money, trying to get people to use this API. The only commercial use case that was really working — the model was just so dumb. If you went back and used it, you'd be astonished. The only commercial use case that was working was copywriting. So you'd pay some marketing firm $20 and they paid us $0.20 for the AI to write you a landing page or whatever. But in addition to that one commercial use case, developers were using this thing we called the Playground, which was like a testing interface to chat with the model. And it was really hard to do because we had not tuned the model to be good to chat with. So you had to give it a few examples of what it means to chat and then do it. And people really liked it. And I'd learned this great lesson from YC — if you notice your users doing something, go down that path. So we decided that we would build a good chatbot, since that's what people were doing. And we started working on that, and we finished GPT-4 and we started using that internally. We were like, this is a big deal. We kind of thought, all right, this is going to be a real update to the world about AI. And there's a bunch of hard questions here, about is this going to create a bunch of fake news? Is this going to say really offensive things and we're going to get in trouble? So we decided we would start with a weaker version. The chat interface and GPT-4 at the same time seemed like a lot. So we would roll out the chat interface and GPT-3.5. In fact, it was originally going to be called Chat with GPT-3.5. We didn't plan for it to be a product. Didn't think it'd be a huge hit, but did think it would get people in the world to catch up with this and realize something was going on. And we mercifully renamed it ChatGPT a few hours before launch and put it out as a research preview. And the thought was we'd put it out as a research preview and then a few months later we would launch a product with GPT-4. And for whatever reason, that model was over the threshold — even though we had gotten used to it internally, people said, okay, this is awesome. There maybe wasn't that much utility yet, but it was an incredible moment for people to feel AI progress and use something that they enjoyed using. And then by the time we put out GPT-4, it was something they really got benefit out of using too.
· Patrick O'Shaughnessy, Sam Altman
[00:00:00] S0: Are you surprised that remains the intuitive interface between us and this alien intelligence, even including coding? Mostly that's me talking to the computer, telling it what to build. [00:00:00] S1: No, because I'm a massive texter. I've been a massive texter my whole life. I think part of my own insight into why that was a good interface is I'm like, I know how to do this. I know what it's like to just start chatting in a text box. [00:00:00] S0: Any thoughts on this notion of diffusion and how to make it faster? If the mission is get intelligence into the hands and more useful for everyone, the key part of that is, I don't know, a marketing campaign or something. How do you get this to diffuse faster than it seems to be doing naturally to me? [00:00:00] S1: I think the key thing is just make it better. I kind of believe that a truly great product markets itself. There was no ChatGPT marketing campaign at the beginning. I think as we get to this next stage of models and we figure out how to make products that are as great as the models themselves, there will be such incredible utility that people will spread it very quickly. We should definitely do more marketing. AI's not too popular. For as much as people use it, they have very understandable anxiety about where it can go. And so that kind of stuff, I think some great marketing would be helpful for. But in terms of the value people are getting out of their products and getting their products to grow faster — better models, more compute, better products. That will do it.
· Sam Altman, Patrick O'Shaughnessy
[00:00:00] S1: I think the key thing is just make it better. I kind of believe that a truly great product markets itself. There was no ChatGPT marketing campaign at the beginning. I think as we get to this next stage of models and we figure out how to make products that are as great as the models themselves, there will be such incredible utility that people will spread it very quickly. We should definitely do more marketing. AI's not too popular. For as much as people use it, they have very understandable anxiety about where it can go. And so that kind of stuff, I think some great marketing would be helpful for. But in terms of the value people are getting out of their products and getting their products to grow faster — better models, more compute, better products. That will do it. [00:00:00] S0: There was this period where the recruiting of researchers, the retention of them, the incentivizing of them was the defining story in the competitive landscape or whatever. I think there's lots of stories about you successfully recruiting great researchers, and there's been many that have come through OpenAI and had huge impacts. Some of which are known, some of which are lesser-known names. I'm just curious about this whole genre of what you learned about how to recruit this class of person, what matters to them, and how you did it. I've never heard you talk about the actual tactical moves you pulled to recruit somebody.
· Patrick O'Shaughnessy, Sam Altman
[00:00:00] S0: There was this period where the recruiting of researchers, the retention of them, the incentivizing of them was the defining story in the competitive landscape or whatever. I think there's lots of stories about you successfully recruiting great researchers, and there's been many that have come through OpenAI and had huge impacts. Some of which are known, some of which are lesser-known names. I'm just curious about this whole genre of what you learned about how to recruit this class of person, what matters to them, and how you did it. I've never heard you talk about the actual tactical moves you pulled to recruit somebody. [00:00:00] S1: In the early days, I think it was quite simple, which was that we believed that AGI was possible and that it was worth going after, and we were willing to say that. And that was an insane heretical belief. When we first announced OpenAI, all of these giants of the field, these experts were saying, this is insane. It's hypey. It's irresponsible. You have really respected people like Yann LeCun or whatever telling journalists like, oh, these guys aren't very good and it's not going to work. But the fact that we were able to say we're going to go for this, it really appealed to a certain kind of researcher that also wanted to go on this crazy adventure with a low probability of success. So an ambitious, audacious vision is a very powerful recruiting tool. [00:00:00] S0: You've written that it's actually easier sometimes to build things that are harder because of this reason.
· Patrick O'Shaughnessy, Sam Altman
[00:00:00] S0: You've written that it's actually easier sometimes to build things that are harder because of this reason. [00:00:00] S1: I super believe in this. It's one of my most frequent pieces of advice to YC founders, and I tried to really live it at OpenAI. [00:00:00] S0: Just do something harder. [00:00:00] S1: It's to do something that matters, do something that is important — and if your company doesn't succeed, might not happen. [00:00:00] S0: You were an investor and are an investor. You've done a lot of it, and at one point that's what you did. What have you learned about investors being on the other side? [00:00:00] S1: The number of investors that actually show up and try to help you is unbelievably small. Josh Kushner — absolute MVP investor, unbelievable. He's worked around the clock for what feels like years to help us. He's the only investor that I could point to that is proactively incredibly helpful all of the time. There are more people that could do that, and there are many other investors that have also been helpful, and that have great strategic advice, and that do things when we ask them to do it. But the constant, relentless all-in support is surprisingly rare from investors. Maybe I'm biased because I always liked it when people said that about me, but I think founders really love that and it actually moves the needle. And as an investor, it's the most fun way to do it.
· Sam Altman, Patrick O'Shaughnessy
[00:00:00] S1: The number of investors that actually show up and try to help you is unbelievably small. Josh Kushner — absolute MVP investor, unbelievable. He's worked around the clock for what feels like years to help us. He's the only investor that I could point to that is proactively incredibly helpful all of the time. There are more people that could do that, and there are many other investors that have also been helpful, and that have great strategic advice, and that do things when we ask them to do it. But the constant, relentless all-in support is surprisingly rare from investors. Maybe I'm biased because I always liked it when people said that about me, but I think founders really love that and it actually moves the needle. And as an investor, it's the most fun way to do it. [00:00:00] S0: Me and my friend play this game where we text each other all the time and the prompt of the text is something I don't want you to know about me. What does that bring to mind? [00:00:00] S1: I'm tired. I've been doing this a long time. It's tiring. [00:00:00] S0: How do you get through that? [00:00:00] S1: You just keep going. [00:00:00] S0: It begs the question, is there an amount of being tired that would make you stop doing this? [00:00:00] S1: No, no, no. This is the coolest job in the world. I plan to do this for the rest of my career. But it's much harder than I have a way to explain to people. I feel very grateful to get to do this. This is not me complaining.