Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
· 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.
· Sam Altman, Patrick O'Shaughnessy
[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. [00:00:00] S0: What's coming next? We talked about automated AI researchers that next year, the year after — how do you think about what is happening in the next six to 36 months? Maybe that's too far out to forecast in this crazy exponential. [00:00:00] S1: Maybe a different version of the question is, let's say in month 23 from now, we have something that everybody agrees is superintelligence. What happens in month 24? And my answer would be nothing much. The cult worship of the machine god states those people believe that more is going to happen quicker than is going to happen. Eventually a lot will happen, but eventually a lot was going to happen anyway. The rate of human progress, and how different each decade is going to be, and how much each decade is more different than the decade before — that's been happening for a long time. Obviously there's ups and downs, but directionally. And I think the right way to think about this — everybody wants to be the hero of the story. Everybody wants to feel like they were there for the moment of the machine god and they played some crazy role. But this is another step and it was hard to imagine 50 years ago. And the step 50 years from now is hard to imagine from today. And I think the right mental framework is just to zoom way out — it's a pretty smooth exponential.
· Sam Altman, Patrick O'Shaughnessy
[00:00:00] S1: Maybe a different version of the question is, let's say in month 23 from now, we have something that everybody agrees is superintelligence. What happens in month 24? And my answer would be nothing much. The cult worship of the machine god states those people believe that more is going to happen quicker than is going to happen. Eventually a lot will happen, but eventually a lot was going to happen anyway. The rate of human progress, and how different each decade is going to be, and how much each decade is more different than the decade before — that's been happening for a long time. Obviously there's ups and downs, but directionally. And I think the right way to think about this — everybody wants to be the hero of the story. Everybody wants to feel like they were there for the moment of the machine god and they played some crazy role. But this is another step and it was hard to imagine 50 years ago. And the step 50 years from now is hard to imagine from today. And I think the right mental framework is just to zoom way out — it's a pretty smooth exponential. [00:00:00] S0: Tell me a little bit about the experience of watching Codex take off, and how much that is tied to what I would describe as a competitive advantage of distribution that you built through chat. And this is a gateway into a question about moats in general in AI, what you think will drive real competitive advantage in the business over time.
· Patrick O'Shaughnessy, Sam Altman
[00:00:00] S0: Tell me a little bit about the experience of watching Codex take off, and how much that is tied to what I would describe as a competitive advantage of distribution that you built through chat. And this is a gateway into a question about moats in general in AI, what you think will drive real competitive advantage in the business over time. [00:00:00] S1: I think Codex mostly is winning because it's the best product and the best model. We do get some advantage from ChatGPT bundling, but very, very tiny. That is mostly not what it's been about. It has made me reflect a lot on this question of competitive advantage. Because brilliant intelligence can migrate from any product to any other product. And network effects still have a competitive advantage. Economic scale and the ability to make the cheapest compute fleets, whatever, still have a competitive advantage. But the product advantage — if we could get people to move over to Codex and someone builds something better, they can get people to move from Codex. So it has made me reflect on that a lot. [00:00:00] S0: There's a really interesting question about whether this is going in the direction of a commodity. Is intelligence going to be a pure fungible commodity like crude oil or something? [00:00:00] S1: Intelligence itself, I would say yes. [00:00:00] S0: So what is not going to be? [00:00:00] S1: Compute fleet — the scale of the compute fleet, the ability to make more compute. I think that's a very durable advantage. [00:00:00] S0: I see.