Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
· 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.
· Patrick O'Shaughnessy, Sam Altman
[00:00:00] S0: I see. [00:00:00] S1: Even if the product itself is not — because Codex can write any piece of software you want — the workflows, the integrations, the complex processes, the ability for teams to collaborate together. That stuff is all pretty powerful. Even brand preference and familiarity is pretty powerful. [00:00:00] S0: Obviously you've done interesting stuff in hardware that I'm sure you'll announce later this year. How does that experiment feel and align with this sort of consumer distribution that you have? [00:00:00] S1: One of the reasons I'm interested in new hardware is, we were talking earlier about how a very powerful thing with AI is that it can be always on and proactive and understand all your context. But current hardware is not good for that. We are working inside of a hardware paradigm that is 50 years old, something like that. And computers are amazing. Keyboard, mice, monitors — an amazing thing. But we have to shape AI into that. I'm excited. I would love AI to be able to reference this conversation, but not so much that I'm willing to crack my laptop open and put it here and have it looking at you and listening to us while it's going. But I would like a piece of hardware that socially was acceptable to do that and also felt like it was designed for that kind of thing. [00:00:00] S0: As you think about the open questions, what debates — in your own head, with your friends, with your colleagues here — what are the most interesting open debates or open questions that you don't feel certain about but feel important?