Relentless
00:04:57 · Ty Morse, Sam Altman
[00:04:57] S0: This idea of constantly shifting chaos, how do you get good at it? How do you get good at operating in a chaotic environment? [00:05:04] S1: I think it's just practice. There are a handful of things that I think no matter how much you intellectually understand take a lot of reps to, like, emotionally be able to handle. And operating in a lot of chaos and trusting that you'll figure it out and it'll be okay and like this is not going be the thing that kills you and you don't quite yet know how you're going to solve it, but you're going figure it out. This seems to me to be something that you can only learn by going through it. Actually, this is a real weakness of young founders is that they have not had the career experience of getting to emotional peace with this, and so they have a very hard time with it in the early days, they eventually learn it, but at, you know, great pain and cost and unforced errors. You definitely will, if you end up in a high stress, sort of impactful job, you will definitely learn how to deal with chaos and function very well through it, at least most people will. But I don't think it's teachable. I think it's only learnable.
00:06:13 · Ty Morse
[00:06:13] S0: You had an interesting thing that you said a long time ago, which is basically like the first time that you experienced this company killing event. It feels like the world's falling apart, and then you make it through. And then by the tenth time, it's not nearly as bad. Yeah. And you're like, well, survived the first nine. This one's probably not that bad. You also had this other idea where you said, at some point, I think it was, like, a year or two ago, you came to the conclusion that shit was always gonna be going wrong. Yeah. And so you kind of had to, like, internalize the enjoyment of experiencing pain or, like, not great things happening. How'd you make that transition?
00:06:45 · Sam Altman
[00:06:45] S1: I was reflecting earlier when you were saying this about how... When I would do office hours at YC, I could always tell who the new founders were because of the way that they reacted to stuff going horribly wrong versus the founder. Because I often didn't know, like, how new a company was, but I could tell if it was, like, a founder in the batch versus a founder that had doing this for a couple of years by their, like, emotional state when they talked about a problem. I think most people think about the opposite of a bad experience as a good experience, and they would rather have the good experience, because it seems like more fun or more pleasant or whatever. But if you think about, like, the opposite of a bad experience is no experience, and at some point in the not distant future, you'll be in no experience land, then, you know, you can be grateful for the bad experience too. Naval Ravikant used to say this thing that I loved, which is if you had, like, a fast forward button on a remote for your life, your life would be over. And so, like, the boring parts, the bad parts, it's, like, much better than no experience. It's all part of the, like, interestingness of... And the kind of, like, emotional depth and range. And I don't know. I find it, like, fairly easy to be grateful for the bad days.
00:08:03 · Ty Morse
[00:08:03] S0: When you think about, like, hard problems and, like, what rallies people to get excited to go work on hard problems, how do you decide, like, internally at the company, which things to go tackle and when, and, like, when you want to, like, focus on just your core competencies versus, like, expanding the
00:08:19 · Sam Altman
[00:08:19] S1: scope? I think, like, a clear mission and then a deep understanding of the problem together do a fairly good job of pointing to what you should do. You won't get it all right. You'll still, like, at some points, overly expand or not be ambitious enough. But we are we are, like, very focused on this is going to massively empower people. It's gonna be, you know, choppy but wonderful, And it's extremely important to us that power in the world get more decentralized and more spread out. And, in fact, one of the biggest AI risks I am worried right now is AI authoritarianism and a small number of people or companies thinking they need to control the world. That'd be very, very bad. But given this mission, we feel like we need to figure out how to make AI extremely abundant, extremely cheap, extremely powerful, put it in everyone's hands, and, like, have a lot of it to get to use. And as we look at what's in the way of that, there's a whole bunch of new constraints like chips and energy and data centers and robots and all the pieces that need to come together to build this platform so that we can, like, enable this mission. Now there's a bunch of things you can build on top of that platform. Like, you can go build every vertical, every startup. We have no desire to do that like that. I think a decentralized economy is important and good, and I would like us to just be really great about producing these units of intelligence and make the world like, Man, this is just, you know, incredibly capable, an incredibly great deal, and we're going to imbue it in every product and service. And so I think that's very instructive to us about what we have to go do. Interestingly, the kind of key inputs to extraordinarily abundant, high quality, low cost intelligence. A lot of those things, like energy, like robots, are also things that you really want in a world of abundant intelligence. If ideas are plentiful and there's all this great stuff, we still live, like, in a physical world, and we still want stuff to happen. So, you know, we need to be able to make stuff happen in that world. And I have wondered if, like, the fact that energy and robots are going be so important to staying on this intelligence infrastructure ramp. And also the things that you need immediately after it are energy and robots.
00:10:44 · Sam Altman, Ty Morse
Says anything deep at all or is just like the most boring obvious thing, which is, like, to produce anything, intelligence included, you need to manipulate matter. But it is kind of interesting that we need these new areas so much for what we're doing now and then so much more immediately after. [00:11:03] S0: What do you think your biggest bottleneck is? If you just say, like, we want this to continue scaling unabated, what is the biggest bottleneck that you can see? [00:11:12] S1: Transistors and then electrons in that order. [00:11:15] S0: So let's say, you know, you take someone like Jensen where he's, like, incredibly good at aligning all his suppliers towards, you know, his vision for the future. I think you're also extremely good at this. How do you kind of think about not only keeping OpenAI on the OpenAI timelines, but also keep the rest of the world on OpenAI timelines as well?