Relentless
00:53:08 · Ty Morse, Sam Altman
[00:53:08] S0: Why'd you make that decision? Why didn't you just give up? [00:53:11] S1: Because it felt like one of these few very strategic areas that was gonna happen very quickly. And coding is so important to RSI, to say nothing of the economic value, that we just didn't... It didn't feel like one we could give up on. [00:53:28] S0: At YC, you basically had the the most distilled version of what the mission was, is just trying to increase the amount of innovation in the world. My hunch is that if you actually, like, thought about why did you decide to go work on OpenAI instead of YC, you could almost make the argument that you could just have a bigger impact on increasing the amount of innovation in the world through working on [00:53:52] S1: It wasn't that intellectualized at the time. It was just like I kinda knew that... I mean, my whole life, I wanted to work on AI. And I kinda knew that it would be the most important thing I could ever touch. Like, for me, it was, like, my passion. I just... And I did think it'd be really important. I just wanted [00:54:10] S0: to do it. What were those first few weeks like? I know that there was this... I I I don't know if you describe it as a camp, but people just basically, like, all got together on some kind of retreat. And it wasn't even, like, meant to be a company at the time, I think. It was just
00:54:10 · Ty Morse, Sam Altman
[00:54:10] S0: to do it. What were those first few weeks like? I know that there was this... I I I don't know if you describe it as a camp, but people just basically, like, all got together on some kind of retreat. And it wasn't even, like, meant to be a company at the time, I think. It was just [00:54:22] S1: like Like, the first few weeks once we started. Yeah. No. We were we were in Greg Brockman's apartment. Yes. And there were maybe, like, 10 of us, 12 of us. And, you know, it had been all of this work to get it going. And then we showed up one day. Mhmm. The first day. I was like, you know, January 4, something like that. And it was like, so here we are. What are we gonna do? We should get a whiteboard. We should start talking about ideas. Maybe we should write papers. And I had this, like, oh, fuck. What have we done? Or, like, it was, like, a really crazy moment. [00:54:58] S0: Had you already, like, committed to the world and a whole bunch of other people, [00:55:00] S1: like, were doing this? It took a couple of years to, like, really get our groove and figure out what we're gonna do. It just... It was not... I mean, we knew that we wanted to, like, figure out how to build AI. But beyond that, man, really unclear. [00:55:15] S0: When you're in the, like, stumbling through the woods phase of this type of, you know, Manhattan project, how do you most efficiently just stumble through the trees to rapidly figure out what not to work on?
00:55:15 · Ty Morse, Sam Altman
[00:55:15] S0: When you're in the, like, stumbling through the woods phase of this type of, you know, Manhattan project, how do you most efficiently just stumble through the trees to rapidly figure out what not to work on? [00:55:29] S1: I mean, if something's not working and you run out of ideas, you can kill it. That's kind of easier. The really hard thing is when something is working super well, when do you decide to kill the other things to make it work even better? So there have been a lot of quite important moments in OpenAI's history where one thing started to really work, and we killed other good things to make the best thing work better. So when GPT three started to work, we shut down things like robotics, stuff that we're really excited about to really focus on this. And then when coding agents started to work recently, we shut down things like Sora that we were also really excited about in the browser to really work on this. And that is difficult to do. [00:56:14] S0: Let's say you invest a billion dollars into some new business like Sora. How do you decide whether or not that business is going to, like, become a, you know, OpenAI pillar? Oh, it wouldn't... No. No. It wouldn't be [00:56:25] S1: super successful. It was just, like, it was more important to put the compute and the energy into coding agents.
00:56:25 · Sam Altman, Ty Morse
[00:56:25] S1: super successful. It was just, like, it was more important to put the compute and the energy into coding agents. [00:56:31] S0: Take me into one of those meetings. Like, imagine you're in that meeting, I guess, maybe you were in that meeting, where you were saying, we've spent a year plus on this thing, huge amounts of money, huge amounts of compute, lots of people and resources, a lot of momentum into it. People use it. They love it. And then you decide we're gonna pull the plug. Like, how do you make that call? [00:56:51] S1: Yeah. It's not like a... It's not it's not a one meeting thing. It's like a... I think it's a real... It's like a somewhat gradual realization that there is a more important use of this compute, these people, you know, this product direction, and we're gonna make a very painful decision to get there. [00:57:11] S0: How do you realign people once you do have to, like, kinda kill their baby to move [00:57:16] S1: them to another baby? People kinda understand the mission and the stakes and the need to reorient to get there. So even if they're, like, unhappy in the moment, Sometimes they're very happy. Sometimes they're like, yeah. This is the right thing for the mission. But even if they're unhappy in the moment, they're like, I get why we're doing this, and the kind of continuing refocus towards superintelligence is, like, a good thing. Do you [00:57:38] S0: think that there's gonna be projects currently that [00:57:40] S1: are gonna get killed? I assume so. In order to pursue.
00:57:40 · Sam Altman, Ty Morse
[00:57:40] S1: are gonna get killed? I assume so. In order to pursue. [00:57:43] S0: Yeah. There's this amazing line from John Collison where he said, basically, everything in the world, if you just look around, it's, like, so difficult to make things happen, even, like, getting [00:57:53] S1: So difficult. [00:57:54] S0: Park bench built. It's incredibly difficult. And so when you look around, you can kind of think of the world as, like, a universe of passion projects. And I think that if you are in, like, Steve Jobs's position where you're gonna, like, create something where a billion people might interact with it every single day for, like, hours, you have to, like, think deeply about how do I, like, design something that people are going to love and ideally not be unhappy about. How do you think about design?
00:57:54 · Ty Morse, Sam Altman
[00:57:54] S0: Park bench built. It's incredibly difficult. And so when you look around, you can kind of think of the world as, like, a universe of passion projects. And I think that if you are in, like, Steve Jobs's position where you're gonna, like, create something where a billion people might interact with it every single day for, like, hours, you have to, like, think deeply about how do I, like, design something that people are going to love and ideally not be unhappy about. How do you think about design? [00:58:24] S1: I feel super lucky to get to work with Jony Ive on designing beautiful things. Mhmm. And I have learned so much from him about how he really studies a problem before trying to get to the solution and not not even letting him think too much about the solution until he really designs... Really understands the problem. And I think this is a key that I didn't appreciate before. Like, really great design is way more about understanding the problem than the flash of insight. And if you try to rush towards the thing or lock yourself too much into the thing, you will not do as good of a job. I think the iPhone is the greatest piece of technology humanity has collectively yet made. It is an incredible thing. But I don't, like, love my relationship with it anymore. I turned off my notifications, so I actually like it much better now. [00:59:16] S0: Yeah. I keep myself on do not disturb.