Relentless
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?
00:11:15 · Ty Morse, Sam Altman
[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? [00:11:35] S1: You talk to them a lot. You have to... And you don't just say, like, I need you to, like, deliver this turbine or this chip on this date, because, you know, people will say, okay, whatever, and they have a bunch of other priorities. You really have to, like, show them. Here's the upcoming model. Here's what it enables. Here's our research. Like, we we... For our core suppliers, we really show them a lot about what we're doing, why we believe what we believe, what it's gonna enable. And, you know, you figure out... I mean, the most important thing is to, like, get them to believe in the mission and why they need to prioritize it, but you also try to figure out how to align their incentives with yours as much as you can. [00:12:10] S0: Charlie Munger has this awesome line where he's like, every time I've thought that I understood the power of incentives, I've, like, underestimated them. How do you, like, successfully align all the incentives of the different partners as well
00:12:20 · Sam Altman
[00:12:20] S1: as the people inside of OpenAI? Well, companies are amazing vehicles for this to start. The... You know, as a kid, I was, like, very fascinated by the industrial revolution, and I understood it as a bunch of technologies that happened to come around the same time and for some puzzling reason happened to scale at around the same time. And, you know, I would, like, talk to my friends or my parents or whatever about whether it was, like, this technology was the most important invention or this one or that one. And my read of it from my current lens is, like, someone who has now spent more time thinking about business is that the the important invention was the joint stock corporation. And before that was invented and, you know, you had these, like, kind of family businesses that ran on trust and you had to know everyone. And you didn't have the idea of a corporation. You didn't have the idea of, like, stockholders, really. And then all of a sudden, this new thing was invented. Countries, like the sovereigns of the world, granted this sort of a new kind of status, really, a thing that didn't exist before. This very powerful thing that we're going to let these new entities emerge and not give them the power of a state, but give them, like, much more than the power of a person. And fundamentally, this was about, you know, incentive alignment, liability protection, which is another kind of incentive alignment, the ability to, like, amass capital. And all of a sudden, you could do things beyond what a family business could do. And that environment let people raise money to develop technologies, very speculative nature. Pool capital, figure out ways to get different companies to sort of specialize in different ways and interact with each other. Serious financial systems and new kinds of instruments. This was really an incredible thing. And the idea of a company has done a huge amount to align incentives of very large groups of people. Now, you know, millions of people can be shareholders of a company. There's a bunch of other things we do, but I don't want to diminish what has been this incredible invention and, like, the the just ridiculous overperformance of capitalism in human society. Like, a chart that I think people should look at much more than they do is the, like, fall of extreme poverty over the last hundred years.