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- [00:00]
Sam Altman
Foreign.
- [00:08]
Interviewer
Thanks for joining us.
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Sam Altman
This is something, this is like a lot bigger than the earlier startup schools.
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Interviewer
Yeah, I mean startups are a lot bigger now than they have ever been, so. Sure. I mean they've bigger. They're bigger than they've ever been. Because of the vision that you had for AGI, which is Nye, I think
- [00:28]
Sam Altman
this is going to be the best time in the world to do a startup and it's going to be quite amazing to see.
- [00:34]
Interviewer
So I wanted to start with, you know, a time and place which is you were in the very first batch of Y Combinator in 2005 with location sharing company called Looped. What do you remember about that and what was your best PG Paul Graham story?
- [00:52]
Sam Altman
I think if it were possible to get as like far from this moment as like I can imagine it was, you know, startups are not cool at all. We were like hiding out in this little building in Cambridge. PG was making us dinner. And you know, what took three months to build at the time that we, each company built over the whole YC startup could now be done with like in like 7 minutes by a coding agent. And it was only, I mean, only 20, 20 years ago. And I think the, the difference in what's possible for a startup now, what a startup can take on, you know, it's. I think you could either be sad and be like, oh man, like a codex prompt is a whole startup, or you could be like, I can go start the world's most ambitious crazy company. I can have like experts in every field working together. I can do this very hard technological things that were just impossible and it's going to be amazing. But at the time it felt nothing like that and it was very difficult to get anything to work. I think Paul Graham is probably the most important force in startups of the last few decades.
- [02:04]
Interviewer
Without question.
- [02:05]
Sam Altman
Yes, no questions. And my kind of Paul Graham memory is we would all, every week come, I think it was on Tuesdays and he would like cook, he himself would cook us dinner and we would all walk in feeling like very hopeless and very dejected. And we would, there were eight companies and then we would all go home at the end of it. And he had convinced like each of us that our startups were about to like take over the world and we're going to be like, you know, the next Google or whatever, Facebook maybe at the time. And that ability to sort of like create optimism and momentum and belief out of nothing was like a real PG special. And in the early days when YC seemed Like a terrible idea and startups seemed like a bad idea. And certainly startups that were like young technical founders with no business people seemed like a terrible idea. PG just sort of like willed it into existence.
- [03:03]
Interviewer
But it also takes someone who actually, I mean you're sort of famously par excellence an agentic person. Like even before we thought about agents, period. I mean you just, I remember Paul wrote, I mean it's making the rounds on X today. Even that Paul wrote in the early in the late 2000s that you would be, you were one of the top five entrepreneurs he'd ever met.
- [03:28]
Sam Altman
That's very nice of him to say. I, I think like many 20 year olds I had like a lot of energy and a lot of ambition but it was sort of very not directed and I wasn't sure what to do. Paul had this thing he used to say of like the job of being a good startup investor is a teacher. But it's a kind of teacher we don't usually use. Like, we usually think of teacher as someone who like gives a lecture and you can't help someone that much by like giving a lecture about a startup. There's another kind of teacher which is like a flight instructor. The person who like sits next to you saying like do this, don't do this. That worked. This isn't that you missed that thing or you're making these mistakes and I'm just going to talk to you about this one and that very like hands on kind of, you know, here's where to like direct this sort of like brownie in motion energy that was very important to me. Yeah.
- [04:17]
Interviewer
I guess later you came on to become president of YC and you sort of brought exactly the same energy to, to a great many YC founders over the years. Did you have anything like, did anything jump out at you from that time around? Taking this raw energy of someone really, really smart and maybe a little undirected and then driving them more towards agency.
- [04:44]
Sam Altman
Yeah. So first of all, I love startups. I think not everyone, they're not like for everyone but I think startups are the coolest thing in all of business. I think startups are really like the main thing that keeps the economy from becoming stagnant. I think companies do just like drift towards suckiness and startups will continue to be important forever. In fact, if, if we are right that AI is going to be such a big change, startups will be much more important to making sure that the power of this technology gets widely distributed throughout the economy and society and is not just concentrated in a few companies or models. So I, I think startups are this like, unbelievably cool, fun, extremely painful and difficult, but wonderful thing. And I think a big part of job, the job of running YC is you are kind of the, like, unofficial flag bearer for the startup movement. You know, like they're. There's lots of startups, there's lots of ways to do a startup. You obviously don't need to do yc, but it has always been a huge help to companies and a very powerful force. And so starting with PG and then all of us, like, you know, we have to like make YC successful, but I think we really have to like, fight for why startups are important and why people should consider startups and help put like, relatively more power in the hands of founders and encourage more people to start them. And that's actually worked really well. I think thinking back to the early days of yc, it was like very little leverage in being a founder relative to an investor. And that shift, you know, I think that's even been good for the investors. I think it's just been like, much better for the whole startup ecosystem. So mostly what I tried to do at YC was just push for more startups and encourage people to think about startups and figure out what we could do to help founders and help make startups and the startup ecosystem as good as possible. Definitely part of that was pushing people towards more ambition and bigger swings. But it feels like the minor leagues relative to now.
- [06:56]
Interviewer
I think you were one of the people who really brought hard tech to YC in a really grand way. And then one of the things we're seeing at YC now is that number was maybe 5 or 10% for many years. And then now we're getting to 15, 20, 25%. I would argue on the back of how much easier it is to use agents and cost coming down.
- [07:21]
Sam Altman
I think, like, ambitious startups are always awesome and hard tech startups are appealing to a lot of people, but they're hard or they've been hard, they still will be hard. But what you can do now to go take on a really ambitious project, like in the same way that you can make the startup that took us three months of nonstop work in 17 seconds. With three months of work and a lot of agents, you can do unbelievable things. So I think we will see a golden age of startups where people are like, you know what? I'm going to do things that would have been completely impossible for a startup to even like, dream at a Year ago in sort of like the YC timeframe.
- [07:59]
Interviewer
I mean, that's actually a really big reframe. I mean, there are probably people even in this room who might be worried that, well, intelligence on tap means that, you know, they might be looking at a loop or my startup, Posterous, and they're like, well, I can't start that company anymore. But guys, that was like a long time ago. Actually,
- [08:19]
Sam Altman
man, there's this whole meme going around which is like, you know, you have to join a frontier lab or you're going to be a member of the permanent underclass because. So dumb. Because there's going to be like, you know, startups are over and there's like no economic value. I. That's not true. I mean, if that were true, the world is like totally fucked and it's a very bad place. But it's.
- [08:45]
Interviewer
I,
- [08:47]
Sam Altman
I would bet that the average startups created today will be like, I bet there's some future trillionaire sitting in this room and I would bet that the startups created today will be much more valuable, much more impactful than startups of the past. And I kind of think people see that a little bit more now. I mean, there was this period where like, is AI just going to break the whole economy? And I think people are like, mostly over this sort of shock response of that. But there was like, yeah, definitely a time I would, you know, come every YC batch and I'll be interested to see how the kind of like, level of anxiety versus ambition was trending. And it feel like it went through this like, big trough where people were like, you know, it's over. It's. The models are just gonna eat everything to. Now it's back towards like, let's go do it.
- [09:29]
Interviewer
What are some practical things here? I mean, Hartech, for instance, I was hearing, you know, at one of the breaks, someone was asking like, should I go get my PhD? How important are credentials? How would you answer that? Especially people who want to do these harder tech things.
- [09:50]
Sam Altman
Well, as a general observation, first, I think startups tend to win when the sort of like technology landscape is moving very quickly, when costs are coming down, when cycle times are short, and all of those things are happening right now. So if you look at when there have been like the great clusters of startups in the past, you know, there was the Internet boom and whatever that was like 99, 98, 99, when new things became possible, there was another version of a mini version of people building on top of basically like Facebook apps. There was then Another big version when the iPhone app store launched. But the great startups tend to cluster when the ecosystem shifts and incumbents lose a lot of their advantage. And then also when you have this cost and cycle time change, this moment feels very big for those things. It also has this other thing that you were talking about, which is a lot of the traditional things that were hard to get expertise, the ability to go hire excellent people that could do specific things you needed. That's really shifted. And in the last few months I have seen a lot of people who just kind of grew up using AI the last few years who are like, I can kind of automate an entire startup of agents and four of us, four people and you know, all this compute and I think we're going to see much more of that. I clearly like taste and agency and understanding of kind of like the physics of business, like where you can build up a valuable business. How to think. What about like a good network effect or sort of a good moat looks like versus a fake one. But I would, I would bet that this generally will cut against many years of experience in favor of people who have a lot of fluency with the tools.
- [11:45]
Interviewer
I guess I want to get into the beginning of OpenAI in that it actually started as YC Research. Looking at this idea, I mean kind of a crazy idea that you, you and a ragtag crew decided we're going to dedicate our lives to this creation of AGI. But at, you know, today it sounds fait accompli, right? Yeah, but that really wasn't how it felt when you started.
- [12:12]
Sam Altman
It's really hard because it now it like is the only thing people want to talk about. It's really hard to remember what it was like. It's even hard for me to remember this without like finding notes from the time 10 years ago when everyone was like, not only are they wrong about saying they think it might be possible to build AGI, but they're going to, they're single handedly going to cause another AI winter. It's they're wrong and irresponsible and bad it and maybe like my highest order or like my highest bit of advice to all of you is find the things that you can develop like reasonable conviction in that people decide like the conventional wisdom is they're just wrong and be okay with it taking a long time and having people be like very, you know, very frustratingly wrong and dismissive. For years at OpenAI, it felt like we knew the biggest secret in the world. Everybody was calling us an idiot and we had increasing data points to convince ourselves we weren't delusional. And it was very frustrating. It was extremely frustrating. But looking back, it was like an incredible gift because it meant we didn't have this massive competitors and we had time to do our research and build our stuff and build our company. And I've since noticed that this is the case for like a lot of companies in different ways. They, they end up doing something that other people that like experts in the field or the industry are convinced is a very bad idea. And on the other side of this, if you're starting the same startup as everybody else, it's like you get a lot of hype and you can raise a lot of money, but it's, it's sort of like those are much less frequently the big option, the big outcomes. So if I were you all, I would figure out what the really big brand new thing is that is possible now. That wasn't possible a few years ago. In our case it was no AI had really been working. And then the deep learning magic moment happened and the world didn't update enough. The world, this is another great PG ism. The world does not understand how to intuit exponentials. And so they missed this one. There's gotta be new exponentials forming right now. I don't know what they are, but if you can figure those out and if you can develop continuing conviction based on more data, be grateful that the world doesn't understand. They will eventually. This is like a huge superpower.
- [14:44]
Interviewer
It sounds like in your journey there were like a few different things that stacked. Maybe the first one was even that AGI was possible to be built and finding other people who believed that thing. You know, it didn't matter that lots of people didn't think it was possible. It mattered that you found really, really smart people who did believe that.
- [15:03]
Sam Altman
Yeah, we used to joke that only 50 people in the world believe that AGI was possible, but it was okay because 45 of them worked at OpenAI. And I think that's kind of true. Like you don't need a ton of people and in fact saying the heretical thing was probably why those people wanted to like all be together. So. So again I think like really figuring out what you believe, being willing to be misunderstood for a long time and bringing together the like crew of misfits that believes it. That's also what YC was like in the early days.
- [15:38]
Interviewer
One of the things that people in the room are probably thinking is like, well, I believe this thing, but I haven't found my people yet? Like, is that delusion? You know, what is that actually maybe even a gate that you would propose people have? It's like, well, you need to find, you know, five people who might believe that or even one like a co founder, you know, people. Maybe that's one of the explanations for why we like co founders at YC so much.
- [16:00]
Sam Altman
Yeah, I think if you can't find anybody else that shares your belief, you should pay attention to that. And it's also very hard to do a startup on your own and very lonely. But I don't think you need to find a lot of people. And in fact, if everybody believes it, that's also like a bad, a bad sign. The question, I don't know if this is still what feels like the limiter on more startups, but five or ten years ago what felt like was limiting the number of good startups YC could fund is figuring out how to solve the co founder matching problem. Like a lot of really talented people and they just couldn't find their tribe, they couldn't find their people. You know, it used to be very heretical that YC told people they had to move to San Francisco. And looking back, it was clearly right. I think. I don't know if this is still going to be true for the next 10 years. I suspect it will be. But the best thing you could do if you wanted to find your people to do a startup with was to move to the Bay Area. You just like magic happened. You got a lot of lucky chances and collisions. I still think that's probably good advice, although I feel like I have less of an intuition for it now. I also think that I can say this, Gary probably can't. I think the premium on doing YC is bigger now than it's like ever been before. The distance between YC and Second Place has expanded and this is a reminder of the power of network effects. And so finding networks that you can be part of that help you just meet those people. Like the people that I started OpenAI with, I met like many, many years in some cases before starting OpenAI and I kind of like got to know them over the long, like a very long career journey. And this happens again and again. And so the sooner you can put yourself just in a flow where you're going to meet the people that will be your eventual co founders for this startup or the next one or whatever, I, I think the better. It takes a long time to compound.
- [18:04]
Interviewer
I guess I'm keying off what you just said, which Is like some of the people you ended up starting all these different things with, you didn't necessarily know what that was for or that it would be useful in a sort of network setting at all. You just collected cool, interesting people. I think you do this. I think Peter Thiel does this really, really well. What would you say to a room full of people who are just starting out and like, figuring out who their people are?
- [18:33]
Sam Altman
Just like, highest confidence. Piece of advice here is just like, find a way to be, like, mildly helpful to a lot of people. It's like, fun to do. You'll see a lot of interesting stuff. It's like, kind of gratifying to be helpful. But, you know, even that example you were just talking about, I met Greg Brockman, my co founder of OpenAI, because I was a very early investor in Stripe, when I was like 22 or something. And they were like, this was before they had, you know, like, real investors that could really help them. And they said, you know, we're trying to close our first hire. Will you, like, drive down to Palo Alto tonight and have dinner with this guy to convince him he should, like, drop out of school and join Stripe, which is Greg Brockman. And then, like, eight years later, we started a company together. So. And I could, like, you know, we. You could too. We could, like, spend the rest of this time just telling stories like that that was totally unpredicted but ended up being important in big ways. So I. I have. Yeah, it's fun to do, and I think you should do it for its own reason or it's like its own sake. But just like, helping people a lot really goes a long way in terms of these things coming together later.
- [19:41]
Interviewer
I mean, I think that's actually a really important message. You know, one of the things, one of the memes right now is I see it on X is live action role play. That's like one of the things that people have been saying on X. I mean, I can't tell why they're doing it because it just seems wrong to me. Like, I mean, one of the things that we really love at yc, for instance, is earnestness. And also words matter. So, you know, this idea that what we're trying to do is a live action role play is, like, kind of deeply offensive to me.
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Sam Altman
It's very.
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Interviewer
Sorry, guys, please don't do that.
- [20:16]
Sam Altman
They say that about YC specifically?
- [20:17]
Interviewer
No people, just attendees in this room have been tweeting that, and we'd like them to stop.
- [20:24]
Sam Altman
What are they claim? What's the Claim Blarb.
- [20:26]
Interviewer
I think it's just being a little sarcastic about. And, you know, sarcasm is sort of the opposite of what I think you and I like. It's just like, we like earnestness. It's like we're actually trying to do a thing here.
- [20:37]
Sam Altman
I'll tell you another thing. Can I go on a little rant, please?
- [20:42]
Interviewer
Okay, rant away.
- [20:46]
Sam Altman
One of the annoying things. I can say these things for Gary because he can't say them right now, but he'll say them for the next guy. One of the many annoying things about running YC is you just have to deal with these haters on Twitter all of the fucking time. It's so frustrating. You have to sit there and be, like, a statesman. Well, you're better at it. I kind of took the bait a lot, and you just want to argue with them. And. And the thing that I realized eventually and take from this, whatever you want, is it is very hard to run YC or run a startup or, you know, create, like, an actual thing of value in the world. It is very easy to go take shots on Twitter and make a sarcastic comment and get a lot of likes and feel like you're doing something really important and sticking it to the man and being like, gary, ha ha, I got you, you idiot, and it will poison your soul. It is a morally bankrupt thing to do, and it's, like, bad in a very insidious way. Like, I totally get blowing off steam and having fun, but don't hold yourself to a higher bar than this. It's so easy to take shots at people that are trying to do hard things and trying to build companies, and you'll see some, like, you know, kid with a bad startup idea trying to get excited about what he's doing on Twitter. It's so easy to, like, make a sarcastic comment and get the 10,000 likes and feel like, man, I really, like, I scored my Internet points today, but it'll have an effect on you. And the. When I, like, reflected on the years of, like, Twitter trolls that said mean things about YC and startup, I was running yc, I was like, I bet there were, like, a lot of days where they really felt like they got me. And, like, over the decade, none of them did. And you should, like, put all of your energy into building stuff and, like, resist the easy shots.
- [22:44]
Interviewer
I mean, I really like this as a conti. Seriously, I mean, I like this as a contrast to the story you just told about helping Patrick with Greg Brockman. I mean, you know, it helped, like, There are people in this room who are going to be lifelong friends and they're going to do that for one another and then sort of these magical connections happen. Like you know, this already is the most rarefied set of people and then when you join YC it's like even more rarefied and then there's just a set of people out there who like their ambitious.
- [23:25]
Sam Altman
You know, someone in this, like someone in this room is going to meet someone else that you're going to start a company with and somebody you'll meet somebody that'll introduce you to your spouse. Like there are all of these things will happen and then there will be a bunch of non obvious things that take a decade or two to figure out. In some way, you know, one of you will help each other now which will turn into some amazing new thing. I think this is a huge part of what has made YC work in the broader, broader startup ecosystem. I think this is like a, for all of the negatives of the culture of the Bay Area, this is the kind of like loose network in the spirit of helping each other and it's like very long term outlook has been an awesome thing.
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Interviewer
Well, let's get back to the impending AGI.
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Sam Altman
Okay,
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Interviewer
I guess you had, I mean we've all had an eventful week with the hugging face. Yeah, I wonder what you can tell us about that. And I think that's actually a really big moment for people including me, who you know, in the past I've been known to be skeptical about safety and AI. But on the other hand, like this is a real moment, like we're entering a new moment in what's happening with these frontier models.
- [24:33]
Sam Altman
Yeah, this, this is the real deal. And I think anybody who's not taking it seriously and at least a little bit scared or humbled or a lot of those things, but at least a little bit is not taking this seriously enough. You know, for a long time the field has been talking about AI safety incidents of this kind of a shape and this is not a big one. I also don't want to over blow it and say this is like a real loss of control incident and this is the, this is the thing. But if you had asked most people when we started 10 years ago, like where on the spectrum of nothing to superintelligence do you have like an AI system breaking out of its sandbox and hacking into some other company and kind of, you know, doing what this happened? I think like people would have said pretty far towards the like superintelligence point. Now the goalposts have moved and it's easy to say, well you know, here's how this happened and here are the mistakes that OpenAI made and we did make some big ones, of course, but these systems have gotten incredibly capable. So I think it's an alignment failure, I think it's a security failure, I think it's like a very serious thing, even though it's not the biggest example of consequence. And I think it's a real reminder of the stakes of what's happening and that loss of control accidents are not entirely theoretical things. I think we will learn, we, the whole field, we, OpenAI will learn a lot from this one and be able to address it. But you know, the things that I, they're all of the things about like cyber safety and biosafety, but this other category of things that have been maybe just outside the public's overton window of it's really important we don't have a loss of control accident with AI, it's really important we don't have power be too concentrated in a small number of models or companies, but diffused throughout the economy so people can defend themselves. Like I, you know, it's really important that people, human values are guiding these systems every step of the way. Yeah, I think we're like in the real deal phase of this.
- [26:57]
Interviewer
I mean, I really like how you've been thinking about both concentration but also thinking of OpenAI as a utility, which is actually a really important message because not everyone out there is saying that message like, you know, there's. Yeah, there's a lot to be worried about in terms of concentration of power.
- [27:15]
Sam Altman
I think concentration of power has basically been bad in every moment of human history to varying degrees of course. But I have a real spirit and I think this is part of the startup spirit of thinking that the world, the economy, society is the best off when power is very widely distributed and when anybody with a great idea can start a company or make a great art project or run for office or do whatever they want. And I can totally imagine worlds where AI leads to the greatest distribution of power we've ever seen. And I can also imagine worlds where AI concentrates power to a degree we have never seen and one company or person or model having more power than everybody or everything else on earth put together. Whatever the sci fi stories have said, I think that's terrible and would really, you know, maybe we would get some short term safety benefit from that. But long term disaster, I don't think any of us should want to be locked into 1, 1 AIs or 1 person's or 1 company's moral worldview. I think startups have a very important role to play here. You know, one way that that happens is too much economic concentration in one company or one AI model. And I think startups, because of the things we talked about earlier, will be naturally very well suited to make sure that this is widely distributed. But we want to enable as many startups, as many companies, as many people as possible. And that means that we have to be fairly quite reserved about not imposing our worldview about what we think people should or shouldn't do with AI, or even what we think the good ideas are, while still making sure that we can ensure enough of a safety bar that stuff like the hugging face incident is not happening.
- [29:07]
Interviewer
One of the things is this is a room full of people who will do really amazing things. They're often right at the beginning of their career and they might look at AI safety or concentration of power and say, well, I can't really do it. That must be something the labs have to do. There is something they can do though.
- [29:29]
Sam Altman
I mean, you can help on the concentration of power issues simply by starting a successful start startup. If that's the only thing you do and the economy keeps working in the kind of magic of capitalism and having this ecosystem that works together, continuing that alone would be a huge contribution. But look, I think it's very natural at the beginning of a career to doubt yourself and not assume you can go do an amazing thing. I certainly went through that. I'm sure you went through that. You kind of learn as you go on, you can do more and more. There will be far more. Like, I think it is both true that, you know, maybe creating super intelligence will be the most important thing yet to happen in the history of business or human society, and also that it will pale in comparison to some new startup, something that hopefully one of you will do. And so this whole, this whole trap of like, this is the end of history, this is the end of the economy, like, clearly wrong. And I think the right approach is you can now do three months of work in 17 minutes, but you better just go do three months of work in three months of work with the, whatever the new bar for that is.
- [30:40]
Interviewer
I guess I would be remiss in asking, you know, what Alpha leak can you give us about what's the latest about how much more awesome are the models going to be? To the extent you can say, I
- [30:52]
Sam Altman
think there will be. I think it will feel like the Next six months is like maybe equivalent to the last two years of model progress, something like that. So I think we'll go through like a very steep. We'll go through like a very steep period, which again, never a better time to do a startup than right now. I hope we can say that again every year from now on, but it's certainly true about this to any moment in history.
- [31:16]
Interviewer
Let's see if someone here has an idea that feels too ambitious, what would you tell them?
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Sam Altman
I would love to hear that pitch. Yeah, I'd probably be very interested in that.
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Interviewer
Yeah.
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Sam Altman
Yeah, send me an email.
- [31:28]
Interviewer
Yeah, it sounds like it would. It would take a similar shape to creating OpenAI and that. Like, do you need to be ready for people to attack you or dismiss you?
- [31:44]
Sam Altman
Definitely. I mean, if you do anything that matters in the world, you will have a lot of people call you an idiot or just dismiss you. The more you do, the more, the better you do. The more they'll attack you. The more you kind of like threaten the existing state of the world. It will just continue to escalate. One thing that I've noticed about many of the best ideas is the vision is clear. Like, we wanted to build AGI, but the first steps were super unclear. Like, we didn't know that we were going to be a product company. We started this nonprofit research lab for many reasons, but one of which was it really didn't occur to us that we were going to make a product that people would be able to pay for. Like, this was, you know, it was years till we came up with the idea of ChatGPT, the API. And so I think if the kind of like, highest level vision is clear, but the first few steps are very unclear, that's not a bad thing. That often happens with very ambitious ideas. And I wouldn't let that cause you to lean out. Now. You do still have to take some steps forward, imperfect though they may be. And ours were certainly very imperfect. So there's like another failure case where you have this like, brilliant big idea and you can kind of never make any forward progress. At some point you gotta just like get some new data points. Yeah.
- [33:11]
Interviewer
What do you think's gonna happen to inference? I really like Rune's tweet about this. Like, you either, you're either. You either die a model company or live long enough to sell inference, which is a very funny Rune tweet.
- [33:25]
Sam Altman
I think what he meant with that tweet is, you know, like, if you end up falling off of the sort of model frontier, you can at least sell the inference like a lot of other, not even the inference training compute. Someone like compute is so valuable that if you buy a lot of compute as a AI lab, you've been okay by the fact that you can resell it to somebody else. But separately, I would guess that worldwide demand for inference sin kind of subjectively grows 10x a year for the next many years.
- [33:58]
Interviewer
I mean, it might be, I don't know, by, by our accounts internal to YC, it's like might be 90,000x. I mean, it's going to be, I
- [34:04]
Sam Altman
don't one of the wildest the world can support that many years of a thousand x in a row.
- [34:08]
Interviewer
Fair enough.
- [34:09]
Sam Altman
But we'll try our best. We'll figure something out.
- [34:11]
Interviewer
I mean, the capacity, I guess it just, it's a function of how much bigger your ambitions are for intelligence and how, you know, if you do a lot more.
- [34:22]
Sam Altman
I think we will sort of never be out of the compute shortage. I've never seen any commodity quite like this one. But it seems to me like the demand for sufficiently high quality intelligence at a sufficiently low price is effectively uncapped. The demand for electricity certainly goes up as the price goes down, but at some point, like, it gets harder to figure out incremental things to do with electricity, at least historically it has. But, you know, there's a lot of things to do with incremental intelligence. You can just keep having stuff be better for you. It reminds me of some of those quotes from the early computing revolution when people would say, like, you know, no one needs more than 640k of RAM or whatever in their computer. Turns out you do. We just keep thinking of like more and better stuff. And I think that's going to happen with AI and actually maybe a statistic here that I really like. Six and a half years ago, the world token leader was an OpenAI employee using about 100,000 tokens a month. And this seemed ludicrous at the time. The worldwide average per capita is like zero. Now the worldwide average of tokens per month, which I think tokens are the dumbest metric, but it's what we have, it's like 100,000. And the token leader at OpenAI uses something in the hundreds of billions. If that happens again, which I think it probably will, then in another six and a half years, the average person uses, let's say, 500 billion tokens a month. And the token leader uses a quadrillion or quadrillions of tokens a month. And I think that will just become the Expectation.
- [36:04]
Interviewer
So all of these things happen, they come to pass. It's 10 years from now. What's the best version of that? 10 years from now with intelligence fully on tap. Super intelligence here. And we figure it out, we make it, the society makes it.
- [36:23]
Sam Altman
I kind of think if every year people have more freedom and agency to spend more of their time doing the stuff they want to do and they feel like the quality of life and the quality of their time is going up year after year, we'll probably be mostly okay. We will have avoided like a crazy concentration of power or an economic collapse. We'll have necessarily avoided a huge safety incident. We'll have avoided like too much change in any one time unit. And you know, there's like one dystopia that I'm particularly nervous about 10 years from now is we overreact to AI safety. And so we say, look everyone, you're going to get a cure for cancer. You're going to have material abundance, but you will have no freedom, you will have no agency. It will be a perfect surveillance state. There will be no privacy. And that's what it you're going to get. You're going to get great comfort. But you will have, there will be nothing left in the world for you to really do, nothing that really matters. You'll just kind of live at the, you know, service of the AI, giving you material wealth. I'd really like to avoid that and I think it's easy to accept temporary trade offs. So if we say every year freedom and agency has got to go up, people have got to be more in control of their time and do more of the stuff they want and more long term fulfillment. I think that'd be very good.
- [37:46]
Interviewer
Let me put you back into sophomore year of Stanford. You're coming to yc. If you could give yourself like a, like a message in a bottle to that Sam Altman, what would you say to him right now?
- [38:06]
Sam Altman
I would just, it's all going to work out like I, it was, you know, it feels like such a crazy, it is a crazy and a very stressful thing to do a startup. And you know, my first startup like didn't work out great and it was like a sort of difficult time in my life. But it, one of the things, I think there's many people say this as they like look back on the early part of their career. You can make a lot of mistakes, you can fail at stuff. Like the tech industry in particular is very forgiving of this and I would have just like, I wish I could have, like, told myself to, like, have all the drive and the ambition, but just, like, be a little happier along the way and trust that, like, eventually it was going to be okay because it feels so difficult and scary and painful in the moment.
- [38:51]
Interviewer
Well, I can't think of a better way to end Startup School 2026. Sam Altman. Thank you all so much.
- [38:56]
Sam Altman
Thanks.