Sam Altman
Co-founder and CEO of OpenAI; previously president of Y Combinator.
Sam Altman did not write this page.
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Their wordsI am very uncomfortable about people trying to ascribe religious force or a surrender of human judgment to AI models, and think it is a real safety issue.
- 2 days earlier
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Their wordsYou should be able to use your AI subscription wherever you need:
- 9 days earlier
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Their wordsStandards should help prevent the concentration of power, including by making sure new companies and open-model companies can compete.
- 8 days earlier
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Their wordsTo ensure that, we need ways to ensure that alignment and safety techniques stay ahead of progress in model capabilities.
- 13 days earlier
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Their wordsManaging the transition to a world with abundant and powerful AI to optimize for safety and benefits to people should be one of the highest priorities in the world.
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Their wordsAn iterative loop where society and this technology evolve together is what will lead to the highest chance of getting this right.
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Their wordsAI is getting extremely capable; no one fully understands the consequences of this.
- 5 days earlier
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Their wordsthis is a critically important moment for cyber defense with AI; there is not much time to act.
- 9 days earlier
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Their wordsWe care very deeply about AI safety. We believe the entire field will have to coordinate on shared safety standards, but will act unilaterally in the meantime. We expect confidence in safety to increasingly set the pace of AI progress.
- 11 days earlier
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Their wordswe do not think it is a good strategy to keep powerful models to a chosen few.
- 3 days earlier
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Their wordsi would rather be an optimist and work hard than a pessimist posting about why things won't work. it's much more difficult and the most likely path is failure, but society fails if people don't try. no amount of "it will never work" essays will drive society forward.
- 7 days earlier
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Their wordsI think startups are really like the main thing that keeps the economy from becoming stagnant. Um I think companies do just like drift towards suckiness and startups will continue to be important forever.
↗Sam Altman: "Never a Better Time to Do a Startup"youtube.com 1st of 20 in this recording
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Their wordsIn 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.
↗Sam Altman: "Never a Better Time to Do a Startup"youtube.com 2nd of 20 in this recording
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Their wordsI think startups tend to win when um the sort of like technology landscape is moving very quickly. uh when costs are coming down when cycle times are short and all of those things are happening right now.
↗Sam Altman: "Never a Better Time to Do a Startup"youtube.com 3rd of 20 in this recording
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Their wordsthe great startups tend to cluster when the ecosystem shifts and incumbents lose a lot of their advantage.
↗Sam Altman: "Never a Better Time to Do a Startup"youtube.com 4th of 20 in this recording
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Their wordsbut 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.
↗Sam Altman: "Never a Better Time to Do a Startup"youtube.com 5th of 20 in this recording
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Their wordsis 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.
↗Sam Altman: "Never a Better Time to Do a Startup"youtube.com 6th of 20 in this recording
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Their wordsif 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.
↗Sam Altman: "Never a Better Time to Do a Startup"youtube.com 7th of 20 in this recording
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Their wordsI think if you can't find anybody else that shares your belief, you should pay attention to that. Um, 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.
↗Sam Altman: "Never a Better Time to Do a Startup"youtube.com 8th of 20 in this recording
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remote workstartupsSilicon Valley
Their wordsit used to be very heretical that YC told people they had to move to San Francisco. And looking back, it was clearly right.
↗Sam Altman: "Never a Better Time to Do a Startup"youtube.com 9th of 20 in this recording
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Their wordsIt 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, haha, I got you, you idiot." Um, and and it will poison your soul. It is a morally bankrupt thing to do.
↗Sam Altman: "Never a Better Time to Do a Startup"youtube.com 10th of 20 in this recording
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AI alignmentOpenAIcybersecurity
Their wordsUm 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 you know not not the biggest example of consequence.
↗Sam Altman: "Never a Better Time to Do a Startup"youtube.com 11th of 20 in this recording
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Their wordsI think it's a real reminder of the stakes of what's happening and that loss of control accidents are not entirely theoretical things.
↗Sam Altman: "Never a Better Time to Do a Startup"youtube.com 12th of 20 in this recording
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Their wordsI think concentration of power has basically been bad in every moment of human history um 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
↗Sam Altman: "Never a Better Time to Do a Startup"youtube.com 13th of 20 in this recording
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Their wordsI don't think any of us should want to be locked into one one AIS or one person's or one company's moral worldview.
↗Sam Altman: "Never a Better Time to Do a Startup"youtube.com 14th of 20 in this recording
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Their wordsit 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.
↗Sam Altman: "Never a Better Time to Do a Startup"youtube.com 15th of 20 in this recording
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Their wordsI think it will feel like the next six months is like maybe equivalent to the last two years of model progress something like that
↗Sam Altman: "Never a Better Time to Do a Startup"youtube.com 16th of 20 in this recording
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Their wordsI mean, if you do anything that matters in the world, uh 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.
↗Sam Altman: "Never a Better Time to Do a Startup"youtube.com 17th of 20 in this recording
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Their wordsI'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.
↗Sam Altman: "Never a Better Time to Do a Startup"youtube.com 18th of 20 in this recording
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Their wordsif 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.
↗Sam Altman: "Never a Better Time to Do a Startup"youtube.com 19th of 20 in this recording