Sam Altman - How to Make an Abundant Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP.484]
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Patrick O'Shaughnessy is the CEO of Positive Sum. All opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of Positive Sum. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions. Clients of PositiveSum may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast. To learn more, visit PSUM dot VC.
My guest today is Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI. It's a conversation spanning the history, present, and future of OpenAI from the origin of ChatGPT through Codex hardware and their new jalapeno chip. We discussed the early decision to buy compute at scale that nobody felt was rational, Kimmy and distillation, the hugging face incident, and what it's like to raise kids who will grow up never knowing a world without abundant intelligence. Please enjoy my conversation with Sam Altman. So, Sam, you wrote a post that I thought was very simple and really interesting and a good place to start, which
On the first part, I think we just we're doing too many things. We're not focused enough and they're actually all good things to do, but the trick is we're in this unbelievable moment in history where you can only do the very few great things. So we spread ourselves too thin and then made a bunch of difficult decisions to really refocus on having the best, most abundant, most cost effective intelligence and empowering the world to build incredible things with that. Since doing that, I think our progress has been remarkable. And just given what we see in the pipeline will be much more remarkabl
Was there a moment last year that something clicked for you that caused you to change directions or restack priorities or something?
If you go back to the beginning of twenty twenty five, just a year and a half ago, the big concern was companies like OpenAI are buying up so much compute. Is the revenue gonna be there? Is the demand gonna be there? And so we were trying to think about, like, a lot of things such that if the revenue growth took longer to materialize than we thought it might, we could have consumer apps and media and all these other things that could help us monetize the GPUs that we were signing up for. Again, it sounds ridiculous now because the revenue growth in the industry has been so steep, but that was
I was reading some of your great old posts from prior to OpenAI, and one of them is this notion of, like, so much discussion of focus and the right amount of things to focus on. Is it one? Is it five? Is it three? How do you calibrate that in a business like this?
Fundamentally, our business is to sell AI that people will build incredible products and services for each other with. And the components that I think of as going into that are we have to train great models that work in all the ways people wanna use them. So great at coding, great at other kinds of knowledge work, great at doing science, like where the real economic value is. We ha
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