Sam Altman

Do you still agree with that?

I think so.

It's hard to overstate.

When we were starting OpenAI, we believed this thing.

That was like right about the time of like maximum skepticism in OpenAI relative to what on the outside relative to what we believed inside.

And I think my most important contribution to the company in that phase was that I just kept reminding people like, look, the external world hates anything new, hates anything that like might go in a different direction than established belief.

And so people are saying all of these crazy

crazy negative things about us and yet we have this incredible progress and I know it's early and I know we have to suspend disbelief to believe it'll keep scaling but it's been scaling so let's push it ridiculously far and now it seems so obvious but at the time I truly believe that had we not done that it might not have happened for a long time because we were the only people that had enough self-belief

to go do what seemed ludicrous, which was to spend a billion dollars scaling up a GPT model.

So I think that was important.

That would have been a much better way to phrase it.

I don't think it's true that experience and ability doesn't generalize at all.

But many people try to generalize it too much.

I should have said something about like in your area of expertise.

But there's nuance because I also think you should be willing to like do new things.

You know, I was an investor and not an AI lab executive, you know, six or seven years ago.

In that world, I think you want to get even more towards the like really core underlying principles that you believe in and that work for you because yeah, even more valuable.

Me too.

First of all, I think humans have got to set the rules like AI can follow them and we should hold AIs to following whatever we collectively decide the rules are.

But humans have got to set those.