Sam Altman - How to Make an Abundant Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP.484]
episode
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
54 min
2 speakers
8 chapters
transcribed 1 month ago
Transcript
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Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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Why did OpenAI refocus its priorities and what changed in the last year?
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My guest today is Sam Maltman, the CEO of OpenAI. It's a conversation spanning the history, present, and future of OpenAI from the origin of ChatGPT through codecs, hardware, and their new jalapeno chip. We discuss the early decision to buy compute at scale that nobody thought 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 Maltman. So Sam, you wrote a post that I thought was very simple and really interesting and a good place to start, which rounded to the last year has been really tough and that's somewhat my fault. And the next year is going to be maybe our best 12 months.
I'd love you to reflect on both, maybe starting with why you said the first part and why you believe the second part.
On the first part, I think we just were 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 remarkable over the next 12 months. And the quality of the models that we'll have, the products that we can build around that to really let people thrive with this technology in new ways.
It should be pretty awesome. 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 2025, just a year and a half ago, the big concern was companies like OpenAI are buying up so much compute. Is the revenue going to be there? Is the demand going to 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 the big change.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:01–1:29
2
Why did OpenAI refocus its priorities and what changed in the last year?
1:29–6:14
3
Why did OpenAI make massive early compute bets and who said yes first?
6:14–11:29
4
How are data centers and the new Jalapeno chip shaping OpenAI's compute strategy?
11:29–18:42
5
What happened in the 'Kimi' distillation and Hugging Face incident and why does it matter?
18:42–23:36
6
What is OpenAI’s mission for democratizing intelligence and how could regulation help or hinder it?
23:36–32:59
7
How does Sam Altman view AI’s impact on jobs, research bottlenecks, and the frontier of returns?
32:59–50:23
8
How did ChatGPT originate and what lessons did OpenAI learn from that launch?
50:23–54:37
Speakers
2 identifiedMore from Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
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Eric Vishria - A Decade of Lessons Investing in Software & Hardware - [Invest Like the Best, EP.486]