It’s fair to say that few people in tech are positioned to have a bigger impact on the future than Sam Altman. As the CEO of OpenAI, Altman and his team have overseen monumental leaps forward in machine learning, generative AI and most recently LLMs that can reason at PhD levels. And this is just the beginning. In his latest essay Altman predicted that ASI (Artificial Super Intelligence) is just a few thousand days away. So how did we get to this point? In this episode of our rebooted series "How To Build The Future," YC President and CEO Garry Tan sits down with Altman to talk about the origins of OpenAI, what’s next for the company, and what advice he has for founders navigating this massive platform shift.
0:00 Coming up
0:43 Is this the best time to start a tech company?
6:27 How Sam got into YC
10:53 The early days of YC Research
12:49 Getting the first OpenAI team together
17:13 Why scaling was considered heretical
21:42 Conviction can be powerful
26:15 Commercializing GPT-4
28:53 What drew Sam to create Loopt
30:24 Learning from platform shifts
33:15 Tech incumbents are unaware of what is happening with AI
34:08 Sam’s recommended startup path
36:56 Reflecting on the OpenAI drama
39:58 What startups are building with current models
44:16 Advice for early founders + final thoughts
