Sam Altman on Building OpenAI & Betting on the Impossible

Sam Altman has spent his career at the intersection of startups, investing and artificial intelligence. He says he was fascinated by AI as a child in St. Louis, studied it in college and eventually helped start OpenAI in 2015 after concluding that the most important opportunities often begin as non-consensus bets. His experience investing in startups taught him to look for power laws, back unconventional talent and recognize the decisions that can change a company’s trajectory. At OpenAI, Altman says most of his effort goes toward research and compute. Scaling compute requires coordinating chips, fabrication plants, data centers, power systems, finance, policy, supply chains and logistics—what he describes as potentially the most expensive infrastructure project in history. He argues OpenAI should function primarily as a platform: one direct interface to powerful AI and one application programming interface that lets people build on top of it. That strategy requires killing good ideas to preserve resources for the great ones. Altman expects AI capabilities to advance faster than society and the economy can absorb them. Human habits and institutional inertia will slow the transition, which he believes may make it smoother. He also expects human connection to become more valuable and AI to enable a major increase in small-business formation. His central concern is that AI should expand human agency rather than concentrate power in a small number of companies, people or models. He also explains how Y Combinator shaped OpenAI’s operating philosophy: make non-consensus bets, put technical people in charge, ship early, learn from reality and iterate. Yet OpenAI required breaking the classic startup playbook. The organization spent four and a half years without launching a product and had to invent ways to measure research progress without customer feedback. On its first day, roughly a dozen people gathered in Greg Brockman’s apartment and quickly realized they did not know what to do next. Years of what Altman calls “chaotic stumbling” eventually produced the research path that led to GPT. Show notes: https://www.davidsenra.com/episode/sam-altman Made possible by Ramp: https://ramp.com AppLovin: https://applovin.com/senra Deel: https://deel.com/senra Chapters (00:00:00) Tobi Lütke, AI-Native Companies & Why Adoption Moves Slowly (00:05:45) Sam's Own Resistance to AI & the Missing iPhone Moment (00:10:00) Models, Compute, Power Laws & Non-Consensus Talent (00:18:37) From AI-Obsessed Kid to Founder, Investor & Back Again (00:23:19) Impossible Problems, Scientific Discovery & Human Connection (00:30:16) AI's Two Biggest Risks: Loss of Control & Centralized Power (00:33:09) Iterative Deployment, AI Safety & Learning From Reality (00:40:27) Why People Fear AI & the Coming Small-Business Boom (00:46:13) Context, Memory & the Next Way We Will Work With AI (00:49:17) OpenAI's Platform Strategy & Killing Good Ideas (00:53:20) Peter Thiel, Paul Graham & the Value of Nonlinear Thinkers (01:00:42) How Y Combinator Changed Startups & Shaped OpenAI (01:04:03) Learning More From Success & the Power of Repetition (01:09:45) Building OpenAI Without Customers, a Product or a Playbook (01:15:57) Letters to His Son & Preserving the Story Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02David Senra?

  I just brought up Toby Luque and the fact that I recorded with him previously. Why did you say that you think he's one of the most interesting CEOs right now?

• 0:10Speaker 01

  One of the things that struck me the most about Toby is in the very early days of AI and then at every moment along the curve of its development, he has been the most forward-leaning CEO. He's in there like writing the software himself. He is experimenting with it. He like sends us extremely detailed feedback on the product offering, on the capabilities of the models. He was, before anybody else was saying this, he was like, "We are not an NPC company and thus we are going to adopt agents. Otherwise, you know, we're totally screwed. We're going to build it ourselves." Every time I talk to him, he is at the edge of what anyone CEO or not is doing. He builds himself. He understands it.

• 0:49Speaker 01

  He has like a great, deep feel and he is always six, eight months ahead of like any other CEO.

• 0:56David Senra?

  Do you remember when he wrote, this was probably like a year and a half ago, maybe 2024, he wrote that letter saying that like the first thing you have to do is see if AI can solve your problem? And then even back then, it was maybe, I don't know, 18 months, 24 months ago, people went crazy. They thought it was ridiculous.

• 1:10Speaker 01

  That was ridiculous. This is my point. Like he's just consistently been ahead. He has been correct. He's leaned in. He's very no bullshit. So there's like no hype. There's nothing other than like, here's what it can really do right now. Here's what I think it'll be able to do soon. Here's what I'm going to push the company here. And just like extremely deep understanding of where it's at.

• 1:28David Senra?

  I never even thought of that. How much of a benefit it has to be for somebody in your position, where you have somebody like that giving you intense and very direct and clear product feedback?

• 1:37Speaker 01

  A lot of people send product feedback. He is the only person at the intersection of like CEO of a large company and extremely accurate, detailed on the cutting-edge feedback.

• 1:48David Senra?

  Yeah, he told me, I don't know if it was on the episode, if it was in the episode or if it was after, but he said he was very adamant. He's like, "We're going to look back in 2026." And I want to ask you your opinion on this. I didn't even think to talk to you about this. "We're going to look back on 2026 as the year that every business was up for grabs." He said, "Somebody was going to build the AI-native version of Shopify." And he said, "And it's going to be me." And so at night, he is literally trying to rebuild. If you started from scratch, what would you do with the current technology?

• 2:17Speaker 01

  That was the other thing I was going to say about him is he does it himself. Like he is using these tools himself. He is writing software himself. He's trying the models himself. He is trying to like reimagine his workflows himself. Most CEOs, when you get to that level, have like teams of people that are managing teams of people that are trying to implement the thing and they're trying to like make you happy and they're trying to like, you know, smooth the rough edges. I think it's very hard to get the feel if you're not actually doing the thing. And he, he does it so hands-on all night long, as far as I can tell. I'm not sure if 2026 will be the year that every business feels up for grabs. I might disagree with him a little bit there, but, but I get the spirit of that and I do understand that it feels like that's happening.

• 3:01David Senra?

  Do you think that's even possible? Like whether it's 2026 or 2046?

• 3:07Speaker 01

  I mean, obviously not literally every business. I think there are some things that are very anti-AI. Like the better AI gets, the more some businesses that have nothing to do with AI, I think will be harder to compete with because we'll really want these like authentic, non-technological experiences or we'll care more about sports teams or whatever. So no, not, not everything. But I think there will be many software businesses that are very up for grabs.

• 3:34David Senra?

  Would you disagree on the timeline then?

• 3:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, I disagree on the timeline. I think it's going to take a little bit longer.

• 3:39David Senra?

  Okay, can you say more about that?

• 3:41Speaker 01

  I love startups. Like I think startups are the coolest thing in the economy and I've spent my career trying to like really understand startups. And I thought when we got to GPT-4, which was back in 2023, I think, that very quickly after that, there was going to be much more disruption in software business being up for grabs right away than it turned out to be. And the thing that, I think I was wrong about a few things, but one of them, in terms of the speed, one of them is the economy just has so much inertia. People keep doing the same things they're doing. They keep buying from the same, you know, company.

• 4:25Speaker 01

  They keep sort of wanting to use their tools in the same way. I think it's actually a positive in many ways and it's going to make this big transition in front of us go smoother and slower. And I'm grateful for it. But I think it means we've all been too ambitious on timelines, even with this incredible technology. I think AI is one of the most incredible technologies humanity has ever invented. Society and the economy will adapt more slowly.

• 4:47David Senra?

  Yeah, it's funny. We were talking before we started recording that there's all these parallels to history. Obviously, I read history for a living. When you were just talking, I wasn't even thinking about OpenAI and AI and Sam Altman. I was thinking of like reading this biography of Larry Ellison in like the eighties. He was just like, "Guys, this isn't a software problem. It's a people problem. We have to convince them. Like we can install software, they, they're not using it. We have to change their behavior. The technology is there. It's like, we have to now adapt humans so they actually start using the technology."

• 5:14Speaker 01

  My own example of this was after Netflix came out and started shipping DVDs, even before they started streaming. It was amazing to me that people still went to Blockbuster. It was incredible to me. Like I would just watch this because I kind of, I drove by a Blockbuster on my way to and from school. And it was amazing to me that people still did it. And, you know, like that is an example that has stuck in my head of like force of habit and the way people do things and changing behavior. It's just much harder than like the tech nerds realize.

• 5:45David Senra?

  So if we go back to this uproar of Toby writing that, you know, open letter or that letter to the people inside of his company, you're adopting this faster than anybody else because you're partially inventing them, right? So like, is there something where you're actually shocked at your own behavior? Or like, "I know there's a better way to do this. I'm even creating the product that can be better and yet I still can't get over this like habit, this force of habit."

• 6:07Speaker 01

  100%.

• 6:07David Senra?

  Okay.

• 6:08Speaker 01

  I love, only one has ever asked me this before. I have been waiting for this question. The thing to me that feels most psychologically inconsistent about myself is that I have for 20 years been using computers the same way.

• 6:26Speaker 01

  I now have a magic thing called Codex. So do you, so does everybody. That means I should completely be using my computer in a different way. I should not be clicking around, you know, pasting from one messaging app to another. I should not be scrolling mindlessly through my emails and trying to figure out which one is like least painful for me to open and respond when I don't want to be dealing with it. I should not be like keeping a to-do list and doing sort of this like these rote computer tasks in the same way that I have for so long. And yet there's like something in my mind that is encoded that like doing this kind of stuff is what it means to work and what it means to be productive. And if you asked me, I would never say I like doing it that way.

• 7:09Speaker 01

  I would, in fact, I would say the opposite and I think I would mean it. But like by revealed preference, I have a better way to do it now. I can do it faster. I can be using Codex for more of just like my day-to-day, like gotta get through this stack of emails, gotta do this stuff on my to-do list, gotta, you know, deal with all these things. And I still do it that way and it makes no sense other than I must like secretly like like it or feel good about it.

• 7:33David Senra?

  What do you think is going to, has to change for you to actually adopt your own product in a more deep way?

• 7:39Speaker 01

  I don't really know. I, I mean, it's happening gradually and this might be the right answer, which is these things have to happen gradually and totally changing someone's like ingrained habits and workflows is difficult. I think there are better products we can build with this technology that will make it more seamless to do that. But right now, it feels like we're all kind of straddling these two worlds of, you know, we still have a computer we can use the old way and we have Codex that can use our computer in this amazing new way. And we're like not sure which to use, when, for what. And I think this is mostly a product failure. The phase that we're in now reminds me of like smartphones before the iPhone. I was like an early adopter.

• 8:21Speaker 01

  I had like a Palm Trio in, you know, 2003 or four or whatever.

• 8:25David Senra?

  Did you ever have a sidekick?

• 8:26Speaker 01

  I never had a sidekick. I thought they were super cool. I wanted one. I've never had one. And a lot of the technology was there. Like it was missing multi-touch, but mostly it was missing like the product ideas that made the iPhone the iPhone. And I feel like we are now in a world where we have all of the technological pieces, but we have not had the iPhone moment of like completely changing how someone interfaces with technology.

• 8:49David Senra?

  We were talking about Toby's, like Toby's out here building these himself, right? We have a mutual friend in Josh Kushner. He says he's like, "There's a big comparison to be made between the way that Steve Jobs thought and the way he ran his company to the way that he thinks that you do." He wasn't the one, obviously, writing the code. He wasn't building the hardware, but he, he was like, "I am patient zero. I am making products that I myself want to use." And essentially like everything that we saw with Apple is just basically what he wanted. There's this great story in one of the books where they, they were supposed to have a meeting on, I think, one of the MacBook, like the new MacBook laptops. And the team prepares like this huge presentation for Steve and they're like really nervous because of his commanding presence. And he walks in, they think it's going to be like an hour meeting.

• 9:33David Senra?

  He walks in and he shows them the laptop and he's like, "On, off." Press the button, it comes on. Press it off like immediately. And then he then tries to open up the MacBook. There's like a delay. He goes, "Make this," meaning the MacBook, "like that." And then walks out of the room. And that's the whole meeting. Like that, there's a lot of examples in the history of Apple like that. How do you approach it? Like, how do you improve the product? Like, are you just doing it through your own needs? Like, how do you think about this?

• 10:00Speaker 01

  Most of my effort right now is on research and compute. I would love to be able to spend more time on product. We have great people thinking about the product here, but the most important thing that we can do is to create smart models and to be able to run them efficiently and abundantly for a lot of people. If we can get that right, I believe that everything else will follow. Philosophically, I'm very inclined to say, you know, try to find the like, the high-leverage, difficult problem that will continue the exponential. And for us, this is like models and compute. I also just think those are like problems that naturally suit me.

• 10:36David Senra?

  Why do they naturally suit you?

• 10:38Speaker 01

  To scale compute in the way that we're doing. This requires like...

• 10:43Speaker 01

  It's a complex supply chain. There's like a lot of interesting partnerships to figure out, which I like doing. There's like interesting financial challenges of how you're going to finance what is probably already, or at least rapidly becoming the most expensive infrastructure project in history. The technology questions that go into building a computer to this scale, from designing your own chip to the supply chain of fabs and people that make racks to sort of the power systems for these things. I've always been interested in energy. All come together. So there are a lot of problems that are interesting across technology, business, policy, supply chain, logistics, altogether around building computer at this kind of scale. So I used to be a startup investor. And the thing in my career

• 11:27Speaker 01

  that I have found closest to startup investing is managing a research program. There are all these ways in which they're really different, too. Like, you know, the average researcher and the average founder have, I think, on the surface, look different for obvious reasons. But there's like a lot of similarities about how you find the non-consensus bets, how you decide where to have conviction, how you understand what exponential growth looks like, how you manage outlier talent, and how you identify it even more. This is the research building that we're in. That's where I sit.

• 11:56David Senra?

  Great. Say more about why the parallels between what you learned in startup investing with doing research.

• 12:02Speaker 01

  One big one is the power law. So people talk about this all the time in investing, which is you have to kind of like reprogram your brain because we don't seem naturally well suited to think this way, where, you know, your best investment will outperform all of your other investments put together. Your second best investment will outperform everything else put together after that. And AI research, at least, is like that as well. When we started, people thought it was totally unlikely, or almost impossible, that AGI was possible.

• 12:31David Senra?

  What year is this?

• 12:33Speaker 01

  2015.

• 12:33David Senra?

  Okay.

• 12:34Speaker 01

  2015. I mean, we just got hammered in the, by like all of the intellectual giants of the field for saying that we were going after AGI. And then when we started really focusing on large language models, we got hammered again, saying this is completely ridiculous. And we understood, or I understood at least from my kind of like startup background, and I think other people understood in other ways, this point of high-risk bets are okay as long as you take the ones where if they work, it's super valuable. And research looks this way. The kind of people that make great researchers are sort of non-consensus, fresh

• 13:14Speaker 01

  approach, high-energy, sort of, non-standard is the word that keeps coming to mind, people.

• 13:20David Senra?

  You got to say more about non-standard. Can you be more specific? Are they spiky?

• 13:24Speaker 01

  You don't want to fund a founder who has

• 13:30Speaker 01

  a very slightly different take

• 13:34Speaker 01

  on the same idea as the last thousand people you talked to, has tried to convince you and maybe convince themselves that somehow they're completely different and doing something totally new. But it's mostly like trying to, you know, fit in with the herd and be on the same track as everybody else and do what they're supposed to do, which is start a startup. And, you know, they've heard Peter Thiel say enough times that, you know, there's like something that you're supposed to be doing different, that they kind of try to emulate that, but they don't really mean it. Like, it's very clear to me when you have someone who just thinks differently than most other people and has, is willing to stand by convictions that are very unpopular, may well be wrong, but if right, like, at

• 14:16Speaker 01

  least they're going to be really right, versus someone who is like a, you know, thin veneer on the same idea that everybody else has. In 2015, late 2015, when we were starting OpenAI, there were very few AGI efforts in the world. There was DeepMind, one or two others that I can think of. It was like a very non-consensus thing to do. In that same year, there were probably, I'll just pick on it just because it came to mind, but there are other categories, too. There were probably many, many thousands of founders starting photo sharing apps. You know, that was probably like not as good of a thing to do. Today, a lot of people want to start AI labs. There are some handful of people, you know, two, three, whatever, doing something completely new that actually wasn't possible until the

• 15:01Speaker 01

  AI got this good, but doesn't seem like a good idea yet. And like, that is the thing that, as a startup funder, I always wanted to fund, and the thing that mostly worked for me. There's a similar thing for researchers. There were a lot of researchers that would chase whatever the last thing was that worked. And there were a small number of researchers that had high conviction towards a new idea. And I think we were and are the best research lab for those people.

• 15:33David Senra?

  I remember talking to Demis about this a few months ago, and he thought, you know, in terms of like chasing after the way that you guys are, it's like, you know, there's the big three players, the money, the capital requires, like, you're not, there's not going to be like a fourth bigger player. But he's like, there's like this 10, I forgot what the number was, I'll just make it up, say 10% chance that there's just some monk researcher that's going to approach it in a way that, just this angle we've never even considered.

• 15:53Speaker 01

  Totally. I don't know how to put a number on it, but there is some chance.

• 15:56David Senra?

  I don't think, I'm making the number up, but it was like a small percentage.

• 15:58Speaker 01

  There is some chance of that, for sure. And I love that. Like, I think that's why stuff stays exciting.

• 16:04David Senra?

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• 16:45David Senra?

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• 17:26David Senra?

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• 18:09David Senra?

  So you want to get started quickly before all of your competitors are on AppLovin. And you can do that by going to applovin.com. That's applovin.com.

• 18:20David Senra?

  Okay, so what is confusing to me, you went from founder to investor to back to founder. But why in 2015? Like, what got you interested in artificial intelligence to begin with, that you're saying, hey, this is such a non-consensus thing, people think I'm fucking crazy, I'm going to do it anyways?

• 18:37Speaker 01

  Well, I had been interested in AI my whole life. I was like a very nerdy kid. I like, you know, I was like the kind of kid that spent Friday nights like playing on my computer and watching sci-fi, reading sci-fi. And I always thought that AI would be the most amazing, kind of craziest thing. I never thought I'd actually get to work on it, but I always, I always like loved it. I even came to college sort of to study it. I worked in the AI lab this summer between my freshman and sophomore year, and nothing was working. In fact, like very memorably, a professor told me, could try all of these things, there's all these directions, the one thing we know doesn't work is deep learning. We tried that for a long time. You know, it's the kind of most guaranteed way to have

• 19:19Speaker 01

  a bad career. And, you know, I was like an impressionable freshman in college, whatever. I like, I assumed that was true. So, you know, pursue these other things. It was clear to me at the time, this is now like kind of 2005, that AI was not working. And...

• 19:38Speaker 01

  I happened to like accidentally get into startups, but then very much fell in love with it. And so I wouldn't even call it a career detour because it was super helpful. Looking back and becoming like a startup investor was great. The sort of normal career path in Silicon Valley is you're like a, or not that long. A common path is that you're a founder and then you sort of semi-retire and you become an investor.

• 20:01David Senra?

  We don't want that. I heard you say that you're going to work on this for the rest of your career.

• 20:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:06David Senra?

  I'm hopefully we're starting, we're going to come on the show multiple times. I'm going to hold you to this. We don't need more founders that retire and invest. We have investors.

• 20:13Speaker 01

  I don't want, we have too many investors.

• 20:15David Senra?

  Thank you. I want to talk about this.

• 20:16Speaker 01

  But what I was going to say is the fact that I got to go in the other direction. I was like an investor first and then I ran a company is pretty unusual.

• 20:24David Senra?

  Very unusual.

• 20:25Speaker 01

  And I'm super grateful for it because the like, you get this unbelievable set of learnings and pattern matching, if you really study and watch companies as an investor, that has been super helpful to me running OpenAI. But it's, it's like, it's the opposite of normal direction. So it's just like a very rare thing and I strongly recommend it. Why is it helpful? If you're running a company, you have faced some number of similar decisions in your past, like some number of like crux decisions and you've seen what works and what doesn't. And if you have to like, you know, make a high stake strategy shift or like fire an executive in a really messy way, you have like whatever your own limited previous experience was over the last five or 10 years that you've been doing it.

• 21:10Speaker 01

  But as an investor, you kind of watch all the crux moments. So you don't get the kind of like operating practice that you do just day in and day out running a company, but you've seen a lot of the like big crux moments, a lot. Kind of all day long, you see those. So just the, the wealth of the data set that I had, that was awesome.

• 21:32David Senra?

  So that plays in your head when you have a decision, Rick?

• 21:35Speaker 01

  Yeah. I'm like, oh, this is what happened when this company had a similar thing, or I saw this founder make this mistake, or this founder got it really right.

• 21:41David Senra?

  We were talking about that you studied the industrial revolution. We were talking about some great biographies that we both read earlier. My friend Daniel X says this about me because like, I think the benefit of me doing this project, my other podcast called Founders for 10 Years is like, so he's like, you're like an LLM trained on history's greatest entrepreneurs, but with the temperature turned up because you're fucking crazy. Because I'm like super passionate about it and a weird way to be like obsessed with dead entrepreneurs. But it is helpful. It's like, oh, like I'll be talking to a founder and they'll talk about something they dealt with. I'm like, oh, well, like Carnegie did this and Rockefeller did this. And like, you might want to try this. It's like.

• 22:14Speaker 01

  And do you find that you have like one big insight of all of that? Or it's just like for any given scenario, you have like what all these people did and how it comes together?

• 22:21David Senra?

  I think it's dependent on the personality of the founder.

• 22:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 22:23David Senra?

  Right? And so like when I was reading, I've read your blog for years. I think like you're a great writer. You're very succinct. I like, like how the brevity is just really appealing to me. And I love numbered lists. It's weird that we both write in the same way. And I feel like I'm reading your blog and I'm like, this is the exact conclusion that I would come to based on all the reading. And like, there's this handful of principles that could be applied, but it's like, it really depends on like who the founders and what they want to do. This is what I'm trying to understand. It's like, let's go back to what we were just talking about. I still like, like you're, you're making a big jump because you know, you're one of the, from what I hear, one of the best investors of all time in Silicon Valley. You could just be rich and not really have to work because investors are kind of lazy.

• 22:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 23:00David Senra?

  I'm just kidding, by the way. Kind of not.

• 23:02Speaker 01

  No, it's pretty, it's, I, having done both, I think I can say it's like much, much, much harder to run a company than being an investor.

• 23:08David Senra?

  Exactly. And that's what people should be doing, in my opinion.

• 23:10Speaker 01

  I agree with that.

• 23:10David Senra?

  So then you're like, fuck that. I'm going to not take the easy route. I'm going to do the hardest thing ever, the thing that people think is impossible, the thing you're made fun of.

• 23:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 23:19David Senra?

  I still need to understand, okay, so you're into a kid. Like, why would it appeal to a kid? You were living in St. Louis at the time?

• 23:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was living in St. Louis.

• 23:25David Senra?

  Why would AI appeal to you back then?

• 23:27Speaker 01

  Well, I think like it appealed to every kind of computer nerd. Like, I don't think it's that unusual. For me, it just felt impossible. I think most people would say like, of course that'd be the coolest thing ever, but it's totally impossible. I think the like, the weird thing about me was like, okay, let's try. But I think everybody thought it, everybody would think it's awesome and something to, something to go for.

• 23:45David Senra?

  So wait, that was a personality trait of yours as a kid? That if people told you that you couldn't do something, like your initial response was resistance?

• 23:55Speaker 01

  Not resistance, but like, are you sure? Like, why not? Let's try, let's see what happens. Maybe I can, maybe we can. I was like a very optimistic kid. And also like the more something seemed impossible, like the more intrigued I was. The idea that we could invent a technology that would let us do everything else, that would just empower people in this way that no other single technology could, that always seemed like innately incredibly appealing to me. It's like, I want that thing. I want to be able to do everything else. Like, I think another thing about, that I kind of was like a personality trait as long as I remember is like, you know, it's like, it is interesting to like really give people a lot more power, a lot more ability. In some sense, this is the whole arc of technology and I was for sure always a technology nerd. But like AI is the strongest version of that I can imagine.

• 24:40David Senra?

  What did you think that it would enable back then? Like when you were a kid, like this seems like a cool technology. I want to do X. I can't do X unless AI is invented.

• 24:52Speaker 01

  It's always hard to remember like how much of this is the stuff that I actually thought at the time versus like.

• 24:56David Senra?

  Or what you're trying to build right now.

• 24:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, like how much my current work has like colored my memories of it. For sure. As a kid, I was like very into robots. You know, we had like a robots club in my school and the robots at the time were like laughably, I even remember at summer camp, we had this like little turtle that you could control with a computer on the floor or on the table. And I thought that was just the coolest thing. There's something about like physical stuff moving controlled by a computer that I always thought was amazing. Now I am extremely interested in what AI can do to advance scientific discovery. In my memory as an adult, I think I thought that was cool as a kid too, but it feels just implausible.

• 25:40Speaker 01

  And I assume that's an example of where like the memories have gotten more colored. But now the fact that we can have AI go discover new physics and cure diseases and what it's already doing for math, like I think this is, I think this will be one of the most important areas, even more important than automation of other tasks that AI can do just to help us understand more things. We were talking earlier about this, this book, The Beginning of Infinity. And rereading that book from today's vantage point, I'm like, man, AI is really going to help us do this, do this important thing of understanding everything or as much as we can. I was definitely interested in the sort of like Star Trek version of like huge prosperity and abundance and what AI could do to drive that.

• 26:24Speaker 01

  Maybe the memory of being interested in science is more real. I also loved science and just this idea that we could like, because we were smart, we could figure out how to understand the world and make predictions and do things that we couldn't without this deep understanding. I don't know. That seems like innately awesome.

• 26:40David Senra?

  It's interesting how consistent over time, what humans want from AI. Because like something you're describing is very similar. I just reread the biography of Claude Shannon for the second time. And I had forgotten, because I hadn't read the book in maybe five years. And I forgot that him and Alan Turing used to meet every day for coffee when they were both at Bell Labs. This is like 1940s.

• 26:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:57David Senra?

  And they would just talk about AI. And they were both obsessed with, they thought it was inevitable back then. And they thought it was going to happen like 15 years from there. So like 1955, that we're going to have computers, which didn't exist, right? They had the analog versions that are, that are going to be smarter than humans. And that anybody that thought that wasn't going to occur, they thought was absolutely ridiculous. And they're like, well, what would you want the computer to do? He's like, solve math problems, write poetry, like solve, cure diseases. Like you hear this over and over again.

• 27:24Speaker 01

  I have read a bunch of things that those guys wrote at the time. And I am so sad they are not here to see it. Because they were so right about everything. We're finally at the moment where AI is solving novel math problems. It is discovering other stuff. It is, you know, you can argue about how good or not, I would say not very good, but it is writing poetry. It's here, like to what these guys, I think they would have said, all right, you've done it. Like this is it, we've got it. And that would have been so cool.

• 27:51David Senra?

  Yeah, this is the weird thing where everybody's just like, oh, it'll never do X. Like I talked to people in the music industry, it's like, it's never going to make great music. And, and then they're like, well, do you think it's going to like make a podcast? I was like, of course it's going to. It's going to do everything that we can do, at least to, I would say better than like, even right now, like better than what we can do. It's a very bizarre thing where it's like, it will never surpass what is happening at this current point that I happen to be alive.

• 28:17Speaker 01

  There's a deep human psychological flaw there. But here is, I think, a more interesting question. Let's say it does make a great podcast. You know, two AIs are having a more interesting conversation than you and I are. Do you think people will care? Or will they want the one with the real people? Because we're all obsessed with people and the fact that it's not real people.

• 28:34David Senra?

  Yeah, for this is like more interesting. It's like, oh, these two people that I may be predisposed to like or dislike or having a conversation that's interesting to me. I think for like strict like reference, like maybe my other podcast where I'm just saying, hey, this is an interesting idea as I read in this book, that could maybe get disrupted over the cases, but especially for people that were born before this happened, maybe it's different for your son, you know?

• 28:54Speaker 01

  Maybe.

• 28:54David Senra?

  But for me, it's just like, I think humans are going to always be drawn to humans.

• 28:57Speaker 01

  I really deeply believe that. I think there's like a lot of other jobs that could face significant transition, but stuff that's about people, stuff that's about people's connection, connection to people and people liking other people, that stuff feels like it gets more valuable in the post day world, not less.

• 29:12David Senra?

  I may be actually the wrong person to talk about this stuff because I kind of deeply desire, even though my entire work is digital, it's, you know, broadcast all over the world. It's just like, I deeply desire like more, like more of an analog life. I like reading physical books. Like when I was talking to Kelly, I was like, I didn't want to get on Zoom, call me or we'll talk in person. Like I like physical shit.

• 29:31Speaker 01

  That's interesting. I'm like that too. I don't read ebooks.

• 29:33David Senra?

  Yeah.

• 29:34Speaker 01

  I don't like Zoom meetings. I like to be like with people in the real world.

• 29:38David Senra?

  I definitely think there's a subset of weirdos and there's probably a lot of them that live in the city that, you know, don't like humans and only want to communicate with computers, but it's just like, I think that's a tiny percentage of humanity.

• 29:47Speaker 01

  I think it's a tiny percentage of humanity. This is why I think like the world is on the whole, not going to be that different. Even with super intelligence, like people are still going to be very fundamentally wired to care about other people, to want to be around other people, to interact with other people. And, you know, there will be some people who just like get obsessed with the models and just think humans are.

• 30:10Speaker 01

  In the way or, you know, danger to be contended with or whatever. And for most people, it'll be the whole point.

• 30:16David Senra?

  I think it's very important when we do find people like that to them be called out and make sure they don't acquire power.

• 30:21Speaker 01

  I certainly agree with that. Maybe the two big risks that I'm most worried about with AI, which are a little bit in tension. One is like a, a loss of control. Where, you know, AI somehow just becomes too powerful in a way that we can't guarantee the control we want. And the other is power gets too centralized. Where you have, you know, one company or model or person with too much power. And in both of these, the fundamental thing is like, I think it's a very anti-human position for either of these things to happen. The right approach is to say like, we want people deeply in control of the future. We want people deeply empowered. People are the whole point of this all, like that this is, we are not going to sit here and, you know,

• 31:02Speaker 01

  gradually hand over control to an AI model because we don't trust or like people and, you know, it's like a very misanthropic thing to say, we're gonna just like put all of our trust in this model and let it have all the power on decision making over the world. But I think there are some people in the world who think that's the right outcome. There's like another version of this, which is because we don't trust people, we have to limit who gets access to this technology and how they can use it. And all of these terrible things could happen. And, and, you know, out of fear of those, we are going to concentrate power in the hands of a few companies and they're gonna, you know, we're not gonna let other people use this, but we'll give them some benefits. Like my, my caricature of this is,

• 31:47Speaker 01

  I think there are some people in the AI field who, who effectively say, we're gonna give the world a cure to all disease and we're gonna make stuff really cheap in exchange for people giving up their autonomy and impact over the future and power, uh, and also in the name of safety. And also like just absolutely rampant inequality. Like there will be people that have access to huge amounts of wealth and power and other people just get a pretty good everything. And this is like a terrible sales pitch, just a very anti-human sales pitch that somehow people feel willing to make.

• 32:24David Senra?

  Why do you think they feel willing to make that?

• 32:26Speaker 01

  I think it's like fear and power. I, I think you can, when people talk about the risks of AI, I think there are a lot of

• 32:35Speaker 01

  people who are so nervous about the magnitude of those risks and get so taken by that and feel a need to protect the world from that. That they're like, you know, we should trade off a lot of liberty for safety here because this is unlike other risks we've seen. But then I think that also ends up kind of like, um, a way to justify a lot of power-seeking behavior.

• 32:58David Senra?

  Everything when I read, like when I was saying to Claude Shannon, what Claude Shannon was saying or Alan Turing, at least in the books that I've read, it's more of like an optimistic, like we're gonna invent things that make our lives better and can do things for us.

• 33:09Speaker 01

  You are totally right that if you go back to the Claude Shannon, Alan Turing era, they talked about how wonderful AGI would be and all the things that it would do. And when we started, we really had a lot of pressure from the doomers. Now, the part of the doomers that I agree with is this is a powerful technology and we should err on the side of, side of safety. And we should act with caution at each level of technology. The part of the doomers that I don't agree with is that it's an unsolvable problem. If you go back to the beginning of OpenAI, um, I think there would have been two widely held opinions. Number one,

• 33:51Speaker 01

  not at all, and certainly not in 10 years, were we going to build something that was very AGI-like? And then conditioned on if we did, we certainly were not gonna be able to make it safe. You know, if you had an AI that was smarter in many ways than a lot of the smartest people, most of the smartest people, then, you know, the doomers would say surely at that point, the world would have been destroyed, the alignment thing would have failed. And there were just these very confidently held positions about what would have happened. A decade on, uh, we have built something that I think most people would say at the time would have said is very AGI-like. And, you know, a lot of good things have happened and the kind of crazy bad predictions of the world then have not happened. So I think that should update people's predictions about the future.

• 34:37Speaker 01

  There are still higher stakes challenges in front of us to solve. But our approach, this is another thing I learned from startups, of the way you do things is to put things out into the world, get feedback from your customers, see where they break, see where they don't break. That is the way you make a good product. That is also the way you make a safe product. And we have made way more progress on AI safety than I think most people thought we would when we started.

• 35:05David Senra?

  Why? Because so many people, there's a billion people using your products on a weekly basis?

• 35:10Speaker 01

  And each time we get a new level of model, we put it out in the world. And we see what, you know, what works, what doesn't work, where people need us to relax the guardrails because they have good things they want to use it for. Where we have alignment failures, where we have safety systems failures. ChatGPT has only been out like less than four years, billion people use it. And sensitive, important stuff. And the fact that we can deliver something that is broadly considered safe, of course, there's issues with it. Like in that short of a timeframe with such a powerful technology, I think there is no way we could have done that in our free tower. And, you know, this is how I believe you build good,

• 35:46Speaker 01

  safe, robust, useful technology and products. And I think it's a great, a great learning of Y Combinator. And it would have seemed to most of the AI safety people, you know, totally impossible to get to this stage and still have the level of safety guarantees we have. Now, I do think it gets harder from here, but I don't think you're gonna solve it by disconnecting yourself from reality.

• 36:11David Senra?

  Why does it get harder from here? Cause we're as about, the smartest people in the world are as about as smart as the smartest models in the world and that's gonna flip right now?

• 36:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, direction, I think that's right. I think that the, the models are just so incredibly capable and improving on such a steep trajectory that the unknown unknowns, maybe they don't get harder relatively, but from an absolute perspective, they, they seem harder. And I think we'll have to make a bunch of difficult decisions about, you know, when we delay development, when we sort of say, okay, you know what, let's have contact with reality now, or let's, let's wait longer to really study this more. I saw someone recently,

• 36:57Speaker 01

  and something that stuck in my mind is that the, you know, the FAA, FAA has helped make flying incredibly safe. Flying on the surface seems like this extremely dangerous thing. And you probably get on an airplane without giving it much thought. And this was certainly, you know, airplanes are not that old in the long-term history and this was certainly not the case at the beginning of airplanes. They have extremely robust accident reporting, extremely clear-eyed. You're never, they never try to like, you know, hand wave over something. They want to extract as much information as possible. And in some sense,

• 37:36Speaker 01

  I think with any new technology, an approach like that

• 37:42Speaker 01

  works very well and is often underappreciated. So when we started deploying our models, when we said, we're gonna put ChatGPT out in the world, we know the model's imperfect. We know it hallucinates. We know it can do these other things. But we also know that the world's got to experience this technology. We've got to learn how to make it safe and we got to put the power in people's hands. We cannot just use this to impose our worldview. We cannot use this to go sit in a lab and try to think through all the impacts, which won't work anyway, because society and the models are gonna co-evolve. Like we have to all do this together as this, as this joint product. And then

• 38:23Speaker 01

  we'll do very good accident reporting. We will study when something goes wrong. We will put out a very clear post-mortem. We will learn as much as we can. We will not only improve our own technology and products, we'll try to share those learnings with other people building AI. I think that's worked surprisingly well so far. And that was like good examples from the history of technology, good examples from startups.

• 38:41David Senra?

  Deal is how the best founders turn the world into their talent pool. I've been studying how history's greatest founders operate for a decade. And one thing they all have in common is they understand that recruiting and hiring the very best talent is your most important priority. A players recognize other A players, which is why top companies like Ramp, Shopify, 11 Labs, Uber and DoorDash all use Deal. Many of the top founders I know have personally invested in Deal after using their product. And what they discovered is that Deal is the best company in the world at building infrastructure for global hiring. Deal will help your business hire, pay and manage any worker anywhere in the world. So you can retain the best talent anywhere and spend the rest of your time focusing on what you do best, delivering value to your customers.

• 39:22David Senra?

  The founder of 11 Labs has a great description of the value Deal can give your company. He said, "We built 11 Labs to break down language and communication barriers, with Deal enabling us to hire and support exceptional talent anywhere." We can accelerate our innovation and bring more voices, stories and ideas to every corner of the world. Deal is trusted by over forty thousand businesses. Learn how they can help your business today by going to deal.com/cenra. That is deal.com/cenra. One thing that has to be disorienting for you, because it doesn't make any sense to me. Like, you know, essentially what I focus on is just entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship, right? So all the podcasts I make are for the benefit of entrepreneurs. I'm glad other people listen, but it's like heavily focused on just trying to serve,

• 40:07David Senra?

  trying to find useful information, whether it's in a biography of a dead entrepreneur or talking to somebody like you, that other entrepreneurs can benefit from this conversation, right? Or any of the podcasts that I make. So in that, there's not like a lot of entrepreneurs love AI. But like what I'm trying to figure out, like if you can help me reconcile, it's like, everybody uses AI, everybody hates AI. What the hell is going on there?

• 40:28Speaker 01

  Well, people are always afraid of like rapid socioeconomic change. Talked about the industrial revolution earlier. I love, I love reading about previous technological revolutions too. And like, people did not have universally warm and fuzzy feelings to the change that was happening during the, throughout the industrial revolution. I think it's probably a good feature of human society that we have some built in inertia. We have some skepticism of rapid change. I think that probably helps society in times of turmoil or in times of, you know, localized craziness or whatever. So some of it is probably good. And I think a feature of human biology, which I believe in never trying to fight too hard.

• 41:13Speaker 01

  I also think a lot of people building AI, you know, have been off saying, there's a twenty five percent chance we're going to destroy the world. And yet we're going to race ahead to do it because otherwise those bad guys will do it first. Or, you know, it's like, man, this thing is going to be really terrible. And there's going to be fifty percent of the jobs are going to go away in the next year. And we hope you all are okay, but it seems really scary. Like, we have not, as a field, done a very good job of explaining to people what the benefits are and how the downsides can be mitigated. And we certainly have not done a good job, even if people have had answers like, you know, saying, well, there's going to be universal basic income or work will be optional or whatever. There's been very little discussion from people about how and why it's important

• 41:55Speaker 01

  that people have more power and personal freedom in the world, not less. And that matters a lot to most people. The ability of people to influence their own future and collectively to design kind of where society is going to go and the autonomy that comes with that, very important. And I don't think a lot of people in the AI field, they feel it for themselves, but they don't spend much time thinking about it, reflecting on it, acknowledging how important that is to other people. And so to go back to that, like character Jason of the sales pitch, characterization of this caricaturization of the sales pitch. I don't know if that's a word from earlier.

• 42:30David Senra?

  It is.

• 42:31Speaker 01

  The like, dear peasants, we will bequeath upon you these gifts of a cure for cancer and material wealth and some things and, you know, great entertainment. And you stop complaining and we'll make all the decisions about the future and just trust us. You know, we'll be bed and we'll be dictators. Not good, not good. As a lover of entrepreneurs and sort of like a student of what has made

• 42:53Speaker 01

  this incredible economic miracle of recent centuries work,

• 43:00Speaker 01

  really empowering people to go do new stuff and to push on the things they believe in and to have the freedom to create companies and invent technology and sort of pursue ideas. And like the system around that that makes that happen, there is like nothing I believe in more strongly. And I think even if people don't see themselves as an entrepreneur, ever, if they, they may never want to start a big company, they do understand how important that is. And then when you hear people kind of implicitly or explicitly saying there's going to be less of that with AI because of small number of people are going to have the power, but they're going to make great decisions and keep everybody safe. I think that's very scary to them.

• 43:39Speaker 01

  I also think that even if maybe most people don't want to start really big companies, a lot of people want to start smaller companies. And that has been hard. That has been something that has required a fair amount of privilege and luck and resources to be able to do. And we are about to see the greatest boom in people starting smaller businesses that we have ever seen. I think AI is empowering that. Now, for some reason, the field, including us, has not talked about that enough, even though we see all these signs of it and it's, it's great. And we have not built enough products to accelerate that. But I think we're going to see a lot more of that.

• 44:17David Senra?

  It's funny, we talked about Toby Luque earlier at the end of the conversation. And I think that's in the episode. He, he mentioned something I didn't think about. He's like, oh yeah, you and me are in the same business. He's like, we're both trying to create more entrepreneurs. He's building infrastructure for entrepreneurs. I'm building educational and inspirational podcasts for them. And the crazy thing with what you just said, it's like, not only, I think, out of any new industry, it's something that as an industry, the AI industry, which it's doing the worst job I've probably ever seen. And I think part of it is just the ability, you guys have to get out there and talk about the stuff that you're seeing and educate. There's this great book called The Intel Trinity and it talks the story of Intel. And it's called Trinity because the three main players are Bob Noe, Sandy Grove and Gordon Moore. And when they, there's a great story in the book that I never forgot. They go from inventing, I think, the integrated circuits of the microprocessor.

• 45:01David Senra?

  And they realized that that technology was so important and it would scare their potential customers. So they went out, they stopped, those three people stopped doing what they're doing and went out and started educating

• 45:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:10David Senra?

  potential customers, investors, the entire country. And they said at one time, they were putting on more classes than like the local community college had in their entire course catalog. That's how much they made it a top priority is like, we're going to get out and educate about this new technology. And it's just like, well, why isn't anyone in AI doing that?

• 45:27Speaker 01

  I mean, no excuse that we should be doing more. I think we've like tried versions of this. We haven't gotten it quite right.

• 45:31David Senra?

  Well, you're doing it right now. We're like, this is one of the points of reason I wanted to talk to you about. Because like, I use AI all the time. I think it's fascinating, but you have such like this, you have a view that makes mine look like, like the view of an ant. Like you have so much stuff in your head that I want to like get out and like, hey, you have all this context, it's like, and you're inventing this incredible technology. I would love to know how other people are using it. Actually, before we even get to other people, I heard you say something that was interesting. I think ties to what you just said about kind of like, we're inventing technology, the technology is increasing rapidly, but the adoption should be slow and deliberate. And I heard you on another podcast saying, hey, I'm even considering like, how much should I let AI see every single thing that's on my computer? You want to talk about that?

• 46:13Speaker 01

  With the latest generation of models, I don't want to say that they feel smart enough because I think we should always aspire for them to get smarter, but they are pretty smart. And I feel more limited at this point by the amount of useful context that AI has on me. Like I want the AI to know as much as it can to help me. I want it to be doing things I can't or don't want to do on my own. Like I, I'm not going to read every post on our internal Slack. I'm not going to go read every story a customer has to tell about where chat GPT worked for them or failed them. I can't. And then there's like other stuff of like, I just, you know, I probably could read more research papers than I do, but like, oh, it's like, takes a lot of mental energy and, you know.

• 46:57Speaker 01

  But I would love to have an AI agent that is constantly trying to be helpful to me and that can look at and understand more context than I can or that I have time for or energy for to do on my own and can help bring that context to bear and give me good advice when I have to make a decision. So I think we focused correctly so much on model intelligence that on the product side, we have not yet thought enough about what it means to give a model more context than any person could have and help advise that person on, on their big decisions. My sense is we are just on the precipice of being able to see

• 47:47Speaker 01

  a very different way of working with AI on a, on a, on an axis where people just can't get this good. There are plenty of like very smart people, but there is no one that can read like,

• 47:59Speaker 01

  you know, tens of thousands of pages of context in some small number of seconds and really like use that accurately. And this is something that AI can do that just is going to be very new and an incredible supplement. You've read all these biographies. There are probably times where you vaguely remember something that if you could remember a specific anecdote from one of them, it would like really help an entrepreneur in one moment for that particular entrepreneur, right? When you were talking to them, but maybe you forgot it or maybe you don't remember it exactly right.

• 48:26David Senra?

  I built my own AI tool, so I use it internally. So you know what it is? It's only trained on, since two thousand and eighteen, I've kept every single note and highlight from every single book that I've ever used into this database. And I would search it for that. And then when you're, the work that you guys do came out, then I added, so I have it trained on that, then every note, every highlight, and then all the transcripts from my episodes of founders. I use this thing every single day.

• 48:48Speaker 01

  That's awesome.

• 48:48David Senra?

  To like, to make every single episode. So I'm working on Claude Shannon, right? The Claude Shannon episode came out, I don't know, two or three weeks ago, whenever it was. And I'm asking questions about all, I was like, hey, what did Bob Noe say about this? Or what did Rockefeller do about this? And I, I made the episode, I read the book, I took the note. I don't remember because it was like seven years ago. It's incredible. This is what I mean. I was like, it's fucking awesome.

• 49:06Speaker 01

  That is so cool.

• 49:07David Senra?

  Let's get into like how you think about running the company, right? So you're spending your time, you said your, your main focus is getting more compute and then research, right? Okay.

• 49:17David Senra?

  So you want the models to be the best in the world, but how do you think about like, do you have to build your own products? Now you built Codex, right? What, I don't even know the fucking product lines. Like where's all the revenue coming from?

• 49:27Speaker 01

  Actually, I think we should be more of a platform company than a product company. Like we will build products, of course.

• 49:33David Senra?

  Well, how many products you have, let's, let's back up. How many products you have now?

• 49:36Speaker 01

  We just merged chat GPT and Codex together. So we used to have like chat GPT, Codex and the API. You know, and Codex sort of unfortunately named, but it was not just coding. It could kind of do any kind of work, which confused people.

• 49:52David Senra?

  I'm confused by that.

• 49:53Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 49:53David Senra?

  Okay.

• 49:54Speaker 01

  As were many other people. What I think most people want is the sort of like single interface to their own personal or their company's AGI that can kind of help them with whatever they need. And then the ability with an API to build anything they want on top of it. And that is the platform that we should offer to the world. We're going to sell great AI at every, at every point on the cost curve, cost performance curve. We will be the best. You know, you want really high end AI to discover science, that's great. You want really like inexpensive AI to do like, you know, a massive amount of volume of work that maybe doesn't require genius level intelligence. We got you covered there too.

• 50:33Speaker 01

  And, you know, thinking about this as a sort of, people talk about different ways, a new utility and new commodity, whatever you want to call it, like, people want to use a lot of AI and they wanted it at a low cost and they want it to be fast and to work well and have their context and be smooth. We got you. And then there's like a single product, which is, I need to ask the AI something. Eventually, maybe it's, the AI should proactively offer me things, but you will have this interface, which started as a chatbot and now also has coding agents, and I think at some point will feel like a more persistent agent to this AI that is running on whatever you need it to run on. But that's it. I don't think we should go build every product category. I don't think we should like go try to compete with all our customers. I don't think we should

• 51:16Speaker 01

  try to like subsume the entire economy. I think we should offer this platform and try to have 100 million new businesses and 8 billion people use it in all kinds of new ways. So, one kind of direct interface to the product, one API for people to use however they want. Those eventually come more and more together too. And then it's all about what people do with it, build on top of it, whatever else.

• 51:38David Senra?

  What mistakes did you make to have to learn that? I feel like you've had to kill some good ideas to, and sacrifice going after the great with your full like intensity and focus.

• 51:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think killing the good ideas, like sacrificing the good ideas to go after the great ideas is kind of the hardest lesson for any entrepreneur or business to learn. It sucks to kill good ideas. And no matter how much you think you're going to do it, you, people, everyone, like kind of, maybe just by the nature of who chooses to be an entrepreneur, seems to do terrible at this. I'm terrible at this. I know I'm bad at this. But last year, for example, we killed Sora, which was, you know, good product and fun and cool, but used a lot of compute and not as important as Codex, where we put the compute. We killed our web browser called Atlas, which, again, I think was a great product. I think it was the best web browser, but not as important for us to focus on

• 52:32Speaker 01

  as somewhere else we could put that talent. In a world of limited compute, limited people, limited resources, we thought really hard and we said, you know what? The, the general intelligence for knowledge work and eventually for science, most important thing we can do. Anything that goes into making that upstream of generating that intelligence, building our own chip, building our own data centers, you know, writing good infrastructure software, certainly training models, obviously. That's all really important. But then let's just offer this AI as a service and get people to use it for intellectual pursuit, for work, for scientific discovery, to be more productive in their personal life. And

• 53:15Speaker 01

  let's have the kind of flexible, general platform and not do a lot of other things.

• 53:19David Senra?

  Anybody engaging complicated work, and you're got to be the, you know, top of, sorts of top of the list of anybody alive right now, needs somebody to help organize their thoughts, right? Extremely beneficial. You see this in every single biography, you see this in histories, like you need somebody to talk to. There's actually a funny story of how extreme this can be. Charlie Munger has this thing called orangutan theory. You've ever heard of this?

• 53:39Speaker 01

  No.

• 53:39David Senra?

  Where he said, a relatively smart human could go in, sit down with an orangutan, tell him all his problems, tell him everything else in mind. And then, you know, the orangutan obviously says nothing about, nothing else. The human leaves and the human's better off. Just the idea of just being forced to put your thoughts into, you know, into some kind of structure. Now, obviously, with a very intelligent partner, Munger played this role for Buffett. Buffett's one of the most intelligent people ever lived, greatest investor of all time, still needed to organize his thoughts to somebody else. You are going through, I can't think, you're, you have almost like a singular lived experience, especially for somebody as young as you are. So, I'm curious, like, who plays this role in your life? Like, who do you go to that can even remotely empathize with what the hell you're dealing with on a day-to-day basis?

• 54:21Speaker 01

  Kind of three categories here. One, a lot of the researchers that have been here forever, we've kind of like all been through it together and we've developed this set of like shared language, intuition, standards, whatever you want to call it. And that I have not been able to replicate with anybody outside of the company when it comes to like the shape of what's happening and what might happen next and where the technology is likely to go. In terms of questions of just like, you know, business and the world, for a long time in my career, Paul Graham and Peter Thiel have been two of the people that I have learned the most from about lots of different phases of my career and are still

• 55:02Speaker 01

  the two people that I go to if I really have like a very non-obvious problem that I'm stuck on. And there, I have not found anyone else, after a lot of looking, that has the same kind of ability to just, to like think in a super nonlinear way. Like, you know, if what LLMs do are predicting what word comes next, those are two of the people that I can predict the least what word is going to come next. And that is a super valuable skill. You go with like, oh man, I feel really stuck and I've kind of thought through all these options. And someone that can tell you like, eh, I think none of those options are good. Here's this thing that now seems totally obvious and correct that you didn't

• 55:46Speaker 01

  think of, just a completely different view that you haven't heard anywhere else.

• 55:50David Senra?

  Is this like more of like a prompt for your own thinking as opposed to like explicit advice? Do X, for example?

• 55:56Speaker 01

  It's often like, here is a specific thing.

• 55:59David Senra?

  Really?

• 55:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 56:00David Senra?

  So what would be an example that you could share from like Peter? Peter's very fascinating to me.

• 56:04Speaker 01

  He is very fascinating.

• 56:05David Senra?

  And it's actually who I thought of. The reason I thought of this question just now is because you're like, we had to kill these good ideas for the great. We're cutting Atlas, we're compute constrained, we have to focus, focus, focus. It's like, that's something that is very obvious when you listen to him talk about the importance of focus. And like, if you have something that's working, making it work better and going down this line, like taking an hour away from that to like explore something else is too expensive. You should just go deeper on what's already working. Like, there's a lot of value at the extremes.

• 56:33Speaker 01

  After we launched ChatGPT, sort of this weird thing, because people didn't really know what to use it for. And it was growing super fast, but it felt like very unstable or kind of almost like low value growth. Like, people were using it to, just because they were like interested in talking to it and what they could do. And so, there were a lot of people in the company who were like, ah, this is, you know, we got to figure out something else. This is not sustainable value. And we were talking about this like a list of five or six other things that we could focus on instead. This is like maybe two months after ChatGPT launched, something like that. And he was like, it's an obvious

• 57:15Speaker 01

  mistake to do anything about this, besides the fact that it's growing, which is rare and great. And it was not growing as fast then as it did start after. He's like, the power of this is the power of the Google text box. It's like a text box you can type anything into and it does the right thing. And the fact that it doesn't match the current silicon valley wisdom of, you know, you got to have like feeds and you have to have like a network effect and you have to have, because we had none of these things and that's why everyone was worried. You know, you have to have like a, you know, way that people are going to build up more, this before we had memory, people are going to build up more context, people are going to get locked in, or people are going to have all these, like, all that stuff, like, people have just been chasing the Google business model for 20 years and this is the first thing that's come up. And, you know, clearly, the empty

• 58:00Speaker 01

  text box worked for Google, so why don't you just double down on that? It's growing, like, it's very flexible and, you know, it has all of the signs other than it doesn't fit the current silicon valley wisdom. And I was like, okay. And so we went super hard on ChatGPT and it was great.

• 58:16David Senra?

  There's like a simple genius to what he just said.

• 58:18Speaker 01

  Sometimes there's like more complexion, yes, but that was an example of very important simple genius.

• 58:23David Senra?

  What about some advice that Paul Graham, or some guidance or a direction he kind of pushed you in?

• 58:29Speaker 01

  When you just said that, the thing, this is like a meme for many YC founders, where you would go see him for office hours and he would say, you know what you should do? And he would like shake his hand, his finger like this, you know what you should do, you know what you should do? And sometimes the thing that came after that was great. Sometimes the thing that came after that was terrible. But the important thing was, there was a kind of, there is a creativity and open landscape and just, you know, let's try a lot of things. We talked about the spirit of iterative deployment and we talked about, you know, what, what, how like in the same way startups, he really, I think,

• 59:13Speaker 01

  pushed the startup ecosystem into this world of, you gotta like get, ship a V1 you're embarrassed of early. And it doesn't matter if it's, you know, it could be much better. You'll, you'll get it much, much better because of the feedback to customers. I don't even think I asked him before we launched ChatGPT, like, hey, do you think we should launch this thing? But I knew what he would say. I knew it was still early. I knew it was still embarrassing. And I knew the right thing was to like get it out and get it in front of people.

• 59:39David Senra?

  So wait, your mental model of Paul Graham is so complete, you don't even have to call him?

• 59:42Speaker 01

  No, just in this one case. That's the one where you would say like, there's certainty.

• 59:46David Senra?

  Let me tell you something funny. Right before he died, a few months before he died, I went to Charlie Munger's house and I had dinner with him. And I was like, how often do you talk to Buffett? He goes, never. I go, what? He goes, we talked every day for hours and hours. Buffett can just pretend to pick up the phone call to call me and he already knows what I'm going to say. That's obviously comes after 65 years of working closely together, but I thought it was hilarious.

• 1:00:04Speaker 01

  That is hilarious. That is really a funny story. No, there's many times that I couldn't predict what he's going to say, which is, that's why I think it's valuable. But in terms of the like, launch when you're embarrassed of the product, I know what he's going to say there. Like that one. That, that has been like, I won't say the most valuable piece of tactical YC advice, but it's been up there. I'm astonished looking back at.

• 1:00:32Speaker 01

  All of my data points of YC founders over the years, how much the ability, the like, moving fast and being iterative correlates with success.

• 1:00:42David Senra?

  Okay, you've mentioned YC way many, too many times in this conversation. I have to explore this because we talked before. It's like, listen, I'm not a journalist, I'm an enthusiast. I don't have a list of questions. I'm like, I have a world-class founder across from me. I want to know what the hell is in this person's mind? And I want to like, extract information out selfishly for me. So like, why, like, I just, I'm shocked at how much you reference it in conversations. Like, how impactful going through YC and then running YC, being affiliate with them, has, is clearly on your life. Can you, like, you expound on this?

• 1:01:14Speaker 01

  There is some band that wasn't that successful. They didn't sell that many albums, I mean, but they like, influenced all of the musicians that came after them.

• 1:01:23David Senra?

  I think it's called The Band. Literally, Rick Rubin told this story.

• 1:01:26Speaker 01

  I think it's, it might be The Velvet Underground. But, but you know the idea I'm getting at.

• 1:01:30David Senra?

  Yes.

• 1:01:30Speaker 01

  Whether it's called The Band or whatever. It's not fair to talk about YC in this way because YC, measured by like, traditional metrics and market cap created, whatever, is one of the hand, would be one of the handful of most valuable tech companies. But the degree to which YC totally influenced everything that has happened in the last 20 years of the tech industry and startups, entrepreneurship, whatever, I think is, is only like, sort of understood. OpenAI is an example of that. Not just from like, how we have shipped our products in the world, but like, the philosophy of how we run our research lab.

• 1:02:11Speaker 01

  I think if you go talk to like, many of the other people running like, this generation of large tech companies, they would tell you similar stories, even if they didn't go through YC.

• 1:02:22David Senra?

  But what's happening there? Is it an operating system that YC is giving you because you hear, you know, do these five things or whatever? Or is it more like a philosophy of building companies? This is the confusing part for me, as an outsider.

• 1:02:33Speaker 01

  I think it's two major things. I mean, there is, there is some of the operating system of what to do. But I think it was the philosophy of how to run companies. The idea of iterative deployment and technical people in charge and sort of being willing to bet on young people with a lot of energy and ambition, but maybe less experience throughout all levels of a company. And then it was also the change, the related change to the whole ecosystem that happened in the pre-YC tech ecosystem. So if we, you know, ran the clock back to 2004 and then projected technology forward to 2016, but not anything else about the shape of startup ecosystem,

• 1:03:18Speaker 01

  what it meant to be an entrepreneur, how capital flowed, all of the, you know, who got to run companies, all of those things. I do not think OpenAI would have been possible. I think the changes that YC induced in the whole ecosystem, you know, more leverage going to founders, young technical founders having the ability to raise lots of capital, the ability to sort of like, work on ambitious things without a very proven resume. I don't think OpenAI would have been possible. So this is kind of like a big change.

• 1:03:45David Senra?

  Is this all tied to the fact that you think there was a benefit in you going from founder to investor for a long period of time, back to founder?

• 1:03:53Speaker 01

  There are all those benefits too. And I wouldn't say I really went from founder to investor to founder because like, the first time I was founder didn't really work out that well. It's like, you know.

• 1:04:01David Senra?

  You still started a company.

• 1:04:02Speaker 01

  You learn some lessons from failure, but I think you learn way more from success.

• 1:04:05David Senra?

  Oh, you gotta, hold on, we're not moving on from that. You gotta say more about that.

• 1:04:09Speaker 01

  There's some, I can't believe, I think it's Anna Karenina, some great Russian novel. I'm very embarrassed not to know this. Starts with like, all unhappy families are unhappy in their own way. All happy families are the same.

• 1:04:19David Senra?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:19Speaker 01

  That explains why I jumped into memory. But I think this is really true. Like, when I look at the lessons of where I have failed at something, I learned something generic about grit and determination and something not to do. But there's, most things don't work. So there's like, a lot of reasons why things don't work. And there's, I think it's like, harder to put together the correct causation. And when I've had something really work, when I understand like, what parts of Y Combinator really worked or what parts of OpenAI really worked, trying to apply those lessons going forward has been much more helpful to me than trying to apply the anti-leçons of what didn't work.

• 1:05:03Speaker 01

  And so, you know, you, you should of course, learn as much as you can from every data point. So learn from the failures, learn from the successes. But in my own experience, I have, when I have tried to apply those lessons,

• 1:05:20Speaker 01

  the lessons I learned from success were very good and I should have applied those more. And the lessons I learned from failure were either fairly generic and I kind of already knew them, or got in the way of something else. And, and I think this is like, generally true for a lot of people.

• 1:05:39David Senra?

  Yeah, but isn't it like, we already kind of know what we should do or what we should avoid? But it's like, the reminder, the constant reminder. So like, the, the best description of my other podcast founders I ever heard is like, it's church entrepreneurs. If you really think about it, I used to drop it on Sundays and I should go back to doing that. But it's like, really, I'm just telling the same, it's the same personality type that's appeared throughout history. It's just like, now this person happens to be building ships and this person built technology, but like, and they lived at different times.

• 1:06:02Speaker 01

  It's the same, it's the same personality, that's for sure.

• 1:06:04David Senra?

  I, I'm kind of obsessed with this idea of things that last for a long period of time.

• 1:06:07Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:06:07David Senra?

  And like, you know, companies, the best companies can last a long time, but not as long as cities. And cities don't last, cities and countries don't last as long as like, religions. And I'm like, so out of all the man-made things, what has lasted longer? I would say, I can't think of anything other than religion, it might be an answer. So then I start studying, I grew up, my mom was fundamentalist Christian. So I was forced to go to church my entire life. And I just start analyzing like, what all the main religions in the world have in common. It's like, oh, we have a shared base of knowledge. Usually some kind of book, right? We meet with like-minded fellow believers at regular intervals. And it's not like I go to church on Sundays. It's like, okay, we talked about Jesus last week, but let's talk about this other guy. It's like, no, go back to these same books, these same stories over and over again. So I read your blog and you even said this, something about like, when YC end, ended.

• 1:06:52David Senra?

  It's like, you're repeating the same thing, you're telling it to them all the time, and then they leave the church, you know, to, for this analogy. And then they stop doing the same stuff. It's like, it's not even the lessons, it's like, the constant reminder that this is important.

• 1:07:05Speaker 01

  I extremely strongly agree with that. But I think it is better to be reminded of the thing, like, talk to your users more. You know, ship products earlier, get more feedback. Hold a higher bar for who you recruit and who you hire and more quickly.

• 1:07:25David Senra?

  This is what I mean.

• 1:07:26Speaker 01

  But it's the positives that I think are good.

• 1:07:28David Senra?

  You have one of the greatest tweets, I say to my phone, you're like, you know, skip the conferences, the fucking dinners, everything else, just like, essentially make the product or sell, and sell the product. If you're not making it, you're not selling it, like, that's all you actually have to do. And I think it's like, again, it goes back to like, that simple genius. So then this is the other part that I find most fascinating because somebody asked me yesterday. They're like, what's your, usually there's some kind of historical equivalent for every founder I meet that I can be like, oh, that guy's kind of like Vanderbilt, that guy's like Rockefeller, Ludwig, or any of these people. And I was like, what's your sort of equivalent for Sam? I was like, there isn't, I can't think of one. Because like, I don't know him enough well, like, I don't understand how he thinks yet.

• 1:08:01Speaker 01

  What do you think now?

• 1:08:02David Senra?

  Well, this is the first of hopefully eight conversations, so I'll tell you on conversation seven.

• 1:08:05Speaker 01

  All right.

• 1:08:06David Senra?

  But this is very rare. I just talked to Doug Leone and he talked about one dude that he hired, it's the founder of New Bank. And he was a fucking like, an associate and VC and then leaves and founds one of the most successful companies. I'm like, I've never heard of that. Doug, have you? And he dedicated his life to this. He goes, no, that's the only one. So again, it's very rare. Mostly people go from founder, sell their business unfortunately, and then investor.

• 1:08:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:08:30David Senra?

  As opposed to run the business till you die, which is my preferred method of things. What I'm curious about this is like, when you just said, I learned more from successes, right? Well, it's the successes because you were exposed to what, 10,000 different companies in that decade or decade and a half that you were doing this? And you saw, obviously, maybe the half a dozen or the dozen that were the best in the world. So like, are you taking their successes as well as like, instructive?

• 1:08:54Speaker 01

  No, no, totally. The, and I think people do, I mean, you're an incredible student, but there's a lot of pretty good students of entrepreneurialism and entrepreneurism. And people, I think, often try to go look for those lessons of the things that, that really worked. And as you've said, it's kind of the same thing over and over again, like, done in different industries. But you have to be reminded of it a lot and it's unglamorous.

• 1:09:18David Senra?

  I had no understanding going into this conversation. I think I have a slightly better understanding going into this. I told you before we started, this is just for my own identification. But like, even the people that influenced you, where it's just like, Peter Thiel saying, no, dummy. He obviously wouldn't say, he's like, no dummy, this is working. Why are you doing anything else but the thing that is working? So there's got to be examples where you're like, hey, I've given this advice to other founders a million times. And then you catch yourself, oh shit, I'm not even applying my own advice at this point in time.

• 1:09:45Speaker 01

  Totally, yeah, I'll give many examples of that. I, I, I think it's also instructive to like, what, what was the new thing? What didn't you have the advice for? And the thing that was really different about OpenAI than anything that I had pattern matching before is it was four and a half years from when we started the company to when we launched our first product.

• 1:10:06David Senra?

  The opposite of YC advice, right?

• 1:10:08Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:10:08David Senra?

  Okay.

• 1:10:09Speaker 01

  Yes. And although there were all these ways which managing a research team was similar to selecting and advising founders,

• 1:10:21Speaker 01

  learning what it, to whatever degree we learned it, because I think we did it perfectly, like, how you manage through this part of the world where you don't have the external signal from customers and you're just trying to like,

• 1:10:37Speaker 01

  You know, do what would normally be the catastrophic startup advice if not

• 1:10:43Speaker 01

  not shipping a product for four and a half years? That was very difficult. And we tried all of these things about how we like had a how we replaced the signal of do customers actually like the product? For is our research actually working? One of the things that worked, actually, is during the Dota two days when we were trying to use RL to beat this video, beat people at a video game. We put up like a leaderboard and people could just see how different ideas were performing. And what was, you know, that was like objective and real. And people wanted to like go up that. But we had to try all of these things to

• 1:11:18Speaker 01

  basically like simulate end users. And that was a totally interesting new problem I had no pattern matching for.

• 1:11:26David Senra?

  How did you work your way through that? What was your thinking? Like, how'd you do this?

• 1:11:29Speaker 01

  We asked a bunch of people who had been at great research labs of the past. And it had been, you know, OpenAI started a sort of a time when everybody in Silicon Valley, as their vanity project, including me, wanted to start a research lab. And there were all these books about the heyday of Bell Labs or Xerox PARC that were very popular. Everybody was talking about this. There was a huge amount of discussion. In fact, I even see one of the books over there about about Bell Labs. But there was not a ton of people that had like in living memory, how to actually do it. So we talked a lot to Alan Kay. We talked to a handful of other people. And we got some advice from them about, you know, what made a really good research research lab. And some of it was really good. Some of it didn't translate as well to the current moment.

• 1:12:11David Senra?

  Well, you also didn't have this giant monopolistic profit

• 1:12:16David Senra?

  profit printing machine like Bell Labs was spun out independently. Polaroid did a lot more research when they had essentially like a monopoly on its photography. I just read the biography of the founder of Honda, right? The guy created the most successful motor vehicle of all time, the Honda Cub, and sold uninterrupted for like 60 years, millions of fucking vehicles. And his whole thing, and he arrived at the same conclusion that Bell Labs did, that he thought the research development had to actually be separate. It was a, it was spun out of the company and had separate ownership, just like Bell Labs did.

• 1:12:47Speaker 01

  We did not have that.

• 1:12:48David Senra?

  No, you did not have.

• 1:12:50Speaker 01

  When I think back to those early days, I mostly feel like I was trying and failing to raise money. That's like my dominant memory of the early days of OpenAI.

• 1:12:58Speaker 01

  So much effort, so frustrating. I wish we had some sort of cash machine like that. I remember like one of my clearest memories of all of OpenAI. So I'm not coming out of 2015, but the first day was right after New Year's in 2016. And 12 of us or 11 of us showed up at Greg Brockman's apartment, you know, like nine, nine thirty on a Monday or Tuesday morning, something like that. Let's say it's January 4th. And everybody's there and it's been this like big effort and everybody walks in a lot of excitement. It feels like the first day of school, whatever.

• 1:13:28Speaker 01

  And then very quickly, people like look around the room and they're sort of like, well, what do we do now?

• 1:13:35Speaker 01

  Someone says, okay, we should get a whiteboard. Greg, you know, gets someone to go off and find a whiteboard. Whiteboard comes. Look around again, you know, what are we supposed to do now? And you just feel the energy in the room collapse.

• 1:13:49Speaker 01

  And none of us know what to do. Like, there's no, it was not like building a product startup. It was not like, let's build this product and let's talk to customers. It's like, okay, we said we want to make AGI. Maybe we should write some papers. Okay, let's write some papers. Maybe we should think about some ideas. Okay, let's think about some ideas. You know, everybody's got their like moments of, I have no idea what I'm doing. That was one of mine. Like I have, you know, we have just launched this thing. None of us have any idea what we're going to do. So we did what we know how to do. And eventually we figured out, a lot of things didn't work. Eventually, we figured out a

• 1:14:23Speaker 01

  kind of like rhythm for

• 1:14:26Speaker 01

  making and then evaluating research bets.

• 1:14:31Speaker 01

  And

• 1:14:33Speaker 01

  I'll, far from perfect, obviously, but we did find a gradient that we could kind of progress along. And we figured out how to get, you know, the resources that very smart people needed and how to make sure that we were like not completely getting lost in the wilderness. And over

• 1:14:54Speaker 01

  some number of years, mostly chaotic stumbling, we eventually made most of the big discoveries. You know, what started as the unsupervised sentiment neuron paper turned into GPT-1 and then eventually GPT-whatever. The scaling loss work that gave us the confidence, not only by the compute, but the understanding about how to scale up our models sort of came together. And through, and many other things too. Through this process, we learned things like that idea of leaderboards that worked. We also learned the incredible power of external demos

• 1:15:37Speaker 01

  for like an eminent person that the researchers really wanted to impress. And then we learned a bunch of things that like didn't work, like fake deadlines.

• 1:15:44David Senra?

  That has to be so disorienting to live through that experience. You're at 12 people in an apartment, don't even have a whiteboard, don't know what to do. Fast forward a decade, you have a billion people using.

• 1:15:54Speaker 01

  Very strange experience.

• 1:15:55David Senra?

  Do you keep a journal?

• 1:15:57Speaker 01

  When my kid was born, my first kid, I would like, you know, get home at the end of the day and be rocking to sleep and just like talk to a kid or whatever. So I was just like, need to come up with things to talk about. So I would like just tell him about my day and what we were struggling with and kind of like what I was worried about and what was happening. It was kind of like fun for me to do. And I was like, this is sort of interesting and someday it'll be like interesting for him to have this. So I started writing him, like every Sunday, I would like write him a letter. I would like talk just to talk and then I would like write it down. I only ever did like eight of them or something.

• 1:16:28David Senra?

  How many kids do you have?

• 1:16:29Speaker 01

  Two.

• 1:16:30David Senra?

  Okay. Bezos has this great line about building Amazon. He's like, we're trying to do stuff that we can tell our grandkids about that we're proud of, right? And those things are hard. The fact that you were writing to your son.

• 1:16:43Speaker 01

  Oh, man.

• 1:16:43David Senra?

  Keep writing the letters. And if you don't do that, this is real quick, just because I've read enough books about this. Most time, guess what? Founders don't write autobiographies when they're 40. They write them when they're 70 and they're looking back and they wish they could do it again. And so much has been lost to the sands of time. They all repeat this. They're like, I wish I journaled. So even if you don't do it, you have enough resources. What I would do, write, have a book written, even if it's for internal purposes only. You ever read The Little Kingdom by Michael Mortz?

• 1:17:09Speaker 01

  I never read it.

• 1:17:09David Senra?

  Oh, you have to. It's like the first six year history of Apple written by Michael Mortz.

• 1:17:13Speaker 01

  Isn't it crazy that he wrote that book?

• 1:17:15David Senra?

  He's a phenomenal writer.

• 1:17:16Speaker 01

  He is a great writer.

• 1:17:16David Senra?

  Crazy writer winds up being one of the best venture capitalists of all time, I guess. But like the, you just, the point is that have, that book ends. Steve hasn't even been at Apple yet. So you get like, what actually happened? You're going to want this. You might not want it now, but you're damn sure going to want it when you're 60 or 70.

• 1:17:31Speaker 01

  The thing that was so interesting was like the mindset of writing to your kid. Like you really can't hide behind anything. Like, oh, I really care what my kid's going to think about me. So like, this thing happened, like, you know, didn't feel great about it, better do it differently next week. Like, it was a very interesting, extremely interesting mental framework. Maybe I'll find some way to do it again.

• 1:17:48David Senra?

  No, maybe you're going to do it.

• 1:17:49Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:17:50David Senra?

  Sam, thanks for taking the time. This was awesome.

• 1:17:51Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 1:17:51David Senra?

  Appreciate it. I hope you enjoyed this episode. Please remember to subscribe wherever you're listening and leave a review. And make sure you listen to my other podcast, Founders. For almost a decade, I've obsessively read over 400 biographies of history's greatest entrepreneurs, searching for ideas that you can use in your work. Most of the guests you hear on this show first found me through Founders.