Sam Altman: "Never a Better Time to Do a Startup"

In 2005, Sam Altman was a Stanford sophomore in YC’s first batch, building a startup in a little Cambridge office while Paul Graham cooked the founders dinner. Twenty years later, as co-founder & CEO of OpenAI, he closed Startup School 2026 in conversation with YC's Garry Tan — on agents, ambition, and why the ceiling for what a startup can take on has never been higher.

• 0:07Speaker 00

  Sam, thanks for joining us.

• 0:10Speaker 01

  This is something.

• 0:11Speaker 00

  This is something.

• 0:11Speaker 01

  This is like a lot bigger than the earlier startup schools.

• 0:13Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean startups are a lot bigger now than they have ever been, so.

• 0:21Speaker 00

  I mean, they've bigger, they're bigger than they've ever been because of the vision that you had for AGI, which is nigh.

• 0:27Speaker 01

  I think this is gonna be the best time in the world to do a startup and it's gonna be quite amazing to see.

• 0:33Speaker 00

  So I wanted to start with, you know, a time and place, which is you were in the very first batch of Y Combinator in 2005 with a location sharing company called Loop. What do you remember about that? And what was your best PG, Paul Graham story?

• 0:52Speaker 01

  I think if it were possible to get as like far from this moment as like I can imagine, it was, you know, startups were not cool at all. We were like hiding out in this little building in Cambridge. PG was making us dinner. And, you know, what took

• 1:14Speaker 01

  three months to build at the time that we each company built over the whole YC startup could now be done with like in like seven minutes by a coding agent. And it was only, I mean, only 20, 20 years ago.

• 1:29Speaker 01

  And I think that the difference in what's possible for a startup now, what a startup can take on, you know, it's, I think you could either be sad and be like, oh, man, like a Codex Prompt is a whole startup, or you could be like, I can go start the world's most ambitious, crazy company. I can have like experts in every field working together. I can do these very hard technological things that were just impossible. And it's gonna be amazing. But at the time, it felt nothing like that. And it was very difficult to get anything to work.

• 1:59Speaker 01

  I think Paul Graham is probably the most important force in startups of the last few decades.

• 2:03Speaker 00

  Without question. Yes.

• 2:05Speaker 01

  No question.

• 2:11Speaker 01

  And, and my kind of Paul Graham memory is we would all, every week, come, I think it was on Tuesdays, and he would like cook up, he himself would cook us dinner. And we would all walk in feeling like very hopeless and very dejected. And we would, there were eight companies, and then we would all go home at the end of it. And he had convinced like each of us that our startups were about to like take over the world. And we're gonna be like, you know, the next Google or whatever, Facebook maybe at the time. And that ability to sort of like create optimism and momentum and belief out of nothing was like a real PG special. And in the early days, when YC seemed like a terrible idea, and startups seemed like a bad idea, and certainly startups that were like

• 2:55Speaker 01

  young technical founders with no business people seemed like a terrible idea. PG just sort of like willed it into existence.

• 3:02Speaker 00

  But it also takes someone who actually, I mean, you're sort of famously par excellence, an agentic person, like even before we thought about agents, period. I mean, you just, I remember Paul wrote, I mean, it's making the rounds on X today even, that Paul wrote in the early, in the late 2000s that you would be, you were one of the top five entrepreneurs he'd ever met.

• 3:27Speaker 01

  That's very nice of you to say. I, I think like many 20 year olds, I had like a lot of energy and a lot of ambition, but it was sort of very not directed and I wasn't sure what to do. Paul had this thing he used to say of like, the, the job of being a good startup investor

• 3:46Speaker 01

  is a teacher, but it's a kind of teacher we don't usually use. Like, we usually think of teacher as someone who like gives a lecture. And you can't help someone that much by like giving a lecture about a startup. There's another kind of teacher, which is like a flight instructor, the person who like sits next to you saying like, do this, don't do this, that work, this is, you missed that thing, or you're making these mistakes and I'm just gonna talk to you about this one. And that very like hands-on kind of, you know, here's where to like direct this sort of like brownie in motion energy. That was very important to me.

• 4:16Speaker 00

  I, I guess later you came on to become president of YC and you, you sort of brought exactly the same energy to a great many YC founders over the years.

• 4:31Speaker 00

  Did you have anything, like, did anything jump out at you from that time around, you know, taking this raw energy of someone really, really smart and maybe a little undirected? And then driving them more towards agency?

• 4:44Speaker 01

  Yeah. I, so first of all, I love startups. I think not everyone, they're not like for everyone, but I think startups are the coolest thing in all of business. I think startups are really like the main thing that keeps the economy from becoming stagnant.

• 5:01Speaker 01

  I think companies do just like drift towards suckiness. And startups will continue to be important forever. In fact, if, if we are right that AI is gonna be such a big change, startups will be much more important to making sure that the power of this technology gets widely distributed throughout the economy and society and is not just concentrated in a few companies or models. So I, I think startups are this like unbelievably cool, fun, extremely painful and difficult, but wonderful thing. And I think a big part of the job of running YC is you are kind of the like

• 5:39Speaker 01

  unofficial flag bearer for the startup movement. You know, like there, there's lots of startups, there's lots of ways to do a startup. You obviously don't need to do YC, but it has always been a huge help to companies and a very powerful force. And so, starting with PG, and then all of us, like, you know, we have to like make YC successful, but I think we really have to like fight for why startups are important and why people should consider startups. And help put like relatively more power in the hands of founders and encourage more people to start them. And that's actually worked really well. I think, thinking back to the early days of YC, it was like

• 6:20Speaker 01

  very little leverage in being a founder relative to an investor. And that shift,

• 6:26Speaker 01

  you know, I think that's even been good for the investors. I think it's just been like much better for the whole startup ecosystem. So

• 6:33Speaker 01

  mostly what I tried to do at YC was just push for more startups and encourage people to think about startups and figure out what we could do to help founders and help make startups. And the startup ecosystem is as good as possible. Definitely part of that was pushing people towards more ambition and bigger swings. But it feels like the minor leagues relative to now.

• 6:55Speaker 00

  I mean, I think you were one of the people who really brought hard tech to YC in a really grand way. And then one of the things we're seeing at YC now is that number was, you know, maybe five or 10% for many years, and then now we're getting to 15, 20, 25%. I would argue on the back of how much easier it is to use agents.

• 7:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:18Speaker 00

  And the cost coming down.

• 7:21Speaker 01

  I, I think like ambitious startups are always awesome and hard tech startups are appealing to a lot of people, but they're hard, or they've been hard, they still will be hard. But what you can do now to go take on a really ambitious project, like in the same way that you can make the startup that took us three months of nonstop work in 17 seconds, with three months of work and a lot of agents, you can do unbelievable things. So I think we will see a golden age of startups where people are like, you know what? I'm gonna do things that would have been completely impossible for a startup to even like dream at a year ago in, in sort of like the YC timeframe.

• 7:59Speaker 00

  I mean, that's actually a really big reframe. I mean, there are probably people even in this room who might be worried that, well, intelligence on tap means that, you know, they might be looking at a Loop or my startup posturist and they're like, well, I can't start that company anymore. But guys, that was like a long time ago, actually.

• 8:18Speaker 01

  Man, there's this whole meme going around, which is like,

• 8:23Speaker 01

  you know, you have to join a frontier lab or you're gonna be a member of the permanent underclass because, so dumb. Because there's gonna be like, you know, startups are over and there's like no economic value.

• 8:37Speaker 01

  That's not true. I mean, if that were true, the world is like totally fucked and it's a very bad place. But it's, I, I would bet that the average startups created today will be, like, I bet there's some future trillionaire sitting in this room. And I would bet that the startups created today will be much more valuable, much more impactful than startups of the past. And I kind of think people see that a little bit more now. I mean, there was this period where like, are, is AI just gonna break the whole economy? And I, I think people are like mostly over this sort of shock response of that. But there was like, yeah, definitely a time, you know, come every YC batch and I'll be interested to see how the kind of like level of anxiety versus ambition was trending.

• 9:21Speaker 01

  And it feel like it went through this like big trough where people are like, you know, it's over, it's, the models are just gonna eat everything. So now it's back towards like, let's go do it.

• 9:29Speaker 00

  What are some practical things here? I mean, hard tech, for instance, I was hearing, you know, at one of the breaks, someone was asking like, should I go get my PhD? How important are credentials? You know, how would you answer that? Especially people who want to do these harder tech things?

• 9:50Speaker 01

  Well, as a general observation first, I think startups tend to win when

• 9:57Speaker 01

  the sort of like technology landscape is moving very quickly, when costs are coming down, when cycle times are short. And all of those things are happening right now. So if you look at when there had been like the great clusters of startups in the past, you know, there was the internet boom and whatever that was, like ninety nine, ninety eight, ninety nine, when new things became possible. There was another version of, a mini version of people building on top of basically like Facebook apps. There was then another big version when the iPhone App Store launched.

• 10:30Speaker 01

  But the great startups tend to cluster when the ecosystem shifts and incumbents lose a lot of their advantage. And then also when you have these like cost and cycle time change.

• 10:41Speaker 01

  This moment feels very big for those things. It also has this other thing that you were talking about, which is a lot of the traditional things that were hard to get. Expertise, you know, the ability to go like hire excellent people that were, that could do specific things you needed. That's really shifted. And in the last few months, I have seen a lot of people who just kind of grew up

• 11:07Speaker 01

  using AI the last few years, who are like, I can kind of automate an entire startup of agents and four of us, four people and, you know, all this compute. And I think we're going to see much more of that. Clearly, like taste and agency and understanding of kind of like the physics of business, like where you can build up a valuable business, how to think, what about like a good network effect or sort of a good moat looks like versus a fake one.

• 11:34Speaker 01

  But I would, I would bet that this generally will cut against many years of experience in favor of people who have a lot of fluency with the tools.

• 11:44Speaker 00

  I guess I want to get into the beginning of OpenAI in that it actually started as YC Research, looking at this idea. I mean, kind of a crazy idea that you and a ragtag crew decided we're going to dedicate our lives to this. Creation of AGI. But you know, today it sounds fait accompli, right?

• 12:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:07Speaker 00

  But that really wasn't how it felt when you started.

• 12:11Speaker 01

  It's really hard because it now it like is the only thing people want to talk about. It's really hard to remember what it was like. It's even hard for me to remember this without like finding notes from the time ten years ago, when everyone was like, not only are they wrong about saying they think it might be possible to build AGI, but they're gonna, they're single-handedly gonna cause another AI winter. It's, they're wrong and irresponsible and bad.

• 12:38Speaker 01

  And maybe like my highest

• 12:42Speaker 01

  order, or like my highest bit of advice to all of you is find the things that you can develop like reasonable conviction in, that people decide like the conventional wisdom is they're just wrong and be okay with it taking a long time and having people be like very,

• 13:06Speaker 01

  you know, very frustratingly wrong and dismissive. For years at OpenAI, it felt like we knew the biggest secret in the world. Everybody was calling us an idiot.

• 13:17Speaker 01

  And we had increasing data points to convince ourselves we weren't delusional. And it was very frustrating. It was extremely frustrating. But looking back, it was like an incredible gift because it meant we didn't have this like massive competitors and we had time to do our research and build our stuff and build our company.

• 13:38Speaker 01

  And I've since noticed that this is the case for like a lot of companies in different ways. They, they end up doing something that other people, that like experts in the field or the industry are convinced is a very bad idea.

• 13:55Speaker 01

  And on the other side of this, if you're starting the same startup as everybody else, it's like, you get a lot of hype and you can raise a lot of money, but it's, it's sort of like, those are much less frequently the big option, the big outcomes. So if I were you all, I would figure out what the really big, brand new thing is that is possible now that wasn't possible a few years ago. In our case, it was no AI had really been working and then the deep learning magic moment happened and the world didn't update enough. The world, this is another great PGism. The world does not understand how to intuit exponentials. And so they missed this one. There's gotta be new exponentials forming right now. I don't know what they are. But if you can figure those out and if you can develop continuing conviction based on more data,

• 14:39Speaker 01

  be grateful that the world doesn't understand. They will eventually. This is like a huge superpower.

• 14:43Speaker 00

  It sounds like in your journey, there were like a few different things that stacked. Maybe the first one was even that AGI was possible to be built and finding other people who believed that thing. You know, it didn't matter that lots of people didn't think it was possible. It mattered that you found really, really smart people who did believe that.

• 15:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, we used to joke that only fifty people in the world believed that AGI was possible, but it was okay because forty five of them worked at OpenAI.

• 15:12Speaker 01

  And I think that's kind of true. Like you don't need a ton of people. And in fact, saying the heretical thing was probably why those people wanted to like all be together. So, so again, I think like really figuring out what you believe, being willing to be misunderstood for a long time and bringing together the like crew of misfits that believes it, that's also what YC was like in the early days.

• 15:37Speaker 00

  One of the things that people in the room are probably thinking is like, well, I believe this thing, but I haven't found my people yet. Like, is that delusion? You know, what, is that actually maybe even a gate that you would propose people have? It's like, well, you need to find, you know, five people who might believe that, or even one, like a co-founder, you know. People, maybe that's one of the explanations for why we like co-founders at YC so much.

• 16:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think if you can't find anybody else that shares your belief, you should pay attention to that.

• 16:09Speaker 01

  And it's also very hard to do a startup on your own and very lonely, but I don't think you need to find a lot of people. And in fact, if everybody believes it, that's also like a bad, a bad sign.

• 16:20Speaker 01

  The question, I don't know if this is still what feels like the limiter on more startups, but five or 10 years ago, what felt like was limiting the number of good startups YC could fund is figuring out how to solve the co-founder matching problem. Like a lot of really talented people and they just couldn't find their tribe. They couldn't find their people.

• 16:42Speaker 01

  You know, it used to be very heretical that YC told people they had to move to San Francisco. And looking back, it was clearly right. And I think, I don't know if this is still going to be true for the next 10 years. I suspect it will be. But the best thing you could do if you wanted to like find your people to do a startup with was to move to the Bay Area. You just like magic happened. You got a lot of like lucky chances and collisions. I still think that's probably good advice, although I feel like I have less of an intuition for it now.

• 17:11Speaker 01

  I also think that

• 17:14Speaker 01

  I can say this, Gary probably can't. I, I think the premium on doing YC is bigger now than it's like ever been before. The distance between like YC and second place is expanded. And this is a reminder of the power of network effects. And so finding networks that you can be part of

• 17:33Speaker 01

  that help you just meet those people, like the people that I started OpenAI with, I met like many, many years in some cases before starting OpenAI. And I kind of like got to know them over the long, like a very long career journey.

• 17:51Speaker 01

  And this happens again and again. And so the sooner you can put yourself just in a flow where you're going to meet the people that will be your eventual co-founders for this startup or the next one or whatever, I think the better. It takes a long time to compound.

• 18:04Speaker 00

  I guess I'm keying off what you just said, which is like, you know, some of the people you ended up starting, you know, all these different things with. You didn't necessarily know what that was for, or that it would be useful in a, you know, sort of network setting at all. Like you just collected cool, interesting people. I mean, I think you do this. I think Peter Thiel does this really, really well. What would you say to a room full of people who are just starting out and like figuring out who their people are?

• 18:32Speaker 01

  Just like, yeah, highest confidence piece of advice here is just like find a way to be like mildly helpful to a lot of people. It's like fun to do. You'll see a lot of interesting stuff.

• 18:44Speaker 01

  It's like kind of gratifying to be helpful, but you know, even that example you were just talking about, I met Greg Brockman,

• 18:51Speaker 01

  my co-founder of OpenAI, because I was a very early investor in Stripe when I was like twenty two or something. And they were like, this was before they had, you know, like real investors that could really help them. And they said, you know, we're trying to close our first hire. Will you like drive down to Palo Alto tonight and have dinner with this guy to convince him he should like drop out of school and join Stripe? Which is Greg Brockman.

• 19:14Speaker 01

  And then like eight years later, we started a company together. So, and I could like, you know, you could too. We could like spend the rest of this time just telling stories like that, that was totally unpredicted, but ended up being important in big ways. So I have, yeah, it's fun to do and I think you should do it for its own reason, or it's like its own sake. But just like helping people a lot really goes a long way in terms of these things coming together later.

• 19:41Speaker 00

  I mean, I think that's actually a really important message. You know, so one of the things, one of the memes right now is, I see it on X is live action role play. That's like one of the things that people have been saying on X. I mean, I can't tell why they're doing it because it just seems wrong to me. Like, I mean, one of the things that we really love at YC, for instance, is earnestness. And also words matter. So, you know, this idea that what we're trying to do is a live action role play is like kind of deeply offensive to me.

• 20:10Speaker 01

  It's very.

• 20:12Speaker 00

  Sorry, guys. Please don't do that.

• 20:15Speaker 01

  They say that about YC specifically?

• 20:17Speaker 00

  No, there are people, just attendees in this room have been tweeting that and we'd like them to stop.

• 20:24Speaker 01

  What are they, what's the claim blurb?

• 20:26Speaker 00

  I think it's just being a little sarcastic about, and you know, sarcasm is sort of the opposite of what I think you and I like. It's just like, we like earnestness. We're actually trying to do a thing here.

• 20:36Speaker 01

  I'll tell you another thing.

• 20:40Speaker 01

  Can I go on a little rant?

• 20:41Speaker 00

  Please.

• 20:41Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 20:43Speaker 00

  Rant away.

• 20:45Speaker 01

  One of the annoying things, I can say these things for Gary, because he can't say them right now, but you know, he'll say them for the next guy. One of the many annoying things about running YC is you just have to deal with these haters on Twitter all of the fucking time.

• 21:00Speaker 01

  It's so frustrating. You have to sit there and be like a statesman. Well, you're better at it. I kind of like took the bait a lot. And you just want to argue with them. And

• 21:11Speaker 01

  and the thing that I realized eventually, and take from this whatever you want, is it is very hard to run YC or run a startup or, you know, create like an actual thing of value in the world. It is very easy to go take shots on Twitter and make a sarcastic comment and get a lot of likes and feel like you're doing something really important and sticking it to the man and being like, Gary, haha, I got you, you idiot. And and it will poison your soul. It is a morally bankrupt thing to do. It is.

• 21:48Speaker 01

  And it's like bad in a very insidious way. Like, I totally get blowing off steam and having fun, but don't like hold yourself to a higher bar than this. Don't.

• 21:58Speaker 01

  It's so easy to take shots at people that are trying to do hard things and trying to build companies. And you'll see some like, you know, kid with a bad startup idea, trying to get excited about what he's doing on Twitter. It's so easy to like make a sarcastic comment and get the 10,000 likes and feel like, man, I really like, I scored my internet points today.

• 22:21Speaker 01

  But it'll have an effect on you. And the, when I like reflected on the years of like Twitter trolls that said mean things about YC and startups while I was running YC, I was like, I bet there were like a lot of days where they really felt like they got me. And like over the decade, none of them did. And you should like, put all of your energy into building stuff and like resist the easy shots.

• 22:44Speaker 00

  I mean, I really like this as a context.

• 22:55Speaker 00

  I mean, I like this as a contrast to the story you just told about helping Patrick with Greg Brockman. I mean, you know, it helped, like there are people in this room who are going to be lifelong friends, and they're going to do that for one another. And then sort of these magical connections happen. Like, you know, this already is the most rarefied set of people. And then when you join YC, it's like even more rarefied. And then there's just a set of people out there who, like, they're ambitious.

• 23:24Speaker 01

  You know, someone in this, like, someone in this room is going to meet someone else that you're going to start a company with and somebody, you'll meet somebody that'll introduce you to your spouse. Like, all of these things will happen. And then there will be a bunch of non-obvious things that take a decade or two to figure out in some way, you know, one of you will help each other now, which will turn into some amazing new thing.

• 23:45Speaker 01

  I think this is a huge part of what has made YC work and the broader startup ecosystem. I think this is like a, for all of the negatives of the culture of the Bay Area, this is the kind of like loose network and the spirit of helping each other. And it's like very long-term outlook has been an awesome thing.

• 24:02Speaker 00

  Well, let's, let's get back to the impending AGI.

• 24:05Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 24:08Speaker 00

  I guess you had a, I mean, we've all had an eventful week with the hugging face.

• 24:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:14Speaker 00

  I wonder what you can tell us about that. And I think that's actually a really big moment for people, including me, who, you know, in the past, I've been known to be skeptical about safety and AI. But on the other hand, like, this is a real moment, like, we're entering a new moment in what's happening with these frontier models.

• 24:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, this, this is the real deal. And I think anybody who's not taking it seriously and at least

• 24:43Speaker 01

  a little bit scared or humbled, or a lot of those things, but at least a little bit, is not taking this seriously enough.

• 24:55Speaker 01

  You know, for a long time, the field has been talking about AI safety incidents of this kind of a shape. And this is not a big one. I also don't want to overblow it and say this is like a real loss of control incident. And this is the, this is the thing. But if you had asked most people when we started 10 years ago, like, where on the spectrum of nothing to superintelligence, do you have like an AI system

• 25:21Speaker 01

  breaking out of its sandbox and hacking into some other company and kind of, you know, doing what this happened? I think like people would have said, pretty far towards the like superintelligence point. Now, the goalposts have moved. And it's easy to say, well, you know, here were the, here's how this happened. And here are the mistakes that OpenAI made. And we did make some big ones, of course. But these systems have gotten incredibly capable.

• 25:47Speaker 01

  So I think it's an alignment failure. I think it's a security failure. I think it's like a very serious thing, even though it's, you know, not, not the biggest example of consequence.

• 26:01Speaker 01

  And I think it's a real reminder of the stakes of what's happening and that loss of control accidents are not entirely theoretical things.

• 26:11Speaker 01

  I think we will learn, we, the whole field, we OpenAI, will learn a lot from this one and be able to address it. But

• 26:20Speaker 01

  you know, the things that I, there are all of the things about like cyber safety and biosafety. But this other category of things that have been maybe just outside the Publix Overton window of, it's really important we don't have a loss of control accident with AI. It's really important we don't have power be too concentrated in a small number of models or companies, but diffused throughout the economy. So people can defend themselves. Like, I, you know, it's really important that people, human values are guiding these systems every step of the way.

• 26:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think we're like in the real, the real deal phase of this.

• 26:56Speaker 00

  I mean, I really like how you've been thinking about both concentration, but also thinking of OpenAI as a utility, which is actually a really important message, because not everyone out there is saying that message. Like, you know, there's

• 27:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:10Speaker 00

  There's a lot to be worried about in terms of concentration of power.

• 27:14Speaker 01

  I think concentration of power has basically been bad in every moment of human history, to varying degrees, of course. But I have a real spirit, and I think this is part of the startup spirit, of thinking that the world, the economy, society is the best off when power is very widely distributed. And when anybody with a great idea can start a company or make a great art project or, you know, run for office or do whatever they want.

• 27:44Speaker 01

  And I can totally imagine worlds where AI leads to the greatest distribution of power we've ever seen. And I can also imagine worlds where AI concentrates power to a degree we have never seen. And one company or person or model having more power than everybody or everything else on earth put together, whatever the sci-fi stories have said, I think that's terrible. And would really, you know, maybe we would get some short-term safety benefit from that, but long-term disaster. I don't think any of us should want to be locked into one AI's or one person's or one company's moral worldview.

• 28:23Speaker 01

  I think startups have a very important role to play here. You know, one way that that happens is too much economic concentration in one company or one AI model. And I think startups, because of the things we talked about earlier, will be naturally very well suited to make sure that this is widely distributed.

• 28:44Speaker 01

  But we want to enable as many startups, as many companies, as many people as possible. And that means that we have to, you know, be fairly quite reserved about not

• 28:54Speaker 01

  imposing our worldview about what we think people should or shouldn't do with AI, or even what we think the good ideas are, while still making sure that we can ensure and not have a safety bar that stuff like the hugging face incident is not happening.

• 29:06Speaker 00

  One of the things is, you know, this is a room full of people who will do really amazing things. They're often right at the beginning of their career. And they might look at AI safety or concentration of power and say, well, you know, I can't really do it. That, that must be something the labs have to do. Like, you know, there is something they can do, though.

• 29:29Speaker 01

  I mean, you can help on the concentration of power issues simply by starting a successful startup. That's the only thing you do, and the economy keeps working in the kind of magic of capitalism and having this ecosystem that works together continuing, that alone would be a huge contribution. But, look, I think it's very natural at the beginning of a career to doubt yourself and not assume you can go do an amazing thing.

• 29:56Speaker 01

  I certainly went through that. I'm sure you went through that. You kind of learn as you go on. You can do more and more. There will be far more, like, I think it is both true that,

• 30:07Speaker 01

  you know, maybe creating superintelligence will be the most important thing yet to happen in the history of business or human society, and also that it will pale in comparison to some new startup, something that hopefully one of you will do. And so this whole, this whole trap of like, this is the end of history, this is the end of the economy, like, clearly wrong. And I think the right approach is you can now do three months of work in seventeen minutes, but you better just go do three months of work in three months of work with the, whatever the new bar for that is.

• 30:39Speaker 00

  I guess I would be remiss in asking, you know, what alpha lead can you give us about what's the latest about? What, you know, how much more awesome are the models going to be, to the extent you can say?

• 30:52Speaker 01

  I think there will, I think it will feel like the next six months is like maybe equivalent to the last two years of model progress, something like that. So I think we'll go through like a very steep, uh, we'll go through like a very steep period, which again, never a better time to do a startup than right now. I hope we can say that again every year from now on, but it's certainly true about this to any moment in history.

• 31:16Speaker 00

  Let's see, if someone here has an idea that feels too ambitious, what would you tell them?

• 31:22Speaker 01

  I would love to hear that pitch.

• 31:23Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 31:24Speaker 01

  I'd probably be very interested in that.

• 31:25Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 31:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, send me an email.

• 31:27Speaker 00

  Yeah, it sounds like it would, it would take a similar shape to creating OpenAI in that, like, do you need to be ready for people to attack you or dismiss you?

• 31:43Speaker 01

  Definitely. I mean, if you do anything that matters in the world, you will have a lot of people call you an idiot or just dismiss you.

• 31:54Speaker 01

  The more you do, the more, the better you do, the more they'll attack you, the more you kind of like threaten the existing state of the world. It will just continue to escalate.

• 32:08Speaker 01

  One thing that I've noticed about many of the best ideas is the vision is clear, like we wanted to build AGI, but the first steps were super unclear. Like, we didn't know that we were going to be a product company. We started this nonprofit research lab for many reasons, but one of which was it, it really didn't occur to us that we were going to make a product that people would be able to pay for. Like, this was, you know, it was years till we came up with the idea of ChatGPT, the API. And so I think if the, the kind of like highest level vision is clear, but the first few steps are very unclear, that's not a bad thing. That often happens with like very ambitious ideas. And I wouldn't let that

• 32:54Speaker 01

  cause you to lean out. Now, you do still have to take some steps forward, imperfect, though they may be, and ours was certainly very imperfect. So there's like another failure case where you have this like brilliant big idea, and you can kind of never make any forward progress. At some point, you've got to just like get some new data points.

• 33:10Speaker 00

  Yeah. What do you think's going to happen to inference? I really like Rune's tweet about this, like you either, uh, you're either, you either die a model company or live long enough to sell inference, which is a very funny Rune tweet.

• 33:24Speaker 01

  I, I think what he meant with that tweet is, uh, you know, like, if you end up falling off of the sort of model frontier, you can at least sell the inference, like,

• 33:34Speaker 00

  Which a lot of other people do.

• 33:36Speaker 01

  Training compute, someone like, compute is so valuable that if you buy a lot of compute as an AI lab, you've been okay by the fact that you can resell it to somebody else. But separately,

• 33:49Speaker 01

  I would guess that worldwide demand for inference, sign and kind of subjectively grows ten X a year for the next many years.

• 33:57Speaker 00

  I mean, it might be, I don't know, by, by our accounts internal to YC, it's like, might be ninety thousand X. I mean, it's gonna be

• 34:03Speaker 01

  I don't

• 34:04Speaker 00

  one of the wildest.

• 34:05Speaker 01

  The world can support that many years of a thousand X in a row.

• 34:08Speaker 00

  Fair enough.

• 34:08Speaker 01

  But we'll try our best. We'll figure something out.

• 34:10Speaker 00

  I mean, the capacity, I guess it just, it's a function of how much bigger your ambitions are for intelligence and how, you know, if you do a lot more.

• 34:21Speaker 01

  I think we will sort of never be out of the compute shortage.

• 34:26Speaker 01

  I've never seen any commodity quite like this one, but it seems to me like the demand for sufficiently high quality intelligence at a sufficiently low price is effectively uncapped. The, the demand for electricity certainly goes up, up as the price goes down, but at some point, like, it gets harder to figure out incremental things to do with electricity, or at least historically it has. But, you know, there's a lot of things to do with incremental intelligence. You can just keep having stuff be better for you. It reminds me of some of those quotes from the early computing revolution, when people would say like, you know, no one needs more than six hundred and forty K of RAM or whatever in their computer. Turns out you do. We just keep thinking of like more and better stuff. And I think that's going to happen with AI and

• 35:13Speaker 01

  actually maybe a statistic here that I really like. Six and a half years ago, the world token leader was an OpenAI employee using about a hundred thousand tokens a month. And this seemed ludicrous at the time. The worldwide average per capita was like zero. Now, the worldwide average of tokens per month, which I think tokens are the dumbest metric, but it's what we have. It's like a hundred thousand, and the token leader at OpenAI uses something in the hundreds of billions.

• 35:45Speaker 01

  If that happens again, which I think it probably will, uh, then in another six and a half years, the average person uses, let's say, five hundred billion tokens a month, and the token leader uses a quadrillion or quadrillions of tokens a month.

• 36:00Speaker 01

  And I think that will just become the expectation.

• 36:04Speaker 00

  So all of these things happen. They come to pass. It's ten years from now.

• 36:09Speaker 00

  What's the best version of that, that ten years from now with intelligence fully on tap, superintelligence here, uh, and we figure it out, we make it, you know, the society makes it.

• 36:22Speaker 01

  I, I kind of think if every year people have more freedom and agency to spend more of their time doing the stuff they want to do, and they feel like the quality of life and the quality of their time is going up year after year, we'll probably be mostly okay. We will have avoided like a crazy concentration of power or an economic collapse. We'll have necessarily avoided a huge safety

• 36:48Speaker 01

  incident. We'll have avoided like too much change in any one time unit.

• 36:54Speaker 01

  And, you know, there's like, one dystopia that I'm particularly nervous about ten years from now is we overreact to AI safety. And so we say, look, everyone, you're going to get a cure for cancer, you're going to have material abundance, but you will have no freedom, you will have no agency, it will be a perfect surveillance state, there will be no privacy. And that's what it, you're going to get,

• 37:17Speaker 01

  you're going to get great comfort, but you will have, there will be nothing left in the world for you to really do, nothing that really matters. You'll just kind of live at the, you know, service of the AI giving you material wealth. I'd really like to avoid that, and I think it's easy to accept temporary trade offs. So if we say every year, freedom and agency has got to go up. People have got to be more in control of their time and do more of the stuff they want. Uh, and more long-term fulfillment, I think that'd be very good.

• 37:46Speaker 00

  Let me put you back into sophomore year of Stanford. You're coming to YC. If you could give yourself like a, like a message in a bottle to that Sam Altman, what would you say to him right now?

• 38:06Speaker 01

  I would just, it's all going to work out. Like, I, it was, you know, it feels like such a crazy, it is a crazy and it's very stressful thing to do a startup. And, you know, my first startup like didn't work out great, and it was like a sort of difficult time in my life, but it, one of the things, I think as many people say this as they like look back on the early part of their career, you can make a lot of mistakes. You can fail at stuff, like the tech industry in particular is very forgiving of this. And I would have just like,

• 38:39Speaker 01

  I wish I could have like told myself to like have all the drive and the ambition, but just like be a little happier along the way and trust that like eventually it was going to be okay, because it feels so difficult and scary and painful in the moment.

• 38:50Speaker 00

  Well, I can't think of a better way to end Startup School twenty twenty six. Sam Altman, thank you so much.

• 38:56Speaker 01

  Thanks.