Sam Altman

“Sam Altman said earlier in 2024 that we'll see the first one-person billion-dollar company within our lifetimes, possibly very soon, powered entirely by AI agents doing what used to require hundreds of people — and it REALLY happened.”

“I think Sam Altman is someone who I would never, ever bet against. And I think he's the best politician in the world... when he says we should give 5% away to the administration, he's posturing because he wants to get on the right side.”

“Frontier AI lab. Signed the open-weights letter but is simultaneously lobbying in Washington alongside Anthropic for regulatory frameworks. Panel reads Sam Altman's signature as shrewd public positioning — aligning with Jensen while continuing closed-model lobbying in private.”

“OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told reporters on Capitol Hill that he's discussed the 'need' to slow AI development with White House officials as models grow more powerful.”

“Sam Altman...He now says "we may have to pace the rate of AI development to give ourselves enough time for society to harden around some of these new capability levels."”

“He borrows Jeff Bezos's description of AWS's seven uncontested years as a business miracle, and applies the same label to his own company.”

“"We are now, like, in the singularity. This is the moment."”

“We have really respected people like Yann LeCun or whatever telling journalists like, oh, these guys aren't very good and it's not going to work.”

“what took a full YC batch three months to build can now be done in minutes by coding agents”

“Like we didn't know that we were going to be a product company... ChatGPT and the API weren't conceived until years in”

“I met Greg Brockman, my co-founder of OpenAI, because I was a very early investor in Stripe. When I was like 22 or something... 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. And then like eight years later, we started a company together”

“The world does not understand how to intuit exponentials. So they missed this one. There's got to 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. Be grateful that the world doesn't understand they will eventually”

“We just were doing too many things. We're not focused enough and they're actually all good things to do. But the trick is we're in this unbelievable moment in history where you can only do the very few great things.”

“very frustratingly wrong and dismissive for years at OpenAI. I felt like we knew the biggest secret in the world. Everybody was calling us an idiot. And we had increasing data points to convince ourselves we weren't delusional... 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”

“We are now like in The Singularity. This is the moment… I've been waiting for this my whole life. And I think it's gonna be incredible, hugely positive, awesome for the world… We're actually in it. This is real…”

“Humanity has entered the technological singularity — the long-theorized point when AI surpasses human intelligence and advances unpredictably — calling the moment 'incredible' while criticizing rival labs' darker warnings.”

“Dario called you the YOLO CEO when you were doing some of this early compute allocation.”

“If you had asked most people when we started 10 years ago, like where on the spectrum of nothing to super intelligence do you have like an AI system breaking out of its sandbox and hacking into some other company... people would have said pretty far towards the like super intelligence point. Now the goalposts have moved”

“I would bet that the average startups created today will be like I bet there's some future trillionaires 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”

“Jalapeño is a great example of a very efficient chip. So by saying we're going to make a chip that's really good at a specific workflow and gets some generality and we want to get some tokens per watt win out of that and gets awesome. I think Jalapeño and its successors are going to be a huge competitive advantage for us from that perspective.”

“This was the thing I really learned from Peter Thiel and Paul Graham, both in two different ways, which is that the very best companies, the very best investment opportunities are almost never the ones that look really popular.”

“Here's what Sam Altman will tell the White House this week.”

“A seven-year-old San Francisco startup co-founded by Sam Altman that scans users' irises to prove they are human”

“The reports are that Sam is going to Washington over the next week to go talk about GPT 6.0, which is blowing the doors off.”

“ARR reportedly growing from $33B in May to $41.3B in July... they were expecting to end the year at 60 billion of ARR. And I think they're forecasting more like 75 billion of exit ARR.”

“All the early PayPal guys that did the pre-seed along with Sam Altman's 2%, they're going to do pretty well in the end.”

“OpenAI...is seriously considering a delay until 2027 after Sam Altman's push to get the company's valuation over $1 trillion in the private markets first.”

“The extreme of course is Elon and Sama.”

“Sam Altman said that by 2028 he expects to have automated researchers... I think all those claims tend to be like recruiting ideas as opposed to actual predictions.”

“OpenAI CEO Sam Altman warns of future hiccups to GPT-5.6”

“Altman mocking Musk for selling investors on 'short-term space datacenters.'”

“Altman said: "I'd rather be on the late end of what's reasonable. But you know, I want him to play in the dirt for now."”

“Listed among attendees at Sun Valley alongside Bezos, Zuckerberg, Amodei, and others.”

“Sam Altman arguing that public ownership is a way to share AI's upside.”

“"Andrew Garfield portraying Sam Altman...soon there was speculation that Altman himself wanted to kill it."”

“Sam Altman was with Luke, was like a double collar. Yes, that was the person to be in the Valley... And he's the person to be again 20 years later.”

“OpenAI has discussed giving the U.S. government a 5% equity stake, per the FT.”

“Neon…has purchased *Artificial*, Luca Guadagnino's $40 million film about Sam Altman's firing and rehiring at OpenAI, after Amazon dropped the project following its $50 billion investment in the company.”

“OpenAI and Anthropic are rumored to go public”

“Altman said he and his team were 'pretty wrong' about the impact on white-collar work”

“"In May, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said he was 'wrong' about projections that AI would wipe out entire categories of jobs."”

“"What it was like inside OpenAI the weekend the board fired, and then reinstated, its CEO"”

“"What Yash admires about Sam Altman" *(timestamp 28:18)*”

“Sam introduced me and... a few weeks later he emailed asking if he could invest.”

“Codex won us over — they stole my heart two months ago when he said you can have two months free... we switched everything to Codex.”

“A lot of these companies don't, especially at the beginning before say OpenAI had a product, they weren't a consumer product for like the first five years or whatever. And so they didn't need to talk to anyone else.”

“Sam Altman's relationship with Baidu was still quite good at that time, because Lu Qi was apparently his mentor.”

“'Sam Altman, the co-founder of OpenAI, said that today the only bottleneck to building great products is knowing what to create.'”