How To Build The Future: Sam Altman

Video Description

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