Because that just seemed impossibly crazy.

I remember a rash of criticism for you guys at that moment.

We really wanted to push on that, and we were far less resourced than DeepMind and others.

And so we said, okay, they're going to try a lot of things, and we've just got to pick one and really concentrate, and that's how we can win here.

Most of the world still does not understand the value of a fairly extreme level of conviction on one bet.

That's why I'm so excited for startups right now.

It is because the world is still sleeping on all of this to such an astonishing degree.

We have a real treat for you today.

Sam Altman, thanks for joining us.

Thanks, Gary.

This is actually a reboot of your series, How to Build the Future.

And so welcome back to the series that you started.

That was like eight years ago. I was trying to think about that.

Yeah, that's wild.

I'm glad it's being rebooted.

That's right.

Let's talk about your newest essay on the age of intelligence.

You know, is this the best time ever to be starting a technology company?

Let's at least say it's the best time yet.

Hopefully there'll be even better times in the future.

I sort of think with each successive major technological revolution, you've been able to do more than you could before.

And I would expect the companies to be more amazing and impactful and everything else.

So yeah, I think it's the best time yet.

Big companies have the edge when things are like moving slowly and not that dynamic.

And then when something like this or mobile or the internet or semiconductor revolution happens, or probably like back in the days of the Industrial Revolution, that was when upstarts had their have their edge.

So yeah, this is like and it's been a while since we've had one of these.

So this is like pretty exciting.

In the essay, you actually say a really big thing, which is ASI, super intelligence, is actually thousands of days away.

Maybe. I mean, that's our hope, our guess, whatever.

But that's a very wild statement.

Yeah. Tell us about it.

I mean, that's big.

That is really big.

I can see a path where the work we are doing just keeps compounding.

And the rate of progress we've made over the last three years continues for the next three or six or nine or whatever.

You know, nine years would be like 3,500 days or whatever.

If we can keep this rate of improvement or even increase it, like that system will be quite capable of doing a lot of things.

I think already even a system like O1 is capable of doing like quite a lot of things.

From just like a raw cognitive IQ on a closed end, well-defined task in a certain area.

I'm like, O1 is like a very smart thing.

And I think we're nowhere near the limit of progress.

I mean, that was an architecture shift that sort of unlocked a lot.

And what I'm sort of hearing is that these things are going to compound.

We could hit some like unexpected wall or we could be missing something.

But it looks to us like there's a lot of compounding in front of us still to happen.

I mean, this essay is probably the most techno-optimist of almost anything I've seen out there.

Some of the things we get to look forward to, fixing the climate, establishing a space colony, the discovery of all of physics, near limitless intelligence and abundant energy.

I do think all of those things and probably a lot more we can't even imagine are maybe not that far away.

And one of, and I think it's like tremendously exciting that we can talk about this even semi-seriously now.

One of the things that I always have loved most about YC is it encourages slightly implausible degrees of techno-optimism.

And just a belief that like, ah, you can figure this out.

And, you know, in a world that I think is like sort of consistently telling people, this is not going to work, you can't do this thing, you can't do that.

I think the kind of early PG spirit of just encouraging founders to like think a little bit bigger is like, it is a special thing in the world.

The abundant energy thing seems like a pretty big deal.

You know, there's sort of path A and path B, you know, if we do achieve abundant energy, it seems like this is a real unlock.

Almost any work, not just, you know, knowledge work, but actually like real physical work could be unlocked with robotics and with language and intelligence on tap.

Like, there's a real age of abundance.

I think these are like the key to, the two key inputs to everything else that we want.

There's a lot of other stuff, of course, that matters, but the unlock that would happen if we could just get truly abundant intelligence, truly abundant energy, what we'd be able to make happen in the world, like both like come up with better ideas more quickly and then also like make them happen in the physical world, like to say nothing of, it'd be nice to be able to run lots of AI and that takes energy too.

I think that would be a huge unlock in the fact that it's, I'm not sure whether to be surprised that it's all happening at the same time, or if this is just like the natural effect of an increasing rate of technological progress, but it's certainly a very exciting time to be alive and a great time to do a startup.

Well, so we sort of walked through this age of abundance, you know, maybe robots can actually manufacture, do anything.

Almost all physical labor can then result in material progress, not just for the most wealthy, but for everyone.

You know, what happens if we don't unleash unlimited energy?

If, you know, there's some physical law that prevents us from exactly that?

Solar plus storage is on a good enough trajectory that even if we don't get a big nuclear breakthrough, we would be like okay-ish.

But for sure it seems that driving the cost of energy down and the abundance of it up has like a very direct impact on quality of life.

And eventually we'll solve every problem in physics, so we're going to figure this out, it's just a question of when.

And we deserve it.

There's, you know, someday we'll be talking not about fusion or whatever, but about the Dyson sphere and that'll be awesome too.

Yeah.

This is a point in time, whatever feels like abundant energy to us will feel like not nearly enough to our great-grandchildren.

And there's a big universe out there with a lot of matter.

Yeah.

Wanted to switch gears a little bit to sort of, earlier you were mentioning Paul Graham, who brought us all together, really created Y Combinator.

He likes to tell the story of how, you know, how you got into YC was actually, you were a Stanford freshman.

And he said, you know what, this is the very first YC batch in 2005.

And he said, you know what, you're a freshman and YC will still be here next time, you should just wait.

And you said, I'm a sophomore and I'm coming.

And you're widely known in our community as, you know, one of the most formidable people.

Where do you think that came from?

That one story, I think I would happy, I'd be happy if that like drifted off.

Well, now it's, it's purely immortalized here.

Here it is.

My memory of that is that, like, I needed to reschedule an interview one day or something.

And PG tried to, like, say, like, just do it next year or whatever.

And then I think I said some nicer version of, I'm a sophomore and I'm coming.

But yeah, you know, these things get slightly apocryphal.

It's funny, I don't, and I say this with no false modesty, I don't like identify as a formidable person at all.

In fact, I think there's a lot of ways in which I'm really not.

I do have a little bit of a, just like, I don't see why things have to be the way they are.

And so I'm just going to, like, do this thing that from first principles seems like fine.

And I always felt a little bit weird about that.

And then I remember one of the things I thought was so great about YC, and still that I care so much about YC, is it was like a collection of the weird people who are just like, I'm just going to do my thing.

The part of this that does resonate as a, like, accurate self-identity thing is,

I do think you can just do stuff or try stuff a surprising amount of the time.

And I think more of that is a good thing.

And then I think one of the things that both of us found at YC was a bunch of people who all believed that you could just do stuff.

For a long time, when I was trying to, like, figure out what made YC so special,

I thought that it was like, okay, you have this, like, very amazing person telling you you can do stuff I believe in you.

And as a young founder, that felt so special and inspiring.

Of course it is.

But the thing that I didn't understand until much later was it was the peer group of other people doing that.

And one of the biggest pieces of advice I would give to young people now is finding that peer group as early as you can was so important to me.

And I didn't realize it was something that mattered.

I kind of thought, ah, like, I have, you know, I'll figure it out on my own.

But, man, being around, like, inspiring peers, so, so valuable.

What's funny is both of us did spend time at Stanford.

I actually did graduate, which is, I probably shouldn't have done that, but I did.

You pursued the path of, you know, far greater return by dropping out.

But, you know, that was a community that purportedly had a lot of these characteristics.

But I was still beyond surprised at how much more potent it was with a room full of founders.

It was, I was just going to say the same thing.

Actually, I liked Stanford a lot, but I was, I did not feel surrounded by people that made me, like, want to be better and more ambitious and whatever else.

And to the degree I did, the thing you were competing with your peers on was, like, who was going to get the internship at which investment bank?

Which I'm embarrassed to say, I fell in that trap.

This is, like, how powerful peer groups are.

It's a very easy decision to not go back to school after, like, seeing what the, like, YC vibe was like.

Yeah.

There's a powerful quote by Carl Jung that I really love.

It's, you know, the world will come and ask you who you are, and if you don't know, it will tell you.

It sounds like being very intentional about who you want to be and who you want to be around as early as possible is very important.

Yeah, this was definitely one of my takeaways, at least for myself, is you, no one is immune to peer pressure.

And so all you can do is, like, pick good peers.

Yeah.

Obviously, you know, you went on to create Looped, you know, sell that, go to Green Dot.

And then we ended up getting to work together at YC.

Talk to me about, like, the early days of YC research.

Like, one of the really cool things that you brought to YC was this experimentation.

And you sort of, I mean, I remember you coming back to partner rooms and talking about some of the rooms that you were getting to sit in with, like, the Larry and Sergeys of the world.

And that, you know, AI was sort of at the tip of everyone's tongue because it felt so close.

And yet it was, you know, that was 10 years ago.

The thing I always thought would be the coolest retirement job was to get to, like, run a research lab.

And it was not specific to AI at that time.

When we started talking about YC research, well, not only was it going to, it did end up funding, like, a bunch of different efforts.

And I wish I could tell the story of, like, if it was obvious that AI was going to work and be the thing.

But, like, we tried a lot of bad things, too, around that time.

I read a few books on, like, the history of Xerox Park and Bell Labs and stuff.

And I think there were a lot of people, like, it was in the air of Silicon Valley at the time that we need to, like, have good research labs again.

And I just thought it would be so cool to do.

And it was sort of similar to what YC does in that you're going to, like, allocate capital to smart people.

And sometimes it's going to work and sometimes it's not going to.

And I just wanted to try it.

AI for sure was having a mini moment.

This was, like, kind of late 2014, 2015, early 2016 was, like, this superintelligence discussion, like, the book Superintelligence was happening.

Both strung me up.

Yeah.

The DeepMind had had a few, like, impressive results, but a little bit of a different direction.

You know, I had been an AI nerd forever.

So I was like, oh, it'd be so cool to try to do something.

But it was very hard to say.

Was ImageNet out yet?

ImageNet was out.

Yeah.

Yeah.

For a while at that point.

So you could tell if it was a hot dog or not.

You could sometimes.

Yeah.

That was getting there.

Yeah.

You know, how did you identify the initial people you wanted involved in, you know, YC research and OpenAI?

I mean, Greg Brockman was early.

In retrospect, it feels like this movie montage.

And there were, like, all of these, like, you know, at the beginning of, like, the Bank Heist movie when you're, like, driving around to find the people and whatever.

And they're like, you son of a bitch.

I'm in.

Right.

Like, Ilya, I, like, heard he was really smart.

And then I watched some video of his.

And he's extremely smart.

Like, true, true, genuine genius and visionary.

But also, he has this incredible presence.

And so I watched this video of his on YouTube or something.