Sam AltmanCo-founder & CEO

Clearly AI, which now enables small teams to build extremely advanced products at rapid speeds. A ten-week-old startup today can achieve what used to require a year of work, making old startup playbooks obsolete.

It is changing so quickly that traditional mental models no longer apply. Software is becoming virtually free, and tasks that once seemed incredibly difficult, like building rockets or complex physical robotics, may soon become much easier as AI tools scale.

Startups have the biggest edge when the ground is shifting, costs are dropping rapidly, and cycle times are short. Under these conditions, the speed and flexibility of small teams outweigh the capital advantages of large, established corporations.

Given how much the landscape is in flux, I am surprised more people are not trying to build massive, completely new things with these tools. There is a strong temptation to apply today's agents to easy wins rather than planning for what scaling laws will enable in two to four years.

I have developed a deep trust in exponentials. The market has not fully adapted to the fact that model progress will continue, meaning it is entirely rational to start building products today that require much smarter or cheaper models to function.

It only comes from practice. Operating through chaos and trusting that you will figure things out requires emotional reps that cannot be taught intellectually. Young founders often struggle with early crises because they have not yet built up this resilience.

If you view the alternative to a bad day not as a good day, but as having no experience at all, you become grateful for the bad days. Boring and painful parts of life are what provide emotional depth and range, which is far better than the fast-forward button.

Our mission is to make powerful intelligence extremely cheap, abundant, and decentralized to empower humanity. I worry deeply about AI authoritarianism, where a small group of people or a single company controls a machine god to dominate the world.

Transistors are the primary bottleneck, followed closely by electrons, meaning the physical energy grid. To produce intelligence and manipulate matter, we must build massive data centers, which requires substantial energy and physical infrastructure.

You have to talk to them constantly. We show our core suppliers upcoming models, share our research, and explain what the technology will enable. Getting them to believe in the mission is far more effective than just requesting a turbine or a chip on a specific date.

Before corporations, businesses were limited to family trust. The joint stock corporation allowed sovereigns to grant status that let entities amass capital, protect liability, and align incentives. This invention is what enabled the rapid scaling of technologies during the industrial revolution.

Capitalism has driven an extraordinary, unprecedented drop in extreme infant mortality and poverty over the last hundred years. If you plot quality of life improvements and economic growth across human history, the curve bends dramatically upward after the invention of the company.

It varies. For many, it is about seeing how good they can get at the strategic game and constantly improving. High-ego CEOs can be annoying, but our system aligns their self-interest with creating valuable products that society benefits from.

Ten years ago, artificial general intelligence was a far-off, improbable dream discussed at lunch tables. Today, we are in the singularity moment where the exponential curve is actively climbing, and the decisions we make will determine if we head toward liberty or authoritarianism.

It is actually a bad habit that shortens my attention span, but it provides a huge amount of short-term context. I act like an AI model with high short-term context but low long-term memory, which lets me make slightly better decisions in the moment when research breakthroughs happen.

Planning backwards creates rigid worldviews that fall apart when the ground shifts. I prefer to hold a small number of strong convictions about the direction of the future, while planning forwards from our current state and remaining highly flexible on everything else.

We must continuously focus on our critical path. When GPT-3 succeeded, we shut down robotics to focus on language models. Recently, when coding agents began showing massive, compounding growth, we made the painful decision to pause Sora and the browser to redirect resources.

Jony Ive taught me that great design is about deeply studying and understanding the problem before ever thinking about the solution. He spends months researching history, materials, typefaces, and sounds, documenting the entire exploration in detail before refining a new concept.