Sam Altman - How to Make an Abundant Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP.484]

My guest today is Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI. It's a conversation spanning the history, present, and future of OpenAI, from the origin of ChatGPT through Codex, hardware, and their new Jalapeno chip. We discuss the early decision to buy compute at a scale nobody thought was rational, and the plan to build a gigawatt of new capacity every week. We talk about Kimi and distillation, the Hugging Face incident and what it means for the pace of AI development, and what it's like to raise kids who will grow up never knowing a world without abundant intelligence. Please enjoy my conversation with Sam Altman. For the full show notes, transcript, and links to mentioned content, check out the episode page ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠here⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. ----- Become a Colossus member to get our quarterly print magazine and private audio experience, including exclusive profiles and early access to select episodes. Subscribe at ⁠colossus.com/subscribe⁠. ----- ⁠Ramp’s⁠ mission is to help companies manage their spend in a way that reduces expenses and frees up time for teams to work on more valuable projects. Go to⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠ramp.com/invest⁠⁠ to sign up for free and get a $250 welcome bonus. ----- Trusted by thousands of businesses, ⁠Vanta⁠ continuously monitors your security posture and streamlines audits so you can win enterprise deals and build customer trust without the traditional overhead. Invest Like the Best listeners get a special offer of $1,000 off Vanta when you go to ⁠vanta.com/invest⁠. ----- WorkOS⁠ is the infrastructure B2B and AI-native companies use to sell to enterprise. It covers everything enterprise security requires: SSO, SCIM, RBAC, Audit Logs, AI governance, and more. Trusted by 2,000+ fast-growing companies, including OpenAI, Anthropic, Cursor, and Vercel. ----- Rogo is the AI platform for finance. They're building agents for Wall Street that are trained to understand how bankers and investors actually do work: from diligence and modeling, to turning analysis into deliverables. To learn more, visit rogo.ai/invest. ----- ⁠Ridgeline⁠ has built a complete, real-time, modern operating system for investment managers. It handles trading, portfolio management, compliance, customer reporting, and much more through an all-in-one real-time cloud platform. Visit⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ridgeline.ai⁠. ----- Editing and post-production work for this episode was provided by The Podcast Consultant. Timestamps: (00:00:00) Welcome to Invest Like The Best (00:02:02) Intro: Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI (00:02:35) Refocusing (00:05:43) OpenAI’s Compute Bets (00:09:07) Data Centers (00:11:14) Jalapeno Chip (00:11:52) Kimi, Distillation & Open Source (00:14:39) The Hugging Face Incident (00:17:46) OpenAI's Mission & Vision (00:22:14) All the Returns Are at the Frontier (00:22:27) Bottlenecks: Compute, Research, Data (00:23:49) Sam's View on AI & Jobs (00:26:56) Unpopular Bets That Turned Out Right (00:27:45) Model Cycles (00:29:45) How Sam Uses AI (00:32:44) Having Kids (00:34:56) Why Sam Has No Equity in OpenAI (00:35:33) Robotics (00:36:48) The Origin Story of ChatGPT (00:39:22) How to Get AI into More Hands (00:42:20) How Sam Recruited Great AI Researchers (00:43:57) What Sam Learned From Being an Investor (00:45:22) What the Next 6–36 Months Look Like (00:46:31) Codex (00:49:36) Could We Be Oversupplied in Compute in Two Years? (00:50:09) Sam's View on Scaling Laws (00:50:20) Alec Radford (00:51:12) Formative Moments (00:53:50) Kindest Thing