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Sam Altman, OpenAI - David Senra

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Sam Altman has spent his career at the intersection of startups, investing and artificial intelligence. He says he was fascinated by AI as a child in St. Louis, studied it in college and eventually helped start OpenAI in 2015 after concluding that the most important opportunities often begin as non-consensus bets. His experience investing in startups taught him to look for power laws, back unconventional talent and recognize the decisions that can change a company’s trajectory. At OpenAI, Altman says most of his effort goes toward research and compute. Scaling compute requires coordinating chips, fabrication plants, data centers, power systems, finance, policy, supply chains and logistics—what he describes as potentially the most expensive infrastructure project in history. He argues OpenAI should function primarily as a platform: one direct interface to powerful AI and one application programming interface that lets people build on top of it. That strategy requires killing good ideas to preserve resources for the great ones. Altman expects AI capabilities to advance faster than society and the economy can absorb them. Human habits and institutional inertia will slow the transiti

[David Senra] I just brought up Tobi Lütke and the fact that I recorded with him previously. Why'd you say that you think he's one of the most interesting CEOs right now? [Sam Altman] One of the things that struck me the most about Tobi is in the very early days of AI, and then at every moment along the curve if it's developed, he has been the most forward-leaning CEO. He's in there writing the software himself. He is experimenting with it. He sends us extremely detailed feedback on the product offering, on the capabilities of the models. He was, before anybody else was saying this, he was…

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