Sam Altman argues agents make this the most ambitious moment ever to start a startup.
Agents raise the ceiling, not the floorThree months of a 2005 YC build now takes minutes, so aim at the project that was impossible instead of the one that got automated.
Be willing to be misunderstood for yearsOpenAI was called irresponsible and delusional for a decade, and that dismissal bought it time and quiet to build.
Be mildly helpful to a lot of peopleA favour for Stripe — a dinner to recruit Greg Brockman — became an OpenAI co-founder eight years later.
Executive SummaryAI
Altman recalls being in Y Combinator's very first batch in 2005 with a location-sharing company, hiding out in a small Cambridge building while Paul Graham cooked the eight companies dinner every Tuesday and convinced each of them they would be the next Google or Facebook.
What took each company three months to build over a whole YC batch 20 years ago could now be done in about seven minutes by a coding agent, which he says means a founder can now take on the world's most ambitious company rather than mourn the old one.
He tells founders to find a belief they can hold conviction in while the conventional wisdom calls them wrong, joking that only 50 people in the world believed AGI was possible and 45 of them worked at OpenAI, and that a decade of being dismissed was a gift because it left them without serious competitors.
On the Hugging Face incident he calls it both an alignment failure and a security failure and a real reminder that loss-of-control accidents are not theoretical, while warning that power concentrated in one company, model or person would be a long-term disaster even if it bought short-term safety.
He measures the growth ahead in tokens: six and a half years ago OpenAI's token leader used about 100,000 tokens a month while the worldwide per-capita average was zero, today that average is 100,000 and the leader uses hundreds of billions, and he expects the next six months of model progress to feel like the last two years.
Key Quote
“Yeah, we used to joke that only 50 people in the world believed that AGI was possible, but it was okay because 45 of them worked at OpenAI.”
— Sam Altman
Key Quote
“Just like, highest confidence piece of advice here is just find a way to be mildly helpful to a lot of people.”
— Sam Altman
Key Quote
“It will poison your soul. It is a morally bankrupt thing to do.”