Sam Altman+

-

Here is a photo of my family. I love them more than anything. Images have power, I hope. Normally we try to be pretty private, but in this case I am sharing a photo in the hopes that it might dissuade the next person from throwing a Molotov cocktail at our house, no matter what they think about me. The first person did it last night, at 3:45 am in the morning. Thankfully it bounced off the house and no one got hurt. Words have power too. There was an incendiary article about me a few days ago. Someone said to me yesterday they thought it was coming at a time of great anxiety about AI and that

Sora update #1

We have been learning quickly from how people are using Sora and taking feedback from users, rightsholders, and other interested groups. We of course spent a lot of time discussing this before launch, but now that we have a product out we can do more than just theorize. We are going to make two changes soon (and many more to come). First, we will give rightsholders more granular control over generation of characters, similar to the opt-in model for likeness but with additional controls. We are hearing from a lot of rightsholders who are very excited for this new kind of "interactive fan fictio

Sora 2

We are launching a new app called Sora. This is a combination of a new model called Sora 2, and a new product that makes it easy to create, share, and view videos. This feels to many of us like the “ChatGPT for creativity” moment, and it feels fun and new. There is something great about making it really easy and fast to go from idea to result, and the new social dynamics that emerge. Creativity could be about to go through a Cambrian explosion, and along with it, the quality of art and entertainment can drastically increase. Even in the very early days of playing with Sora, it’s been striking

Abundant Intelligence

Growth in the use of AI services has been astonishing; we expect it to be even more astonishing going forward. As AI gets smarter, access to AI will be a fundamental driver of the economy, and maybe eventually something we consider a fundamental human right. Almost everyone will want more AI working on their behalf. To be able to deliver what the world needs—for inference compute to run these models, and for training compute to keep making them better and better—we are putting the groundwork in place to be able to significantly expand our ambitions for building out AI infrastructure. If AI sta

Jakub and Szymon

AI has gotten remarkably better in recent years; ChatGPT can do amazing things that we take for granted. This is as it should be, and is the story of human progress. But behind the blinking circle, nicely abstracted away, is the greatest story of human ingenuity I have ever seen. A lot of people have worked unbelievably hard to discover how to build something that most experts thought was impossible on this timeframe, and to build a company to deliver products at massive scale to let people benefit from it. Most people who use ChatGPT will never think about the people that put so much work int

The Gentle Singularity

We are past the event horizon; the takeoff has started. Humanity is close to building digital superintelligence, and at least so far it’s much less weird than it seems like it should be. Robots are not yet walking the streets, nor are most of us talking to AI all day. People still die of disease, we still can’t easily go to space, and there is a lot about the universe we don’t understand. And yet, we have recently built systems that are smarter than people in many ways, and are able to significantly amplify the output of people using them. The least-likely part of the work is behind us; the sc

Three Observations

Our mission is to ensure that AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) benefits all of humanity. Systems that start to point to AGI* are coming into view, and so we think it’s important to understand the moment we are in. AGI is a weakly defined term, but generally speaking we mean it to be a system that can tackle increasingly complex problems, at human level, in many fields. People are tool-builders with an inherent drive to understand and create, which leads to the world getting better for all of us. Each new generation builds upon the discoveries of the generations before to create even more

Reflections

The second birthday of ChatGPT was only a little over a month ago, and now we have transitioned into the next paradigm of models that can do complex reasoning. New years get people in a reflective mood, and I wanted to share some personal thoughts about how it has gone so far, and some of the things I’ve learned along the way. As we get closer to AGI, it feels like an important time to look at the progress of our company. There is still so much to understand, still so much we don’t know, and it’s still so early. But we know a lot more than we did when we started. We started OpenAI almost nine

GPT-4o

There are two things from our announcement today I wanted to highlight. First, a key part of our mission is to put very capable AI tools in the hands of people for free (or at a great price). I am very proud that we’ve made the best model in the world available for free in ChatGPT, without ads or anything like that. Our initial conception when we started OpenAI was that we’d create AI and use it to create all sorts of benefits for the world. Instead, it now looks like we’ll create AI and then other people will use it to create all sorts of amazing things that we all benefit from. We are a busi

What I Wish Someone Had Told Me

Optimism, obsession, self-belief, raw horsepower and personal connections are how things get started. Cohesive teams, the right combination of calmness and urgency, and unreasonable commitment are how things get finished. Long-term orientation is in short supply; try not to worry about what people think in the short term, which will get easier over time. It is easier for a team to do a hard thing that really matters than to do an easy thing that doesn’t really matter; audacious ideas motivate people. Incentives are superpowers; set them carefully. Concentrate your resources on a small number o

Helion Needs You

Helion has been progressing even faster than I expected and is on pace in 2024 to 1) demonstrate Q > 1 fusion and 2) resolve all questions needed to design a mass-producible fusion generator. The goals of the company are quite ambitious—clean, continuous energy for 1 cent per kilowatt-hour, and the ability to manufacture enough power plants to satisfy the current electrical demand of earth in a ten year period. If both things happen, it will transform the world. Abundant, clean, and radically inexpensive energy will elevate the quality of life for all of us—think about how much the cost of ene

DALL•E 2

Today we did a research launch of DALL•E 2, a new AI tool that can create and edit images from natural language instructions. Most importantly, we hope people love the tool and find it useful. For me, it’s the most delightful thing to play with we’ve created so far. I find it to be creativity-enhancing, helpful for many different situations, and fun in a way I haven’t felt from technology in a while. But I also think it’s noteworthy for a few reasons: 1) This is another example of what I think is going to be a new computer interface trend: you say what you want in natural language or with cont

Helion

I’m delighted to be investing more in Helion. Helion is by far the most promising approach to fusion I’ve seen. David and Chris are two of the most impressive founders and builders (in the sense of building fusion machines, in addition to building companies!) I have ever met, and they have done something remarkable. When I first invested in them back in 2014, I was struck by the thoughtfulness of their plans about the scientific approach, the system design, cost optimizations, and the fuel cycle. And now, with a tiny fraction of the money spent on other fusion efforts but the culture of a star

The Strength of Being Misunderstood

A founder recently asked me how to stop caring what other people think. I didn’t have an answer, and after reflecting on it more, I think it's the wrong question. Almost everyone cares what someone thinks (though caring what everyone thinks is definitely a mistake), and it's probably important. Caring too much makes you a sheep. But you need to be at least a little in tune with others to do something useful for them. It seems like there are two degrees of freedom: you can choose the people whose opinions you care about (and on what subjects), and you can choose the timescale you care about the

PG and Jessica

A lot of people want to replicate YC in some other industry or some other place or with some other strategy. In general, people seem to assume that: 1) although there was some degree of mystery or luck about how YC got going, it can’t be that hard, and 2) if you can get it off the ground, the network effects are self-sustaining. More YC-like things are good for the world; I generally try to be helpful. But almost none of them work. People are right about the self-sustaining part, but they can’t figure out how to get something going. The entire secret to YC getting going was PG and Jessica—ther

Researchers and Founders

I spent many years working with founders and now I work with researchers. Although there are always individual exceptions, on average it’s surprising to me how different the best people in these groups are (including in some qualities that I had assumed were present in great people everywhere, like very high levels of self-belief). So I’ve been thinking about the ways they’re the same, because maybe there is something to learn about qualities of really effective people in general. The best people in both groups spend a lot of time reflecting on some version of the Hamming question—"what are th

Project Covalence

Almost every company and non-profit working on COVID-19 that I offered to help asked for support with clinical trials—for companies focusing on developing novel drugs, vaccines, and diagnostics, rapidly spinning up trials is one of their biggest bottlenecks. Science remains the only way out of the COVID-19 crisis. Dramatically improving clinical trials, which are usually time-consuming and cost tens to hundreds of millions of dollars, is one of the highest-leverage ways to get out of it faster. The goal of this project, in collaboration with TrialSpark and Dr. Mark Fishman, is to offer much be

Idea Generation

The most common question prospective startup founders ask is how to get ideas for startups. The second most common question is if you have any ideas for their startup. But giving founders an idea almost always doesn’t work. Having ideas is among the most important qualities for a startup founder to have—you will need to generate lots of new ideas in the course of running a startup. YC once tried an experiment of funding seemingly good founders with no ideas. I think every company in this no-idea track failed. It turns out that good founders have lots of ideas about everything, so if you want t

Please Fund More Science

Experts on the COVID-19 pandemic seem to think there are three ways out—that is, for life, health, and the economy to return roughly to normal. Either we get a vaccine good enough that R0 for the world goes below 1, a good enough treatment that people no longer need to be afraid, or we develop a great culture of testing, contract tracing, masks, and isolation. I wish that the federal government were doing much more—it would be great to see even a few percent of the recent stimulus bill go to funding R+D. But they don’t seem to be funding enough science, and although I think concerns about the

Funding for COVID-19 Projects

I’m trying to fund startups/projects helping with COVID-19, because it’s basically the one thing I know how to do that can help. I think we will soon have enough testing capacity, so now I’d like to start funding more startups working on: Producing a lot of ventilators or masks/gowns very quickly. This will require a lot of repurposing and creativity but thankfully is an engineering problem not a scientific ones. Screening existing drugs for effectiveness. Novel approaches to vaccines (i.e., not doing what the big pharma companies are already doing). Novel therapeutics that the big pharma comp

The Virus

Although I still hope things will go differently, the experts I’ve spoken to think we are likely to face a global tragedy—hundreds of thousands of deaths from Covid-19. I hope that society views this as a warning for the future. Covid-19 is bad, but only a warm-up. I think it’s unlikely that this is the worst new pandemic (human-created or otherwise) we’ll see in our lifetimes. We need to be ready to deal with it much better next time. In the meantime, young healthy people should try to avoid getting Covid-19 for as long as possible. It’s true that it doesn’t seem to be very bad for young peop

Hard Startups

The most counterintuitive secret about startups is that it’s often easier to succeed with a hard startup than an easy one. A hard startup requires a lot more money, time, coordination, or technological development than most startups. A good hard startup is one that will be valuable if it works (not all hard problems are worth solving!). I remember when Instagram started to get really popular—it felt like you couldn’t go a day without hearing about another photo sharing startup. That year, probably over 1,000 photo sharing startups were funded, while there were fewer than ten nuclear fusion sta

How To Invest In Startups

There is a lot of advice about how to be a good startup founder. But there isn’t very much about how to be a good startup investor. Before going any further, I should point out that this is a particularly hard time to invest in startups—it’s easier right now to be a capital-taker than a capital-giver. It seems that more people want to be investors than founders, and that there’s an apparent never-ending flow of capital looking for access to startups. The law of supply and demand has done its thing. Valuations have risen, and the best investment opportunities are flooded with interest. As a fri

How To Be Successful

I’ve observed thousands of founders and thought a lot about what it takes to make a huge amount of money or to create something important. Usually, people start off wanting the former and end up wanting the latter. Here are 13 thoughts about how to achieve such outlier success. Everything here is easier to do once you’ve already reached a baseline degree of success (through privilege or effort) and want to put in the work to turn that into outlier success. [1] But much of it applies to anyone. 1. Compound yourself Compounding is magic. Look for it everywhere. Exponential curves are the key to

Reinforcement Learning Progress

Today, OpenAI released a new result. We used PPO (Proximal Policy Optimization), a general reinforcement learning algorithm invented by OpenAI, to train a team of 5 agents to play Dota and beat semi-pros. This is the game that to me feels closest to the real world and complex decision making (combining strategy, tactics, coordinating, and real-time action) of any game AI had made real progress against so far. The agents we train consistently outperform two-week old agents with a win rate of 90-95%. We did this without training on human-played games—we did design the reward functions, of course

US Digital Currency

I am pretty sure cryptocurrency is here to stay in some form (at least as a store of value, which is the only use case we have seen work at scale so far). There was possibly a time when governments could have totally stopped it, but it feels like that’s in the rearview mirror. However, I think it’s very possible that the dominant cryptocurrency hasn’t been created yet (Google was years late to the search engine party, and Facebook came long after most people assumed the social network wars were won). And from the perspective of a nation, there are real problems with current systems, especially

Productivity

I think I am at least somewhat more productive than average, and people sometimes ask me for productivity tips. So I decided to just write them all down in one place. Compound growth gets discussed as a financial concept, but it works in careers as well, and it is magic. A small productivity gain, compounded over 50 years, is worth a lot. So it’s worth figuring out how to optimize productivity. If you get 10% more done and 1% better every day compared to someone else, the compounded difference is massive. What you work on It doesn’t matter how fast you move if it’s in a worthless direction. Pi

A Clarification

I made a point in this post inelegantly in a way that was easy to misunderstand, so I’d like to clarify it. I didn’t mean that we need to tolerate brilliant homophobic jerks in the lab so that we can have scientific progress. Although there are famous counterexamples, most of the best scientists I’ve met are unusually nice, open-minded people. Generally I expect that labs that don’t tolerate jerks will produce more impressive results than the ones that do, and choosing not to employ jerks is a good idea—jerks usually reduce the net output of organizations. What I meant is simply that we need,

E Pur Si Muove

Earlier this year, I noticed something in China that really surprised me. I realized I felt more comfortable discussing controversial ideas in Beijing than in San Francisco. I didn’t feel completely comfortable—this was China, after all—just more comfortable than at home. That showed me just how bad things have become, and how much things have changed since I first got started here in 2005. It seems easier to accidentally speak heresies in San Francisco every year. Debating a controversial idea, even if you 95% agree with the consensus side, seems ill-advised. This will be very bad for startup

The Merge

A popular topic in Silicon Valley is talking about what year humans and machines will merge (or, if not, what year humans will get surpassed by rapidly improving AI or a genetically enhanced species). Most guesses seem to be between 2025 and 2075. People used to call this the singularity; now it feels uncomfortable and real enough that many seem to avoid naming it at all. Perhaps another reason people stopped using the word “singularity” is that it implies a single moment in time, and it now looks like the merge is going to be a gradual process. And gradual processes are hard to notice. I beli