Quotes by Sam Altman

“I wouldn't call Loopt a failure. It didn't turn out like I wanted, for sure, but it was fun, I learned a lot, and I made enough money to start investing, which led me to my current job. I don't reg...”

“Check-ins are cool, but kind of a pain.”

“Many founders hire just because it seems like a cool thing to do, and people always ask how many employees you have.”

“Communication services need interoperability to succeed - and Loopt is the first such service since SMS that is available across all major U.S. wireless carriers.”

“There's this famous observation that I totally believe: Great startup ideas are the ones that lie in the intersection of the Venn diagram of 'is a good idea' and 'looks like a bad idea.' So you wan...”

“Maybe I am a bit unusual here, but I am less stressed if I have my phone with me. Because I can spend like an hour in the morning taking care of everything instead of I sit there and wonder what I ...”

“Intelligence is usually easy to tell in a 10-minute conversation. Determination is harder.”

“Making money is often more fun than spending it, though I personally have never regretted money I've spent on friends, new experiences, saving time, travel, and causes I believe in.”

“I think extreme secrecy is a bad sign in all startups. Very few startups die because they tell you exactly how their technology works. On the long list of startup killers, that's pretty far down. T...”

“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 ...”

“We are already in the phase of co-evolution — the AIs affect, effect, and infect us, and then we improve the AI. We build more computing power and run the AI on it, and it figures out how to build ...”

“More important than that, unless we destroy ourselves first, superhuman AI is going to happen, genetic enhancement is going to happen, and brain-machine interfaces are going to happen. It is a fail...”

“The merge can take a lot of forms: We could plug electrodes into our brains, or we could all just become really close friends with a chatbot. But I think a merge is probably our best-case scenario....”

“Although the merge has already begun, it’s going to get a lot weirder. We will be the first species ever to design our own descendants. My guess is that we can either be the biological bootloader f...”

“It’s probably going to happen sooner than most people think. Hardware is improving at an exponential rate—the most surprising thing I’ve learned working on OpenAI is just how correlated increasing ...”

“Regulation will be crucial, and it will take time to understand this. Although the artificial intelligence tools of our generation are not particularly frightening, I think that we are not so far a...”

“Do we make sure AI is a tool that has proper safeguards as it gets really powerful? (November 23, 2023)”

“I aspect AI to be capable of superhuman persuasion before it is superhuman at general intelligence, which may lead to some very strange outcomes.”

“I think AGI will be the best tool humanity has yet created. With it, we will be able to solve all sorts of problems. We'll be able to express ourselves in new creative ways. We'll make just incredi...”

“I’m a Midwestern Jew. I think that fully explains my exact mental model—very optimistic, and prepared for things to go super wrong at any point.”