I am Rvie Balani, a lecturer in the Management Science and Engineering department and the director of the Alchemist Accelerator for Enterprise Startups at Stanford University. Today, I have the pleasure of welcoming Sam Altman, co-founder and CEO of OpenAI, to the Entrepreneurial Thought Leader Seminar.
OpenAI is the research and deployment company behind ChatGPT, Dolly, and Sora. Sam is known for breaking boundaries and transcending what's possible for both himself and the world. He grew up in the midwest, attended Stanford, and took the ETL seminar as an undergrad. After two years, he joined the inaugural class of Y Combinator with a Social Mobile app company called Looped, which went on to raise money from Sequoia and others. He then dropped out of Stanford and spent seven years on Looped, which was acquired. He rejoined Y Combinator in an operational role and became the president from 2014 to 2019. In 2015, he co-founded OpenAI as a nonprofit research lab with the mission to build general-purpose artificial intelligence that benefits all of humanity.
Sam was named one of Time's 100 most influential people in the world and was also named Time CEO of the Year in 2023. He was most recently added to Forbes' list of the world's billionaires. Sam lives with his husband in San Francisco and splits his time between San Francisco and Napa. He's also a vegetarian.
I asked Sam, if he were a Stanford undergrad today, what three words would describe his feelings. He said excited, optimistic, and curious. I then asked him what three words would describe him now, and he said the same.
When asked for his advice for Stanford undergrads today, Sam said, "I think this is probably the best time to start a company since the internet at least and maybe kind of like in the history of technology. I think with what you can do with AI is going to just get more remarkable every year, and the greatest companies get created at times like this, the most impactful new products get built at times like this."
Sam has a bias towards contributing to AI research and would be agnostic about whether that's in Academia or Private Industry. He thinks staying as a student is a perfectly good thing to do but wouldn't have picked that for himself.
When asked about the biggest near-term challenges in AI, Sam said, "I'm not going to answer that because I think you should never take this kind of advice about what startup to start from anyone. I think you should chart your own course."
Sam is currently wrestling with how to build really big computers and how to put PhD-level intelligence into a product. He's also thinking about how to have a positive impact on society and people's lives with that intelligence.
Sam is reportedly embarking on a semiconductor Foundry Endeavor. He sees AI infrastructure as one of the most important inputs to the future and wants to make more of it available. He wants to look at the entire ecosystem, including chip design, networks, and data centers.
Sam is not worried about stifling human innovation with AGI. He believes that people will just surprise us on the upside with better tools. He is increasingly worried about how to do this all responsibly and is thinking about making training compute more available to the world.
Sam is excited about ChatGPT Five, which is coming out. He's most excited about the fact that it's going to be smarter than the previous versions. He believes that the gravity of that statement is still underrated.
In conclusion, Sam Altman is an entrepreneurial thought leader who is breaking boundaries and transcending what's possible in the world of artificial intelligence. His advice to aspiring entrepreneurs is to chart their own course and take advantage of the opportunities that exist in the world of technology.