Sam Altman Quotes

A big secret is that you can bend the world to your will a surprising percentage of the time—most people don't even try, and just accept that things are the way that they are. People have an enormous capacity to make things happen. A combination of self-doubt, giving up too early, and not pushing hard enough prevents most people from ever reaching anywhere near their potential.

"Ask for what you want. You usually won't get it, and often the rejection will be painful. But when this works, it works surprisingly well. Almost always, the people who say "I am going to keep going until this works, and no matter what the challenges are I'm going to figure them out", and mean it, go on to succeed. They are persistent long enough to give themselves a chance for luck to go their way."

I’m reasonably optimistic about solving the technical alignment problem. We still have a lot of work to do but you know I feel …better and better over time, not worse and worse.

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 incredible things for each other, for ourselves, for the world, for kind of this unfolding human story. And it's new, and anything new comes with change and change is not always all easy. But I think this will be just absolutely tremendous upside. And in nine more years if you're nice enough to invite me back, you'll roll this question and people will say, "How could we have thought we didn't want this?"

In a well functioning society, governments would be doing the AGI project and [nuclear] fusion and a whole bunch of things — and yet they’re not. So we either sit around and watch the gradual decline of state capacity and say ‘that’s a bummer’ and we’re just not going to have any more technical progress . . . or you do the next best thing and just build great companies.

Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.

I think what we believe in very strongly, is that keeping the rate of change in the world relatively constant, rather than, say, go build AGI in secret and then deploy it all at once when you’re done, is much better. This idea that people relatively gradually have time to get used to this incredible new thing that is going to transform so much of the world, get a feel for it, have time to update. You know, institutions and people do not update very well overnight. They need to be part of its evolution, to provide critical feedback, to tell us when we’re doing dumb mistakes, to find the areas of great benefit and potential harm, to make our mistakes and learn our lessons when the stakes are lower than they will be in the future. Although we still would like to avoid them as much as we can, of course. And I don’t just mean we, I mean the field as a whole, sort of understanding, as with any new technology, where the tricky parts are going to be..

Trust the exponential. Flat looking backwards, vertical looking forwards.