Late last week, in a rare sit-down before a small audience, I spent an hour with Sam Altman, the former president of Y Combinator and, since 2019, the CEO of OpenAI, the company he famously co-founded with Elon Musk and numerous others in 2015 to develop artificial intelligence for the "benefit of humanity."
The crowd wanted to learn more about his plans for OpenAI, which has taken the world by storm in the last six weeks owing to the public release of its ChatGPT language model, a chatbot that has educators in particular both dazzled and alarmed. (OpenAI's DALL-E technology, which enables users to create digital images by simply describing what they envision, generated only slightly less buzz when it was released to the public earlier last year.)
Because Altman is also an active investor -- one whose biggest return to date comes from the payments startup Stripe, he said at the event -- we spent the first half of our time together focused on some of his most ambitious investments.
To learn about these, including a supersonic jet company and a startup that aims to help create babies from human skin cells, you might tune in for the roughly 20 minutes we spent on them. (You'll also hear Altman's thoughts about Twitter under the stewardship of Elon Musk, and why Altman is "not super interested" in crypto or web3. "I love the spirit of the web3 people," Altman said with a shrug. "But I don't intuitively feel why we need it.)
We'll feature more from our fuller conversation, including about OpenAI, soon. In the meantime, what follows is an excerpt from our discussion about one of Altman's biggest bets: a nuclear fusion company called Helion Energy that, like OpenAI, is aiming to turn another long-elusive promise -- this one of abundant energy -- into reality. The excerpt has been edited lightly for length and clarity.
What makes a Sam Altman deal?
SA: I try to just do things that I'm interested in at this point. One of the things I have realized is, all of the companies I think I have added a lot of value to are the ones that I sort of like to think about in my free time on a hike or whatever, and then text the founders and say, 'Hey, I have this idea for you.' Every founder deserves an investor who is going to think about them while they're hiking. And so I've tried to hold myself to the stuff that I really love, which tends to be the hard tech, [involving] years of R&D, [is] capital intensive or is sort of risky research. But if it works, it really works.
More here.
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