Sam Altman

6 points · 3 appearances · 2014–2018 · changed view

“Before we jump in on the how, I want to talk about why you should start a startup. I'm somewhat hesitant to be doing this class at all, because you should never start a startup just for the sake of doing so. There are much easier ways to get rich, and everyone who starts a startup always says — always — that they couldn't have imagined how hard and painful it was going to be. You should only start a startup if you feel compelled by a particular problem, and that you think starting a company is the best way to solve it. The specific passion should come first and the startup second. In fact, all of the big successes we have at YC followed this.”

6 points · 2 appearances · 2025

“First of all, you can't ask it anything. That's very nice of you to say, but there's a lot of things that it's still embarrassingly bad at. But even if we fixed those, which hopefully we will, it doesn't continuously learn and improve. It can't go get better at something that it's currently weak at. It can't go discover new science and update its understanding and do that. And it also kind of can't — even if we lower the bar — it can't just sort of do any knowledge work you could do in front of a computer. Even without the sort of ability to get better at something it doesn't know yet, I might accept that as a definition of AGI. But the current systems — you can't say, like, hey, go do this task for my job, and it goes off and clicks around the internet and calls someone and looks at your files and does it. And without that, it feels definitely short of it.”