AI Geek

JORGE CUETO Hi. Everyone Welcome to our Talks at the Google event, I’m going to go through some logistics first. This is a fireside. Chat-style talk, So it will take about 40 minutes to talk through some questions.

And then, in the last 20 minutes, we’ll open up to the audience to submit questions both in person here through a mic in the back of the room and also through the Dory at go/ask-sam, And I’d like to thank everyone who has helped out to make. This talk is possible, including our facilities, team and everyone on the PM speaker, series, and organizing team. So, it’s great to have Sam Altman here with us today for Talks at Google Sam is the President of Y Combinator, which is widely regarded as one of the top startup incubators. In Silicon Valley, He went to Stanford and studied computer science and was the founder and CEO of a mobile location-based startup called Loopt, which was funded by YC as part of its first class of startups and acquired by a financial services, company Green Dot.

President of Y Combinator since then, he’s worked on a wide range of initiatives from YC Research, which is a non-profit branch of Y Combinator that focuses on doing pure research. Around moon-shot ideas like universal basic income. And he’s also worked on OpenAI, which is a non-profit AI research company, looking into finding ways to create safe, friendly, artificial intelligence that can actually help all of humanity, And it’s great to have you here, SAM ALTMAN, Thanks for having me

So just as I mentioned, you’re involved in a wide range of things, from YC to OpenAI And most recently you released The United Slate. So I wanted to ask you what you think about prioritizing the projects that you work on for SAM ALTMAN. You know, I think optimal time allocation is probably like an AI, complete problem. I think if you can get to spend, like 1 % of your time perfectly, that’s really good. And. So I think this idea of figuring out what to focus on and what not to focus on is both really hard and still significantly under-invested. In

The frameworks that I have used sort two big frameworks that I’ve used to figure out how to allocate time impacted. Maximization slash, regret minimisation. So I try to look at those two curves together And I try to think about where I can have the biggest net impact on the world net positive impact on the world, Easy to have a big impact And then also just regret. Minimization

You know you get to live once It’s really important that you do what you want to do and that you spend time with the people you’d like to work with and work on, the things that you find personally fulfilling, And so if I think I’m going to really regret doing something or regret not doing something, even if I think it’s not the best use of my time for a pure sort of net impact on the world, I’m still willing to take that really seriously. And. I think that makes me do better at the things I do that do help the world. So you know the broad things that I’ve learned that I like to do. — one is to teach people

Another is to create economic growth. I really do believe that one of the things that are most fundamentally going wrong right now in the country is that we don’t have enough economic growth And the little that we do is not evenly distributed at all, And so I think, in a democracy, you really want everyone’s lives to get better every year. We’re, basically insensitive to the absolute quality of our lives and extremely sensitive to relative differences year over year to our neighbours

And it’s really important that everyone’s life is getting better constantly And I think economic growth is important in that. I think that AI is going to be the most important technological trend of our lifetime. So I spend a lot of my time on that And you know I try to think about things on those two strategies.

Impact Maximization
The other framework, besides the sort of impact maximization, regret, minimization that I found really useful, is spend a little bit of effort trying a lot of things and then relentlessly prune down and focus quickly on the ones that you like, and the ones that seem to be Working So in some sense this is the Y Combinator model of fund a lot of startups with a little bit of money, And then you know most don’t work out and some work really well. You spend more time and more money on the ones that do Hey guys.

This is the thing that I’ve tried to apply to my life. More generally is thidea that I can try a lot of things with a little bit of effort, It’s very hard to predict exactly what’s going to work and what hasn’t, But then the hard part about that. The thing that most people don’t do is really want to relentlessly focus on the ones that do work. And? The last thing I’ll say about prioritization is the other hack I have learned if you can get one really great partner with you on every project that will cover up a lot of the slack Because if you try to do multiple things at once, crises come At the same times,

JORGE CUETO

And that’s really hard, if you have to do it all yourself, JORGE CUETO And focusing more specifically on productivity. What are some life hacks? Maybe you apply it to make your every day more productive. Sam ALTMAN, I mean, I think, there’s like a lot of crap written about productivity secrets on the internet And people sort of like get into this thing, where they spend more time trying to be productive about their productivity system than actually getting things done. Well say two: I think pieces of advice that aren’t that obvious

One is, I think, far more important than any particular system is just figuring out the right things to work on, And so all of the time that people spend with this new productivity app or that or whatever would be better spent like really trying to think diligently About I have the same number of hours as anybody else. What am I going to spend them on getting that right is more important than being exactly being perfectly productive with that hourss? A big part of that is not doing things that waste time.

I think if you can just focus on the things that are important and not do the things that waste time you can be fairly sloppy with productivity, otherwise and you’ll still get far more done than most people. It’s really hard to do, though. The other thing that I think people don’t think about enough is figuring out your own personal rhythms of productivity And there’s a huge variance. I’ve noticed between people that figured this out and don’t So me ppersonally. It turns out that I am most productive. If I go to sleep late, wake up late and then keep the first like three or four hours of the day and don’t schedule any meetings like work from home. Get there my list of stuff, then and then pack all my meetings when I’m kind of less productive at just grinding stuff out or thinking creatively in the afternoon.

And it took me some number of years to figure out because it didn’t fit well with the work schedule I was naturally in, But then I was like all right. If this is the thing that makes me most productive, then I’m going to make my whole schedule work to support that, And that was a really important change for me. So I think, figuring out your own personal, optimal times to work on what kind of different things people don’t really talk about, that much

And at least for me, it had a huge impact, JORGE CUETO, Shifting gears a little bit but still trying to get your perspective on different things related to day-to-day. But one of the key issues that has come up recently is bias in the workplace and both conscious and unconscious bias, And I wanted to get your perspective on what are some of the strategies that you implement personally, whether in the way you interact with people that You encounter or in how you approach the decision, making process and using strategies to minimize your own bias. Sam ALTMAN Look. I think this is an important conversation happening in Silicon Valley right now.

And there are a lot of opinions on a lot of sides, But I would just like to say the following. I think, no matter what you believe about biology, no one that I respect does not believe that women and racial minorities and a number of other groups face an absolutely unfair playing field, their entire lives. I think people start getting told directly or indirectly from a very young age. This is the kind of thing you should do or can do or whatever, And that has an effect. An effect anyone.

And I think trying to counter that is really important again, I think there are things reasonable well-meaning people can disagree on. I think, unfortunately, we spend all of our time talking about the disagreements And we don’t focus enough on the agreements And I think almost all smart, reasonable people will agree that the society we grew up in has a hugely unfair playing field.

And I think because of that, it is not enough to talk about unconscious bias. I, think that is a real problem. To be clear, I think we are all a product of the society we grew up in And we all have biases that aren’t our fault, but still, have a responsibility to counteract. But one thing I don’t like about the discussion in Silicon Valley about unconscious bias and how that’s the problem that we need to fix is: I think it is not nearly sufficient.

A good thing to fix, but it ignores the fact that you know decades or centuries of society have built up a very uneven playing field, and that is why we do need programs to try to proactively counter that. So you know, I think it’s really important. We does not lose sight of that And that unconscious bias training alone, although currently very fashionable, will not fix that. That said, I do believe unconscious bias is a problem. We try to counteract it A by talking about it and doing training, which I think does help

But B, I think one of the things that we have done that, unfortunately, other investors have not done as much is just have a very diverse partnership. You know we have six female GPs on our team And that’s probably a large part of the women. In top investing roles in Silicon Valley And that’s really bad – We have the CEO of our corp program. Is black

And I hate to play the kind of like who’s, the most discriminated stack game, But I think black entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley have an exceptionally hard time And I think, having a more diverse team, it helps us have broader networks and also think about our own Unconscious bias, all the time JORGE CUETO And the issue of politics, or maybe even bringing these issues of in the workplace, is sometimes seen as a taboo And yet you’ve been pretty vocal about your views on current political events and also other issues that are coming up. In Silicon Valley,

So I wanted to ask you how you walk that fine line between expressing your opinions but also minimizing any repercussions that could have on the day-to-day business of YC.SAM ALTMAN? Well now, it’s not even controversial. You know like now. All the tech CEOs are talking about politics When I started doing it a couple of years ago, kind of at the beginning of the rise of Trump, it was controversial. Two things were going on.

One is, I think, no one took him seriously, So most people were like yeah. This is a ridiculous thing. That’s going to go away. Two is that I think in normal times it does make sense for business leaders of large organizations to remain apolitical. You know, I think it actually does make a lot of sense. It’S a huge distraction.

It’s hugely time-consuming, And it has all of these weird negative effects. As you know, if you piss off the president, he can do bad things to you. However. These are not normal times, And I think when the future of the republic is at risk, the duty to the country and our values transcends the duty to your particular company and your stock price.

And I think I started that a little bit earlier than other people, But at this point, I’m in very good company – And it doesn’t seem to be that controversial anymore, JORGE CUETO. What are some things that you wish people knew about you that they don’t know about? You, SAM ALTMAN, You know at this point I would just like to have my own little quiet, private life back

I’ll say nothing at all: JORGE CUETO, OK., Fair answer, Moving on to talking a little bit about YC and what you look for in companies are there qualities in founders that you think are overrated or underrated? Sam ALTMAN, Yeah

I think the most underrated quality of all is being really determined. This is more important than being smart. This is more important than having a network. This is more important than a great idea. The hardest thing about starting a company is the level and the frequency of bad stuff that happens to you.

And most people that are good in really other ways eventually just get killed. The company gets killed by stuff going wrong And you know so much about being a successful entrepreneur is just not giving up. When. We have funded people who have a great idea, perfect background on paper and a great product and still failed. It has usually been that they’re insufficiently determined. So I think this is the most important non-obvious skill of a founder. Of course, you need a good product and a good market and to be smart,

But that’s really obvious The degree to which, being like a three or four standard deviation outlier on determination is a required skill of a CEO is not something that was obvious to me when I started. That’s also bad because it’s really hard to select It’s really hard to Identify that, As we have said more publicly, how important that is, people applying to YC have gotten better and better at telling us stories from their past life about how they overcame these impossible odds to get through something.

And, unlike intelligence, which is very difficult to fake in a one-hour meeting, you can definitely fake determination in a one-hour meeting. So that’s one thing that really matters. Another thing that really matters that is non-obvious is independent thought, And this, I think, is an even more unusual skill than determination. I think both of these you can make a conscious effort and build up

But I think independent thought is one of the hardest skills to build up Because, speaking of social pressures from birth, we are all pushed to think like other people And if you think in your own lives about the number of people you spend time with that, you Would say are true, independent thinkers that consistently have new ideas. You haven’t heard from other people and think about the world in different ways. It’s probably a very short list. And. Yet these are the people that start all the interesting companies. The consensus idea is, everyone who tries Google will eat them at lunch

And they’re also not kind of the really big trends of the future. You want startup ideas. — if you picture a Venn diagram – and here you have is a good idea – and here you have sounds like a bad idea. You want that tiny little overlap And those are the kind of ideas that are the hardest to identify and the ones that, even if you do manage to notice them most people will talk you out of So I’d, say those are two non-obvious skills that we look For JORGE CUETO And what’s one challenge that YC companies face repeatedly that you notice

Sam ALTMAN Hiring engineers, when Google can just sort of like throw unlimited cash at anyone, they want, has become very problematic for startups. I think the good thing about that –. I always try to find the good in any bad situation, And the good thing about this is: it means that all of the really good startups have really important missions. Eventually. They figure it out. They may not have it on day one, but they eventually get to this. Like a missionary mindset,

And it used to be that, even if you didn’t have that you could just sort of get a bunch of mercenaries to come work for you And now you can’t, because you can’t [, INAUDIBLE, ], Google And so one positive side effect of this thing has been That the importance now of a startup having a really clear and really important mission on day three has gone up a lot. And. I think that’s leading to better startups Because otherwise you just can’t recruit

Another common problem that startups have — – and this doesn’t sound like a great insight, But most startups still don’t ever build a product that people want, And it doesn’t seem to matter how much we talk about this. It doesn’t seem to matter how much anyone talks about this People still keep trying to do anything, but this

And if there’s one thing that a startup has to get right, it’s building a product that people really want not a little. If they want it a little bit, then you won’t generate enough. Momentum Like you’ve got to build something that some people really love And, after failing because of insufficiently determined founders, this is the number two reason that startups that seem really good, otherwise fail, JORGE CUETO Moving on to talking about different technologies. What would you say is the biggest challenge that we’re facing in terms of making progress on artificial intelligence right now?

Sam ALTMAN, Well, I don’t know if any of you saw this, but OpenAI beat the best single player, DotA players in the world last Friday. And when we started that project at the beginning of this year. I did not think that was going to happen this year And I wasn’t even sure it was going to happen next year it was very wild to watch that happen Because it was almost purely self-training.

And it was this very complex environment And the AI was just playing itself and getting better and better and better. In fact, the final bot that we had that beat all the humans handily. One day later, it lost 60-40 to a one-day-more evolved version of itself. Just to give you a sense for the rate of improvement. And, so I think people are kind of asleep at the wheel here. There are problems.

But again, in the same spirit of always trying to figure out the good, not the bad, we are making unbelievable progress, maybe too much progress, But I think of all the things I worry about with AI. The technical barriers to progress are not at the top of the list, JORGE CUETO, There’s another camp that says that maybe we’re placing too much emphasis on the threat of AI. What. What do you think about that? Sam ALTMAN Yeah? I think we don’t talk enough about the benefits.

I think that AI has the potential to eliminate nearly all human suffering in the next couple of decades. I think we can have a world of abundance. We can eliminate poverty over time. We can probably cure a whole lot of diseases. There. All these wonderful things that technology can do

I think we’re already seeing that in just how much better a lot of consumer products we use every day have gotten People like disaster porn People are more interested in talking about the end of the world than they are about life, getting 10 % better every year and, Having that compound, which gets a lot better, So you know, if you’re a journalist, you can write an article about how AI is going to end the world and get a lot of clicks, and you know a page view bonus or whatever you get.Or. You can write an article about how AI is gradually making all these problems, 10 % better

And probably no one reads it. Certainly, no one shares it, And so I think, for whatever reason, the way we’re wired is to talk much more about the downside of this than the upside, But the upside, I think, is going to be huge. It already is huge.

Jorge CUETO, what do you think about cryptocurrencies? Do you see the same growth, SAM ALTMAN Yeah? I mean, I think it’s going to go up and down. Like. I bought my bitcoin a long time ago.

I plan to hold them for a really long time. I try not to watch the price ticks, but it’s so addicting that I can’t help myself. I think –. This is not investment advice. I think the only super compelling proven use case we have seen so far is store value And as a replacement for gold. I think we are seeing real adoption there and real collective belief that actually makes it have some value.

However, if that’s how it’s going to play out, then I think bitcoin should dominate — biggest network first biggest brand, most collective belief whatever, And so I have been surprised by the continued strength of all of the altcoins. I think there are potential other truly valuable applications of the blockchain. Filecoin is a YC thing, so I know that one pretty well And I can see that being big

But I think most of what’s going on outside of bitcoin feels like a complete speculative bubble And I feel bad that a lot of people are going to get burned. So I think probably the right thing to do if you believe in it is to buy bitcoin and then not think about it for another five years. JORGE CUETO. Is there any specific product area or technology that you think people are sleeping on SAM ALTMAN Sure a lot

Ai, as we mentioned, I think people are asleep at the wheel in a really big way on Nuclear fusion, I think, is within some single-digit number of years of working And because it’s been so bad for so long people are just kind of burned out and Not really taking a new look at new materials and stronger magnets and better computer models. That’s going to enable this to work, Synthetic biology, — again, it’s like people talked about it a lot a couple of years ago. It didn’t quite work as fast as people were hoping

So we have like this hype cycle and then it really falls off. And now we’re in the part where I think the interesting work is happening And people aren’t paying enough attention. I guess that’s a topic I can go on for a long time, But I’ll limit it to three

Jorge CUETO Sure Is there any particular problem that you think technology can’t solve SAM ALTMAN? How to make us nice to each other. Technology has clearly been quite bad at solving. I won’t say it can’t, But I haven’t seen it yet and I certainly don’t think technology can by itself

And I think we are kind of in the situation, at least in the developed world, where the world keeps getting better and we keep getting unhappier. And you know there’s like a decent amount of data on this And I think technology is not entirely to blame. But it’s certainly not blameless. And. I think 30 minutes left. I couldn’t even start the conversation, But I think the number of things that technology has done to make us more isolated, and feel relatively worse a friend of mine, a little bit older, said she never used to be unhappy.