Sam Altman

Quotes are word for word from the source.

• Compounding and Growth

  “Compounding is magic. Look for it everywhere. Exponential curves are the key to wealth generation.”

  Our noteSeek out exponential compounding curves as the foundational driver of wealth and growth.

• Career Leverage

  “As your career progresses, each unit of work you do should generate more and more results.”

  Our noteIncrease personal leverage over time so each unit of effort produces greater output.

• Step-Change Focus

  “Most people get bogged down in linear opportunities. Be willing to let small opportunities go to focus on potential step changes.”

  Our noteForgo incremental opportunities to focus on potential step-change breakthroughs.

• Long-Term Thinking

  “In a world where almost no one takes a truly long-term view, the market richly rewards those who do.”

  Our noteTaking a genuinely long-term view yields outsized market rewards because few competitors have the patience.

• Deep Self-Belief

  “Self-belief is immensely powerful. The most successful people I know believe in themselves almost to the point of delusion.”

  Our noteExtraordinary achievers possess intense self-belief that borders on delusion.

• Truth-Seeking Awareness

  “Truth-seeking is hard and often painful, but it is what separates self-belief from self-delusion.”

  Our noteRigorous truth-seeking keeps strong conviction from turning into self-delusion.

• Persistence and Luck

  “"I will fail many times, and I will be really right once" is the entrepreneurs' way. You have to give yourself a lot of chances to get lucky.”

  Our noteEntrepreneurship relies on surviving multiple failures to capture one massive win.

• Resourceful Problem-Solving

  “One of the most powerful lessons to learn is that you can figure out what to do in situations that seem to have no solution.”

  Our noteResourceful problem-solving can uncover paths forward even in seemingly impossible situations.

• Revenue Share

  “We are going to try sharing some of this revenue with rightsholders who want their characters generated by users.”

  Our noteHe proposes a revenue-sharing model to foster partnerships between creators and rightsholders.

• Pace of Change

  “Please expect a very high rate of change from us; it reminds me of the early days of ChatGPT.”

  Our noteHe anticipates a rapid pace of innovative changes reminiscent of the early days of their previous products.

• User Experience

  “a new product that makes it easy to create, share, and view videos.”

  Our noteHe explains the core value of a product designed to make content creation and sharing highly accessible.

• Boundless Possibilities

  “Even in the very early days of playing with Sora, it's been striking to many of us how open the playing field suddenly feels.”

  Our noteHe shares his amazement at the boundless possibilities and openness felt even during early testing.

• User Participation

  “the ability to put yourself and your friends into a video - the team worked very hard on character consistency - with the cameo feature”

  Our noteHe explains the effort put into maintaining character consistency while developing features for user participation.

• Responsible Design

  “The team has put great care and thought into trying to figure out how to make a delightful product that doesn't fall into that trap”

  Our noteHe highlights the deep thought and care put into designing a delightful product that avoids technological pitfalls.

• Right Priorities

  “It is much more important to work on the right thing than it is to work many hours. Most people waste most of their time on stuff that doesn't matter.”

  Our noteWorking on the right problem matters far more than logging long hours on secondary tasks.

• Accountability

  “If that's not the case, we will make significant changes (and if we can't fix it, we would discontinue offering the service).”

  Our noteServices that fail to positively impact users must be significantly altered or discontinued.

• Goal Support

  “* Help users achieve their long-term goals. We want to understand a user's true goals, and help them achieve them.”

  Our noteWe must understand users true goals and support them in achieving long-term success.

• AI and Human Rights

  “access to AI will be a fundamental driver of the economy, and maybe eventually something we consider a fundamental human right.”

  Our noteAccess to AI may evolve from an economic driver into a fundamental human right.

• Compounding Effort

  “Hard work compounds like interest, and the earlier you do it, the more time you have for the benefits to pay off.”

  Our noteHard work compounds over time, making early career intensity especially rewarding.

• Compute and Revenue

  “increasing compute is the literal key to increasing revenue, we have some interesting new ideas.”

  Our noteExpanding computing resources directly drives revenue and we are preparing innovative ideas for this.

• Hidden Ingenuity

  “But behind the blinking circle, nicely abstracted away, is the greatest story of human ingenuity I have ever seen.”

  Our noteBehind the simple AI interface lies the greatest story of human creativity and effort.

• Massive Scale

  “most experts thought was impossible on this timeframe, and to build a company to deliver products at massive scale”

  Our noteEfforts were focused on achieving rapid innovation and building an organization capable of massive scale delivery.

• Hidden Effort

  “Most people who use ChatGPT will never think about the people that put so much work into it”

  Our noteUsers rarely consider the immense effort of the developers behind the services they use.

• Acknowledgment

  “which is totally ok, but just to take a minute of your time…”

  Our noteIt is natural for users to be unaware of developers efforts but their contributions deserve a moment of spotlight.

• Scaling RL

  “They have not gotten enough public credit, but they decided to scale up RL as a baseline”

  Our noteScaling up reinforcement learning as a baseline was a crucial yet underappreciated decision.

• Defying Wisdom

  “to see where it broke when the conventional wisdom was that it didn't scale which led to our Dota result,”

  Our noteTesting limits against conventional wisdom led to the success of the Dota project.

• Power of AI

  “In some big sense, ChatGPT is already more powerful than any human who has ever lived.”

  Our noteAI has already achieved capabilities in certain areas that surpass any individual in human history.

• Cognitive Agents

  “2025 has seen the arrival of agents that can do real cognitive work; writing computer code will never be the same.”

  Our noteThe arrival of AI agents with cognitive abilities will permanently change the way software is developed.

• Intelligence and Energy

  “In the 2030s, intelligence and energy - ideas, and the ability to make ideas happen - are going to become wildly abundant.”

  Our noteIn the future intelligence and energy will become infinitely abundant dramatically lowering the cost of realizing ideas.

• Routine Singularity

  “This is how the singularity goes: wonders become routine, and then table stakes.”

  Our noteThe technological singularity occurs through a process where amazing innovations gradually become taken for granted.