Sam Altman: belief

Transcript context

…Now, the last two months or so, there have been so many deals involving OpenAI, and I’m not even talking about the globetrotting. A lot of them are local, or there’s new product features such as Pulse. Presumably, you were productive, to begin with. How is it that you managed to up your productivity to get all this done? I don’t think there’s one single takeaway other than I think people almost never allocate their time as well as they think they do. As you have more demands and more opportunities, you find ways to continue to be more efficient. We’ve been able to hire and promote great people, and I delegate a lot to them and get them to take stuff on. That is the only sustainable way I know how to do it. I do try to make sure we increasingly, as what we need to do comes into focus — and there’s, as you mentioned, a lot of infrastructure that needs to be built out right now — I do try to make sure I understand what the core thing for us to do is. It has, in some sense, simplified, and it’s very clear what we need to do. That’s been helpful. I don’t really know. I guess another thing that’s happened is more of the world wants to work with us, so deals are quicker to negotiate. You’re doing much more with hardware or matters that are hardware-adjacent. How is hiring or delegating to a good hardware person different from hiring good AI people, which is what you started off doing?…

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