Lenny Rachitsky: uncertainty

Transcript context

…Especially when democracy is at stake. I mean, I think that we are, and I don't want to be on a high horse or something, but I do think that we're in a place where we need to think about things in the future in these terms and defend these things with our capabilities while also hoping that we never have to have hot conflict anywhere. Along those lines, I have to ask you, recently you became famous, on Twitter at least, for quitting OpenAI. You tweeted that you're leaving with your brief explanation and got seven million views, 50, I don't know, 8,000 likes. What happened? Why'd you leave OpenAI? What happened? Yeah. So what I said in my tweet was that I have a lot of friends in the executive side of OpenAI that I care a lot about, I think are really good people. And I feel that what happened with the decision making, the speed of the decision making, the governance, and the lack of defined guardrails around the announcement of the Department of War deal is not how I thought it should have been done. And both of those things can be true. And so my hope, Lenny, was that there's a third path. You see a lot of people just going along with what their company's doing and then you see some people that are kind of scorched earth about it. In this case, that didn't make sense for me. I didn't feel that way about the company. OpenAI is an amazing company and I was able to help build a robotics program there and attract some of that top talent in robotics, I think in the world. And so I have a lot of, I don't know, this is a group of people I care a lot about. And you can also disagree with friends and feel like what they did isn't good and isn't right. And that's where I ended up and that's what I tweeted about. It was going to get reported on, so I tweeted before that happened.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.