He doesn’t read the news
Likes trolling on Twitter…”Twitter’s fun”
“Twitter’s gonna be fine”
HIS INVESTMENTS
400 personal investments, a few thousand including YC
All the companies he’s added value to are those he thinks about in his free time – while hiking, texting the founder an idea
Most successful investment? Stripe on a multiples basis
Helion – fusion energy
Personally invested $375M (!)
Other thing besides OpenAI that he spends a lot of time on
New energy system that works on super low cost
Hardest challenge is how to replace all (current) generative capacity on Earth really quickly
“Who can deliver energy the cheapest, and enough of it”
Simple machine, affordable cost, reasonable size
If fusion works…will change dynamics of what’s possible – enables more downstream (eg, more powerful planes)
Hermeus – supersonic jet company
Led $100M round
Was also involved with a competitor Boom – but different tech and approach
Huge market with multiple needs
Worldcoin
He’s a cofounder, on the board, but not day to day involved
Will tell its story soon – believes it will go over well (unlike earlier negative media coverage)
We give up more privacy to Facebook than Worldcoin
Phenomenal team
Launch in months
Interested in any tech to experiment with global UBI (versus what one country can do)
Re: crypto — “honestly not super interested”
“Love spirit of web3, but don’t intuitively feel why we need it”
Inception Fertility
In-vitro gametogenesis
In shadow of AI
Next 5-7 years of biotech will be remarkable
Human life extension – “yeah maybe that’s gonna work”
Investing for 20 years, president of YC for 5-6 years
Garry (new YC president) will do a lot of things differently and be wildly successful
Last few years were really hard for YC
YC can remake itself now – tourists are leaving now
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ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
OpenAI has pulled together “most talent dense” AI team
“Gonna be tremendously good”
Why did ChatGPT and DALL-E so surprise people?
“Don’t know…reflected on it a lot”
If you make a good UX on top of something – believed users wanted to interact via dialogue
Pieces were there for awhile
Standard belief was AI would take over low skill / truck driving / generic white collar
Going exact opposite direction – taking over creativity where we thought humans might have special sauce
It’s not an intuitive finding
Released GPT-3 three years ago – thought ChatGPT would be incremental, was surprised by public reaction
ChatGPT will cause societal changes – eg, academic integrity
“Stakes are still relatively low”
Covid did show us society can update to massive changes faster than he expected
Given expected economic impact – “more gradual is better”
GPT-4 will come out when we’re confident we can do it safely and responsibly
Will release tech much more slowly than people will like
GPT-4 rumor mill is a ridiculous thing
Re: ChatGPT – built a thing, couldn’t figure out how to monetize it, put it out via an API, and users figured out how to use it
Would like to see AI super democratized, have several AGIs in the world
Cost of intelligence and energy trends down and down
“Massive surplus…benefits all of us”
Believes in capitalism – best service at lowest price
Society will need to agree on what AGI should never do
Broad absolute rules of the system
Within that, AI can do different things – safe for work one, edgier creative one – different values they enforce
A user can write up a spec of what they want, and AI will act according to it – “should be your AI…to serve you”
Microsoft – only tech company he’d be excited to partner with this deeply
Satya, Kevin Scott, Mary McHale
Values-aligned company
“We’re very much here to build AGI”
“We wanna be useful to people”
Re: Google’s AI – hasn’t seen it, assume they’re a competent org
We’re in a new world – generated text is something we all need to adapt to, like we adapted to calculators
“I’d much rather have ChatGPT teach me…than read a textbook”
Anthropic – rival AI, stressing an ethical layer
Very talented team
Multiple AGIs in the world is better than one
Society decided free speech is not quite absolute – in similar ways AI / LLMs will need to have bounds too
Video is coming… no confident prediction about when
Legitimate research project – could take awhile
AUDIENCE Q&A
When fusion online?
By 2028, could be plugging fusion generators into grid (pending regulators)
Re: AI worst and best case?
“best case is so unbelievably good that it’s hard to imagine, discovering new knowledge in a year instead of 70K years”
“Bad case is lights out for all of us”
More worried about accidental mis-use in short term, less about the AI itself being evil
How far away is AGI?
Much blurrier and gradual transition than people think
Re: state of San Francisco
Real shame we treat people like this
How elected leaders don’t fix the problem
Tech has some responsibility for it
But other cities do better than this
Super long in-person work and Bay Area
Re: ChatGPT reaction
Expected one order magnitude less hype, users, of everything
Less hype is probably better
The tech is impressive, but not robust
Use it 100x, see the weaknesses
How Sam uses ChatGPT?
Summarize super long documents, emails
For translation
Re: Google code red, threat to search
When people talk about new tech being end of a giant company, they’re usually long
Change is coming (for Google), but not as dramatically as people think
Before Google, memorizing facts was important – and now we’ll change again – and we’ll adapt faster than most people think
Prefers hybrid work, like YC – few days at home, few days in office
Skeptical that fully remote is thing everyone does
Most important companies will still be heavily in-person
Safety engineering for AI is different from standard safety engineering – consequences are greater, deserves more study
Raising capital now is hard, especially later stages – but other things easier – easier to rise above noise, hire, get customers
What he’d do now — recommends for founders – “do AI for some vertical”
Advice for AI startups
Differentiate by building deep relationships with users, some moat like network effect
Plan for AI models continually improving
OpenAI is a platform, but also wants to do a killer app (platform + killer app) to show people what’s possible