Sam Altman on David Senra
Sam Altman on Building OpenAI & Betting on the Impossible
Worth hearing for the unusually concrete account of killing Sora and Atlas to redirect compute and talent, plus Altman’s candid admission that even he resists AI-native workflows. Much of the broader platform, safety, and adoption argument reprises earlier appearances.
But last year for example, we killed Sora. Which was you know, good product and fun and cool, but used a lot of compute and not as important as Codex where we put the compute. Um we killed our web browser called Atlas, uh which again, I think it was a great product. I think it was the best web browser, but not as important for us to focus on it. Somewhere else we could put that talent. Um in a world of limited compute, limited people, limited resources, we thought really hard and we said, you know what? The the general intelligence for knowledge work and eventually for science, most important thing we can do.
Sam Altman discusses AI adoption, the persistence of human habits, and the risks of both uncontrolled and centralized AI power. He also describes OpenAI's platform strategy, its iterative approach to safety, and the difficult product choices required to focus resources on general intelligence.