OpenAI's CEO on What Kids Should Be Studying

What do you think kids should be studying these days? Resilience, adaptability, a high rate of learning, creativity, certainly familiarity with the tools. So should kids still be learning how to code? Because I've heard people say, "Don't need to learn how to code anymore." "Just math, just biology." Well, I'm biased because I like coding, but I think you should learn to code. I don't write code very much anymore, although I randomly did yesterday. But learning to code was great as a way to learn how to think. And I think coding will still be important in the future. It's just going to change a little bit, or a lot. We have a new tool. What are we all going to do when we have nothing to do? I don't think we're ever going to have nothing to do. I think what we have to do may change. You know, like what you and I do for our jobs would not strike people from a few thousand years ago as real work, but we found new things to want and to do and ways to feel useful to other people and get fulfillment and create. And that will never stop. But probably, I hope, if we can look at the world a few hundred years in the future, be like, "Wow, those people have it so good. I can't believe they call this stuff work. It's so trivial." Need motivation?

Watch a Top 10 with Believe Nation.

Hey, it's Evan Carmichael, and I watch these videos every day because I need them for motivation. Being around successful entrepreneurs every morning helps me believe that I can do great things too. It's like your morning coffee, but for your goals, kickstarting your day with a blast of positivity. So here is a challenge for you. Try watching one video every morning for the next 30 days, and let's find out together if they help you do great things too. If you're in, leave a hashtag #believe in the comments below so I can celebrate with you. So today, let's learn from one of the best, Sam Altman, and our take on his top 10 rules of success.

Believe.

Rule number 2 is chart your own course.

One of the most important things I believe about having an impactful career is you have to chart your own course. If, if the thing that you're thinking about is something that someone else is going to do anyway, or more likely something that a lot of people are going to do anyway, You should be like somewhat skeptical of that. And I think a really good muscle to build is coming up with the ideas that are not the obvious ones to say.

Rule number 3 is help others.

How do you advise people to select sort of who they're working on things with? This is really hard. Finding your tribe, finding the sort of people that you end up working with on and off for the rest of your career is really hard. I think I'll tell you some things I've learned, and I will admit that I don't have a perfect answer to this yet, but I think one thing is you should be willing to move. For whatever you're doing, there tend to be pockets of it around the world where there are similar people that are doing great work in whatever field you care about, and it's really worth trying to go be near them. And so, you know, we get criticized sometimes at YC for having people move to the Bay Area, But bringing people together that are interested in a similar thing of startups, I think, has been really valuable for a lot of people. I think another thing that I have learned is that whenever I've helped people for no immediate benefit and with no intention of ever getting a benefit at all, time and again in my career, it has really later benefited me a lot. So I think you at some point often get to a point in your career where you're limited by how many good people you know. And how many of those you can work with or get to do things together. And so just helping a lot of people and spending a lot of time with a lot of people has benefited me, you know, years after I've really helped someone for no reason. I get to invest in their startup and it goes on to be this huge success, or we're able to like work on OpenAI together, any number of things. I think just trying to help a lot of people and out of that scene, who is really impressive and who gets things done is helpful.

Rule number 4 is maximize your time.

Focusing more specifically on productivity, like, what are some life hacks that maybe you apply to make your everyday more productive? I mean, I think there's like a lot of crap written about productivity secrets on the internet, and people sort of like get into this thing where they spend more time like trying to be productive about their productivity system than actually getting things done. I will say, I think that, well, I'll say two, I think, pieces of advice that aren't that obvious. One is, I think far more important than any particular system is just figuring out the right things to work on. And so all of the time that people spend with like this new productivity app or that or whatever would be better spent like really trying to think diligently about, I have the same number of hours as anybody else. What am I going to spend them on? And getting that right is more important than exactly like being perfectly productive with those hours. A big part of that is not doing things that waste time. I think if you can just like focus on the things that are important and not do the things that waste time, you can be fairly sloppy with productivity otherwise, and you will still get far more done than most people. It's really hard to do though. The other thing that I think people don't think about enough is figuring out your own personal rhythms of productivity. And there's huge variance I've noticed between people that figure this out and don't. So for me personally, it turns out that I am most productive if I go to sleep late, wake up late, and then keep the first 3 or 4 hours of the day and don't schedule any meetings, work from home, get through my list of stuff then, and then pack all my meetings when I'm kind of less productive at just grinding stuff out or thinking creatively. In the afternoon. And it took me some number of years to figure that out, 'cause it didn't fit well with the work schedule I was naturally in. But then I was like, all right, if this is the thing that makes me most productive, then I'm gonna make my whole schedule work to support that. And that was a really important change for me. So I think figuring out your own personal optimal times to work on what kind of different things people don't really talk about that much. And at least for me, it had a huge impact.

Also, to make sure you're actually taking action after watching this video, I've designed a special free worksheet just for this video. The worksheet will highlight our favorite lessons from the video that will inspire you to remember what you learned today and actually apply them. The worksheet will also give you space to write down what your key takeaways are and your specific plan of action to make sure you're getting results. If you want the worksheet designed specifically for this video, absolutely for free. There's a link in the description below. Go click on it and start building the momentum in your life and your business.

I'll see you there.

Rule number 5 is find your intersection.

Could you talk a little bit about how to pick what's important to work on? Yeah, um, I think you want to look for the intersection of what you're good at, what you enjoy, and, and what— where you can create value for the world. And in my experience, if you don't find something at the intersection of those three it's hard to really have an impact. I think most people kind of just fall into what they work on, they don't give it much thought, and there is benefit to that. Sometimes you actually have to just try stuff to figure out what you like. But I really do think it is worth upfront thought about what you're going to spend most of your waking time doing. So I think it's really good when people think about what they're good at, what they like, and kind of how they can create value for the world.

Rule number 6 is think ahead.

Share with us kind of your thoughts on what this future AI looks like. You see it a lot in the business and B2B environments, you know, accounts payable, accounts receivable, OpenAI, that kind of stuff. But where— what direction are you guys headed? I mean, we have figured out how to make legitimate intelligence in a computer. It's not a parlor trick. It actually learns. It actually can, like, combine concepts in novel ways. It can— it can figure out new things. And this, you know, you can see this now starting to really take effect with some of our products. We have something called Copilot with Microsoft. Developers that use that, it's now writing half their code. There's an AI doing half of people's jobs. We have another thing called DALL-E, which does, generates images. And there's a lot of benefits to that. It's, you know, generating tens of millions of images a day for people. But that's doing like all of Illustrator's jobs. So this is like— and then you have our text models like GPT-3 and beyond that are doing a very wide array of tasks. But we have actually figured out how to put human-like cognition into a computer. And that, I think, will be the most significant shift probably that we see in our lifetimes of the technological landscape. I think this will be bigger than any of the great technological revolutions of the past. This will be bigger than the Industrial Revolution. AI will change every aspect of society, and I think it's going to be on the whole just tremendously good, but it will certainly be a disruptive time.

Rule number 7 is take no shortcuts.

How do you hire? How do you hire great teams? The folks I've interacted with at OpenAI, some of the most amazing folks I've ever met.

It takes a lot of time. I spend I mean, I think a lot of people claim to spend a third of their time hiring. I for real truly do. I still approve every single hire at OpenAI. And I think there's, you know, we're working on a problem that is like very cool and that great people want to work on. We have great people and so people want to be around them. But even with that, I think there's just no shortcut for putting a ton of effort into this.

So even when you have the good people, hard work.

I think so.

Rule number 8 is make long-term commitments.

I think that one of the few arbitrage opportunities left in the market is time. I think we have gotten really good at high-frequency trading. We've gotten really good at the price of things. We've gotten worse at the long-term value. And I don't think you can go beat the market in a lot of ways, but the one way I do is by making a long-term commitment to something. I think that my new belief on how long I should hold stock in the best companies I invest in is forever. I think in a world where people are increasingly focused on the tick and the quarterly earnings cycle, you should try and go in the other direction. This is a great way to generate value and wealth. When you're thinking about a startup, it's really worthwhile to think about something you're willing to make a very long-term commitment to, because that is where the current void in the market is. I think, you know, you get paid as a founder for the wealth you create for other people. So there's this view of the world that business is all about, like, trying to steal money, and sometimes that's true, but the best companies, just create massive amounts of value for the world, and then they capture some of that for themselves, but they capture far less than they create, and they do it over a very long period of time. So if you're going to be one of those companies, um, I think you want to make a super long-term commitment to yourself and others that are going to work on it with you that this is going to take a long time, um, but it is worth waiting because you will make far more money over the long horizon, um, by doing this company really well than a bunch of short-term things along the way.

Rule number 9 is adapt as you go.

You don't get to like play life in reverse and you have to just like adapt. There's a mission we really cared about. We thought AI was going to be really important. We thought we had an algorithm that learned. We knew it got better with scale. We didn't know how predictably it got better with scale and we wanted to push on this. We thought this was like going to be a very important thing in human history and we didn't get everything right, but we were right on the big stuff. And our mission hasn't changed, and we've adapted the structure as we go, and we'll adapt it more in the future. But, you know, like, you don't— like, life is not a problem set. You don't get to, like, solve everything really nicely all at once. It doesn't work quite like it works in the classroom as you're doing it. And my advice is just, like, trust yourself to adapt as you go. It'll be a little bit messy, but you can do it.

And rule number 10, the last one before some very special bonus clips, is question all advice.

It's way too tempting to take advice from other people. And the stuff that worked for me, which I tried to write down there, probably doesn't work that well, or may not work as well for other people. Or like, other people may find out that they want to just have a super different life trajectory. And I think I mostly got what I wanted by ignoring advice. And I think, like, I tell people not to listen to too much advice. Listening to advice from other people should be approached with great caution.

How would you describe how you've approached life outside of this advice that you would advise to other people? So really, just in the quiet of your mind, to think, what gives me happiness? What is the right thing to do here? How can I have the most impact?

I wish it were that, you know, introspective all the time. It's a lot of just like, you know, what will bring me joy, what will bring me fulfillment, you know, what will bring— what will be, uh— I do think a lot about what I can do that will be useful, but like, who do I want to spend my time with? What I want to spend my time doing?

Like a fish in water, just going along with the current.

Yeah, that's certainly what it feels like. I mean, I think that's what most people would say if they were really honest about it.

I think it's very easy to spend, um, a decade being incredibly busy and incredibly stressed every day and feeling like you're working incredibly hard and creating a ton of, uh, movement but not moving forward. And I think this is like a big trap, and it's so easy to get caught up in things that are urgent but unimportant, or it is so easy to get caught up in the trifles of office politics and playing status and power games that don't matter but feel so fun and so important, or just random other bullshit that piles up in life. And I've at least found for myself, I have a fixed budget of cognitive output per day, and I can spend that on whatever. But if I let it go on unimportant stuff, then I never have time to get to the really important stuff. And it's so easy to get heads down and focused and sort of miss, like, what am I actually accomplishing? The number of people who have said to me, like, man, I thought for 10 years I was doing incredible work because I felt like I was creating a huge amount of output, but in retrospect it was in the wrong direction, is always depressing. You do need to focus and do stuff, but I think it's really good to focus for some period of time and then step back and think, am I doing the right thing? You also don't want to make the mistake that sort of like the stereotypical Silicon Valley 22-year-old or 21-year-old college dropout says of, I'm going to solve all the world's problems in 3 months, and if I haven't done it in 3 months, I failed, so I'm going to give up and do the next thing, and then they jump on on to some other project, that's bad too. So balancing this is hard. Um, but I think like making— checking in to make sure you're working on things that matter and working on an appropriate time scale, time horizon, is really important.

For 10 more amazing rules from Elon Musk, check the video right there next to me. I think you'll love it.

Continue to believe, and I'll see you there. Failure? Never heard of it. There's your answer. Well, there's a ton of failures along the way, that's for sure. For SpaceX, The first 3 launches failed, and we're just barely able to scrape together enough parts and money to do the 4th launch. If that 4th launch had failed, we would have been dead.