Sam Altman and John Collison explain that every startup goes through "the dark times"

OpenAI Again, currently, you know, ChatGPT is on everyone's lips. The products are working incredibly well. GPT4 is delivering a huge amount of real value to people. I presume it did not feel that way all along the journey. Maybe. Do you have any fun war stories or just what was it like?

I do, but I will say like no one is as honest about how bad the bad early days are as they should be because it's so embarrassing in retrospect but non nervous laughter out there. But the beginning of OpenAI was really tough. Like stuff was not working that well. We were this like extremely ragtag group of people. We were as I mentioned earlier, like mocked by everyone serious in the field. There was this like kind of like pretty famous guy that runs a lab, another AI lab that is not doing as well as OpenAI anymore that would like go around to the media when they would write something nice about OpenAI and tell them like, you know, I don't know why you're saying stuff. This is just not a good group of people. People.

You had a kerfuffle with Elon Musk.

We had a kerfuffle with Elon Musk. But more than that, like we just didn't have working technical progress. Like we, we had like some little things, you know, we did some projects that kind of worked. We even like did Dota, which was great and was what let us raise the money for Microsoft that led us to the GPT series. But it was like it was not, it was deeply unclear how we were going to make AGI and we were like unbelievably outgunned by DeepMind at the time. And a lot of people were like, why are you even doing this? Like DeepMind is untouchable. No one had figured out the idea of language models. Certainly no one had figured out the idea of putting an API around one or releasing ChatGPT. So yeah, it was like, it was pretty bad, it was pretty hard and we just kept on the one foot in front of another but we were constantly not able to find enough money or compute or people. And you just keep going and eventually.

Something works when you see you just keep going. So if I think back to the. Because again I think every company that gets to some scale definitely goes through the period dark times. And if I think back to Stripe's dark times, there's a point early on where just after launch the endorphins have worn off and we had a bunch of early people leave all at once at one point. And it's Very draining. You lose some of your own confidence and you think about what keeps you going. One, it helps if you have an idea that you're really excited about. But at least in our case also, there's a momentum from serving customers where, I don't know, it's like, well, we got to stay going because we have all these requests coming into the API and we have all these customers to serve, so we kind of don't have a choice. It sounds like you guys were doing more foundational research. You did not have that customer momentum to keep you going. And so were you not tempted to just pack it all up and quit?

There were all of these. So I think Silicon Valley used to be really good at research labs, and then it wasn't. And so we didn't have. There's good canonical advice now about what to do as a sort of product startup, and it's totally true. And this is one of the reasons why C pushes forward so much. Once you have customers that you have to serve and you really feel that and they pull it out of you. But one of the things that we had to sort of like, rediscover about how to run a research lab was how you keep that internal momentum going when you don't have customers, you don't have context, reality, to know if you're doing the right thing. And it is really hard. A good set of colleagues matters. We would try to figure out how to set up enough external touch points that kind of, like, for our own, mine included, sanity, would fake the equivalent of having customer feedback. But there were a lot of things we had to rediscover, how to do this.