Sam Altman outlines two startup strategies: build for today's AI capabilities, or bet on rapid model improvement. He warns that companies assuming static models risk being steamrolled, and says most should bet on continued progress. An AI medical advisor example shows how faster models could enable life-saving products.
Chapters
I think fundamentally there are two strategies to build on AI right now. There's one strategy which is assume the model is not going to get better and then you kind of like build all these little things on top of it. And then there's another strategy which is build assuming that OpenAI is going to stay on the same rate of trajectory and the models are going to keep getting better at the same pace. It would seem to me that 95% of the world should be betting on the latter category, but a lot of the startups have been built in the former category. And then when we just do our fundamental job, which is make the model and its tooling better with every crank, then you get the OpenAI killed. My startup meme, if you're building something on GPT4 that a reasonable observer would say if GPT5 is as much better as GPT4 over GPT3, was not because we don't like you, but just because we have a mission, we're going to steamroll you. But there's a giant set of startups where you benefit from GPT5 being way better. And if you build those and AI progress keeps going the way that we think it's going to go, I think for the most part you'll be really.
Happy as an investor looking for an investment thesis that's actually lost. What are those that will not be steamrolled that I can invest in? Sam, ask the company whether 100x improvement in the model is something they're excited about. We know the companies that come to us saying we want the next model, when is it coming out? When is it coming out? I want to be the first to try it. It's going to be the best thing for my company. And then there's a lot of companies that we don't hear from in that regard. And I think that's like a pretty good delineation, is if there's a clear path to how better intelligence, better underlying intelligence accelerates that product and that company. Most companies can tell that story really clearly.
I talked just this morning to an AI medical advisor, I guess they would call it, and they were like, here's the places the model's underperforming. It's still pretty useful for these kinds of things. But if the model could just get this much better on these metrics, we'd have all these other businesses, so can you all do that faster? And then we can have this thing that'll save all these lives and give people who have not had access to medical care like some access. And how soon can we get that? And here's how many people are dying every day you delay. It was an effective pitch, actually.
