Sam Altman: “No one is as honest about how bad the early days are as they should be”

No one is as honest about how bad the early days are as they should be, because it's so embarrassing in retrospect. The beginning of OpenAI was really tough stuff was not working that well. We were this, like, extremely ragtag group of people. We were, as mentioned earlier, like, mocked by everyone serious in the field. But more than that, like, we just didn't have working technical progress. Like, 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 us do the GPT series. But 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? 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, that was pretty hard. And we just like, kept on the one foot in front of another, but we were like, constantly not able to find enough money or compute or people and you just keep going and eventually something works.