Sam Altman Quotes

“No matter how successful you are, the haters will never go away.”

“AI won't replace humans. But humans who use AI will replace those who don't.”

“What I lose the most sleep over is the hypothetical idea that we already have done something really bad by launching ChatGPT.”

“We are now confident we know how to build AGI as we have traditionally understood it… It is possible that we will have superintelligence in a few thousand days; it may take longer, but I'm confident we'll get there.”

“Astounding triumphs – fixing the climate, establishing a space colony, and the discovery of all of physics – will eventually become commonplace. With superintelligence, we can do anything else.”

“The best ideas are fragile and easy to kill.”

“You get truly rich by owning things.”

“The best startups have a mission.”

“Most people underestimate what they can do in ten years.”

“Being hard to compete with is the most important defensibility.”

“You can't build an important company without being optimistic.”

“If you don't believe in your company, no one else will.”

“Self-belief is immensely powerful. The most successful people I know believe in themselves almost to the point of delusion. Cultivate this early.”

“We always knew, abstractly, that at some point we would hit a tipping point and the AI revolution would get kicked off. But we didn't know what the moment would be. To our surprise, it turned out to be this.”

“That 48 hours was like a full range of human emotion. It was like impressive in the breadth.”

“These years have been the most rewarding, fun, best, interesting, exhausting, stressful, and — particularly for the last two — unpleasant years of my life so far. The overwhelming feeling is gratitude.”

“I kind of genuinely believe that we can launch the first AGI and no one cares that much.”

“I feel a sense of duty to scientific progress… and of all of the things that I have a personal capacity to contribute to, this is the one that I believe will drive scientific progress and thus standards of living, the quality of the human experience, whatever you wanna call it, forward the most.”

“That was definitely the most painful professional experience of my life, and chaotic and shameful and upsetting and a bunch of other negative things. There were great things about it too.”