Sam Altman: What Startups Will be Steamrolled by OpenAI & Where is Opportunity | E1223

We are gonna try our hardest and believe we will succeed at making our models better and better and better. And if you are building a business that patches some current small shortcomings, if we do our job right, then that will not be as important in the future. We believe that we are on a pretty, a quite steep trajectory of improvement, and that the current shortcomings of the models today will just be taken care of by future generations. And I would encourage people to be in line with that.

Ready to go? (instrumental music plays) (mouse clicking) Hello everyone. Welcome to OpenAI DevDay. I am Harry Stebbings of 20VC, and I am very, very excited to interview Sam Altman. Welcome, Sam. Sam, thank you for letting me do this today with you.

Thanks for being here, Harry.

Now, we have many, many questions from the audience, and so I wanted to start with one. When we look forward, is the future of OpenAI more models like 01 or is it more larger models that we would maybe have expected of old? How do we think about that?

I mean, we want to make things better across the board, but this direction of reasoning models is of particular importance to us. I think reasoning will unlock... I hope reasoning will unlock a lot of the things that we've been waiting years to do. And the- the ability for models like this to, for example, contribute to new science, uh, help write a lot more very difficult code, uh, that I think can drive things forward to a significant degree. So you should expect rapid improvement in the O series of models, and it's of great strategic importance to us.

Another one that I thought was really important for us to touch on was when we look forward to OpenAI's future plans, how do you think about developing no-code tools for non-technical founders to build and scale AI apps? How do you think about that?

It'll get there for sure. Uh, I- I think the- the first step will be tools that make people who know how to code well more productive. But eventually, I think we can offer really high-quality no-code tools. And already there's some out there that make sense. But you can't- you can't sort of in a no-code way say, "I have like a full startup I wanna build." Um, that's gonna take a while.

So, when we look at where we are in the stack today, OpenAI sits in a certain place. How far up the stack is OpenAI going to go? I think it's a brilliant question but, uh, if you're spending a lot of time tuning your RAG system, is this a waste of time because OpenAI ultimately thinks they'll own this part of the application layer, or is it not? And how do you answer a founder who has that question?

The general answer we try to give is we are gonna try our hardest and believe we will succeed at making our models better and better and better. And if you are building a business that patches some current small shortcomings, if we do our job right, then that will not be as important in the future. If, on the other hand, you build a company that benefits from the model getting better and better, if- If, you know, an oracle told you today that 04 was gonna be just absolutely incredible and do all of these things that right now feel impossible and you were happy about that, then, you know, maybe we're wrong but at least that's what we're going for. And if instead you say, "Okay, there's this area where..." There are many, but you pick one of the many areas, "where 01 preview underperforms, and so I'm gonna patch this and just barely get it to work," then you're sort of assuming that the next turn of the model crank won't be as good as we think it will be. And that is the general philosophical message we try to get out to startups. Like, we- we believe that we are on a pretty, a quite steep trajectory of improvement and that the current shortcomings of the models today, um, will just be taken care of by future generations. And, you know, I would encourage people to be in line with that.