Sam Altman
Entrepreneur and investor who has served as CEO of OpenAI since 2019, leading the company behind ChatGPT and its research on artificial general intelligence.
“If you are a developer and you have 30 ideas, the canonical advice that was correct two years ago is pick one and put all of your effort into it, because you can't build 30 things. You can now build all 30 things, and you can get people to use them all. And then you can work more on the ones that work.”
TBPN · Startups & Venture · September 2026
Context
A host said a venture-investor mindset, where you expect three of ten bets to work, suits the current moment. Altman answers with advice for developers: the old rule of picking one idea no longer holds because building is now fast and cheap.
Transcript
…we'll be very right about how people kind of are gonna have the same things that they care about and drives in their lives ten years from now they have from today. And even with this like amazing intelligence, a lot of parts of life are gonna stay the same. But then a lot of the details and kind of
…of a venture investor and somebody that's made a bunch of very long term bets makes people very well suited for today in the sense that having that openness to if I get three things out of 10 right and I get them really right, then then that's great. Like it it sort of pays for all the other bets.
One of the things that I think is coolest about this new generation of people building with AI is you can try something so quickly and so cheaply that if you have if you are a developer and you have 30 ideas, the canonical advice that was correct two years ago is pick one and put all of your effort into it because you can't build 30 things. You can now build all 30 things Mhmm. And you can get people to use them all. And then you can work more on the ones that work. So I think this mindset of lots of ideas, quick feedback, and be open to a lot of things not working is great for this new era of how how people build.
I have one more question that we wanna get you to hit the gong. On alignment, you've been deep in the weeds, I'm sure. There was a debate I saw, is it an engineering problem? Is it a science problem? Is there a different frame of mind that we should be approaching alignment with?
I I think it's like all of those things but it's certainly incorrect to talk about this only as an engineering problem. Okay. Anyone who says we have solved the science of alignment, I believe is wrong Okay. In a very dangerous way. Like we need to make more research progress. I assume we will.…
Have we considered moving away from the term sandbox? Because I have a five year old, if I put him in a sandbox, he's not gonna stay there. I think we might need a new term.
More from TBPN
