Two months after OpenAI launched ChatGPT, Sam Altman sought advice from Paypal founder Peter Thiel who warned him of the big “Google mistake’ he is making. Speaking during the David Senra podcast, Sam Altman said that after the ChatGPT launch, “it was sort of this weird thing because people didn’t really know what to use it for”. Altman said that while ChatGPT was growing super fast, “it felt very unstable” as people were using it just because they were interested in talking to it and what they could do. He then turned to Theil who said “It’s an obvious mistake to do anything but this, besides the fact that it’s growing, which is rare and great.”“The power of this is the power of the Google text box. It’s like a text box you can type anything into, and it does the right thing. And the fact that it doesn’t match the current Silicon Valley wisdom … you have to have feeds and you have to have a network effect”“He’s like, ‘People have just been chasing the Google business model for 20 years and this is the first thing that’s come up, and clearly the empty text box worked for Google, so why don’t you just double down on that? It’s growing. It’s very flexible and it has all of the signs other than it doesn’t fit the current Silicon Valley wisdom’,” Sam Altman said.“So we went super hard on ChatGPT and it was great,” he stated.
Investment advice Sam Altman got from Peter Thiel
In August, Sam Altman shared a “not-to-miss” investing advice he learned from billionaire Peter Thiel and Y Combinator co-founder Paul Graham. According to The OpenAI CEO, who has invested in hundreds of startups including Airbnb, Stripe and Reddit, the most valuable investment opportunities are often those that do not appear popular at the time.Speaking on the Invest Like the Best podcast, Altman said the lesson shaped the investment philosophy behind his venture portfolio, which includes stakes in nearly 400 companies. “I really learned from Peter Thiel and Paul Graham, both in two different ways, which is that the very best companies, the very best investment opportunities are almost never the ones that look really popular,” he noted.
