Reflections

Sam Altman reflects on OpenAI's first nine years and the year since his brief firing, arguing that the company's work is still early and that its vision will stay fixed while its tactics keep changing. He says ChatGPT, launched on November 30, 2022, kicked off a growth curve the company had never seen, with weekly active users rising from about 100 million to more than 300 million. He calls his firing a big failure of governance by well-meaning people, including himself, and credits Ron Conway and Brian Chesky with help that he says kept OpenAI from falling apart. He also says the company expects AI agents may join the workforce in 2025 and is beginning to aim at superintelligence.