A chronological index of public posts with topic labels, summaries, and severity badges.
30 posts across 10 years
1 post
Here is a photo of my family. I love them more than anything. Images have power, I hope. Normally we try to be pretty private, but in this case I am sharing a photo in the hopes that it might dissuade the next person from throwing a Molotov cocktail at our hou...
7 posts
We have been learning quickly from how people are using Sora and taking feedback from users, rightsholders, and other interested groups. We of course spent a lot of time discussing this before launch, but now that we have a product out we can do more than just theorize....
We are launching a new app called Sora. This is a combination of a new model called Sora 2, and a new product that makes it easy to create, share, and view videos. This feels to many of us like the “ChatGPT for creativity” moment, and it feels fun and new....
Over the next couple of months, we’ll be talking about some of our plans and the partners we are working with to make this a reality....
Jakub is our chief scientist. He once described Szymon as “indefatigable”, which is as perfect of a use of that word as I have ever heard....
We are past the event horizon; the takeoff has started. Humanity is close to building digital superintelligence, and at least so far it’s much less weird than it seems like it should be. Robots are not yet walking the streets, nor are most of us talking to AI all day....
Our mission is to ensure that AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) benefits all of humanity. Systems that start to point to AGI* are coming into view, and so we think it’s important to understand the moment we are in....
The second birthday of ChatGPT was only a little over a month ago, and now we have transitioned into the next paradigm of models that can do complex reasoning....
1 post
There are two things from our announcement today I wanted to highlight. First, a key part of our mission is to put very capable AI tools in the hands of people for free (or at a great price)....
1 post
Optimism, obsession, self-belief, raw horsepower and personal connections are how things get started. Cohesive teams, the right combination of calmness and urgency, and unreasonable commitment are how things get finished....
2 posts
Helion has been progressing even faster than I expected and is on pace in 2024 to 1) demonstrate Q > 1 fusion and 2) resolve all questions needed to design a mass-producible fusion generator....
Today we did a research launch of DALL•E 2, a new AI tool that can create and edit images from natural language instructions. Most importantly, we hope people love the tool and find it useful. For me, it’s the most delightful thing to play with we’ve created so far....
1 post
I’m delighted to be investing more in Helion. Helion is by far the most promising approach to fusion I’ve seen. David and Chris are two of the most impressive founders and builders (in the sense of building fusion machines, in addition to building companies!...
10 posts
A founder recently asked me how to stop caring what other people think. I didn’t have an answer, and after reflecting on it more, I think it's the wrong question....
A lot of people want to replicate YC in some other industry or some other place or with some other strategy. In general, people seem to assume that: 1) although there was some degree of mystery or luck about how YC got going, it can’t be that hard, and 2) if y...
I spent many years working with founders and now I work with researchers. Although there are always individual exceptions, on average it’s surprising to me how different the best people in these groups are (including in some qualities that I had assumed were p...
Almost every company and non-profit working on COVID-19 that I offered to help asked for support with clinical trials—for companies focusing on developing novel drugs, vaccines, and diagnostics, rapidly spinning up trials is one of their biggest bottlenecks....
The most common question prospective startup founders ask is how to get ideas for startups. The second most common question is if you have any ideas for their startup. But giving founders an idea almost always doesn’t work....
Experts on the COVID-19 pandemic seem to think there are three ways out—that is, for life, health, and the economy to return roughly to normal....
I’m trying to fund startups/projects helping with COVID-19, because it’s basically the one thing I know how to do that can help....
Although I still hope things will go differently, the experts I’ve spoken to think we are likely to face a global tragedy—hundreds of thousands of deaths from Covid-19. I hope that society views this as a warning for the future. Covid-19 is bad, but only a warm-up....
The most counterintuitive secret about startups is that it’s often easier to succeed with a hard startup than an easy one. A hard startup requires a lot more money, time, coordination, or technological development than most startups....
There is a lot of advice about how to be a good startup founder. But there isn’t very much about how to be a good startup investor....
1 post
I’ve observed thousands of founders and thought a lot about what it takes to make a huge amount of money or to create something important. Usually, people start off wanting the former and end up wanting the latter. Here are 13 thoughts about how to achieve such outlier success....
3 posts
Today, OpenAI released a new result. We used PPO (Proximal Policy Optimization), a general reinforcement learning algorithm invented by OpenAI, to train a team of 5 agents to play Dota and beat semi-pros....
I am pretty sure cryptocurrency is here to stay in some form (at least as a store of value, which is the only use case we have seen work at scale so far). There was possibly a time when governments could have totally stopped it, but it feels like that’s in the rearview mirror....
I think I am at least somewhat more productive than average, and people sometimes ask me for productivity tips. So I decided to just write them all down in one place. Compound growth gets discussed as a financial concept, but it works in careers as well, and it is magic....
3 posts
I made a point in this post inelegantly in a way that was easy to misunderstand, so I’d like to clarify it. I didn’t mean that we need to tolerate brilliant homophobic jerks in the lab so that we can have scientific progress....
Earlier this year, I noticed something in China that really surprised me. I realized I felt more comfortable discussing controversial ideas in Beijing than in San Francisco. I didn’t feel completely comfortable—this was China, after all—just more comfortable than at home....
A popular topic in Silicon Valley is talking about what year humans and machines will merge (or, if not, what year humans will get surpassed by rapidly improving AI or a genetically enhanced species). Most guesses seem to be between 2025 and 2075....