When it comes to artificial intelligence, a management consultancy that has previously proven to be reliable often seems less relevant.
Consider OpenAI. Founded in 2015, the AI company behind ChatGPT and GPT-4 is already appreciated at nearly $30 billion and is the talk of Silicon Valley. But its success was hardly inevitable. If its founders had heeded some traditional startup rules, OpenAI might be an obscure company today.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who previously ran startup accelerator Y Combinator, discussed his company’s unusual rise during a fireside chat hosted by a fintech company stripes this week.
“OpenAI went against all YC advice,” Altman told Stripe co-founder and fellow billionaire John Collison.
He rattled down the aisles: “It took us four and a half years to bring a product to market. We will be the most capital-intensive startup in Silicon Valley history. We created technology without knowing who our customers would be or what they would use it for.”
On Saturday, Altman tweeted: “Chatgpt has no social features or built-in sharing, you have to log in before you can use it, no inherent viral loop, etc., which seriously challenges the years of advice I’ve given to startups.”
chatgpt has no social features or built-in sharing, you need to login before using it, no inherent viral loop etc.
seriously questioning the years of advice I’ve given to startups 🙃
— Sam Altman (@sama) May 6, 2023
When asked if potential OpenAI investors wagged their fingers and told him he was doing it wrong, Altman replied, “Yeah, and I just thought I really don’t care. Don’t invest.”
Of course, knowing the startup rules inside out allowed Altman to break them with confidence. In addition to running Y Combinator, whose success depends on valuing startups, he was also the CEO of Reddit and a prominent investor – he was one of Stripe’s early investors.
“Maybe you’re more self-actualized, you don’t have to worry about it that much,” Collison noted, to which Altman replied, “Yeah.”
Greg Brockman, President and Co-Founder of OpenAI, also reflected this week on the company’s rule-breaking ways.
“One should solve a problem, not technology in search of the solution,” he says told The Possible podcast this week. He added that they “spent a couple of months writing down all the different ideas that we could work on for both GPT-3 and GPT-4… Maybe we could do a medical thing or a legal thing.”
Instead, they decided to ignore the rule altogether – with great success.
AI is just different, Brockman concluded: “Every company, every individual, every company is a language company. It has language flows that are deeply ingrained. So if you can add a little value to existing language workflows, then it’s just going to be that widespread.”
//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
—————————————————-
Source link