Money Talks: Play it again, Sam Altman
Economist Podcasts
The Economist
4.3 • 5K Ratings
🗓️ 23 November 2023
⏱️ 45 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In five days OpenAI’s boss was fired by its board; hired by Microsoft, the startup’s biggest investor; and returned to his post at OpenAI. Yet things cannot be as they were: the shuffle will have consequences for the darling of the artificial-intelligence community and for the industry as a whole.
Hosts: Tom Lee-Devlin, Alice Fulwood and Mike Bird. Guests: Benedict Evans, a technology analyst and former venture capitalist, and The Economist’s Arjun Ramani and Ludwig Siegele.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | You're listening to a free episode of Money Talks. |
| 0:03.4 | To listen every week, you'll need to be a subscriber. |
| 0:06.8 | To sign up, click the link in the show notes, or search online for Economist Podcasts Plus. |
| 0:16.1 | In a world of seismic change, will your business shape the future or be shaped by it? |
| 0:22.6 | How will we capture the imagination of tomorrow's consumers? |
| 0:27.6 | Overcome operational constraints to focus on future growth and unlock economic and social prosperity through environmental responsibility. |
| 0:40.5 | With EY's full spectrum of services across sectors, |
| 0:43.4 | we're all in to shape the future with confidence. |
| 0:47.9 | Start your transformation journey at EY.com slash transformation. The Economist The Economist. |
| 1:01.8 | Sam Altman was always fascinated with computers. |
| 1:06.1 | At the age of eight, he learned to code and take apart a Macintosh computer, |
| 1:13.7 | paving the way for him to study computer science at Stanford University. There, he developed a mobile app with two classmates, |
| 1:20.6 | and after two years, he dropped out to work on it full-time. The app, Looped, shared users' locations with their friends. |
| 1:30.5 | It was part of the first group of eight companies at Startup Accelerator Y Combinator, |
| 1:36.3 | which has a knack for creating unicorns. |
| 1:40.2 | Loop was sold for $43 million in 2012, and after a stint running his own venture fund, |
| 1:47.1 | Sam was chosen by Y Combinator's founder as his successor. |
| 1:51.5 | This was 2014, and Sam was 28 years old. |
| 1:57.3 | The following year, Sam got together with Elon Musk to co-found a non-profit company called OpenAI. |
| 2:06.6 | Its aim was to develop cutting-edge artificial intelligence while ensuring that the technology wasn't cataclysmic for humanity. |
| 2:14.6 | We sit there all day and stress about what this means for sort of the continuation of humanity |
| 2:21.3 | and how we want to design a structure where the world gets input and benefit from what we're doing. |
... |
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