Sam Altman on Sora, Energy, and Building an AI Empire

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a16z

Science, Innovation, Business, Entrepreneurship, Culture, Disruption, Software Eating The World, Technology

4.4 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 8 October 2025

⏱️ 48 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Sam Altman has led OpenAI from its founding as a research nonprofit in 2015 to becoming the most valuable startup in the world ten years later. In this episode, a16z Cofounder Ben Horowitz and General Partner Erik Torenberg sit down with Sam to discuss the core thesis behind OpenAI’s disparate bets, why they released Sora, how they use models internally, the best AI evals, and where we’re going from here.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Sort of thought we had like stumbled on this one giant secret that we had these scaling loss for language models and that felt like
0:06.0	Such an incredible triumph. I was like we're probably never gonna get that lucky again and deep learning has been this miracle that keeps on giving and we have kept finding
0:16.0	Breakthrough after breakthrough again when we got the the reasoning model breakthrough, I also thought that was like,
0:22.1	we're never going to get another one like that.
0:23.9	It just seems so improbable that this one technology works so well.
0:27.2	But maybe this is always what it feels like when you discover,
0:29.6	like, one of the big, you know, scientific breakthroughs is if it's like really big,
0:34.4	it's pretty fundamental and it just, it keeps working.
0:38.5	OpenEI isn't just building an app.
0:40.6	It's building the biggest data center and human history.
0:43.9	Yesterday, I sat down with Ben Horowitz and Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI.
0:48.5	We talk about OpenAI's vision to become the people's personal AI, the massive infrastructure
0:53.9	behind it, and how the company's
0:55.8	research is pushing toward AGI,
0:58.0	including AI that can do real science.
1:00.5	We also talk about how his views
1:02.0	have changed on open source, regulation,
1:04.7	and why AI and energy
1:05.8	are now deeply linked.
1:07.5	Let's get to it.
1:10.9	Sam, welcome to AISZ podcast.
1:12.9	Thanks for having me.
	...

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