Peter Thiel Told Sam Altman to Double Down on ChatGPT
He compared its plain text box to the empty box that made Google work, and said its fast growth mattered more than missing feeds and lock-in.
David Senra · Sam Altman on Building OpenAI & Betting on the ImpossibleAbout two months after ChatGPT launched, Sam Altman, who runs OpenAI, brought a worry to Peter Thiel, the PayPal co-founder and early Facebook investor. Thiel is one of the two people Altman says he still seeks out for very non-obvious problems, because theirs is the thinking he can predict least.
Inside OpenAI, the mood was uneasy despite fast growth. People were trying ChatGPT mainly because they were curious to talk with it and see what it could do, Altman recalls, and many employees feared that curiosity was unstable and would not turn into lasting value. So the team began discussing five or six different projects it might pursue instead.
The choice mattered because OpenAI had to decide where to put its limited people, money, and computing power. Altman has said sacrificing good ideas to chase great ones is hard, and that entrepreneurs seem to be bad at it, himself included.
By Altman's account, Thiel called the growth rare and great. Putting effort anywhere but ChatGPT, Thiel told him, was an obvious mistake.
By Altman's account, Thiel's reasoning started with simplicity. A plain box where a person writes any question in ordinary words and gets back a useful answer had already worked for Google, Thiel noted, and ChatGPT had the same shape.
That view cut against Silicon Valley wisdom at the time, which prized feeds, social networks, and ways to lock users in by storing more of their history. ChatGPT had none of that before memory, which was why the team was nervous. By Altman's account, Thiel argued that did not matter, because this was the first thing to come along that clearly worked like the empty box that had worked for Google, so OpenAI should just double down on it.
Altman says OpenAI followed the advice and went super hard on ChatGPT. He later called it "very important simple genius."
Questions people ask
How fast did ChatGPT grow after launch?
ChatGPT was released on November 30, 2022. It reached about 100 million monthly users within about two months, one of the fastest consumer takeoffs on record. That speed is why rapid early use looked both exciting and hard to trust.
Who is Peter Thiel in relation to Altman?
Peter Thiel co-founded PayPal and Palantir, and was an early investor in Facebook. Altman says he and Paul Graham are the two advisers he still consults on very non-obvious business problems, because they think in a nonlinear way.
What is the Google text box comparison?
Google won users with a simple empty box where you could type almost any question and get a useful answer. Thiel meant ChatGPT had the same quality: maximum flexibility with minimum interface. Startups had copied Google with feeds and social features, while he thought the plain box was the real prize.