How To Build The Future: Sam Altman
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN commenters cite it as the primary source for what Altman actually said about AGI timelines and the path to it, mainly to check or correct press quotes like the "AGI in 2025" claim.
Recommended by 1 people across 1 different months, 2024 to 2026.
What it is
Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan interviews OpenAI CEO Sam Altman in an episode of the rebooted "How To Build The Future" series. They cover Altman's path into YC, the founding of OpenAI, the scaling bet, commercializing GPT-4, the OpenAI board drama, and advice for founders building on current AI models.
What people said
Recommends tim333 · 2024-11 · Hacker News · on “OpenAI's new "Orion" model reportedly shows small gains over GPT-4”
I was thinking the way the LLMs work is quite similar to a human reading a lot of books and remembering the stuff in them be able to answer questions but not really thinking about it. GPT4 already read all the stuff and can answer back so it's hard to do much better there. The next step would seem maybe to think about it, which o1 is maybe making a start on. If you think of humans learning say programing, they read the books and can answer questions but they have to do exercises, write code and so on which gives greater understanding which is maybe where AI needs to go next. By the way the Altman Tan Nov 8th interview which is a source for most of the Altman mentions in the article is worth
Cites AlwaysRock · 2024-11 · Hacker News · on “OpenAI, Google and Anthropic are struggling to build more advanced AI”
I think your definition is off from what most people would define AGI as. Generally, it means being able to think and reason at a human level for a multitude/all tasks or jobs. "Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) refers to a theoretical form of artificial intelligence that possesses the ability to understand, learn, and apply knowledge across a wide range of tasks at a level comparable to that of a human being." Altman says AGI could be here in 2025: [this video] But he certainly means an LLM that can perform at/above human level in most tasks rather than a self aware entity.
Cites tim333 · 2025-11 · Hacker News · on “Ilya Sutskever, Yann LeCun and the End of “Just Add GPUs””
Fair enough although that Altman quote doesn't match what he actually said in the interview. He said: >...first time ever where I felt like we actually know what to do like I think from here to building an AGI will still take a huge amount of work there are some known unknowns but I think we basically know what to go what to go do and it'll take a while it'll be hard but that's tremendously exciting... [this video] and at the end there was "what are you excited for in 2025?" and Altman says "AGI" but that doesn't specify if that's it arriving or just working on it. I don't think huge amount of work and known unknowns is the same as we just need to scale.
Cites nl · 2026-09 · Hacker News · on “How accurate have Ed Zitron's AI skeptic predictions been?”
> Because he was wrong. That's how it works. > His statement was wrong. I don't care what other ideas you want to read into it, he was incorrect about AGI arriving in 2025. No Sam Altman never claimed we'd get AGI in 2025. That is Tom's Hardware incorrect headline. Altman's quote is: "I felt like we actually know what to do like I think from here to building an AGI will still take a huge amount of work there are some known unknowns but I think we basically know what to go what to go do and it'll take a while it'll be hard but that's tremendously exciting I also think on the product side there's more to figure out but roughly we know what to shoot at and what we want to optimize for that's a
Cites djeastm · 2026-09 · Hacker News · on “How accurate have Ed Zitron's AI skeptic predictions been?”
I think the alleged 2025 prediction comes from this part: [this video] Interviewer: "What are you excited about in 2025? What's to come?" Altman: "AGI. Excited for that." I don't know if that counts as predicting it would be here in 2025 or that he's just excited to work on it in 2025