.@sama on the similarities between startup investing and AI research: “The thing in my career that I have found closest to startup investing is managing an AI research program.” “There's a lot of similarities: -how you find non-consensus bets -how you decide where to have conviction -how you understand what exponential growth looks like -how you identify outlier talent” Both AI research and startup investing are dominated by power laws: “So people talk about this all the time in investing which is you have to reprogram your brain because we don't seem naturally well-suited to think this way:” “Your best investment will outperform all of your other investments put together. Your second-best investment will outperform everything else put together after that. And AI research is like that as well.” “When we started people thought it was totally unlikely that AGI was possible.” “We just got hammered by all of the intellectual giants of the field for saying that we were going after AGI.” “And then when we started really focusing on large language models we got hammered again saying ‘This is completely ridiculous.’” “And I understood from my startup background that high-risk bets are okay as long as you take the ones where if they work it's super valuable. And research looks this way too.” “The kind of people that make great researchers are non-consensus, have a fresh approach, have high energy, and are non-standard people.” “You don't want to fund a founder who has a slightly different take on the same idea as the last thousand people you talked to. One that has tried to convince you, and maybe convince themselves, that somehow they're completely different and doing something totally new. A founder that is mostly trying to fit in with the herd and be on the same track as everybody else and do what they're supposed to do, which is start a startup. And they've heard Peter Thiel say enough times that there's something that you're supposed to be doing different that they kind of try to emulate, but they don't really mean it.” “It's very clear to me when you have someone who just thinks differently than most other people and is willing to stand by convictions that are very unpopular, but if right at least they're going to be really right versus someone who has a thin veneer on the same idea that everybody else has.” “In late 2015 when we were starting OpenAI there were very few AGI efforts in the world. It was a very non-consensus thing to do.” “In that same year there were probably many thousands of founders starting photo-sharing apps.That was probably not as good of a thing to do.” “Today a lot of people want to start AI labs. There are some handful of people, two, three, whatever, doing something completely new that actually wasn't possible until the AI got this good but doesn't seem like a good idea yet.” “And that is the thing that as a startup funder I always wanted to fund and the thing that mostly worked for me.” “There's a similar thing for researchers. There were a lot of researchers that would chase whatever the last thing was that worked and there were a small number of researchers that had high conviction towards a new idea.” “And I think we were, and are, the best research lab for those people.”