EMBRACE CURIOSITY

“I think Mark and I were, giving a demo of reasoning, in front of the, whole company. We're having to do a puzzle in front of everyone. And, I think one of the moments that made me totally feel the EGI is, like, we were in the middle of the demo, and everyone started laughing. I was like, wait. What what is funny? And then I stared at the screen because we're showing this chain of thought as it was streaming out of the model. And the model swore and said, like, oh, damn it. May I have to adjust because I realized I had made a mistake in the puzzle.”

“Curiosity functions as an evolved positive emotion. It is the biological mechanism that pulls us toward new information and experiences, which is essential for building a life that feels meaningful and expansive rather than narrow and fearful. Without that drive, we simply do not grow into our full potential.”

“But GPUs are zero sum. And if you don't have more GPUs, you really have to figure out how do you make very, very hard trades and hate making hard trades for our users. Hence the desire to, have more GPUs, but, it's it's useful to start with the most zero sum trade off when you do your planning. So I think starting working backwards from GPUs, is usually a pretty pretty good idea.”

“Happiness isn't a feeling but a combination of enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning — the macronutrients of happiness, as I call them. Most of us are gorging on the wrong ones, chasing short-term hits of dopamine when what we actually need is a balanced diet of all three to find true purpose in an age of emptiness.”

“Scarcity is what makes savoring possible in the first place. If you have an infinite supply of something, you lose the ability to appreciate it at the margin, whereas knowing that a resource or a moment is limited actually heightens our enjoyment and satisfaction because the rarity forces us to pay attention.”

“The future of think tanks is a shift from content to curation. In an age where everyone is a publisher and information is infinite, the role of a think tank is no longer just to produce more papers, but to help people navigate the noise and find what is actually true and useful.”

“What twin studies tell us about the genetics of well-being is that about half of our happiness is heritable. That’s not actually depressing because it means the other fifty percent is entirely dependent on our habits, our faith, our family, and our work, which is plenty of room for improvement through intentional choices.”

“The pending AI revolution will drastically change the marginal value of truth. As content becomes cheaper and easier to produce, the value of authenticated, human-driven insights and curated knowledge is going to skyrocket because those are the specific things that an algorithm cannot easily replicate or imbue with meaning.”

“The future of think tanks is a shift from content to curation. In an age where everyone is a publisher and information is infinite, the role of a think tank is no longer just to produce more papers, but to help people navigate the noise and find what is actually true and useful.”

“There is a real science to accepting death, and the research shows that knowing you will die actually sharpens the mind. It forces you to stop wasting time on trivialities and focus on the things that provide genuine meaning and legacy, creating a certain level of existential hygiene in your daily life.”

“Curiosity functions as an evolved positive emotion. It is the biological mechanism that pulls us toward new information and experiences, which is essential for building a life that feels meaningful and expansive rather than narrow and fearful. Without that drive, we simply do not grow into our full potential.”

“Pricings there's no world in which pricing doesn't significantly evolve when the technology is changing this quickly. Yeah. it's possible that, you know, in in the current era, having unlimited plan is like having unlimited electricity plan. You know? It just doesn't make sense because, like, you know, people may need a lot a lot of electricity, and they're getting a lot of value out of that. There's a reason you can't buy that.”

“What twin studies tell us about the genetics of well-being is that about half of our happiness is heritable. That’s not actually depressing because it means the other fifty percent is entirely dependent on our habits, our faith, our family, and our work, which is plenty of room for improvement through intentional choices.”

“I think the most important perma skill in this era is, curiosity, I think, because if the machine can answer all your questions, you better have good questions. And the only way to have good questions, I think, is to pursue the things you were actually excited about from an early age and throughout your entire life. And I reflect on this because the only reason I'm here and working on this stuff is because I thought it was neat when I got, you know, nerds sniped in, in the interview process.”

“most people don't think about continuous learning in their job. Now the the founders do because they they're learning these new technologies, and maybe doctors do because it's required by law, but most people that get into a field, I think I think the college experience and the high school experience were so exhausting. They're like worn out and they're like, I'm glad I'm done learning and then they're gonna go to work. But whatever you do, I guarantee you, especially with AI out there, there's some nuance of what you could be doing that's new and and unless you're trying to find that edge, somebody else may be.”

“The greatest obstacle to a spiral-shaped career or any form of reinvention is the weight of sunk costs. People stay in roles they have outgrown because they have invested decades in them, but true happiness often requires the courage to walk away from your past success to find a new peak.”

“The thing that's already come first is the, domain specific agents. If you look at what's happening in in code, we're we're we're fully there. You know, it it's mind bending, but we've got so many engineers, who who don't open their IDE, like, ever. I won't be surprised if you see this happen for other forms of sort of quantitative knowledge work just because it happens to have the properties that code has. It's testable. You know if it worked or not. It's, you know, very RL friendly.”

“I once asked Jeff Bezos how he could possibly be good at angel investing while he's running this company. Oh, he did, Google, Uber. Like, it's a murderer's road. But but but to get to the point, he said the only thing he looks for is this insane determinism. He's like he he wanted to believe the person was gonna go do this no matter what come hell or high water.”

“ChatGPT originally was entirely free, and the reason for that was that it was intended to be a demo. And we're gonna wind it down after a month. We then realized that the demo went viral and people loved the demo, and it was actually a product. And but we realized it'd be a product. You can't take the product down every time you're at capacity. So we, you know, shipped subscriptions simply because it could shape the demand. It was a way of gracefully turning users away, and we had to turn away someone.”

“I saw a ton of those people when I came to New York. we were getting paid decent money, like, for entry level jobs, but they would run and get they'd go get the place in the Hamptons, and they'd join the private club, and they'd run their budget right up to the top, sometimes above it. It's where if they don't get the bonus, they're underwater.”

“I think the way you describe it is right. Like, everyone talks about mentors and no one talks about peers. So I do have a chapter on mentors, and I offer a ton of very practical advice about how to play that correctly. But the peer thing, the idea is that when you get on that first rung of the ladder and you're trying climate, if you could develop a friend group, it might be four, it might be six that are also on that same journey. And hopefully, I think outside your organization.”

“Happiness isn't a feeling but a combination of enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning — the macronutrients of happiness, as I call them. Most of us are gorging on the wrong ones, chasing short-term hits of dopamine when what we actually need is a balanced diet of all three to find true purpose in an age of emptiness.”

“If you're crafting your own personal career and you're high agency, I think that's the word you used earlier, AI is like a jetpack. Like, you can do more stuff than you ever could before. You can learn faster than you ever could before in the history of time. You can find people to connect with. You can network faster than than you ever could before. And so if you have agency and and a direction you're headed in, AI is gonna make things way better.”

“There's a lot of fear out there. Just remember, Warren Buffett said be be greedy when others are fearful and fearful when others are greedy. So the first wave of AI was a lot of people being greedy, and now all of a sudden there's fear for the first time. So if you're a net buyer of stocks, this is when you it's when you sharpen your pencil.”

“We've got about 10% of the world coming to us now, 90% left to go. Right? There's so much more opportunity to to to to reach more people and introduce them to the way that AI can can can benefit fit them. But we're also really excited to go deeper. And that means taking the same billion users that find value in ChatGPT today, and actually providing more meaningful value in their world.”

“I care a lot about long term retention, and I would put all my points there because, I'm I'm really proud of the retention stats we have. Huge. But, ultimately, the sign of durable value is whether or not people are coming back in three months because that means you're really solving their problems. And I think things like revenue, they follow from that.”

“We came across this Gallup poll that said 53% of people aren't engaged at work. And so we had this idea to ask, like, a thousand people if you could start your career over again, would you do it differently? And and seven out of 10 said yes. And then we we took that to to Wharton People Analytics to do the official academic version so you make sure you get all the statistical data correct. And their their number came back six out of 10, so still a really big number.”

“So my mother-in-law, her name's Smithy. She came here, to to America from Haiti at, like, 14 years old. Didn't speak English. Married my father-in-law, Jeff. Jeff owned a moving company. Smithy was a stay at home mom for a long time. The kids grew up, and she was like, I'm kinda lost. I need to do something. So about five years ago, she says to me. She goes, Sam, I think I'm gonna start an online store that sells pillows. She now has a pillow company that sells over $1,000,000 a year in pillows. She has a warehouse in New Jersey with five full time employees selling pillows.”

“I think the CEO job is the loneliest job in America. I've said that many many times before. It's hard. And one of the things that makes it particularly hard, you need to run culturally opposite what's happening at the company. So if the company's doing poorly, you have to bring the positive energy and make people believe it's possible. And if the company's running hot, you wanna bring them down to earth.”

“The greatest obstacle to a spiral-shaped career or any form of reinvention is the weight of sunk costs. People stay in roles they have outgrown because they have invested decades in them, but true happiness often requires the courage to walk away from your past success to find a new peak.”

“The pending AI revolution will drastically change the marginal value of truth. As content becomes cheaper and easier to produce, the value of authenticated, human-driven insights and curated knowledge is going to skyrocket because those are the specific things that an algorithm cannot easily replicate or imbue with meaning.”

“We highlight in the book that that word's kind of cliched and overused. Seinfeld gave a talk at Duke where he said fascination was a better word. I think obsession's a good word. We titled the chapter chase your curiosity. Like, what just what is it that you you can't ignore? Like, what is this thing that you love so much that you always wanna know more about it?”

“So first off, Code Reds are a tool we use, to create focus. End of last year, we had one of those moments where we felt like we we need to show up for our users. We need to focus the things, focus on the basics, like reliability, performance, the way that talking to the model feels, making personalization really great. We just exited the code red, which we knew we would, with the launch of 5.3, which, you know, is a is a great model for the everyday user.”

“There is a real science to accepting death, and the research shows that knowing you will die actually sharpens the mind. It forces you to stop wasting time on trivialities and focus on the things that provide genuine meaning and legacy, creating a certain level of existential hygiene in your daily life.”

“Scarcity is what makes savoring possible in the first place. If you have an infinite supply of something, you lose the ability to appreciate it at the margin, whereas knowing that a resource or a moment is limited actually heightens our enjoyment and satisfaction because the rarity forces us to pay attention.”