Sam Altman reveals Peter Thiel's advice to double down on ChatGPT's 'Google text box'
_AustinCalvert_ · x · 2026-09-22
Sam Altman recounts that in ChatGPT's early days, despite rapid growth, many at OpenAI felt the growth was unstable or "low-value" and drew up 5-6 alternative directions. Peter Thiel told him doing anything else would be an obvious mistake: the power of ChatGPT is "the power of the Google text box" — a box you can type anything into and it does the right thing. People chased the Google business model for 20 years, and this was the first real analog, so double down while it grows.
More from Companies & People
- Nat Friedman: Muse was built from scratch but inspired by openclaw, bought hundreds of Mac minis — firstadopter · 2026-09-22
- OpenAI calls for US leadership in setting global AI standards — Anxious-Yoghurt-9207 · 2026-09-22
- Jensen Huang explains why AI is a multitrillion-dollar opportunity: the machine never stops running — rohanpaul_ai · 2026-09-22
- Ex-Spotify playlist AI lead starts up to redefine how humans and agents compound knowledge — floguo · 2026-09-22
- Mistral researcher to keynote Interspeech 2026 on Voxtral audio foundation models — shrutirij · 2026-09-22
- Huawei's Sept 19 event: long-running agents bottleneck on data movement, not FLOPs — krishnan · 2026-09-22