Sam Altman Reveals Peter Thiel's Advice That Made OpenAI Double Down on ChatGPT
davidsenra · x · 2026-10-30
Sam Altman shares the best advice Peter Thiel ever gave him: focus on what's working — and Thiel was the one who convinced him to double down on ChatGPT early on.
- After launch, ChatGPT felt internally like a "weird thing": growing super fast but seemingly unstable, almost low-value growth
- Many at OpenAI pushed to pivot; the team listed 5-6 alternative directions
- Thiel: "It's an obvious mistake to do anything but this" — the power is "the power of the Google text box... you can type anything into, and it does the right thing"
- He noted people had chased Google's business model for 20 years and this was the first real answer: the empty text box worked for Google, so double down
- Altman obliged: "We went super hard on ChatGPT and it was great."
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