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Sam Altman on maintaining conviction when Elon said OpenAI had a “0% chance of success”

July 02, 2025

“It is hard to have conviction in the face of a lot of other people telling you you’re wrong. I think people who say it’s easy are not being honest.”

Sam tells the audience of founders at Y Combinator of a time when his conviction in OpenAI was really tested:

“A few years into OpenAI, Elon sent us this really mean email that said we had a 0% chance of success and were totally failing. We showed him GPT1 and he was like, ‘This is crap. It’s not going to work. It doesn’t make sense.’ And he was really a hero of mine at the time, and I remember going home that night and being like, ‘What if he’s right?’”

Sam continues:

“It sucks. You’re working so hard on this thing. You’re pouring your lifeforce into it. And then you have these people who are smart and you look up to who say you are totally wrong: ‘This is never going to work. You don’t have defensibility. Someone’s going to kill you’… I don’t have a magic answer other than it’s really tough and it gets significantly easier over time. But it’s going to happen to all of you. You get knocked down. Then you get back up, brush yourself off, and try to keep going.”