Top all-time · #65
Sam Altman
Personal blog · blog.samaltman.comstartupsphilosophy
Sam Altman's personal blog at blog.samaltman.com covers startups and philosophy. Since 2013, 450 different Hacker News readers have linked it 628 times, most often “Employee Equity”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-04-10, and you can follow it by feed.
Rarely recommended · 3 of 40 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers mostly link Altman's posts to cite what he said about AI risk, OpenAI, YC startup equity and hiring. Comments rarely judge the writing itself.
- Recommended for · 3 comments
- Called an "excellent piece" on one mindset; listed among "great resources" on hiring.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 40 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Sam Altman
Most-linked posts?
- Employee Equity24 people · 27 mentions · first linked 2014-04-18
- How to Be Successful (2019)22 people · 24 mentions · first linked 2020-01-07
- The days are long but the decades are short (2015)22 people · 24 mentions · first linked 2018-04-01
- Sam Altman: Employee equity (2014)15 people · 17 mentions · first linked 2017-11-28
- Productivity15 people · 15 mentions · first linked 2018-04-10
- The Gentle Singularity13 people · 18 mentions · first linked 2025-06-10
- The Merge (2017)12 people · 13 mentions · first linked 2022-12-17
- Sam Altman: Why You Should Fear Machine Intelligence (2015)11 people · 28 mentions · first linked 2021-07-31
- Trump11 people · 12 mentions · first linked 2016-06-20
- The Tech Bust of 20159 people · 9 mentions · first linked 2015-11-02
What Hacker News says?
OpenAI's Mission and the New Voice Mode of GPT-4 • Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, emphasizes two key points from their recent announcement. Firstly, he highlights their commitment to providing free access to powerful AI tools, such as ChatGPT, without advertisements or restrictions. This aligns with their initial vision of creating AI for the benefit of the world, allowing others to build amazing things using their…
Comment linking /gpt-4o
on “GPT-4o”Submitted Productivity as a story · 1264 points
HN discussion@sama reflects: https://blog.samaltman.com/gpt-4o
Comment linking /gpt-4o
on “GPT-4o”Submitted The days are long but the decades are short as a story · 1163 points
HN discussionSorry to hear that, as I've been on this website for 8 years now, I think, and have never commented about politics in here until this topic came up. But is disingenuous to mark this as "off-topic" as the anti-immigration discourse has been center stage in the "Leave" campaign, and as this topic is about the UK actually leaving the UK I fail to see how this was marked as "off topic". This is just about decent people…
Comment linking /trump
on “UK votes to leave EU”Submitted Time to Take a Stand as a story · 1131 points
HN discussionI'm not sure if you're referencing his post or not, but Sam Altman has an excellent piece about this exact mindset. I meditate on this idea quite a bit. https://blog.samaltman.com/the-days-are-long-but-the-decades...
Comment linking /the-days-are-long-but-the-decades-are-short
on “Having Kids”Submitted Keep the Internet Open as a story · 1032 points
HN discussionSafe AI [1], on the other hand, has [2] running on < $1M and [3] running on $10M (!) from Musk. Throw in Yudkowsky's recently expressed interest in startups [4] and you can guess what I am guessing. [1] http://blog.samaltman.com/machine-intelligence-part-1 [2] https://intelligence.org/donate/ [3] http://futureoflife.org/AI/AI_beneficial [4] http://hpmor.com/notes/119/
Comment linking /machine-intelligence-part-1
on “YC Research”Submitted Reddit as a story · 988 points
HN discussionFrom http://blog.samaltman.com/the-2016-election "Peter is a part-time partner at YC, meaning he spends a small fraction of his time advising YC companies, does not have a vote in how YC is run, and in his case waives the equity part-time partners normally get."
Comment linking /the-2016-election
on “Welcome, ACLU”Submitted How to Be Successful as a story · 894 points
HN discussionThe Midler v. Ford decision said her voice was distinctive. Not the song. OpenAI didn't just use a voice like Scarlett Johansson's. They used it in an AI system they wanted people to associate with AI from movies and the movie where Johansson played an AI particularly.[1][2] [1] https://blog.samaltman.com/gpt-4o [2] https://x.com/sama/status/1790075827666796666
Comment linking /gpt-4o
on “Statement from Scarlett Johansson on the OpenAI "Sky" voice”Submitted Hard Startups as a story · 728 points
HN discussion>So what is final state here for us? The merge. ( https://blog.samaltman.com/the-merge ) I'm quite enthusiastic. I've always thought mortality sucks.
Comment linking /the-merge
on “Genie 3: A new frontier for world models”Submitted Affordable Care as a story · 720 points
HN discussionIt's not a ridiculous comparison. This thread involves Sam Altman and Elon Musk, right? Sam Altman:"Development of superhuman machine intelligence is probably the greatest threat to the continued existence of humanity." In the essay "Why You Should Fear Machine Intelligence" https://blog.samaltman.com/machine-intelligence-part-1 So, more than nukes then... Elon Musk: "There’s a strong probability that it [AGI] will…
Comment linking /machine-intelligence-part-1
on “Elon Musk sues Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, and OpenAI [pdf]”Submitted E Pur Si Muove as a story · 647 points
HN discussionRandom waiting-for-a-build thoughts: I find that if you hang around long enough and pay attention, you start to see the shape and patterns of your life. Not an original or profound observation, but it can be surprisingly easy for many of us to defer thinking about such things. What you gain from this you pay for with time, though. In a similar experience to yours, I watched The Matrix with my son recently and was sh…
Comment linking /the-days-are-long-but-the-decades-are-short
on “My Biggest Regret as a Programmer”Submitted AI as a story · 616 points
HN discussionI like the idea to use YC's dataset to calculate expected outcomes based on actual historicals a lot. That's a great idea! Options have been mentioned before - we 100% agree we need to fix this and are going to work on it. https://blog.samaltman.com/employee-equity
Comment linking /employee-equity
on “Ask HN: Pros and cons of working at a startup in 2018?”Submitted Cruise as a story · 580 points
HN discussionThanks for the pointer to global investment performance standards - that's a good analogue. We already agree about 10 year exercise windows ( https://blog.samaltman.com/employee-equity ) but we need to do more to make it a standard.
Comment linking /employee-equity
on “Ask HN: Pros and cons of working at a startup in 2018?”Submitted The Tech Bust of 2015 as a story · 562 points
HN discussionThis is such a great area to work on. The equity side is pretty rough. Founders are very sensitive about disclosing important information about company performance. They are sensitive about disclosing the cap table. Some will share info with investors that they don't share with employees. And they are sometimes trying to pitch optimistically and leaving out items that don't fit the narrative. So you end up with a ve…
Comment linking /employee-equity
on “Ask HN: Pros and cons of working at a startup in 2018?”Submitted PG and Jessica as a story · 555 points
HN discussionYC could do that, but it goes against YC's mantra of the importance of having a team working in the same office of a startup and it being located only in SV. https://blog.samaltman.com/how-to-hire Thats not to say that it is the right policy, but if I were founding a startup I would definitely be looking for remote workers in other locations.
Comment linking /how-to-hire
on “Ask HN: Pros and cons of working at a startup in 2018?”Submitted Idea Generation as a story · 524 points
HN discussion> OpenAI knowing how to build AGI and similar outlandish claims. The fact that the scaling of pretrained models is hitting a wall doesn't invalidate any of those claims. Everyone in the industry is now shifting towards reasoning models (a.k.a. chain of thought, a.k.a. inference time reasoning, etc.) because it keeps scaling further than pretraining. Sam said the phrase you refer to [1] in January, when OpenAI had al…
Comment linking /reflections
on “GPT-4.5”Submitted Helion as a story · 514 points
HN discussion
