Sam Altman: The Future of OpenAI, ChatGPT's Origins, and Building AI Hardware
A fireside with Sam Altman at AI Startup School in San Francisco.Sam Altman grew up obsessed with technology, broke into the Stanford mainframe as a kid, and dropped out to start his first company before turning 20.In this conversation, he traces the path from early startup struggles to building OpenAI—sharing what he’s learned about ambition, the weight of responsibility, and how to keep building when the whole world is watching. He opens up about the hardest moments of his career, the limits of personal productivity, and why, in the end, it's all still about finding people you like working with and doing something that matters.
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42:44
Elon Musk: Digital Superintelligence, Multiplanetary Life, How to Be Useful
A fireside with Elon Musk at AI Startup School in San Francisco.Before rockets and robots, Elon Musk was drilling holes through his office floor to borrow internet. In this candid talk, he walks through the early days of Zip2, the Falcon 1 launches that nearly ended SpaceX, and the “miracle” of Tesla surviving 2008. He shares the thinking that guided him—building from first principles, doing useful things, and the belief that we’re in the middle of an intelligence big bang.
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49:40
Andrej Karpathy: Software Is Changing (Again)
Andrej Karpathy's keynote at AI Startup School in San Francisco.Drawing on his work at Stanford, OpenAI, and Tesla, Andrej sees a shift underway. Software is changing, again. We’ve entered the era of “Software 3.0,” where natural language becomes the new programming interface and models do the rest.He explores what this shift means for developers, users, and the design of software itself— that we're not just using new tools, but building a new kind of computer.Slides provided by Andrej: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1a0h1mkwfmV2PlekxDN8isMrDA5evc4wW/view?usp=sharing
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39:31
Cursor CEO: Going Beyond Code, Superintelligent AI Agents And Why Taste Still Matters
Michael Truell, co-founder and CEO of Anysphere, the company behind Cursor, joins Garry to talk about building one of the fastest-growing startups of all time—and why he's betting on a future beyond code. He walks through the early insights that led his team to leave a promising AI-powered CAD project and instead chase a bigger dream: reinventing how software is written. From years of false starts and rewrites to Cursor's breakthrough moment, Michael explains what it takes to build a tool that could eventually replace programming as we know it. He also reflects on their first 10 hires, why taste still matters and how the decade ahead will unlock a new kind of creativity for builders everywhere.
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37:28
Fusion Energy Is Tech's Next Big Unlock
Fusion may still sound like science fiction— but it might not be for much longer. With AI pushing demand for clean power to new highs, a breakthrough may finally be close.For Decoded, YC General Partner Gustaf Alstromer traces the history of fusion, the physics behind it, and the engineering challenges that stalled it for nearly a century. He also looks at how Helion is approaching the problem differently, as they develop a new fusion system expected to deliver power to Microsoft by 2028.