https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2025-sam-altman-interview

One of the strengths of that original OpenAI group was recruiting. Somehow you managed to corner the market on a ton of the top AI research talent, often with much less money to offer than your competitors. What was the pitch?

The pitch was just come build AGI. And the reason it worked—I cannot overstate how heretical it was at the time to say we’re gonna build AGI. So you filter out 99% of the world, and you only get the really talented, original thinkers. And that’s really powerful. If you’re doing the same thing everybody else is doing, if you’re building, like, the 10,000th photo-sharing app? Really hard to recruit talent.

OpenAI senior executives at the company’s headquarters in San Francisco on March 13, 2023, from left: Sam Altman, chief executive officer; Mira Murati, chief technology officer; Greg Brockman, president; and Ilya Sutskever, chief scientist. Photographer: Jim Wilson/The New York Times