Sam Altman on scaling OpenAI after ChatGPT’s sudden popularity: ‘There’s no playbook for this’

When ChatGPT launched in November 2022, its popularity soared beyond anyone’s expectations. Due to the chatbot's sudden popularity, its parent company OpenAI, suddenly became the talk of the tech world. Before this, OpenAI had operated as a research-focused entity and not many people were familiar with the company or its CEO Sam Altman.

Thanks to ChatGPT's rapid rise, Altman faced a huge challenge: scaling OpenAI’s operations from research-based beginnings to an expansive, customer-facing business almost overnight. “What has been unusual in these years is the rate at which things changed,” Altman explained while speaking at The Twenty Minute VC (20VC) podcast recently. The tech mogul also noted that while most companies get time to grow gradually, OpenAI’s path has been far from conventional. “You get time to go from 0 to million and then billion but don’t have to do that in two years," he added.

Altman admitted that, when ChatGPT’s success hit, OpenAI wasn’t fully prepared to function as a scaled business in the Silicon Valley sense. “We didn’t really have a company in the sense of a traditional Silicon Valley startup that’s scaling and serving lots of customers,” he said. His team had to learn rapidly and build structures in real-time, adjusting to a new scale of operation that most startups face years down the line.

This rapid pace presented a steep learning curve for Altman, who candidly shared that leading OpenAI through such growth required him to pick up new skills on the job. “There was a lot of stuff that I was supposed to get more time to learn that I got,” he admitted. He also added that his team had to “fumble their way through” unique challenges, as no established playbook existed to guide them in scaling a company built around AI at such unprecedented speed.

"There’s no playbook to this and if there was one nobody gave it to me. We have all sort of fumbled our way through this but there has been a lot to learn on the fly," he said.

OpenAI has come a long way after ChatGPT's launch and is one of the most important AI companies in the world today. After they launched ChatGPT, companies like Google and Meta also began developing their own chatbots and released them to the market. There were even reports of a "code red" situation at Google offices after ChatGPT's launch.

OpenAI has been backed by tech giant Microsoft, which invested billions of dollars in the AI company. Microsoft too has its own chatbot, called CoPilot (earlier Bing).