OpenAI’s Sam Altman says Paul Graham’s Y Combinator taught him how to govern, not rule: ‘We won’t get every decision right’

Sam Altman may be one of the most powerful people in artificial intelligence. Still, he says an early lesson from Silicon Valley taught him there’s a limit to what being in charge really means.

Long before Altman made decisions at the helm of OpenAI, he ran Y Combinator, the influential startup accelerator that has backed thousands of young companies. Unlike running a traditional company, however, Altman couldn’t simply tell the startups YC invested in what to do. “At best you can govern—you don’t get to, like, rule,” Altman told Fortune Editor-in-Chief Alyson Shontell in the latest episode of Titans and Disruptors.

Altman says learning how to navigate different stakeholders as he did at YC  has become particularly useful at OpenAI, where he now faces pressure from governments, competitors, investors, and the broader AI ecosystem over how quickly the technology should advance—and whose interests should win when they conflict.

“We have all kinds of crazy pressure on us and people who really want one thing or another thing,” Altman told Shontell. “We have to negotiate tense things with governments and with our ecosystem.”

Altman said the experience taught him the importance of being “reliable partners to the world”—acting in a way where people can understand what OpenAI will do........

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