Marc Olivier Le Blanc/Worldcoin
- Sam Altman says he chooses who he works with based on the first 10 minutes of their conversation.
- It's why the OpenAI CEO partnered with Alex Blania on the Worldcoin Project, he told FT Partners.
- Still, Altman said on the webinar that Worldcoin and OpenAI are nowhere close to success.
Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, appears to have gotten on board with the mysterious Worldcoin project after just a 10-minute conversation with Alex Blania, the cofounder of Tools For Humanity.
And it's a rule of thumb that the human face of ChatGPT says he uses when he makes business decisions that works the majority of the time.
"One of things I have found in my life again and again," Altman said during a Thursday webinar with FT Partners, a fintech firm, "is that 90% of time, I can tell in the first 10 minutes if I want to work with someone if I thought they had a shot at being exceptional."
The ability to make snap business decisions is one the OpenAI CEO picked up when he was an investor at Y Combinator, "where we did 10-minute interviews before deciding which companies to fund," he said. In his time there, he backed companies like Airbnb, Dropbox, and Reddit.
He also noted that "people that I've had to spend hours being unsure about" have not usually been "great people to work with."
The CEO said his timing guideline helped him collaborate with Blania on Worldcoin, which is on a quest to decentralize financial systems and distinguish humans from AI through eyeball-scanning orbs.
After just 10 minutes, "I was very sure that Alex is exceptional. I really wanted to work with him," Altman said. That short chat turned into a multi-hour long walk where they discussed "a lot of other interesting things."
Altman also shared his thoughts on how he thinks OpenAI and WorldCoin are doing. As noted in the webinar, the goals for their projects are ambitious. Altman said he hopes that 8 billion people — close to the world population — will use ChatGPT some day; Blania said he aims to register one billion people on Worldcoin.
"I certainly would never say for Worldcoin or for OpenAI that we're anywhere close to success," Altman said.
The leader's thoughts on how he chooses who to work with come just weeks after OpenAI's board ousted Altman — and after he was reinstated just days later after hundreds of employees threatened to quit.
OpenAI didn't immediately respond to Business Insider's request for comment before publication.