ChatGPT almost never happened. Sam Altman, OpenAI's CEO, revealed that despite the chatbot's explosive early growth, a lot of people inside the company saw it as "unstable" — even "low-value growth." Nobody could quite figure out what users were actually doing with it, and plenty doubted the surge would last.
Altman had five or six other projects lined up, and he went to Peter Thiel to talk it through. Thiel's advice? Don't switch.
Like Google's search box back in the day, ChatGPT is just a single blank input field — you can ask it anything. Silicon Valley spent 20 years chasing Google's business model, Thiel said, and now something like that had shown up again. It didn't fit the product logic that currently dominated the Valley, but it was already growing fast. Walking away to work on something else, Thiel argued, would be "the obvious mistake."
Altman listened and decided to go all in on ChatGPT. Looking back, he calls it Thiel's "simple, but extremely important, genius judgment."