Executives worldwide are developing expansive, costly AI initiatives. Amplitude CEO Spenser Skates says a lot of the industry’s buy-in is thanks to Sam Altman.
Skates cofounded the publicly traded analytics company, which he said has about 800 employees. On the “Lightcone Podcast,” Skates acknowledged that some engineers were skeptical of their company leaders’ rapid adoption of AI.
While it may sound “extraordinarily reductive,” Skates credited the OpenAI CEO.
“I think Sam Altman is the best salesperson of this generation, bar none,” Skates said. “I think he has done an exceptional job stating a very ambitious vision, getting a lot of people rallied behind it.”
Thanks to Altman’s pitch, “investors already bought in, executives are bought in, world leaders are bought in,” he said.
In an email to Business Insider, Skates doubled down on that view.
“Sam has gotten companies to invest $1.5 trillion in AI this year while the corresponding revenue is in the tens of billions. Almost 100x ahead of where revenues are at,” he wrote. “It’s incredible.”
Skates also wrote that Y Combinator cofounder Paul Graham explained it “better than I ever could.”
In a 2009 blog post, Graham wrote of Altman: “There are a few people with such force of will that they’re going to get whatever they want.”
Skates is one of many tech leaders to marvel at Altman’s speed and salesmanship. Box CEO Aaron Levie told Business Insider that he was “one of the most ambitious founders out there.”
“I can’t imagine moving the speed that they’re moving,” AutoUnify CEO Joel Milne previously told Business Insider.
Others have been more critical. Friend-turned-foe Elon Musk often throws jabs Altman’s way. Alexis Ohanian said he had a bad feeling about the “cunning” Altman’s ask to scrape Reddit in the mid-2010s.
On the podcast, Skates said that — after Altman’s impressive sales pitch — the tech is still racing to meet its stated potential.
“The reality is the capabilities are still trying to catch up,” Skates said. “You have a lot of desire for this thing to happen, but it’s not clear if the capabilities are there yet.”
Skates used his own company as an example. Some engineers were initially frustrated by what they thought of as “grifting” in AI, he said. They started to change their minds last year, he added, after seeing the potential to transform the analytics business.
In his email to Business Insider, Skates explained how he convinced these skeptical engineers to use AI tools.
“We actually had a bunch of leaders at Amplitude use Cursor and other tools themselves, and then show the rest of the organization by example,” he wrote. “You have to lead from the front!”
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