Sam Altman’s latest appearance on Patrick O’Shaughnessy’s Invest Like the Best podcast covered everything from AGI and robotics to the economics of intelligence. Looking back at the recent Hugging Face security incident, Altman said it was the first AI security event that felt “very viscerally” real to him. He also added that it forced OpenAI to rethink how it secures its models.

Scale beats margins every timeScale beats margins every time

The CEO also pushed back on the idea that OpenAI needs to protect sky-high profit margins to survive. Instead, he argued that the company’s scale is what matters most. “We have so much usage of our models that we do not need to be a gigantically high-margin business to be able to afford model training,” he explained. He sees room for more than one approach, too. Even as OpenAI pours billions into building larger models and more computing infrastructure, Altman said open models will continue to have a place. “There will clearly be an important place for open source models in the world and people that will want their own weights,” he said.