OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in a systems design class at Stanford that with a reasonable token cost, one person can now accomplish what once required a hundred-person elite engineering team, a reality that was previously nonexistent for startups. He discussed the magic of scale, how users discovered ChatGPT and Codex, how AI is becoming a new utility like electricity, and why betting against LLM scaling is currently the worst possible move. Altman said the ambition you can afford, the speed you can achieve, and the number of things you can push forward at once are all completely different, calling it a transformation of the very set of options available rather than incremental change. He said he lacks a theory that fully satisfies him for why the observation holds, but that empirically every most interesting thing he has observed in his career has been related to emergent properties arising from scale. He also said scaling is fundamentally a system design problem, noting that as things grow they break faster and in increasingly unpredictable ways.