OpenAI's CEO Sam Altman said on Tuesday that handling the ChatGPT maker's new product releases are reminding him of his early days as a Y Combinator-backed founder.
"Lol I feel like a YC founder in 'build in public' mode again," Altman wrote in a post on X.
Altman's remark comes after a busy week for OpenAI. The company released a new image generation feature for ChatGPT on March 25.
The new feature was a hit with users, who flooded social media with AI-generated images in the style of Japanese animation firm Studio Ghibli's films. Altman said in an X post on Monday that OpenAI saw a record spike in users after the feature was rolled out.
the chatgpt launch 26 months ago was one of the craziest viral moments i'd ever seen, and we added one million users in five days.
— Sam Altman (@sama) March 31, 2025
we added one million users in the last hour.
But the sudden uptick in users did cause some problems for OpenAI.
On Thursday, just two days after the new feature was released, Altman said that OpenAI's "GPUs are melting" from all the image generation requests they were getting from users.
"It's super fun seeing people love images in ChatGPT. But our GPUs are melting. We are going to temporarily introduce some rate limits while we work on making it more efficient," Altman wrote on X.
Then, in a subsequent X post made on Tuesday, Altman said the company was "getting things under control." He added that users "should expect new releases from OpenAI to be delayed, stuff to break, and for service to sometimes be slow as we deal with capacity challenges."
working as fast we can to really get stuff humming; if anyone has GPU capacity in 100k chunks we can get asap please call!
— Sam Altman (@sama) April 1, 2025
Altman may be best known for his work at OpenAI now, but the entrepreneur cut his teeth in the tech world at Y Combinator. The startup accelerator counts organizations like Airbnb, Dropbox, Stripe, and Twitch as alumni companies.
Altman's first startup, a social networking application named Loopt was one of the first few companies to be backed by Y Combinator in 2005. Loopt was later acquired by Green Dot, a banking company, in 2012 for over $43 million.
In 2014, Y Combinator's founder Paul Graham named Altman as his successor. Altman replaced Graham as Y Combinator's president, and held the role for five years. Altman stepped down as president in March 2019 to focus on OpenAI.
On Monday, OpenAI announced it had raised $40 billion at a $300 billion valuation. OpenAI's new valuation is nearly double what it was worth in October, when it raised $6.6 billion at a $157 billion valuation.
Representatives for Altman at OpenAI did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.
