A chance meeting at President Donald Trump’s second inauguration brought together OpenAI CEO Sam Altman with YouTuber-turned-boxer Jake Paul, an unlikely connection that gave Paul a crash course in efficiency.
Speaking with host Molly O’Shea on the Sourcery podcast, Paul explained how he immediately bonded with the OpenAI CEO over a shared interest in “fast cars” after they were seated next to each other at Trump’s inauguration last January.
“We just started talking about cars, and then we kind of just got along, and that was really it,” he said on the podcast.
The meeting with Altman may have been incidental, but it has already sparked real results, including an investment in OpenAI and a collaboration on the company’s video-generation app Sora 2. Paul said he consulted with OpenAI ahead of the app’s September launch, and he became one of the first celebrities to allow his name, image, and likeness to be used in the app. Upon release, Sora 2 users quickly jumped to include Paul in AI-generated videos that featured him as a robber, a makeup artist, and in other personas, helping propel the app to No. 1 on the App Store in the U.S.
Along the way, Paul said the most important lesson he learned from Altman had nothing to do with AI, but rather how to conduct efficient meetings.
