Techie's Exchange With Sam Altman Proves 'You Miss Every Shot You Don't Take'

One might assume that securing someone like Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, to visit their college requires extensive networking. However, recently a young techie, Punit Palial, showed that he managed to successfully invite Sam Altman to his college for an interactive event by just reaching out to him on Instagram. Punit Palial shared a screenshot of an Instagram chat dated June 5, 2023. As per the screenshot, he asked, “Heyyy Sam. Have been watching your videos since I was 16 years old. Is there any way I could get an invite to your Delhi event?”

Interestingly, one day later Sam Altman replied “Sure” and asked him to send the invite details to two emails. Now, this X post has gone viral with 1.5 lakh views since it was posted. Punit Palial shared a popular quote at the end of this post: “You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.”

This interaction proves that often cold emails work and sometimes shooting the shot, regardless of how far-fetched it looks, works out. Sam Altman later attended an interactive event at the Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology, Delhi (IIIT-Delhi or IIITD) on June 8, 2023, when he was in India.

After the post mentioned above raked in thousands of likes, Punit Palial reshared an X thread documenting the 2023 event at IIIT-Delhi.

Punit Palial wrote that Sam Altman started the event by inviting reviews, criticism and opinions on OpenAI’s products. The attendees mentioned that one of the common criticisms of OpenAI-backed products was the “high pricing associated with using the API and slow response time when calling it.” They also highlighted how ChatGPT has a slow response time when it comes to using Indian languages. In response, Sam Altman acknowledged these criticisms and assured that they are constantly working on improving the response time.

Someone also pointed out a concerning feature where ChatGPT made up citations while giving health advisories. Sam Altman referred to this oversight as a “hallucination” and asserted that they are trying to fix it. The OpenAI CEO also said they plan to “simplify ChatGPT in a way that allows ordinary individuals to obtain the desired results without requiring expertise in prompt engineering”. Sam Altman also mentioned he isn’t a good “prompt engineer” himself. The 39-year-old tech entrepreneur added that they would make conversations with ChatGPT more interactive and diverse instead of relying on a single text prompt as input.