Sam Altman's response to Indian techie who messaged him on Instagram: ‘It worked’

An Indian techie has revealed how he bagged an invite to an exclusive interaction with Sam Altman by simply messaging the OpenAI CEO on Instagram. Punit Palial said that his friend messaged Sam Altman over Instagram before the CEO of ChatGPT-maker OpenAI was due to visit India last year.

While most people would never expect the multi-millionaire CEO of one of the world’s hottest startups to respond to Instagram messages from strangers, Sam Altman not only responded to the text but even agreed to invite Palial and his friend, Ishan Goswami, to an event with developers at IIIT-Delhi.

Palial shared a screenshot of Goswami's interaction with Sam Altman on X this morning, a year after it took place.

“Heyyy sam,” Goswami wrote to Altman according to the screenshot in June 2023. “Have been watching your videos since I was 16 years old. Is there any way I could get an invite to your Delhi event?” he asked.

To this, Altman responded in the affirmative. “Sure,” he wrote, asking Goswami to email an OpenAI employee for the invite while keeping Altman himself looped in through cc.

“I suggested we try our luck on Instagram because Sam has just 5.7K followers on Instagram and has a private account. We followed him on Instagram years ago when he was less popular and had a public Instagram account. We knew we had a higher probability of getting a reply by messaging him on Instagram and that worked for us,” Palial told Hindustan Times.

Take a look at the exchange below:

Palial topped off his screenshot with some words of wisdom - “you miss 100% of the shots you don’t take,” he wrote.

Last year, the Noida-based techie had also shared a photograph from the invite-only event at IIIT-Delhi which he got to attend, thanks to the Instagram message.

In his thread on X, he revealed that Altman opened the event – the Developers Roundtable Conference at IIIT-D – by welcoming ideas, opinions and criticism of OpenAI’s products.

The CEO of OpenAI acknowledged ChatGPT’s “hallucination problem,” said Palial. “The conversation kept switching between asking technical questions to understand the product and lighter questions to gain insight into Sam’s perspective about AI and his company in general,” Palial said.

(Also read: ‘We welcome all collaborations for digital transformation,’ says PM Modi after meeting ChatGPT's Sam Altman)