In the best case, tech will be so transformative that Altman won’t have to choose between the few and the many. When A.I. reshapes the economy, he told me, “we’re going to have unlimited wealth and a huge amount of job displacement, so basic income really makes sense. Plus, the stipend will free up that one person in a million who can create the next Apple.”

At an all-hands meeting for YC’s partners and team near the end of the winter batch, Paul Buchheit, the partner running the batch, discussed a survey of its founders. There had been complaints about the food (not enough nightshade-free options) and the coffee (instant). The main criticism, Buchheit said, was that, with a hundred and twenty-seven companies in the batch, “YC feels too big. I think a lot of us feel that way, too. Founders aren’t schoolchildren or farm animals that we herd around. They’re the next Mark Zuckerbergs, they’re peers, and it’s critical to our success that they love us.” He concluded, “I have a goal of the next batch being a hundred companies.”

Afterward, Altman told me that it was a mistake to focus entirely on founders. “When I took over,” he said, “we measured our companies’ happiness with YC, but that was the wrong metric. To make sure we’re getting and keeping the best investors, we now also measure partner happiness”—currently 4.38 out of five—“versus whether a company that wasn’t going to make it was unhappy with our love.” Venture capitalists believe that their returns follow a “power law,” by which ninety per cent of their profits come from one or two companies. This means that they secretly hope the other startups in their portfolio fail fast, rather than staggering onward as resource-consuming “zombies.” Altman pointed out that only a fifth of YC companies have failed, and said, “We should be taking crazier risks, so that our failure rate would be as high as ninety per cent. And, if you’re optimizing for returns, you’d like to have your best company in each batch raise all the money.” He acknowledged that “that would be demoralizing to all the other companies, and you don’t build a helpful network that way. On the other hand, a network of just three or four huge YC companies would be pretty helpful.”

Concerns about the accelerator scaling too much and too fast remain widespread. Drew Houston, the co-founder of Dropbox, told me that the supply of talented founders isn’t infinite: “At some point, company No. 10,001, you’re just admitting people you would have rejected before.” Marc Andreessen, whose venture firm invests fifteen per cent of its funds in YC companies, said, “The composite view here is that YC is getting better at picking as they grow—and that, because they have an increasingly powerful magnet, they’re getting a more routinely qualified set of founders.” But he added, “The debate is: are they stretching the network to its breaking point? It’s the genius and the madness all rolled into one.” In huge success, the Valley’s guiding principles conflict: scale precludes uniform excellence and a tight-knit network.

Altman acknowledged the strain on the YC network, with hundreds of nascent companies all wanting the ear of, say, Patrick Collison at Stripe. Noting that Stripe just designated a contact for YC-related inquiries, he said he hoped that YC’s other anchor companies will follow suit. They’d better hurry. Starting this winter, YC Fellowship is becoming Startup School, a free, online, ten-week course for as many companies as want to take part. They won’t get funded, but they can learn the same lessons as batch companies do. Altman, who will personally oversee this initiative, believes it is the fastest, easiest way to bring ten thousand new founders a year into the network. He said, “If we create more scale for the world and 10x the number of great startups, even though we don’t have any ownership in them, it will benefit YC in some way I can’t exactly predict now.” Meanwhile, the summer batch, with Fellowship companies included, numbered a hundred and seventy—larger than the winter batch. And this winter YC will expand from one night a week of programming to two, permitting further rapid growth. Altman plans to launch YC China next year, and has contemplated YC India. He said, “Someday, YC will be hundreds of times larger than when I took over.” Much could go wrong, he noted, but, really, “I don’t see how anyone can stop us.”

Altman’s regime has left some people at YC nostalgic for the homey camaraderie of the early days. One YC stalwart told me, “Sam’s a little too focussed on glory—he puts his personal brand way out front. Under P.G., we had a family feel, and now it’s all institutional and aloof. Sam’s always managing up, but as the leader of the organization he needs to manage down.” When I asked Altman about this critique, he said, “I absolutely could do a better job at managing the organization—it was my chief weakness at Loopt, and I still have some learned helplessness about it. I don’t want to do weekly one-on-ones and let’s-talk-about-your-career-paths. But I think it’s O.K. to have a little mess at the organizational level if we’re making the big decisions right, since those are the ones that bring us all our returns.” More generally, he observed, “The missing circuit in my brain, the circuit that would make me care what people think about me, is a real gift. Most people want to be accepted, so they won’t take risks that could make them look crazy—which actually makes them wildly miscalculate risk.”

Recently, YC began planning a pilot project to test the feasibility of building its own experimental city. It would lie somewhere in America, or perhaps abroad, and would be optimized for technological solutions: it might, for instance, permit only self-driving cars. “It could be a college town built out of YC, the university of the future,” Altman said. “A hundred thousand acres, fifty to a hundred thousand residents. We crowdfund the infrastructure and establish a new and affordable way of living around concepts like ‘No one can ever make money off of real estate.’ ” He emphasized that it was just an idea—but he was already looking at potential sites.

You could imagine this metropolis as an exemplary post-human city-state, run on A.I.—a twenty-first-century Athens—or as a gated community for the élite, a fortress against the coming chaos. For Altman, the best way to discover which future was in store was to make it. One of the first things he did at OpenAI was to paint a quotation from Admiral Hyman Rickover on its conference-room wall. “The great end of life is not knowledge, but action,” Rickover said. “I believe it is the duty of each of us to act as if the fate of the world depended on him. . . . We must live for the future, not for our own comfort or success.” Altman recounted all the obstacles Rickover overcame to build America’s nuclear-armed Navy. “Incredible!” he said. But, after a considering pause, he added, “At the end of his life, when he may have been somewhat senile, he did also say that it should all be sunk to the bottom of the ocean. There’s something worth thinking about in there.” ♦

*A previous version of this article misstated where Sebastian Wallin is from.