Much of entrepreneurship is about spotting trends before they become mainstream, and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman — when he was with Y Combinator — had given an interesting heuristic to test trends.
Speaking in August 2018 as president of Y Combinator, Altman offered a deceptively simple framework for distinguishing genuine technological shifts from mere hype. His insight cuts through the noise of adoption numbers and marketing buzz to focus on something far more revealing: actual user behavior. The test he proposed has proven remarkably prescient, particularly given how the technology landscape has evolved in the years since.
“(If you want to) bet big on a new platform, you want to make sure it’s real,” Altman began. “Now, there’s an easy trick for this, which I’ll share now. Real trends are ones where a new technology platform comes along, and the early adopters use it obsessively and tell their friends how much they love it. A fake trend is one where people may buy the product, but don’t use it. Or at least not enough.”
The distinction Altman drew wasn’t about sales figures or market penetration, but about the intensity of engagement among those who did adopt the technology. It’s a framework that prioritizes depth over breadth in the early stages of a platform’s life.
To illustrate his point, Altman reached for what has become the canonical example of a transformative platform. “An example of a real trend. When the iPhone first came out, many people were dismissive because they only sold a million or 2 million that year. And they said, well, this just doesn’t matter. But for the people that had an iPhone, they used it for hours every day. It became central to their lives. They loved it. They told their friends, you’ve got to get one. And I think it was obvious then to people paying attention that something had fundamentally shifted. And we had a new computing platform that was going to spawn huge businesses, and it was a good time to bet on mobile apps.”
Then came the contrast. “A fake trend, or at least a fake trend as of August 2018, I would say is VR. I do believe VR will be big someday, but today most people that I know that own a VR headset use it never, or very rarely. And so, although a lot of people talk about it and maybe even a lot of people buy them, there’s not the intense usage per user among the early adopters that I think you want to see.”
Six years later, Altman’s framework holds up remarkably well. His VR assessment, though cautiously optimistic about the future, captured a reality that persisted even through Meta’s multi-billion dollar push into the metaverse. Despite significant improvements in hardware and substantial marketing efforts, VR still struggles with the retention problem Altman identified. Apple’s Vision Pro, launched in 2024, has faced similar challenges with reports of users returning devices after the novelty wore off.
Meanwhile, the technology Altman would go on to lead offers an interesting test case for his own framework. ChatGPT’s launch in November 2022 saw not just rapid adoption but intense, sustained usage. Early adopters integrated it into their daily workflows, returned to it repeatedly, and enthusiastically shared their experiences. It demonstrated precisely the obsessive engagement and organic evangelism that Altman described as markers of a real trend. The subsequent explosion of AI applications and the pivot of major tech companies toward AI suggests his heuristic identified something genuine about how transformative technologies take root. The pattern holds: real platforms don’t just get bought, they get used, loved, and shared.