---
title: "One person can make a difference"
url: https://raskell.io/notes/one-person-can-make-a-difference/
author: Raffael Schneider
date: 2026-11-08
description: "Sam Altman had a line from Admiral Rickover painted on OpenAI's walls. It says one person can make a difference, and it was used to ask for unity."
tags: [research-labs, hubris, ethics, entrepreneurship]
---

# One person can make a difference

In the early days of OpenAI, Sam Altman had a quote painted on the office walls. It comes from Hyman G. Rickover, the admiral known as the father of the nuclear navy, who built the first nuclear-powered submarines:

> I believe it is the duty of each of us to act as if the fate of the world depended on him. Admittedly, one man by himself cannot do the job. However, one man can make a difference.

Karen Hao tells the story in *Empire of AI* (chapter 6). Years later Altman put the same quote, with a few more lines about each person's "individual and independent capacities", at the end of a memo to the company. The memo asked for less transparency, at least one impressive demonstration of progress a year, and more seriousness and unity. Under the quote he wrote: "We must put the mission ahead of any individual preferences."

I like the quote, and I believe it. It is the conviction behind most things worth building, and it is the same thing I argued about [who carries progress](https://raskell.io/notes/who-carries-progress/): a small number of people deciding to act as if it depends on them is how a lot of the future gets made. Rickover is a fair example. A nuclear navy was a state project, but it happened at the pace it did because one difficult man drove it.

What strikes me is the turn in the memo. Rickover's lines are about the individual: each of us, our own capacities, our own duty. Altman uses them to ask each person to set their own judgement aside for the mission. Both can be true at once, a person can make a difference by joining something larger, but the second reading is the one that makes an organisation dangerous when the mission is as large as the one OpenAI claimed. If everyone acts as if the fate of the world depends on them, someone still has to be allowed to say that the fate of the world is not in fact at stake this quarter.

## References

- Karen Hao, *Empire of AI* (2025), chapter 6. Hao prints the quote with gender-neutral brackets; the wording above follows the version usually attributed to Rickover.
- Hyman G. Rickover, attributed to "Thoughts on Man's Purpose in Life" (1974), as given on [Quotepark](https://quotepark.com/quotes/1900877-hyman-george-rickover-i-believe-it-is-the-duty-of-each-of-us-to-act-as-i/) after Wikiquote. I have not seen the primary text.