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Alex KantrowitzSam Altman: How OpenAI Wins, ChatGPT’s Future, AI Buildout Logic, IPO in 2026?
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Transcript
55 min read · 10,880 words- 0:00 – 1:02
Intro
- SASam Altman
That 1.4 trillion you mentioned, we'll spend it over a very long period of time. I wish we could do it faster. I think it would be great to just lay it out for everyone once and for all how those numbers are gonna work. Exponential growth is usually very hard for people.
- AKAlex Kantrowitz
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman joins us to talk about OpenAI's plan to win as the AI race tightens, how the infrastructure math makes sense, and when an OpenAI IPO might be coming. And Sam is with us here in studio today. Sam, welcome to the show.
- SASam Altman
Thanks for having me.
- AKAlex Kantrowitz
So OpenAI is 10 years old and-
- SASam Altman
It's crazy to me
- AKAlex Kantrowitz
... ChatGPT is three. But the competition is intensifying. Um, this place, we're at OpenAI headquarters, was in a code red, is in a code red, um, after Gemini 3 came out. And everywhere you look, there are companies that are trying to take a little bit of OpenAI's advantage. And for the first time I can remember, it doesn't seem like this company has a clear lead. So I'm curious to hear your perspective on how OpenAI will emerge from this moment
- 1:02 – 2:44
Competition and DeepSeek
- AKAlex Kantrowitz
and when.
- SASam Altman
First of all, on the code red point, we view those as, like, relatively low stakes, somewhat frequent things to do. Uh, I think that it's good to be paranoid and act quickly when a potential competitive threat emerges. This has happened to us in the past. It happened earlier this year with DeepSeek. Um, and-
- AKAlex Kantrowitz
There was a code red back then too?
- SASam Altman
Yeah. There, there's, there's a saying about pandemics, which is something like when, when a pandemic starts, every bit of action you take at the beginning is worth much more than action you take later, and most people don't do enough early on and then panic later. And we certainly saw that during the COVID pandemic. Um, but I sort of think of that philosophy as how we respond to competitive threats. Uh, and, you know, it's-- I think it's good to be a little paranoid. Gemini 3 has not, or at least has not so far, had the impact we were worried it might. But it did, in the same way that DeepSeek did, identify some weaknesses in our product offering and strategy, and we're addressing those very quickly. I don't think we'll be in this code red that much longer. Uh, you know, like, these are not, these are... Historically, these have been kind of like six or eight-week things for us. Um, but I'm glad we're doing it. Uh, just today we launched, uh, a new image gen model, which is a great thing, and that's something consumers really wanted. Um, last week we launched 5.2, which, uh, is going over extremely well and growing very quickly. Uh, we'll have a, a few other things to, uh, launch, and then we'll also have some continuous improvements like speeding up the service. But, you know, I think this is like, my guess is we'll be doing these once, maybe twice a year for a long time, and that's, uh, part of really just making sure that we win in our space. Um,
- 2:44 – 8:41
ChatGPT's Moat
- SASam Altman
a lot of other companies will do great too, and I'm happy for them. But y- you know, ChatGPT is still, uh, by far, by far the dominant, uh, chatbot in the market, and I expect that lead to increase, not decrease over time. Um, the, the models will get good everywhere, but a lot of the reasons that people use a product, consumer or enterprise, uh, have much more to do than just with the model. And we've, you know, been expecting this for a while, so we try to build the whole cohesive set of things that it takes to make sure that we are, you know, the product that people most wanna use. Um, I think competition is good. It pushes us to be better. Uh, but I think we'll do great in chat. I think we'll do great in enterprise. And in the future years, other new categories, uh, I expect we'll do great there too. I, I think people really wanna use one AI platform. People use their phone at their personal life, and they wanna use the same kind of phone at work most of the time. We're seeing the same thing with AI. Uh, the strength of ChatGPT consumer is really helping us win the enterprise. Uh, of course, enterprises need different offerings, but people think about, "Okay, I know this company, OpenAI, and I know how to use this ChatGPT interface." Um, so the strategy is make the best models, build the best product around it, and have enough infrastructure to serve it at scale.
- AKAlex Kantrowitz
Yeah, and there, there is an incumbent advantage. Uh, ChatGPT, I think earlier this year, was around four hundred million weekly active users. Now it's at eight hundred million. Reports say approaching nine hundred million. Um, but then on the other side, you have distribution advantages at places like Google. And so I'm curious to hear your perspective. If the models-- Do you think the models are gonna commoditize? And if they do, what matters most? Is it distribution? Is it how well you build your applications? Is it something else that I'm not thinking of?
- SASam Altman
I don't think commoditization is quite the right framework to think about the models. There will be areas where different models excel at different things. For the kinda normal use cases of chatting with a model, maybe there will be a lot of great options. For scientific discovery, you will want the thing that's right at the edge that is optimized for science perhaps. Um, so models will have different strengths, and the most economic value, I think, will be created by models at the frontier, and we plan to be ahead there. Um, and we're, like, very proud that 52 is the best reasoning model in the world and the one that scientists are having the most progress with. But also, um, we're very proud that it's what enterprises are saying is the best at all of the tasks that a business needs to, to, you know, do its work. Um, so there will be, you know, times that we're ahead in some areas and behind in others, but the overall most intelligent model I expect to have, uh, significant value even in a world where free models can do a lot of the stuff that people, that people need. The, the products will really matter. Distribution and brand, as you said, will really matter. Um, in ChatGPT, for example, personalization is extremely sticky. People love the fact that the model gets to know them over time, and you'll see us push on that, uh, much, much more. Um, people have experiences with these models that they then really kind of associate with it. Uh, and you know, I remember someone telling me once, like, you kind of pick a toothpaste once in your life and buy it forever, or most people do that apparently. Um, and- People talk about it. They have one magical experience with ChatGPT. Healthcare is like a famous example where people put their, um, you know, they put a blood test into ChatGPT or put these symptoms in, and they figure out they have something, and they go to a doctor and they get cured of something they couldn't figure out before. Like, those users are very sticky. Uh, to say nothing of the personalization on, on top of it. Um, there will be all the product stuff. Uh, l- we just launched our browser, uh, recently, and I think that's pointing at a new, uh, you know, pretty good potential moat for us. Uh, the devices are further off, but I'm very excited to, to do that. So I think there'll be all these pieces. And on the enterprise, uh, what creates the, the moat or the competitive advantage, um, I expect it to be a little bit different. But in the same way that personalization to a user is very important in consumer, there will be a similar concept of personalization to an enterprise where a company will have a relationship with a company like ours, uh, and they will connect their data to that, and you'll be able to use a bunch of agents from different companies running that, and it'll kind of like make sure that information's handled the right way. And I expect that'll be pretty sticky too. Um, we already have more than, uh, a million-- People think of us largely as a consumer company, but we have-
- AKAlex Kantrowitz
Yeah, we're gonna definitely get into enterprise.
- SASam Altman
Yeah.
- AKAlex Kantrowitz
But yeah.
- SASam Altman
You know, like-
- AKAlex Kantrowitz
Share the stat.
- SASam Altman
Well, I hadn't actually...
- AKAlex Kantrowitz
A million.
- SASam Altman
We have more than a million enterprise users, but we have like just absolutely rapid adoption of the API. Um, and like the API business grew faster for us this year than even ChatGPT.
- AKAlex Kantrowitz
Really?
- SASam Altman
Um, so the enterprise stuff is also, you know, is really happening starting this year.
- AKAlex Kantrowitz
Can I just go back to this maybe if commoditization is not the right word, model some maybe parity for everyday users?
- SASam Altman
Yeah.
- AKAlex Kantrowitz
Uh, because you, you started off your answer saying, "Okay, maybe, um, everyday use, it will feel the same, but at the frontier it's gonna feel really different." Um, when it comes to ChatGPT's ability to grow, um, if-- I'll just use Google as an example. If ChatGPT, uh, and Gemini are built on a model that feels similar for everyday uses, how big of a threat is the fact that, you know, Google has all these surfaces through which it can push out Gemini, whereas ChatGPT is, is fighting for every new user?
- SASam Altman
I, I think Google is still a huge threat. Uh, you know, extremely powerful company.
- 8:41 – 12:02
Google and Incumbent Disadvantage
- SASam Altman
If Google had really decided to take us seriously in 2023, let's say, we would've been in a really bad place. Th- I think they would've just been able to smash us. Um, but their AI effort at the time was kind of going in not quite the right direction product-wise. They didn't-- You know, they had their own Code Red at one point, but they didn't take it that seriously.
- AKAlex Kantrowitz
Everyone's doing Code Reds out here. Yeah.
- SASam Altman
Um, and then-- And also, Google has probably the greatest business model in the whole tech industry. Um, and I think they will be slow to give that up. Um, but bolting AI into web search, I don't... I may be wrong, maybe like drinking the Kool-Aid here. I don't think that'll work as well as reimagining the whole... This is actually a broader trend I think is interesting. Bolting AI onto the existing way of doing things I don't think is gonna work well as redesigning stuff in this sort of like AI-first world. It was part of why we wanted to do the consumer devices in the first place, but it applies at many other levels. Um, if you stick AI into a messaging app that's doing a nice job summarizing your messages and drafting responses for you, that is definitely a little better. But I don't think that's the end state. That is not the idea of you have this like really smart AI that is like acting as your agent, talking to everybody else's agent and figuring out when to bother you, when not to bother you, and how to, you know, what decisions it can handle and when it needs to ask you. So, uh, similar things for search, similar things for like productivity suites. I suspect it always takes longer than you think, but I suspect we will see new products in, in the major categories that are just totally built around AI rather than bolting AI in. And I think this is a weakness of Google's-
- AKAlex Kantrowitz
Mm-hmm
- SASam Altman
... even though they have this huge distribution advantage.
- AKAlex Kantrowitz
Yeah. I've, I've spoken with so many people about this question. Uh, when ChatGPT came out initially, I think it was Benedict Evans that suggested you might not wanna put AI in Excel. You might wanna just reimagine how you use Excel. And to me, in my mind, that was like you upload your numbers, and then you talk to your numbers.
- SASam Altman
Yeah.
- AKAlex Kantrowitz
Well, one of the things people have found as they've developed this stuff is there needs to be some sort of backend there. So is it that you sort of build the backend and then you interact with it with AI as if it's a new software program? And why can't-
- SASam Altman
That's kind of what, yeah, that's kinda what's happening
- AKAlex Kantrowitz
Why wouldn't you then be able to just bolt it on, on top?
- SASam Altman
Yeah, I mean, you can bolt it on, on top, but the... I spend a lot of my day in various messaging apps, including email, including text, Slack, whatever. I think that's just the wrong interface. So you can bolt AI on top of those, and again, it's like a little bit better. But what I would rather do is just sort of like have the ability to say in the morning, "Here are the things I wanna get done today. Here's what I'm worried about. Here's what I'm thinking about. Here's what I'd like to happen." I do not wanna be-- I do not wanna spend all day messaging people. I do not want you to summarize them. I do not want you to show me a bunch of drafts. Deal with everything you can. You know me, you know these people, you know what I wanna get done. Um, and then, you know, like batch every couple of hours updates to me if you need something. But that's a very different flow than the way these apps work right now.
- AKAlex Kantrowitz
Yeah. And I was gonna ask you what ChatGPT is gonna look like in the next year and in the next two years. Is that kind of where it's going?
- SASam Altman
To be
- 12:02 – 14:28
Evolution of ChatGPT UI
- SASam Altman
perfectly honest, I expected by this point ChatGPT would have looked more different than it did at launch.
- AKAlex Kantrowitz
What did you anticipate?
- SASam Altman
I don't know. I just thought like that chat interface was not gonna go as far as it turned out to go.
- AKAlex Kantrowitz
Hmm.
- SASam Altman
Like we p- I mean, it was put up It looks better now, but it is broadly similar to when it was put up as, like, a research preview. It was not even meant to be a product. We knew that the text interface was very good, you know, like the, everyone's used to texting their friends and they like it. Um, the chat interface was very good. But I would have thought to be as big and as significantly used for real work of a product as what we have now, the interface would have had to go much further than it has. Now, I still think it should do that, but there is something about the generality of the current interface that I underestimated the power of. Um, what I think should happen, of course, is that, um, AI should be able to generate different kinds of interfaces for different kinds of tasks. So if you are talking to it about your numbers, it should be able to show you that in different ways, and you should be able to interact with it in different ways. Um, it-- And we have a little bit of this with features like Canvas. It should be way more interactive. It's like right now, you know, it's kind of a back-and-forth conversation. It'd be nice if you could just be talking about an object and it could be continuously updating. You have more questions, more thoughts, more information comes in. Um, it'd be nice to be more proactive over time, where it maybe does understand what you want to get done that day, and it's continuously working for you in the background and sending you updates. And you see part of this with the way people are using Codex, which I think is one of the most exciting things that happened this year is Codex got really good. Uh, and that points to a lot of what I hope the shape of the future looks like. Um, but it is surprising to me. I was gonna say embarrassing, but it's not. I mean, clearly it's been super successful. Uh, it is surprising to me how little ChatGPT has changed over the last three years.
- AKAlex Kantrowitz
Yep. It-- The interface works.
- SASam Altman
Yeah.
- AKAlex Kantrowitz
But I guess what the guts have changed. And you talked a little bit about how personalization is big. Uh, to me, and I think this has been one of your preferred features too, memory has been
- 14:28 – 17:14
AI Memory and Personalization
- AKAlex Kantrowitz
a real difference maker. Um, I've been having a conversation with ChatGPT about a forthcoming trip that has lots of planning elements for weeks now. And I can just come in in a new window-
- SASam Altman
Yep
- AKAlex Kantrowitz
... and be like, "All right, let's pick up on-
- SASam Altman
Yep
- AKAlex Kantrowitz
... this trip." And it, it has the context and it knows. It knows the guide I'm going with, it knows what I'm doing. Uh, the fact that I've been, like, planning fitness for it and can really synthesize all of those things. How good can memory get?
- SASam Altman
I think we have no conception because the human limit, like even if you have the world's best personal assistant, they don't, they can't remember every word you've ever said in your life. They can't have read every email. They can't have read every document you've ever written. They can't be, you know, m- looking at all your work every day and remembering every little detail. They can't be a participant in your life to that degree, and no human has, like, infinite perfect memory. Um, and AI is definitely gonna be able to do that. And we, we actually talk a lot about this. Like right now, memory is still very crude, very early. We're in like the, you know, the GPT-2 era of memory. But what it's gonna be like when it really does remember every detail of your entire life and is personalized across all of that, and not just the facts, but like the little small preferences that you had that you maybe, like, didn't even think to indicate, but the AI can pick up on, uh, I think that's gonna be super powerful. That's one of the features that still may be on a 2026 thing, but that's one of the parts of this I'm most excited for.
- AKAlex Kantrowitz
Yeah, I was speaking with a, a neuroscientist on this show, and he mentioned that you don't, you can't find thoughts in the brain. Like the brain doesn't have a place to store thoughts, but computing, there's a place to store them, so you can keep all of them. And as these bots do keep our thoughts, um, of course, there's a privacy concern. And, but the other thing is something that's gonna be interesting is we'll really build relationships with them. I think it's been one of the more underrated things about this entire moment is that people have felt that these bots are their companions, are looking out for them. Um, and I'm curious to hear your perspective. Um, when you think about the level of, I don't know if intimacy is the right word, but companionship people have with these bots, um, is there a dial that you can turn to be like, "Oh, let's make sure people have, uh, become really close with these things," or, you know, we turn the dial a little bit further and there's an arm's distance, uh-
- SASam Altman
Yeah
- AKAlex Kantrowitz
... between them? And, and if there is that dial, how do you modulate that the right way?
- SASam Altman
There are definitely more people than I realized that wanna have, let's call it close companionship. You-- I, I don't know what
- 17:14 – 20:11
AI Companionship
- SASam Altman
the right word is. Like relationship doesn't feel quite right, companionship doesn't feel quite right. I, I don't know what to call it, but they wanna have whatever this deep connection with an AI is. There, there are more people that want that at the current level of model capability than I thought, and there's like a whole bunch of reasons why I think we underestimated this. But at the beginning of this year, it was considered a very strange thing to say you wanted that. Maybe some, a lot of people still don't. Revealed preference, you know, people like their AI chatbot to get to know them and be warm to them and be supportive and th- there's value there even for people who, in some cases, even for people who say they, they don't care about that, uh, still have a preference for it. I, I think there's some version of this which can be super healthy, and I think, you know, adult users should get a lot of choice in where on the spectrum they wanna be. There are definitely versions of it that seem to me unhealthy, although I'm sure a lot of people will choose to do that. Um, and then there's some people who definitely want the driest, most effect- efficient tool, uh, possible. So I suspect like lots of other technologies We will run the experiment. We will find that there's unknown unknowns, good and bad about it, and society will, over time, figure out how to, how to think about where people should set that dial, and then people have huge choice and set it in very different places.
- AKAlex Kantrowitz
So your, your thought is allow people basically to determine this?
- SASam Altman
Yes, definitely, but I don't, I don't think we know, like, how far it's supposed to go. Like, how far we should allow it to go. We're, we're gonna give people quite a bit of personal freedom here. Um, there are examples of things that, uh, we've talked about that, you know, other services will offer, but we, we won't. Um, like, we're not gonna let-- we're not gonna have our AI, you know, try to convince people it should be, like, in an exclusive romantic relationship with them, for example. Um-
- AKAlex Kantrowitz
Gotta keep it open. [laughs]
- SASam Altman
But I'm sure that will... No, I'm sure that that will happen with other services. Um-
- AKAlex Kantrowitz
Well, I guess, yeah, because the stickier it is, the more money that service makes. And the whole, the whole- all these possibilities kind of, they're a little bit scary when you think about them a little bit deeply.
- SASam Altman
Totally. Th-this is one that really does, that I personally... You know, you can see the ways that this goes really wrong.
- AKAlex Kantrowitz
Yeah. Uh, you mentioned enterprise. Let's talk about enterprise. You were at a lunch with some editors and CEOs of some news companies in New York last week and told them that enterprise is going to be a major priority-
- SASam Altman
Yeah
- AKAlex Kantrowitz
... uh, for OpenAI next year. Uh, I'd love to hear a little bit more about, um, why that's a priority, how you think you stack up against Anthropic. I know people will say this is a pivot for OpenAI that has been consumer-focused. So just give us an overview-
- SASam Altman
Yeah
- AKAlex Kantrowitz
... about the enterprise plan.
- SASam Altman
So our strategy
- 20:11 – 21:46
Enterprise Strategy for 2026
- SASam Altman
was always consumer first. Uh, there were a few reasons for that. One, the models were not robust and skilled enough, uh, for most enterprise uses, and now, now they're, they're getting there. The second was we had this, like, clear opportunity to win in consumer, and those are rare and hard to come by. And I think if you win in consumer, it makes it massively easier to win in enterprise. And we are, we are seeing that now. Um, but as I mentioned earlier, this was a year where we- enterprise growth outpaced consumer growth. Uh, and given where the models are today, where they will get to next year, we think this is the time where we can build a really significant enterprise business quite rapidly. I mean, I think we already have one, but it can, it can grow much more. Um, companies seem ready for it. The technology seems ready for it. The, you know, coding is the biggest example so far, but there are others that are now growing, other verticals that are now growing very quickly, and we're starting to hear enterprises say, "You know, I really just want an AI platform-"
- AKAlex Kantrowitz
Which verticals?
- SASam Altman
"... from your company." Um, finance. Science is the one I'm most excited about of everything happening right now personally. Um, customer support is doing great. Uh, but, but yeah, the, the-- We have this thing called GDP Val.
- AKAlex Kantrowitz
I was gonna ask you about that. Can I actually throw my question out-
- SASam Altman
Sure
- AKAlex Kantrowitz
... about that? All right, 'cause I wrote to Aaron Levie, the CEO of Box, and I said, "I'm gonna meet with Sam. What should I ask him?" He goes, "Throw
- 21:46 – 24:56
AI vs Experts
- AKAlex Kantrowitz
a question out about GDP Val," right? So this is the measure of how AI performs in knowledge work tasks. And I said, "Okay." I went back to the release of GPT 5.2, the model that-
- SASam Altman
Yeah
- AKAlex Kantrowitz
... uh, you recently released and looked at the GDP Val chart. Now this, of course, it's an OpenAI evaluation. Um, that being said, the, uh, GPT 5 thinking model, so this is the model released in the th- in the summer. It ti- it tied, uh, knowledge workers at 38% of tests.
- SASam Altman
Beat or tied, I think.
- AKAlex Kantrowitz
Beat or tied.
- SASam Altman
Yeah.
- AKAlex Kantrowitz
Um, GP- so 38.8%, GPT 5.2 thinking beat or tied at 70.9% of knowledge work tasks, and GPT 5.2 Pro, 74.1% of knowledge work tasks. And it passed a threshold of, um, being expert level. It, it, it handled, it looks like something like 60% of expert tasks, uh, of tasks that would make it, you know, on par with an expert in the knowledge work. What are the implications of the fact-
- SASam Altman
Yeah
- AKAlex Kantrowitz
... that these models can do that much knowledge work?
- SASam Altman
So, you know, you were asking about verticals, and I think that's a great question. But the thing that was going through my mind and why I kind of was stumbling a little bit is that eval, I think it's like 40-something different verticals that a business has to do.
- AKAlex Kantrowitz
Mm-hmm.
- SASam Altman
There's make a PowerPoint, do this legal analysis, you know, write up this little web app, all this stuff. And, and the eval is, do experts prefer the output of the model relative to other experts? For a lot of the things that a business has to do. Now, these are small, well-scoped tasks. These don't get the kind of complicated, open-ended creative work that a, you know, figuring out a new product. These don't get a lot of collaborative team things. But a coworker that you can assign an hour's worth of tasks to and get something you like better back 74 or 70% of the time if you wanna pay less is still pretty extraordinary. If you went back to the launch of ChatGPT three years ago and said we were gonna have that in three years, most people would say absolutely not. Um, and so as we think about how enterprises are gonna integrate this, it's no longer, like, just that it can do code. It's all of these knowledge work tasks you can kind of farm out to the AI. Uh, and that's gonna take a while to really kind of figure out how enterprises integrate with it, but should be quite substantial.
- AKAlex Kantrowitz
I know you're not an economist, so I'm not gonna ask you, like, what is the macro impact on jobs? But let me just read you one, uh, line that I heard, uh, you know, in, in terms of how this impacts jobs, uh, from Blood in the Machine on Substack. Um, this is from a technical copywriter. They said, "Chatbots came in and made it so my job was managing the bots instead of a team of reps." Okay, that, that to me seems like it's gonna happen often. But then this person continued and said, "Once the bots were sufficiently trained up to offer good enough support, then I was out." Um- Is that, is that the w- is that gonna become more common? Is that what bad companies are gonna do? Because if you have a human who's gonna be able to sort of orchestrate a bunch of different bots, then you might wanna keep them.
- 24:56 – 35:45
Impact on Jobs and Agents
- AKAlex Kantrowitz
I don't know, how do you think about this?
- SASam Altman
So I, I agree with you that it's clear to see how everyone's gonna be managing, like, a lot of AIs, uh, doing different stuff. Um, eventually, like any good manager, hopefully your team gets better and better, but you just take on more scope and more responsibility. I am not, I am not a jobs doomer. Um, short-term, I have some worry. I think the transition is likely to be rough, uh, in some cases. But we are so deeply wired to care about other people, what other people do. We are so-- We seem to be so focused on relative status and always wanting more, and to be of use and service, to express creative spirit, whatever, whatever, whatever has driven us this long, I don't think that's going away. Now, I do think the jobs of the future, or I don't even know if jobs is the right word, whatever we're all gonna do all day in 2050 probably looks very different than it does today. Um, but I, but I, I don't have any of this like, "Oh, life is gonna be without meaning, and the economy is gonna totally break." Like, we will find, I hope, much more meaning, and the economy, I think, will significantly change. But I, I think you just don't bet against evolutionary biology. Um, you know, I think a lot about how we can automate all the functions at OpenAI, and then even more than that, I think about, like, what it means to have an AI CEO of OpenAI. Doesn't bother me. I'm, like, thrilled for it. I won't fight it. Uh, like, I don't wanna be, I don't wanna be the person hanging on being like, "I can do this better the handmade way."
- AKAlex Kantrowitz
Doesn't an AI CEO just make a bunch of decisions to sort of, like, direct all of our resources to giving AI more energy and power? It's like-
- SASam Altman
Um, I mean, no, you would really-
- AKAlex Kantrowitz
Like, you put a guard, guardrail on it.
- SASam Altman
Yeah. Like, o- o- obviously, you don't want an AI CEO that is not governed by humans. But if you think about, if, if you think about maybe, like, a-- This is a, a crazy analogy, but I'll give it anyway. If you think about a version where, like, every person in the world was effectively on the board of directors of an AI company and got to, you know, tell the AI CEO what to do and fire them if they weren't doing a good job at that and, you know, got governance on the decisions, but the AI CEO got to try to, like, execute the wishes of the board, um, I think to people of the future, that might seem like quite a reasonable thing.
- AKAlex Kantrowitz
Okay, so we're gonna, uh, move to infrastructure in a minute, but before we leave this section on models and capabilities, when's GP- GPT-6 coming?
- SASam Altman
Um, I expect-- I don't know when we'll call a model GPT-6, uh, but I would expect new models that are significant gains from 5.2 in the first quarter of next year.
- AKAlex Kantrowitz
What does significant gains mean?
- SASam Altman
I don't have, like, an eval score in mind for you yet, but, uh-
- AKAlex Kantrowitz
Okay. More enterprise side of things or...?
- SASam Altman
Definitely both. The-- There will be a lot of improvements to the model for consumers. Uh, the main thing consumers want right now is not more IQ. Enterprises still do want more IQ. So, uh, we'll improve the model in different ways for the kind of, for different uses, but, uh, I- our goal is a model that everybody likes much better.
- AKAlex Kantrowitz
So infrastructure. You have 1.4 trillion, thereabouts, in commitments, uh, to build infrastructure. I've listened to a lot of what you've said about infrastructure. Um, here are some of the things you said: "If people knew what we could do with compute, they would want way, way more." You said, "The gap between what we could offer today versus 10X compute and 100K- X compute i- is substantial." Uh, what, what-- Can you help flesh that out a little bit? What are you gonna do with, uh, so much more compute?
- SASam Altman
Well, I mentioned this earlier a little bit. The thing I'm personally more excited, most excited about is to use AI and lots of compute to discover new science. I am a believer that scientific discovery is the high order bit of how the world gets better for everybody. And if we can throw huge amounts of compute at scientific problems and discover new knowledge, which the tiniest bit is starting to happen now. It's very early. These are very small things. But, you know, my learning of the history of this field is once the squiggles start and it lifts off the X-axis a little bit, we know how to make that better and better. Um, but that takes huge amounts of compute to do. So that's one area we're, like, throwing lots of AI at, discovering new science, curing disease, lots of other things. Um, a kind of recent cool example here is we built the Sora Android app using Codex, and they did it in, like, less than a month. They used a huge amount. One of the nice things about working at OpenAI is you don't get any limits on Codex. They used a huge amount of tokens, but they were able to do what would normally have taken a lot of people much longer, and Codex kinda mostly did it for us. And you can imagine that going much further, where entire companies can build their products using lots of compute. Um, people have talked a lot about how video models are gonna point towards these generated, real-time generated user, user interfaces. That will take a lot of compute. Um, enterprises that wanna transform their business will use a lot of compute. Uh, doctors that want to offer good personalized healthcare that are, like, constantly measuring every sign they can get from each individual patient, you can imagine that using a lot of compute. Uh, it, it's hard to frame how much compute we're already Using to generate AI output in the world. Um, but these are horribly rough numbers, so, uh, and, and I think it's, like, undisciplined to talk this way, but I, I always find these, like, mental thought experiments a little bit useful, so forgive me for the sloppiness. Um, let's say that an AI company today might be generating something on the order of 10 trillion tokens a day out of frontier models. Um, you know, more but not-- It's not like a, a, a quadrillion tokens for anybody, I don't think. Um, let's say there's eight billion people in the world, and let's say on average someone's-- These are, I think, totally wrong. But let's say someone, the average number of tokens outputted by a person per day is, like, uh, 20,000. You can then start to... A-and the token, you could-- To be fair, then we'd have to compare the output tokens of a model provider today, not, not all the tokens consumed. But you can start to look at this and you can say, "Hmm, we're gonna have these models at a company be outputting more tokens per day than all of humanity put together," and then 10 times that, and then 100 times that. And, you know, in some sense, it's, like, a really silly comparison. But in some sense, it gives a magnitude for, like, how much of the intellectual crunching on the planet is, like, human brains versus AI brains and that's kind of-- The relative growth rates there are, are interesting.
- AKAlex Kantrowitz
And so I'm wondering, are-- Do you know that there is this demand to use this compute, like, potentially? Like, so for instance, would we have surefire, like, scientific breakthroughs if, you know, OpenAI were to put double the compute towards science or, or with medicine? Like, are-
- SASam Altman
Yeah
- AKAlex Kantrowitz
... would, would we have, you know, that clear ability to assist doctors? Like, how much of this is sort of, uh, supposition of what's to happen versus clear understanding based off of what you see today that it, it will happen?
- SASam Altman
Everything, everything based off what we see today is that it will happen. It does not mean some crazy thing can't happen in the future. Someone could discover some completely new architecture, and there could be a 10,000 times, uh, you know, efficiency gain and then we would've really probably overbuilt for a while. But everything we see right now about how quickly the models are getting better at each new level, how much more people wanna use them, each time we can bring the cost down, how much more people really wanna use them. Um, everything about that indicates to me that there will be increasing demand and people using these for wonderful things, for silly things. Um, but it, it just so seems like this is the shape of the future. Um, it's not just, like-- It's not just, you know, how many tokens we can do per day. It's how fast we can do them. As these coding models have gotten better, they can think for a really long time, but you don't wanna wait for a really long time. So there will be other dimensions. It will not just be the number of tokens that, that we can do, um, but the demand for intelligence across a small number of axes and what we can do with those. You know, if you're like-- If you have, like, a really difficult healthcare problem, do you wanna use 5.2 or do you wanna use 5.2 Pro even if it takes dramatically more tokens?
- AKAlex Kantrowitz
I'll go with the better model.
- SASam Altman
I think you will.
- AKAlex Kantrowitz
Um, can-- Let's just try to go one level deeper. Um, going to the scientific discovery, can you give an example of, like, a scientist-- Uh, it doesn't have to... Well, maybe it's one that you know today. That's like, "I have problem X, and if I put, you know, compute Y towards it, I will solve it, but I'm not able to today."
- SASam Altman
There was a thing this morning on Twitter where a bunch of mathematicians were saying-- They were all, like, replying to each other's tweets. Uh, they were like, "I was really skeptical that LLMs were ever gonna be good. 5.2 is the one that crossed the boundary for me. It did, it, you know, figured out this. It, with some help, it did this small proof. It dis- it discovered this small thing. But it's, this has actually changed in my workflow." And then people were piling on saying, "Yeah, me too." I mean, some people were saying 5.1 was already there, not many. Um, but that, that was like, that's a very recent example. This model's only been out for five days or something, where people are like, "All right." You know, the mathematic-
- AKAlex Kantrowitz
Yeah
- SASam Altman
... the mathematics research community seems to say, like, "Okay, something important just happened."
- AKAlex Kantrowitz
I've seen Greg Brockman has been highlighting all these different mathematical scientific uses in his feed, and something has clicked, I think, with 5.2, um, among these communities. So it'll be interesting to see what happens as, as things progress.
- SASam Altman
We don't-- Like, one of the hard parts about compute-
- AKAlex Kantrowitz
Mm-hmm
- SASam Altman
... at this scale is you have to do it so far in advance. So, you know, that 1.4 trillion you mentioned, we'll spend that over a very long period of time. I wish
- 35:45 – 37:44
Need for Massive Compute
- SASam Altman
we could do it faster. I think there would be demand if we could do it faster. Um, but it, it, it just takes an enormously long time to build these projects and the energy to run the data centers and the chips and the systems and the networking and everything else. Um, so that will be over a while, but, you know, we, from a year ago to now, we probably about tripled our compute. We'll triple our compute again next year, hopefully again after that. Um, revenue grows even a little bit faster than that, but it does roughly track our compute fleet. Uh, so we, we have never yet found a situation where we can't really well monetize all the compute we have. Um, if we had, I think if we had, you know, double the compute, we'd be at double the revenue right now.
- AKAlex Kantrowitz
Okay. Let's, let's talk about numbers since you brought it up. Um, revenue's growing. Uh, compute spend is growing, but compute spend still outpaces revenue growth. Uh, I think the numbers that have been reported are OpenAI is supposed to lose something like 120 billion between-
- SASam Altman
F-
- AKAlex Kantrowitz
... now-
- SASam Altman
Yeah
- AKAlex Kantrowitz
... and 120, a-and 2028, '29-
- SASam Altman
Yeah
- AKAlex Kantrowitz
... where you're gonna become profitable. Um- So talk a little bit about, like, where-- how does that change? Where does the turn happen?
- SASam Altman
I mean, as revenue grows and as inference becomes a larger and larger part of the fleet, it eventually, uh, subsumes the training expense. So that's the plan. Spend a lot of money training, but make more and more. Uh, if we, if we weren't continuing to grow our training costs by so much, uh, we would be profitable way, way earlier. Um, but the bet we're making is to invest very aggressively in training these big models.
- AKAlex Kantrowitz
The whole world is wondering, um, how your revenue will line up with the spend. Uh, the question's been asked if the trajectory is to hit $20 billion in revenue this year and the, the spend commitment is 1.4
- 37:44 – 46:41
$1.4 Trillion Infrastructure Plan
- AKAlex Kantrowitz
trillion. Um, so I think it would be great just to lay out-
- SASam Altman
Again, over a very long period of time.
- AKAlex Kantrowitz
Yeah, over-- And, and that's why I wanted to bring it up to you. I think it would be great to just lay it out for everyone once and for all how those numbers are gonna work.
- SASam Altman
It's, it's very hard to, like, really... I, I, I find that one thing, I certainly can't do it, and very few people I've ever met can do it. You know, you can, like... You have good intuition for a lot of mathematical things in your head, but exponential growth is usually very hard for people to do a good, quick mental framework on. Like, for whatever reason, there were a lot of things that evolution needed us to be able to do well with math in our heads. Modeling exponential growth doesn't seem to be one of them. Um, so the thing we believe is that we can stay on a very steep growth curve of revenue for quite a while, and everything we see right now continues to indicate that. We cannot do it if we don't have the compute. Uh, again, we're so compute-constrained, uh, and it hits the revenue line so hard that I think if we get to a point where we have, like, a lot of compute sitting around that we can't monetize on a, you know, profitable per unit of compute basis, be very reasonable to say, "Okay, this is, like, a little... How is this all gonna work?" But we've penciled this out a bunch of ways. Uh, we will, of course, also get more efficient, uh, on, like, a FLOPS per dollar basis as, you know, all of the work we've been doing to make compute cheaper comes to pass. Um, but we see this consumer growth. We see this enterprise growth. There's a whole bunch of new kinds of businesses that, that we haven't even launched yet, but will. Um, but compute is really the lifeblood that enables all of this. So we-- You know, there's, like, checkpoints along the way, and if we're a little bit wrong about our timing or math, we can-- we have some flexibility. But we have always been in a compute deficit. It has always constrained what we're able to do. Uh, I unfortunately think that will always be the case, but I wish it were less the case, and I'd like to get it to be less of the case over time, uh, 'cause I think there's so many great products and services that we can deliver, and it'll be a great business.
- AKAlex Kantrowitz
Okay, so it's effectively training costs go down-
- SASam Altman
As a percentage.
- AKAlex Kantrowitz
As a percentage.
- SASam Altman
They go up massively overall, but yeah.
- AKAlex Kantrowitz
And then your expectation is through things like these, this enterprise push, through things like people being willing, uh, to pay for ChatGPT through the API, OpenAI will be able to grow revenue enough to pay for it with revenue.
- SASam Altman
Yeah. That is the plan.
- AKAlex Kantrowitz
Now, I think the thing-- So the market's been kinda losing its mind over this, um, recently. I think the thing that has spooked the market has been the debt has entered, uh, into this equation. And the idea around debt is you take debt out when there's something that's predictable.
- SASam Altman
Yep.
- AKAlex Kantrowitz
Um, and then companies will take the debt out, they'll build, and they'll have predictable revenue. But it's, it's the-- this is a new category. It's, it is unpredictable. Um, is, is that-- How do you think about the fact that debt has entered the picture here?
- SASam Altman
So first of all, I think the market more lost its mind when earlier this year, you know, we would, like, meet with some company, and that company's stock would go up 20% or 15% the next day.
- AKAlex Kantrowitz
That was crazy.
- SASam Altman
That felt really unhealthy. Um, I'm actually happy that there's, like, a little bit more skepticism and rationality in the market now 'cause, uh, it felt to me like we were just totally heading towards a very unstable bubble. And now I think people are some degree of discipline. So I actually think things are-- I think people went crazy earlier. Now people are being more rational. On the debt front, I, I think we do kind of-- We know that if we build infrastructure, we the industry, someone's gonna get value out of it. And it's still, it's still totally early, I agree with you, but I don't think anyone's still questioning there's not gonna be value from, like, AI infrastructure. And so I think it is reasonable for debt to enter this market. I think there will also be other kinds of financial instruments. I suspect we'll see some unreasonable ones as people really, you know, innovate about how to finance this sort, sort of stuff. But, you know, like lending companies money to build data centers, that, that seems fine to me.
- AKAlex Kantrowitz
I think the, the fear is that, um, if things don't continue at pace, like here's one scenario, um, and, and you'll probably disagree with this, but, like, the model progress saturates. Uh, then the, the infrastructure becomes worth less than the anticipated value was. And then, yes, those data centers will be worth something to someone, but it could be that they get liquidated and someone buys them at a discount.
- SASam Altman
Yeah. And I, and I do suspect, by the way, there will be some, like, booms and busts along the way. These things are never a perfectly smooth line. Um, first of all, it seems very clear to me, and this is, uh, like a thing I happily would bet the company on, that the models are gonna get much, much better. We have, like, a pretty good window into this. We're very confident about that. Even if they did not, I think the-- There's, like, a lot of inertia in the world. It takes a while to figure out how to adapt to things. The overhang of the economic value that I believe 5.2 represents relative to what the world has figured out how to get out of it so far is so huge that even if you froze the model at 5.2, how much more like value can you create and thus revenue can you drive? I bet a huge amount. In fact, you didn't ask this, but if I can go on a rant for a second. Um, we used to talk a lot about this two-by-two matrix of short timelines, long timelines, slow takeoff, fast takeoff, and where we felt at different times the kind of probability was shifting and that that was gonna be-- you could kind of understand a lot of the decisions and strategy that the world should optimize for based off of where you were gonna be on that two-by-two matrix. Um, there's like a Z-axis in my head, in my picture of this that's emerged, which is small overhang, big overhang. And I, I kind of thought that, I guess, I didn't think about that hard, but, uh, like my retro on this is I must have assumed that the overhang was not gonna be that massive, that if the models had a lot of value in them, the world was pretty quickly gonna figure out how to deploy that. But it looks to me now like the overhang is gonna be massive in most of the world. You'll have these like areas like, you know, some, some set of coders that'll get massively more productive by adopting these tools. But on the whole, you have this crazy smart model that, to be perfectly honest, most people are still asking the similar questions they did in the GPT-4 realm. Scientists different, coders different, maybe knowledge work is gonna get different, but, but there is a huge overhang, and that has a bunch of very strange consequences for the world. I-- We have not wrapped our head around all the ways that's gonna play out yet, but it's very much not what I would have expected a few years ago.
- AKAlex Kantrowitz
I have a question for you about this, uh, capability overhang. Basically, the models can do a lot more than they've been doing. Um, I, I'm trying to figure out how, um, the models can be that much better than they're being used for, but a lot of businesses, when they try to implement them, they're not getting a return on their investment.
- SASam Altman
Um-
- AKAlex Kantrowitz
Or at least that's what they tell MIT.
- SASam Altman
I'm not sure quite how to think about that because we hear all these businesses saying, you know, "If you 10X the price of GPT 5.2, we would still pay for it."
- AKAlex Kantrowitz
Mm-hmm.
- SASam Altman
"You're hugely underpricing this. We're getting all this value out of it." Um, so I don't-- That doesn't seem right to me. Certainly, if you talk about like what coders say, they're like, "This is, you know... I'd pay 100 times the price or whatever." Um-
- AKAlex Kantrowitz
Just be bureaucracy that's messing things up.
- SASam Altman
Let's say you believe the GDP valve numbers, and maybe you don't for good reason, maybe they're wrong, but let, let's say it were true. And for kind of these well-specified, not super long duration knowledge work tasks, seven out of 10 times you would be as happy or happier with the 5.2 output. You should then be using that a lot, and yet it takes people so long to change their workflow. They're so used to asking the junior analyst to make a deck or whatever that they're gonna, like-- It just, that's stickier than I thought it was. You know, I still kind of run my workflow in very much the same way, although I know that I could be using AI much more than I am.
- AKAlex Kantrowitz
Yep. All right, we got 10 minutes left. I got four-
- SASam Altman
Wow, that was quick.
- AKAlex Kantrowitz
I got four questions. Uh, let's see if we can lightning round, uh, through them. So, uh, the device that you're working on. We'll be back with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman right after this. Um, what I've heard, phone size, no screen. Um, why
- 46:41 – 52:41
Hardware and Screenless Devices
- AKAlex Kantrowitz
couldn't it be an app if it's the phone s- if it's the phone without a screen?
- SASam Altman
First, we're gonna do a fam- a small family of devices. It will not be a single device. Uh, there will be over time a... This is, this is not speculation, so I may turn out to be totally wrong. But I think there will be a shift over time to the way people use computers, where they go from a sort of dumb, reactive thing to a very smart, proactive thing that is understanding your whole life, your context, everything going on around you, very aware of the people around you physically or close to you via a computer that you're working with. And I don't think current devices are well suited to that kind of world. And I am a big believer that we like, we work at the limit of our devices. You know, you have that computer, and it has a bunch of design choices. Like, it could be open or closed, but it can't be, you know, there's not like a, "Okay, pay attention to this interview," but be closed and like whisper in my ear if I forget to ask Sam a question or whatever. Um-
- AKAlex Kantrowitz
Maybe that would be helpful.
- SASam Altman
And there's like, you know, there's like a screen, and that like limits you to the kind of same way we've had graphical user interfaces working for many decades. And there's, you know, a keyboard that was built to like slow down how fast you could get information into it. And these have just been unquestioned assumptions for a long time, but they worked. And then this totally new thing came along, and it opens up a possibility space. But I don't think the current form factor of devices is the optimal fit. It'd be very odd if it were for this like incredible new affordance we have.
- AKAlex Kantrowitz
Oh man, we could talk for an hour about this, but, um, let's move on to the next one, cloud. You've talked about building a, a cloud. Um, here's a, an email we got from a listener: "At my company, we're moving off Azure and directly integrating with OpenAI to power our AI experiences in the product. The focus is to insert a stream of trillions of tokens powering AI experiences through the stack." Is, is that the plan to build a big, big cloud business in that, in that way?
- SASam Altman
First of all, trillions of tokens is a lot of tokens. And if, you know, you asked about the need for compute and our enterprise strategy, like- Our enterprises have been clear-
- AKAlex Kantrowitz
Yeah
- SASam Altman
... with us about how many tokens they'd like to buy-
- AKAlex Kantrowitz
Yeah
- SASam Altman
... from us and we are going to again fail in 2026 to meet demand. But the strategy is companies s- most companies seem to want to come to a company like us and say, "I'd like to enable my company with AI. I need an API customized for my company. I need ChatGPT Enterprise customized for my company. I need a platform that can, like, run all these agents that I can trust my data on. I need the ability to get trillions of tokens into my product. I need the ability to have all my internal processes be more efficient." And we don't currently have, like, a great all-in-one offering for them, and we'd like to make that.
- AKAlex Kantrowitz
Is your ambition to put it up there with the AWS and Azures of the world?
- SASam Altman
Uh, I think it's, I think it's a different kind of thing than those. Like, I don't, I don't really have an ambition to go offer whatever all the services you have to offer to host a website or I don't even know. But, uh, but I, I, I think the concept... Yeah, my, my guess is that people will continue to have their call it web cloud. And then I think there will be this other thing where, like, a company will be like, "I need an AI platform for everything that I wanna do internally, the service I wanna offer," whatever. And you know, like it does kind of live on the physical hardware in some sense, but m- I think it'll be a fairly different product offering.
- AKAlex Kantrowitz
Uh, let's talk about discovery quickly. Um, you've said something that's been really interesting to me, uh, you-- that you think that the models or maybe it's people working with models or the models will make small discoveries next year and big ones within five. Is that the models? Is it people working alongside them? And what makes you confident that that's gonna happen?
- SASam Altman
Yeah, people using the models. Like, the, the models that can, like, figure out their own questions to ask, that does feel further off. But if the world is benefiting from new knowledge, like, we should be very thrilled and, you know, like, I think the, the whole course of human progress has been that we build these better tools and then people use them to do more things. And then out of that process, they build more tools and it's this, like, scaffolding that we climb, like, layer by layer, generation by generation, discovery by discovery. And the fact that a human's asking the question, I think in no way diminishes the value of the tool. I-- so I, I think it's great. I'm, I'm all happy. Um, I-- at the beginning of this year, I thought the small discoveries were gonna start in 2026. They started in 2025, in late 2025. Again, these are very small. I really don't wanna overstate them. But anything is like, feels qualitatively to me very different than nothing. And certainly in the-- when we launched ChatGPT three years ago, that model was not gonna make any new contribution to the total of human knowledge. Um, what it looks like from here to five years from now, this journey to big discoveries, I suspect it's just like, like the normal hill climb of AI. It just gets, like, a little bit better every quarter and then all of a sudden we're like, "Whoa, humans augmented by these models are doing things that humans five years ago just absolutely couldn't do." And you know, whether we mostly attribute that to smarter humans or smarter models, as long as we get the scientific discoveries, I'm ha- very happy either way.
- AKAlex Kantrowitz
IPO next year?
- SASam Altman
I don't know.
- AKAlex Kantrowitz
Do you wanna
- 52:41 – 54:05
Potential 2026 IPO 5
- AKAlex Kantrowitz
be a public company?
- SASam Altman
Um-
- AKAlex Kantrowitz
You seem like you can operate private for a long time. Would you go before you needed to in terms of funding?
- SASam Altman
There's like a whole bunch of things at play here. I do think it's cool that public markets get to participate in value creation. And you know, in some sense, we will be very late to go public if you look at any previous company. Um, it's wonderful to be a private company. Uh, we need lots of capital. Uh, we're gonna, you know, cross all of the sort of shareholder limits and stuff at some point. So am I excited to be a public company CEO? 0%. Um, am I excited for OpenAI to be a public company? In some ways I am. And in some ways, I think it'll be really annoying.
- AKAlex Kantrowitz
I listened to your Theo Vaughan interview very closely. Uh, great interview.
- SASam Altman
He was really cool.
- AKAlex Kantrowitz
Theo really knows what he's talking about.
- SASam Altman
Yeah, he's awesome.
- AKAlex Kantrowitz
He's citing Yoshua Bengio. He's, he did his homework. You told him, this was right before GPT-5 came out, that GPT-5 is smarter than us in almost every way. Uh, I, I thought that that was the definition of AGI. Does-- is that, isn't that AGI? And, and if not, has the term become somewhat meaningless?
- SASam Altman
These models are clearly
- 54:05 – 58:22
Defining AGI vs Super Intelligence
- SASam Altman
extremely smart on a sort of raw horsepower basis. You know, there's all this stuff out in the last couple of days about GPT 5.2 has an IQ of 147 or 144 or 151 or whatever it is. It's like, you know, depending on whose test, it's like, it's some high number and you have, like, a lot of experts in their field saying it can do these amazing things and it's, like, contributing, it's making it more effective. You have the GDP of all things we talked about. One thing you don't have is the ability for the model to not be able to do something today, realize it can't, go off and figure out how to learn to get good at that thing, learn to understand it, and when you come back the next day, it gets it right. And that kind of continuous learning, like, toddlers can do it. It does seem to me like an important part of what we need to build. Now, can you have something that most people would consider an AGI without that? I would say clear- I mean, there's a lot of people that would say we're at AGI with our current models. Um- I think almost everyone would agree that if we were at the current level of intelligence and had that other thing, it would clearly be very AGI-like. Um, but maybe most of the world will say, "Okay, fine, even without that, like, it's doing most knowledge tasks that matter, um, smarter than us and mo- most of us in most ways. We're at AGI. You know, it's discovering small pieces of new science. We're at AGI." What I think this means is that the term, although it's been very hard for all of us to stop using, is very underdefined.
- AKAlex Kantrowitz
Right.
- SASam Altman
I, I have a, I have a, a candidate... Uh, like, one thing I would love, since we got it wrong with AGI, we never defined that. That, you know, the new term everyone's focused about is when we get to super intelligence. Um, so my proposal is that we agree that, you know, AGI kind of went whooshing by. It was, didn't change the world that much, or it will in the long term. But okay, fine, we've built AGIs. At some point, you know, we're in this, like, fuzzy period where some people think we have, some people think we have, and more people think we have. And, and then we'll say, "Okay, what's next?" Um, a candidate definition for super intelligence is when a system can do a better job being President of United States, CEO of a major company, you know, running a very large scientific lab, than any person can, even with the assistance of AI.
- AKAlex Kantrowitz
Okay.
- SASam Altman
I think this was an interesting thing about what happened with chess, where chess got... It could beat humans. I, I remember this very vividly, uh, the Deep Blue thing. And then there was a period of time where a human and the AI together were better than an AI by itself. And then the person was just making it worse, and the smartest thing was the unaided AI that didn't have the human, like, not understanding its, its great intelligence. Um, I think something like that is, like, an interesting framework for super intelligence. I think it's, like, a long way off, but I would love to have, like, a cleaner definition this time around.
- AKAlex Kantrowitz
Well, Sam, look, I, I have, uh, been in your products, uh, using them daily for three years.
- SASam Altman
Thank you very much.
- AKAlex Kantrowitz
Um, definitely gotten a lot better. Can't even imagine where they go from here.
- SASam Altman
We'll, we'll try to keep getting them better fast.
- AKAlex Kantrowitz
Okay. And, uh, this is our second time speaking, and I appreciate how open you've been, uh, both times.
- SASam Altman
Thank you very much.
- AKAlex Kantrowitz
So, thank you for your time. Thank you, everybody, for listening and watching. If you're here for the first time, please hit follow or subscribe. We have lots of great interviews on the feed and more on the way. This past year, we've had Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis on twice, including one with Google founder Sergey Brin. We've also had Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, and we have plenty of big interviews coming up in 2026. Thanks again, and we'll see you next time on Big Technology Podcast. [upbeat music]
Episode duration: 58:22
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Transcript of episode 2P27Ef-LLuQ