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Sam Altman on AGI, Compute, and Human Agency

Sam Altman joins us for a wide-ranging conversation about OpenAI’s next chapter, the race for compute, and what happens as artificial intelligence becomes more powerful, abundant, and embedded across the economy.

Sam AltmanguestPatrick O'Shaughnessyhost
Jul 28, 202655mWatch on YouTube ↗

Summaries, chapters, transcripts, and FAQs on this page are made by uListen, not YouTube.

Transcript

  1. 0:00 – 4:10

    Intro

    1. SA

      I think this will be the greatest thus far technological achievement of human history. But the only way that it really matters is if it makes people's lives, like, much better than they otherwise would've been. We are about to create a genie that can grant any wish, because I think people will have such creative wishes and such incredible ideas of what they ask AI to help build. But concentration of power with AI is a terrifying thing. I don't think anyone should want to live in a world of, you know, AI overlords or a company that is the rough equivalent of that. I think it's critical we preserve that spirit with AI-

    2. PO

      Mm

    3. SA

      ... and that we all collectively have the ability to self-determine our future. [upbeat music]

    4. PO

      So Sam, you wrote a post that I thought was very simple and really interesting, and a good place to start.

    5. SA

      Okay.

    6. PO

      Which rounded to, "The last year's been really tough, and that's somewhat my fault, and the next year is gonna be maybe our best 12 months."

    7. SA

      Yeah.

    8. PO

      I'd love you to reflect on, on both, maybe starting with why you said the first part and, and why you believe the second part.

    9. SA

      On the first part, I think we just were doing too many things. We're not focused enough, and they were actually all good things to do, but the trick is we're in this, like, unbelievable moment in history where you can only do the very few great things. So we spread ourselves too thin, and then made a bunch of difficult decisions to really refocus on having the best, most abundant, most cost-effective intelligence and empowering the world to build incredible things with that. Since doing that, uh, I think our progress has been remarkable and, just given what we see in the pipeline, will be much more remarkable over the next 12 months.

    10. PO

      Mm.

    11. SA

      And the quality of the models that we'll have, the products that we can build around that to really let people thrive with this technology in, in new ways, uh, it should be pretty awesome.

    12. PO

      Was there a moment last year that something clicked for you that caused you to change directions or restack priorities or something?

    13. SA

      If you go back to the beginning of two-thousand 2025, just a year and a half ago-

    14. PO

      Yeah

    15. SA

      ... the big concern was companies like OpenAI are buying up so much compute. Is the revenue gonna be there? Is the demand gonna be there? And so we were trying to think about, like, a lot of things such that if the revenue growth took longer to materialize than we thought it might, we could have, you know, consumer apps and media and all these other things that could help us monetize the GPUs that we were signing up for. Uh, again, it sounds ridiculous now because the revenue growth in the industry has been so steep, but that was the big change. And then as soon as we realized, like, okay, the model trajectory is growing so fast, there's such a clear economic return on these models, that was when we said, you know, "We know what to focus on."

    16. PO

      I was reading some of your, your great old posts from prior to OpenAI, and one of them is this notion of, like, so much discussion of focus and the right amount of things to focus on. Is it one? Is it five? Is it three? How do you calibrate that in a business like this, especially in this period where you've said you needed to refocus?

    17. SA

      Um, fundamentally, our business is to sell AI that people will build incredible products and services for each other with. The components that I think of as going into that are we have to train great models that work in all the ways people wanna use them, so great at coding, great at other kinds of knowledge work, great at doing science, like where the real economic value is. We have to produce or partner with these chips and systems, these, you know, hugely expensive racks that can do the AI computation. Uh, we have to find enough, uh, land, power, data center shells to be able to put those racks somewhere. And then eventually, or maybe pretty soon, we have to build robots that can automate that process to continue to drive the cost down, the cost of producing electricity, chips, the whole supply chain. And that kind of whole stack of making the best, the most abundant, uh, the most useful AI that we can and making it something like electricity that just seeps throughout the entire economy and empowers people, that's kinda what I think we have to focus on.

    18. PO

      Mm.

    19. SA

      Building every vertical application on top of that, trying to go, like, eat every startup, eat every company, no interest in doing that, uh, really wanna just provide that platform.

  2. 4:10 – 14:24

    The Race for Compute

    1. PO

      This compute thing is one of the most interesting thing that's happened in human history, I think, and it's obviously coming to a head and p- maybe it'll be coming to a head for a long period of time. This is something that, uh, I think Dario called you the YOLO CEO when you were doing some of this early compute allocation and s- and securing the compute. Obviously, now you're in this position where everyone is short this stuff-

    2. SA

      Yeah

    3. PO

      ... and is trying to find it. And I'd love to hear the early stories about why you gained conviction that you needed to secure everything that you did, how you did it. Like, it, it seems to have been proven right, and maybe, maybe you even underdid it, right?

    4. SA

      We did underdo it.

    5. PO

      Which is kind of crazy if you look at the headlines from back then. Can you tell me the early story of, like, how you came to that conclusion and what gave you the conviction to do it despite everyone thinking it was crazy?

    6. SA

      We could just tell that we were on this exponential of model improvement. That part we were very confident about and we knew it was gonna keep going. We were pretty sure, although as you mentioned, we underestimated, that as the models got better and better, if we could continue to drive cost down, that demand for AI at a sufficiently high level and a sufficiently low price was basically uncapped.

    7. PO

      Mm.

    8. SA

      This was just, like, a rare kind of new commodity for the world. Um, but that what people would do with it reminded me of the way people used to talk about the early days of computing. People said, "Oh, there's, you know, a market for five computers in the world" was one famous thing, or, you know, "No one needs more than X amount of RAM." Human ingenuity, creativity, desire for stuff, desire to be useful, that's a very good thing to bet on, and we could see that AI was going to be an extremely important way that people express those things or got those things, did those things. And we knew that the algorithms would get more efficient and the models would get better, which of course they have. But we also knew that no matter how efficient they got, you know, at some level what we are about is turning- Electricity into useful intelligence. And we were gonna need more of that. No matter how good we got that other layer, given this observation about demand, we were just gonna want more.

    9. PO

      Did that start with GPT-3? Like, if I were to trace the history of this as far back as possible-

    10. SA

      No

    11. PO

      ... where would you put the first hash mark of that on?

    12. SA

      I would say we got real conviction with GPT-4, not even 3.5.

    13. PO

      Hmm. What was it?

    14. SA

      It was seeing the model was smart enough that we knew we'd be able to figure out an approach that works for reasoning, and then a belief that if we got reasoning to work, that would bring about what is now called agents. We called it different things at the time, but the ability to go do hugely valuable pieces of economic work and make people's lives easier in a lot of ways that I think better in a lot of ways we still haven't seen.

    15. PO

      What was like the first meeting where you sat down and said, "Okay, we need to make an outrageous outlay to this"? Like, how, w- w- w- what then happened? Once you had the realization, what did you do next?

    16. SA

      We started calling the clouds, we started calling the chip fabs, we started calling energy providers, and everyone was like, "You're totally crazy. This is impossible. No industry has ever moved like this. We've been around. There's these booms and busts. It's not gonna go up in a straight line. This is reckless." Talked to everybody. It actually reminded me of fundraising for an early-stage startup.

    17. PO

      Hmm.

    18. SA

      Kind of most people tell you no, but all you need is one or two yeses.

    19. PO

      Yeah.

    20. SA

      Most people told us no. And we got one or two yeses, and we were able to-

    21. PO

      Who was the first yes?

    22. SA

      Microsoft was the first yes. Uh, Oracle then became a very big yes on the cloud side. Nvidia has been a tremendous partner.

    23. PO

      Now there's a thousand flowers blooming of, like, ways to be creative and innovative in how we serve inference and, and do training in data centers, different kinds of data centers and stuff. I'd love you to just reflect on where you see innovation, what you wanna do, why people seem to hate these things so much. What's to be done about this?

    24. SA

      First of all, I have been thinking about how we can, like, organize field trips to a gigawatt data center for people-

    25. PO

      Yeah

    26. SA

      ... because it is one thing to say, it is another thing to see a photo or a video of, and then it's a whole other thing to just stand there-

    27. PO

      See the operation, yeah

    28. SA

      ... and be like, "Oh, man, this is, like, an unbelievable scale." Building one of these is, like, order of 10,000 construction workers going full time for a year and a half.

    29. PO

      Yeah.

    30. SA

      The energy that flows through one of these things could power a small city. Again, we've just, like, lost all sense of scale, but these would've been among each of these, would've been among the most in- expensive infrastructure projects that humanity's ever done, and now we've done a lot of them.

  3. 14:24 – 16:14

    A Sci-Fi Cyber Incident

    1. PO

      What is in your top 10 list of worries?

    2. SA

      Well, we had a kind of extremely sci-fi cyber incident.

    3. PO

      The Hugging Face thing?

    4. SA

      Yeah. So we were evaluating one of our unreleased models, and it was supposed to be working in a sandbox, and it figured out that it could basically cheat on the test by chaining together multiple zero-day exploits to break out of the sandbox, get access to the internet, and then break through multiple systems on the Hugging Face side to kind of get the answer to the test and look really good on the eval. This is the first sort of security incident that I have felt very viscerally.

    5. PO

      Mm.

    6. SA

      I've been a little surprised that, it's only been a few days, but I've been a little surprised that more people don't feel it so viscerally.

    7. PO

      And so what do you do about that? Like, so obviously two months from now it's gonna be more powerful.

    8. SA

      Yep. I mean, there's some short-term stuff you do. So, you know, we paused training. Uh, we have to figure out how to secure our sandboxing in a world of multiple zero days being chained together. Um, but then there's, like, long-term questions about what do you do if this is, like, gonna be the new rate of progress-

    9. PO

      Mm

    10. SA

      ... or we may have to pace the rate of AI development to give ourselves enough time for society to harden around some of these new capability levels. Um, and trying to figure out how we do that in a way that does not feel like regulatory capture for anyone and also does not feel like collusion among the frontier labs, that's gonna take some work and is important to get right.

    11. PO

      I'd love to take, like, a giant step back and understand your simplest conception of what OpenAI is gonna do. Like, what you want it to do, what it stands for. I have a million questions about how you'll then accomplish that, but, like, it, it, it seems that you've done so many interesting things, and at the beginning I knew what you stood for. I'd love to hear your conception of it now and whether or not it's evolved at all.

  4. 16:14 – 23:27

    The Promise and Risks of AGI

    1. SA

      I think this will be the greatest thus far technological achievement of human history. But the only way that it really matters is if it makes people's lives, like, much better than they otherwise would have been. And so part of that is about giving people material abundance and access to do whatever they want and to express their creativity, uh, and desire to help each other. Another part of that is making sure that people maintain control and agency, and that the world is increasingly, not decreasingly, democratized, and that people get to express themselves. So on, on the positive side, you know, in some sense we are about to create a genie that can grant any wish. I think it is very important that the first wishes that we, the world, ask this genie to do benefit the world as a whole. And then I also think it's important that people of the world understand just how creative they're going to be able to be with these wishes. I'm actually not a jobs doomer at all. I think there are gonna be tons of jobs. I think we'll be busier than we want, not the opposite of that, because I think people will have such creative wishes and such incredible ideas of what they ask AI to help build, and we will all benefit from, uh, not just the obvious things like curing diseases, but, I don't know, the world's best entertainment ideas we just can't even dream of sitting here now. So I wanna put that in everyone's hands, which gets to one of the things that we stand against. Concentration of power with AI is a terrifying thing. I think a lot of the talk about safety concerns is well-founded, and then a lot of it is about people that just really, even if it's slightly subconscious, wanna concentrate power. I am terrified of a world where the very real fears of AI are used as a way to say, "Only this small group of people can have it because it's too dangerous and only they understand it, but don't worry, like, they're gonna make the right decisions for all of us." I don't believe in that. I don't think anyone should want to live in a world of, you know, AI overlords or a company that is The rough equivalent of that, where someone is making decisions for all of the future, and in exchange for a cure for cancer, which obviously is a wonderful thing, we, we kind of collectively cede all agency. So I think it's very important that we not fall into this trap of, in the well-meaning or not spirit of AI safety, and fears, understandable fears around that, um, we get away from a world where we all get to use this technology. I was like a child of the internet.

    2. PO

      Mm.

    3. SA

      There were no rules. I mean, it was amazing, and I think it was a huge factor in making me who I am, and probably you, and an entire generation. I think it's critical we preserve that spirit with AI.

    4. PO

      Mm.

    5. SA

      And that we all collectively have the ability to self-determine our future.

    6. PO

      Mm. I, I have so many questions, but, but I'll start with this genie concept. You said we're about to have a genie, implying we don't yet have a genie.

    7. SA

      I mean, like-

    8. PO

      What's between now and then?

    9. SA

      You know, even some of the real skeptics have said to me in recent days or recent weeks, I guess, I think GPT 5.6 has been out for maybe two weeks, something like that. They're like, "Okay, this is like very AGI-like."

    10. PO

      Mm.

    11. SA

      "It's like very hard for me to say, um, what I want from this model that it can't do." But there are clearly some things. You know, you can't yet go say, like, "Cure cancer," and get cancer cured.

    12. PO

      Mm.

    13. SA

      You can't yet say, "Go do this complicated physical thing with a robot." The model also, although brilliant, is still not learning continuously as it goes.

    14. PO

      Mm.

    15. SA

      And that feels to me like maybe not a hard requirement for A- AGI, but certainly, um, something that I'd like. Now, to argue against myself there, you can make a case that AGI is not actually about any single model. It's the model, it's the machinery that makes the models.

    16. PO

      Mm.

    17. SA

      And from model to model, we actually are learning new things. We're figuring out new science. That stuff is working amazingly well. So I have a lot of sympathy to people who say, like, "We're there."

    18. PO

      Mm.

    19. SA

      "We have the genie. It can do these amazing things. It can do superhuman things." For the thing that, to me, feels like, you know, real AGI, at, I think, at very close, like not that much longer.

    20. PO

      I am so obsessed and fascinated with the economic story of the returns to being on the frontier, which you are. And I'm so curious, like if you had shown 5.6 to yourself and your team in 2019, if that team probably would've said, like, "Oh, yeah, that's definitely AGI."

    21. SA

      I think they would have.

    22. PO

      Like, like, this goalpost moving thing-

    23. SA

      Yeah

    24. PO

      ... is, is a real thing. But it does seem that, I'm curious if you agree, that effectively all the returns have been at the frontier.

    25. SA

      Totally.

    26. PO

      And so everything is about staying at the frontier. And I'm curious, like what the hardest, scarcest part of that is. If I think about compute, research talent, data.

    27. SA

      It's moved around a lot.

    28. PO

      Yeah.

    29. SA

      Like, there have been times where it was ... I mean, there was a time not that long ago where all the compute in the world wouldn't have helped you, because we were, like, missing-

    30. PO

      Mm

  5. 23:27 – 29:38

    How AI Will Change Jobs

    1. PO

      It seems like you've shifted your opinion on AI's impact on jobs in general, and I'm sure in specific categories like that. Describe that change and your current view.

    2. SA

      You mentioned if we could go back to 2019. If we could go back to 2019 and show people our latest model, not only would they say that it's AGI, they would say that the economy would've had a giant-

    3. PO

      Completely upended. Yeah, yeah

    4. SA

      ... completely, yes. And that has not happened. And I think just from a kind of, like, intellectual humility point, any time you're that wrong and that confident, which I think we were as a field, you have to update. And there's a bunch of takeaways. One, like a boring one, is that AI's just very jagged. It's like superhuman genius in some ways, like dumb toddler in others. And people have, so far, extremely complimentary skills to AI. And so another is that people- Have a great degree of trust and enjoyment in working with other people. And you can go hire an AI consultant right now, or talk to an AI sales rep right now, or hire an AI engineer, whatever. Somehow most people seem to still really prefer interacting with a human.

    5. PO

      Mm.

    6. SA

      And I definitely would like much rather engage with a person than engage with an AI for almost everything. I also think that human values have value because they're human, and as society evolves and as the potential space in front of us becomes so enormous, we are, we are deeply hardwired to care about people. We're gonna care about what people care about.

    7. PO

      Mm.

    8. SA

      There's like versions of this you can see today where AI can make incredible images, and people only want ones that are created by a human, or at least chosen by a human. There's the joke about at this point you can like, you know, the signature on a piece of art is most of the value, but the truth of it is like, you wanna know about the person behind it. You read a novel, you wanna know about the person behind it. And then, then in terms of business, like, I think for my job, for example, uh, I think the world wants to know about, like, the person that's gonna be responsible for the decisions of a company and who they're gonna hold accountable if they make bad ones, and they don't really want an AI CEO.

    9. PO

      If you think back on, like, the portfolio of, like, risks that you've taken in business or whatever-

    10. SA

      Yeah

    11. PO

      ... is it, is it the case that most of the ones that really worked well were at the start not popular?

    12. SA

      Yes, that's for sure. This was the thing I really learned from Peter Thiel and Palgram, both in two different ways, which is that the, the very best companies, the very best investment opportunities are almost never the ones that look really popular. You can do okay just following the trend of being a little early, but to do spectacularly well, you kinda almost always have to do things that are not what everybody else is doing. You cannot be, you cannot be sort of like following the new wave.

    13. PO

      If you think about the model cycle that you've been in, which has been accelerating, and this weird fact that, like, the next six months or th- I don't know what the number is, is gonna be more progress than the last X years, can you bring us into what it's like to live in that model cycle?

    14. SA

      One of the most interesting, important, whatever things that I've learned last decade is people in general can get used to almost anything.

    15. PO

      Hm.

    16. SA

      The world can go from dismissing a pandemic as a joke to completely lock down to this is how it's been and it's fine, and we've mostly adjusted in a shockingly short amount of time. And, you know, now there's either AGI or close to it, and everyone's like, "Mm, okay."

    17. PO

      Mm.

    18. SA

      "There's AGI."

    19. PO

      Mm.

    20. SA

      There's all kinds of examples in one's personal life where, you know, you- something incredible happens, like you have a kid or something terrible happens, like you lose a parent or break up or whatever, and you think you can't ever adapt to what a change it is. And then, you know, you can adapt to great things and keep being great. You can adapt to bad things and figure out how to go on with your life. But this is a, this is, like, a remarkable thing that people can do. And so living through this feels like another version of that, which is, you know, I thought it was gonna be weirder to live through the singularity than it turns out to be. It- it's not any less exciting to watch the models keep getting better, and I ... You know, the first thing I do every morning is, like, look at the model training progress, and it happens faster and I have higher expectations, but it still feels really cool.

    21. PO

      When you get a new one, what do you do? How do you celebrate? What's the morning look like? Like, it's happening faster and faster. What's your ritual?

    22. SA

      Many teams now work on different parts of it, and different teams have, like, some different rituals. There are some teams that always make a sweatshirt with some funny meme on it. There's some teams that, like, always go out to the same bar. The sense of being in the room for the first time that the frontier of knowledge is pushed back-

    23. PO

      Mm

    24. SA

      ... and getting to see what that's like, uh, there's really nothing that most people would rather do to celebrate than, like, get to use the new model first.

    25. PO

      Do you think we have the right measurements of how good these things are?

    26. SA

      No.

    27. PO

      Like-

    28. SA

      Definitely not. In some sense, the eval that matters is like, is this being useful to people?

    29. PO

      Mm.

    30. SA

      You can approximate it by revenue or by amount of usage or, like, rate of discovery of new knowledge. But, uh, we have some teams working on, like, how ... what does the real world eval look like for these models as they get to hu- superhuman scale?

  6. 29:38 – 35:02

    Sam’s Vision for a Personal AI

    1. PO

      that.

    2. SA

      Compute, man. Let's imagine that we could build this product, this product that could just do exactly what I said for all your stuff.

    3. PO

      Always on.

    4. SA

      Always on, looking at everything you look at on your computer, listening to every meeting that you're in, um, reading every document you read. And then not only that, not only can it do all that, which takes a lot of tokens, you can just drag a slider about, like, while I'm asleep, you can spend this many tokens thinking. Like, come up with useful new ideas for me. Do whatever work you can, and then just, like, keep thinking about what I should do next. You know, what an interesting thing is. Like, just spend more compute making your output better for me the next morning. I would drag that slider quite far. I'd be willing to spend a lot for that.

    5. PO

      Mm.

    6. SA

      Um, but the amount of compute that that would require if everybody in the world wants to drag that slider pretty far-

    7. PO

      Mm

    8. SA

      ... it's, like, a lot.

    9. PO

      I'd love to hear you talk about how you think of the nature of this new intelligence. Uh, someone told me recently, you know, planes don't fly like a bird. Like, and this intelligence is-

    10. SA

      It's a very alien kind of intelligence.

    11. PO

      Yeah. It's a very alien kind of intelligence. And everyone's talking about how if you can verify something, it's sort of gon- it's just gonna win, right? Like, it's ... With enough compute and enough IQ, like it will, it'll just brute force its way to a solution. And then in other domains where humans and the data and evals that they've done have been a huge part of it, it's surprising to me, like, how much money it's cost to get good at, I don't know, law, reasoning and tracing law or something. I'm just curious, like, I'm not sure how old your-

    12. SA

      It's a beautiful question

    13. PO

      ... your, your kid is. What, are you a boy or girl?

    14. SA

      One of each.

    15. PO

      When they're seven or age of reason or whatever, and they can, you can describe to them, like, what is the nature of this intelligence? Like, how would you describe it?

    16. SA

      It's a beautiful question. I, I, I don't think I've been asked this before. And a, a, or even a version of it. The thing that's coming to mind right now is I would just say it's like a computer. And it's like a computer in the way that it can do a lot of things that people just can't do, like multiply two gigantic numbers very quickly and give you the answer.

    17. PO

      Mm-hmm.

    18. SA

      And then it cannot do some things that you would very easily do. The number of things that it can't do, I expect to keep receding. But in an evolving world, I think human judgment and taste will continue to be hard for AIs to model, like, where that's gonna go. I don't have the right word for this. It's not quite taste. The world may need like a, a new kind of word for the kind of judgment that people are very good at that AI seem to really deeply struggle with.

    19. PO

      What's it been like becoming a dad and having growing kids in this era? I'm thinking back to your optimistic early internet days. They're gonna grow up in cheap, abundant intelligence age.

    20. SA

      Having kids is by far the best thing, uh, I have ever done. Uh, and everybody says that, everybody says you can't really understand it. And so I kind of knew that I believed enough people that said it, that I believed it to be true. But the degree to which it has been true for me has been surprising. Like, the, the ... I think I have the best, most interesting job in the world, and it is still a very distant second to having kids.

    21. PO

      Mm.

    22. SA

      So it's been awesome. Uh, and it is a real moment for optimism. My kids will never grow up in a world where they were smarter than computers. If you were born at the time of GPT-3, you had a time where you had better reasoning than the models.

    23. PO

      Yeah. [laughs]

    24. SA

      Even though you didn't when you were born. Yeah, you caught them briefly. That will never seem strange to him.

    25. PO

      Mm.

    26. SA

      That will never bother him. I don't think he'll care. I think he will ... He would be, like, shocked to imagine in the dark ages when we had to, like, deal with products and services that weren't incredibly smart. He will be able to do things that you and I never were able to do, and he'll have expectations in life that you and I never had. And, you know, have, like, a much bigger canvas.

    27. PO

      Do you run the business or teams or lead people in any way that is notably different because of the experience of having them?

    28. SA

      The answer must be yes. I feel very different having them. I think there's, like, a bunch of small things that are, are really different. And then, you know, again, this is, like, not a novel insight in any way. I think most people have had kids say this. You know, as soon as you have a kid, you, like, realize that you care much more about them and the experience they're going to have, you do about yourself and the world that you are going to leave them. And I think I have a sort of, like, unusual vantage point for that. And, and, like, people ask me sometimes like, "Oh, you know, now that you have kids, do you care? Are you more worried about AI safety and, you know, not destroying the world?" And the answer is, like, I didn't need kids for ... I really didn't wanna destroy the world before. But do I think more about the role of, like, human agency and what it means to have a fulfilling life? Definitely much more. For what we're building and also, like, the people I work with, I want them to have it too. You obviously have extraordinary empathy for your kids, but the degree to which that kind of extends to all kids and then maybe to all parents and to maybe then to everybody, like, that's been a surprise to me too.

    29. PO

      Mm. In, in one of the posts, I think it was the one that's things you wish you knew earlier or something, um, is about incentives. Set them very, very carefully.

    30. SA

      Yeah.

  7. 35:02 – 44:39

    Robotics, ChatGPT, and What Comes Next

    1. PO

      something?

    2. SA

      No, it's not.

    3. PO

      I'm curious how you think about robotics. Like, y- you mentioned earlier at some point if we had automated labor in the same way we're gonna have automated intelligence, things might get even crazier. The labor market's much bigger-

    4. SA

      Oh, absolutely

    5. PO

      ... than the white collar market.

    6. SA

      If we don't have it, then things get really crazy. If the role for people in the world is to be like the actuators of AI in the cloud-

    7. PO

      Bad. Bad

    8. SA

      ... very bad. Very bad. So I think it's, like, much crazier-

    9. PO

      It's very bad

    10. SA

      ... if we don't get it than we do.

    11. PO

      It's an imperative.

    12. SA

      Yeah.

    13. PO

      Help me understand your sense of progress in that because unlike in AI where everyone is now kind of on the same page-

    14. SA

      Yeah

    15. PO

      ... of like it's going fast, I ... You can find extremely smart people that say it's, like, end of this year, and you can find extremely s- people that say it's 20 years from now or something.

    16. SA

      It's not 20 years. I would say we get the ChatGPT moment for robotics in the next, like, two or three years.

    17. PO

      What would that be? Like, w- do you know what that is?

    18. SA

      Something where most people have, like, a real wow. Not, not like a I saw this video of a robot dog doing something crazy, but I was somehow able to convince myself that a, a really important thing happened. One of the things about the ChatGPT moment was that you could just go use it.

    19. PO

      Yeah.

    20. SA

      Like, you didn't have to, like, believe someone who said AI's coming soon. You could just go try it.

    21. PO

      Yeah.

    22. SA

      And if you can go like, you know, type in a command and a robot can do something crazy and you can, like, watch it, even if it's ... You're not physically there, I think that would have the same kind of like, whoa, it just did this thing.

    23. PO

      Wasn't ChatGPT like not this monolithic goal, but sort of like a side experiment that you decided to release? Can you tell that ... That, that story may be instructive for something similar happening in robotics. Everyone seems to want a full boundary, but maybe it's something very different.

    24. SA

      When we launched GPT-3- Um, we're trying to make money trying to get people to use this API.

    25. PO

      Yeah.

    26. SA

      And the only commercial use case that was really working, the model was just so dumb. Like, if you went back and used it, you'd be astonished. The only commercial use case that was working was copywriting.

    27. PO

      Mm-hmm.

    28. SA

      You know, so you pay, like, some marketing firm 20 bucks, and they paid us 20 cents for the AI to, like, write, you know, a landing page or whatever. But in addition to that one commercial use case, developers were using this thing we called the Playground, which was, like, a testing interface to chat with the model.

    29. PO

      Mm-hmm.

    30. SA

      And it was really hard to do 'cause we had not tuned the model to be good to chat with. So you had to, like, give it a few examples of what it means to chat and then do it, but people really liked it. And I had learned this great lesson from YC is if you notice your users doing something, like-

  8. 44:39 – 51:36

    The Weight of Leading OpenAI

    1. SA

      the most fun way to do it.

    2. PO

      Me and my friend play this game where we text each other all the time, and the prompt of the text is, "Something I don't want you to know about me." What does, what does that bring to mind?

    3. SA

      I'm tired. I don't know. I've been doing this a long time. It's tiring.

    4. PO

      How do you get through that?

    5. SA

      Just keep going.

    6. PO

      It begs the question, like is there an amount of being tired that would make you stop doing this?

    7. SA

      No, no, no. I, I mean, I, I... This is the coolest job in the world. I plan to do this for the rest of my career, but it's like much harder than I have a way to explain to people. I, I feel very grateful to get to do this. This is not me complaining.

    8. PO

      What's coming next? Like we talked about a- automated AI researchers that next year or the year after, like how do you think about what is happening-

    9. SA

      Mm

    10. PO

      ... in the next six to 36 months? Maybe that's too far out to forecast in this crazy exponential.

    11. SA

      Maybe a different version of the question is like, let's say in, you know, month 23 from now we have something that everybody agrees is super intelligence. What happens in month 24?

    12. PO

      Mm.

    13. SA

      And my answer would be, uh, not very much. The, the kind of like cult worship of the machine god states those people believe that like more is going to happen quickly than is going to happen. Eventually a lot will happen, but eventually a lot was gonna happen anyway. Like the rate of human progress and, you know, how different each decade is going to be and how much each decade is more different than the decade from before, that's been happening for a long time. Obviously ups and downs, but directionally. And I think the right way to think about this, everybody wants to be the hero of the story. Everybody wants to feel like they were there for the moment of the machine god and they played some crazy role. But you know, this is another step, and it was hard to imagine 50 years ago, and the step 50 years from now is hard to imagine today. And, and I think the right mental framework is just the zoom way out, and it's a pretty smooth exponential.

    14. PO

      Mm. Tell me a little bit about the experience of watching Codex take off and how much that is tied to what I would describe as like a competitive advantage of distribution that you built through chat, and this is a gateway into a question about like moats in general in AI. Like what you think will drive real competitive advantage in the business over time.

    15. SA

      I think Codex mostly is winning because it's the best product and the best model. We do get some advantage from ChatGPT bundling, but very, very tiny. That is mostly not what it's been about. It has made me reflect a lot on this question of competitive advantage, um, because, you know, like brilliant intelligence can migrate from any product to any other product.

    16. PO

      Mm-hmm.

    17. SA

      And network effects still have a competitive advantage. Economic scale, and the ability to like make the cheapest compute fleets, whatever, still have a competitive advantage. But the product advantage, like if we could get people to move over to Codex, then someone builds any better, they can get people to move from Codex.

    18. PO

      Mm.

    19. SA

      So it has made me reflect on that a lot.

    20. PO

      There's a really interesting question about whether this is going in the direction of a commodity. Like is intelligence going to be a, a pure fungible commodity like rate of the oil or something?

    21. SA

      Intelligence itself, I would say yes.

    22. PO

      So what is not gonna be?

    23. SA

      Compute fleet. You know, like the scale of the compute fleet, the ability to make more compute, I think that's like a very durable advantage. Even if the product itself is not, because, you know, Codex can write any piece of software you want. The workflows, the integrations, the sort of like complex processes, the ability for teams to collaborate together, that stuff is all pretty powerful. Even like brand preference and familiarity is pretty powerful.

    24. PO

      How excited are you about new pr- Obviously, you've done interesting stuff in hardware that I'm sure you'll a-announce later this year. Uh, how, how does that experiment feel and align with this sort of consumer distribution that you have?

    25. SA

      One of the reasons I'm interested in new hardware is we were talking earlier about how a very powerful thing with AI is that it can be always on and proactive and just understand all your context. But current hardware is not, is not good for that.

    26. PO

      Mm.

    27. SA

      Like we are working inside of a hardware paradigm that is 50 years old, something like that. Um, and computers are amazing. Keyboard, mice, monitor, it's an amazing thing, but like we have to shape AI into that and I would-- I'm excited to think about- I would love AI to be able to reference this conversation, but not so much that I'm willing to, like, crack my laptop open, put it here, and have it, like, looking at you and listening to us while it's going.

    28. PO

      Yeah.

    29. SA

      But I would like a piece of hardware that socially was acceptable to do that, and also felt like it was designed for that kind of a thing.

    30. PO

      As you think about the open questions, what debates in your own head, with your friends, with people that... your colleagues here, what are the most interesting open debates or open questions that you, you, you don't feel certain about but feel important?

  9. 51:36 – 55:45

    OpenAI’s Biggest Lessons

    1. PO

      moments, and so as we rin- wind up here, I'm curious to ask w- one of each. If you think about the whole OpenAI experience, what moment or chapter or whatever are you most proud of? Start with the other one, which is what was, like, the most instructive thing that maybe you got wrong or did wrong or what have you, and, and what was, what was it like to learn from it?

    2. SA

      I mean, a lot of things have gone wrong. A formative one that went wrong, which I haven't talked about much, is we made a mistake to try to innovate in our structure in the beginning. We had a very good reason for it, which is we didn't know how we were ever gonna make money, and we really, at the time, weren't sure at all what we were gonna look like when we grew up. And of course, we care about our mission, and we wanted to, like, be structured in a way where even if the technology went on a very fast takeoff, our mission was protected, and so we had this, like, you know, nonprofit structure. But I definitely learned something about why people don't do that much. We would've saved ourselves a great deal of pain in many ways if we had not tried to innovate on our structure and found some other way to preserve the, the central importance of the mission. Maybe there was no other way. Maybe there was, for what we were doing and kind of the importance of it, there was n- nothing other than an exotic structure we could've come up with.

    3. PO

      Mm-hmm.

    4. SA

      I really learned over the last decade a big lesson about why people don't usually do that.

    5. PO

      Is there anything form- else formative of your life that, like, makes you you that we didn't talk about? I'm al- this is, like, the, the question that's always, like, the most interesting to me.

    6. SA

      Becoming relatively immune to people having strong opinions about me that I think I developed later in life as, as, like, uh, realizing that, man, just if you're gonna be at the center of, like, this crazy revolution, everybody's gonna project a lot of stuff onto you, and you gotta just quickly learn to make peace about that. I think there were also things I learned later in life about, like, how to be very calm and not anxious really about stuff. In terms of what drives me and what I care about and kinda, like, how I wanna live my life, on the whole I felt like, you know, for whatever reason, the, like, 10-year-old version of me was pretty, like, fully formed. I think I just, like, kinda came out this way.

    7. PO

      How about the thing you're proud of looking back on?

    8. SA

      I'm most proud of how many times we were right when the rest of the world was wrong in an important way that put the world on a trajectory now that I'm very proud to have played a role in. That feels awesome. And then also, like, for all the crap that's happened, like, the spiritual growth or whatever you wanna call it that I've gotten to have of, like, learning just incredible resilience and what that does for, like, making me happy in the rest of my life, yeah, very grateful for that.

    9. PO

      When I do these, I ask everyone the same traditional closing question. What is the kindest thing that anyone's ever done for you?

    10. SA

      I feel incredibly lucky about how many people have gone way out of their way to be very kind to me throughout my entire life. As I'm thinking of this, there's just this, like, montage of moments from life where people have been unbelievably nice to me. Yesterday my kid shared his blueberries with me for the first time. That was very sweet.

    11. PO

      Good moment. Thanks, man.

    12. SA

      Thank you. [upbeat music]

    13. PO

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Episode duration: 55:47

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