No PriorsRevolutionizing Cybersecurity and AI-Driven Science with OpenAI President Greg Brockman
EVERY SPOKEN WORD
40 min read · 8,322 words- 0:00 – 0:42
Intro
- GBGreg Brockman
To ensure AGI benefits all of humanity, we think that humans should be firmly in the driver’s seat, should have control over the future, and this technology should amplify human agency. When I look at the world we're going to be in, where software in some ways is becoming like a barrier to entry-
- SGSarah Guo
Yeah
- GBGreg Brockman
... it's becoming so cheap. You don't just want software, right? You want software that is reliable, that is secure, that you can believe in. And so cyber spend, security spend should actually vastly outstrip software spend. I think that people have not yet really internalized how much the physics around cybersecurity are going to change. I think there's an opportunity to end up with a much more secure world.
- SGSarah Guo
[upbeat music] Hi, listeners. Welcome back to No Priors.
- 0:42 – 0:59
Trailer
- SGSarah Guo
Today, Elad and I talk with Greg Brockman, the co-founder and president of OpenAI. We discuss OpenAI's latest math results, Astra, and why Greg believes AI can now generate genuinely new knowledge. We get into drug discovery, Dots, and his case for why security spending should actually vastly
- 0:59 – 1:11
Greg Brockman Introduction
- SGSarah Guo
outstrip software spending, which is quite a claim. Here's our conversation with Greg Brockman. Greg, thanks so much for doing this.
- EGElad Gil
Thanks for joining us.
- GBGreg Brockman
Thank you for having me.
- EGElad Gil
So every week in AI feels like a year, and a lot's
- 1:11 – 5:55
AI and Advancements in Mathematics
- EGElad Gil
happened this week for OpenAI. Uh, you rolled out GPT-6 to over a billion people, which is pretty amazing. Um, there's some really exciting news that you have on the math side. Um, there's all sorts of things undoubtedly that are happening internally. What are you most excited about that's happening right now, both at OpenAI and in the broader AI world?
- GBGreg Brockman
Look, I think that in AI, like I have this, this belief about how OpenAI operates, uh, that, uh, there's this cycling quote of, "It never gets easier, you just go faster." And I think that's very much what, what happens, is that there's just so much activity and that every time you think you're at kind of peak sort of, you know, impact in how things are happening, you realize that there's actually ano- another level that's possible. And it's not just about any one company, it's not just about any one technology, it's really about we as a world and society are all coming together to adopt this technology to get the most out of it to improve everyone's lives. And so I think to me, the math results this week represent a real milestone, right? It's a real moment where the-- If you think about like the fundamental driver of human quality of life improving over the past thousand years is technology, right? It's scientific advancement. And I think that we now have the ability to massively accelerate scientific discovery. And there's always been this question of, is AI actually able to come up with new knowledge? And at this point, it's just impossible to deny, right? It is definitively, yes, possible. Now, there's still more to go. I think we're not yet coming up with whole brand-new theories, but we are able to resolve these hundred-year-old math problems. And to me, the thing that's very exciting is it's not just about the sort of, you know, sort of the just, the machine just sort of gives you an answer, right? It's really, what can a human equipped with these tools achieve that was unthinkable before? And I think it's almost like that the leverage of humans to do whatever you want to do, it's going way, way up, right? It's now that you can, if you have a math problem you want to go solve, you can solve it. But what about taking that same capability, applying it to biology? What about if you're a small business owner and you want to be able to operate your business well, like that level of intelligence that's tuned for that domain, it's just going to mean that almost this sort of unthinkable results that are aligned with your goals, with your desires, is now going to be within the reach of everyone. And that to me is so exciting.
- EGElad Gil
The, the rate of progress has been pretty amazing too because if, if I look at a, you know, you used to have problems with, uh, arithmetic, right? In early models, I remember people complain, "Oh, why can't it do basic math?" And now you're solving these advanced theorems. As these things continue to advance and this starts to really impact areas of math, physics, materials, et cetera, and various applications, is, is there some need if, if these models get so smart to focus on how to communicate that effectively to people? Or how do you think about the actual communication side of this as you do a very advanced theorem? Because if you look at any field of math, only a very small number of people can ever really adjudicate a theorem that's produced by a person.
- GBGreg Brockman
Yes.
- EGElad Gil
Right? And so you kind of have this specialization that happens.
- GBGreg Brockman
Well, and this, this, by the way, is something that has always been-- Like I came from a math background. Like I thought I was going to be a mathematician. And I was very inspired by mathematicians like Galois or Gauss, right? These people who are working on like a hundred, four hundred year time horizon, right? And I think there's something deeply beautiful about mathematics being about sort of understanding the structure of the universe. And so it's not just about-- And there's always these questions about, is math invented or discovered? And that in my mind, it's something that the, the beauty and the meaning of mathematics, it's not something that is objective in some sense. It's, it's in the eye of the beholder. It's something that appeals to us. And there is some math that's like kind of physical laws, and it's about simplicity and, you know, compr-compression theory, you know, it's just complexity theory and all these things like that are maybe are more physics, but there's something that is also importantly human about it. And so to me, it's not just about, and I think a lot of the conversation about mathematics, it's not just about here's a proof, no one understands it, great, we've solved the problem. It's really about what are the insights that are derived. And the thing that I think, uh, we will see, but I think there's promising signs of life on, is that there's beautiful insights within the work that this, that these AIs have, have done. And I think what we're seeing right now is that, um, uh, you know, we published about almost four hundred very important open problems that are now resolved, and the mathematical community is going through all of that to look for insights. And if you read some of the things that people have posted, you know, domain experts in these particular problems, and they say that it's like that there's these almost like sort of very surprising ways of applying ideas
- 5:55 – 7:45
AI Communication and Oversight
- GBGreg Brockman
or s- incredibly like, "Wait, why do they use that result over here?" And that, that the, what's coming out is not these incomprehensible- the, uh, theorem or the proofs, which by the way, there's a history of incomprehensible proofs in mathematics, like four color theorem is a-
- SGSarah Guo
Mm-hmm
- GBGreg Brockman
... perfect example of this that is, it's like, okay, like we just had the machine check a bunch of cases.
- SGSarah Guo
Yeah.
- GBGreg Brockman
Like, there's no beauty in that, and so I think we're, we're into a different phase of machine discovery.
- SGSarah Guo
I have some optimism that like, as models also get to better theory of mind, like the ability to figure out like what we as humans know and how to get us to follow them on the path to new understanding will also be paved, right? And, and so like, for example, like I'm a, a math person, but at some point in school, I stopped learning math, and then I did Math Academy, and then I did like ChatGPT to help me learn new math. And so I, I just feel like the expectation for, you know, the rising tide of what knowledge like you can expect people to understand will also be there.
- GBGreg Brockman
I think that this is a really important point, and one of maybe the underappreciated benefits that I expect from and hope for and s- we're starting to see from this technology is helping people know more, understand more, understand each other better, understand the world better, and I think that there are technical mechanisms that can underlie the, the an AI that's able to go and solve these problems, see all these connections between domains, but how does it actually communicate it to you? How do you understand it? And actually, there's even connections to AI safety and alignment on having AI that we're able to understand what they're doing. And so there are techniques, uh, that we've been talking about since twenty seventeen, such as debate and iterative amplification, which are kind of two sides of a, of a similar coin, where you, you really think about if you have AIs that are solving problems that are just too hard for humans to check. And even, for example, summarizing a book is an example of a task that's really
- 7:45 – 11:28
AI for Overcoming Biology Data Bottlenecks
- GBGreg Brockman
hard to check, right? It's like, it's really hard to know, is the summary any good unless you've read the whole book. Um, and so if an AI just gives you a summary of a book and says, "This is a summary," is it a good summary or not a good summary? It's pretty hard. Unless you have another AI who is trying to prove that the summary is a bad summary. And so then if that AI comes back and says, "Hey, like, here's this like paragraph in the book that I found, it has, it's got a clearly a very important plot point, and that is not represented in the summary," you don't have to read the whole book to be like, "Oh yeah, that's actually a very good argument." And so you realize that there are ways to train the AI that are actually very aligned with having humans be able to have oversight, to be able to be in the driver's seat, which is fundamental value, a fundamental thing that is important for the future, uh, from OpenAI's perspective. Um, but also are very much aligned with what you're saying, of can you make the results of an AI be something that means you learn something that is really tuned for the human rather than just sort of knowledge for, you know, some abstract knowledge sake.
- SGSarah Guo
For most people, advancements in, um, math theory are still somewhat abstract, right? So there, there's like, wow, this is absolutely happening today, and then also, you know, AI for science, like there's a claim or a belief that it could solve all disease in some number of future years, right? How do you look for like one step in terms of what we might see in advancements, um, in between?
- GBGreg Brockman
Well, I think that we've had a number of years and iterations of this technology to see the shape of, of what to expect. And I think that it's kind of like when you have an AI that is capable in a certain dimension, and if you understand the like why it got capable in that dimension, then all other fields of human endeavor that have similar properties, you should also expect similar results. And so in my mind, like why is mathematics something that we've managed to really transform in the way that, that we have, had such incredible results? And that part of it is that, that our AI is now at a certain level of capability and raw intelligence. Part of it is that you could think of it as that, well, mathematics is checkable, but that's not quite true anymore, right? Like we really started with very checkable problems of here's an arithmetic problem, there's like some numeric answer, and so you have an AI that you can train to just like check if it got the answer right because we can very much just see is the answer that the AI is proposing the same as the actual answer. But for a proof, very different. Proofs are very hard to check. Is this actually accurate or not? A formalized proof, okay, yes, that is checkable, but, but natural language proof, which is what we're really producing here, much, much more difficult. But the thing that actually I think is the core insight is really about data, right? It's that you can get lots of data in mathematics. You can get lots of data in theoretical physics. Can you get lots of data in biology?
- SGSarah Guo
Mm-hmm.
- GBGreg Brockman
That's obviously something that's very data bottlenecked, very difficult. Now, fortunately, we also have been working on lots of techniques to be able to work with less data. And if you think about what that means, it's like, okay, we now have smart models that if there's something where there's a lot of data, and this is the fundamental physics of, of deep learning, right? Compute data, algorithms equals capability equals results. Um, we're able to do it in these hard domains where people have spent hundreds of years of our smartest people all trying to solve the problem, and now the AI can solve it. Amazing. Um, when you transfer that over to biology, and clearly what we want is drug discovery, all of these things that are like fundamental changes in biology and our understanding of it to improve quality of life, uh, that's what we want to apply. The question will be, and is not yet resolved, do we have the data? Do we have the ability to get the data? And so I think that what will happen is that we will take these, and we're already doing this, where we take these, these models, these same techniques, and apply them in the biological domain, and there are some areas that will fall
- 11:28 – 14:18
Revolutionizing Drug Discovery
- GBGreg Brockman
quickly, right? That we'll just see massive acceleration of things that used to be incredibly painful, now incredibly easy. But there will be other bottlenecks, and there'll be a question of, well, how do we alleviate those bottlenecks? And some of these, by the way, are not even really about deep biological theory. For example, regulatory filings. Huge bottleneck, right? It takes like a year to write up your whole, um, sort of case for clinical trial and all these things, and it's just like, like you can write those things with an AI much more easily. And so I think that we're going to, to have to look at every step of the drug discovery process, and there are going to be places where the fundamental data just does not exist, and so then innovations on wet labs, innovation on how you actually do simulations All of this will become incredibly important. But so I think that we will see these breakthroughs coming, but it's important to know there are things that are shared with mathematics, that is about scientific discovery, and things that are very different in terms of where the data comes from.
- EGElad Gil
But are there specific, um, you mentioned biology, and I think that's a great example where a lot of the early research, AlphaFold and things like that, were really focused on designing a molecule or understanding how something binds to each other. And to your point, it takes 15 years to develop a drug. It's $1.5 billion, 50 million or so tends to be preclinical, mouse studies, the molecule, and then 1.4 billion-plus tends to be the clinical trial. And so your point is, uh, and it's also, you know, two, three years versus another 12 years. And so your point is really well taken in terms of a lot of the early emphasis of these models has been can the thing bind versus what are all the other things you have to worry about downstream to actually turn it into a productive thing for human endeavors. How do you at OpenAI currently stack rank the different areas of scientific endeavor in terms of where you're focused or where you wanna generate more data or more results or more capabilities that others can benefit from?
- GBGreg Brockman
Look, I think that drug discovery is the most clear and obvious-
- EGElad Gil
Mm-hmm
- GBGreg Brockman
... area if you get to pick one that you want to fully revolutionize, and just to places where you're going to really uplift everyone's quality of life that is just, like, so purely important and maybe the top one application of AI that everyone's been kind of thinking about for a long time, clearly we ought to do it. And to, to your point, like, there's this whole pipeline, it's just so long.
- EGElad Gil
Mm-hmm.
- GBGreg Brockman
And I think we're going to find that humans are incredibly bad at biology, incredibly bad at drug discovery. And if you think about it, there's this, like, property where for humans, natural language, we're very well-suited to it. Like, it's something that, you know, very clear, it's very human, it's, like, very well-tuned to, to how we have interacted with the world, whereas biology, it's totally foreign.
- EGElad Gil
Mm-hmm.
- GBGreg Brockman
But for a neural net, I don't really think there's any reason to believe it should be better at natural language than it should be better, you know, compared to, to biology. And so the fact we're seeing such incredible results with neural nets in natural language, you're just like from first principles, you should be able to really be able to crack the language of biology.
- 14:18 – 16:51
Changing Regulations to Accelerate Progress
- EGElad Gil
Mm-hmm.
- GBGreg Brockman
And so to me, that is number one. It's like first principles it should work in terms of what we're seeing. We're so close on so many axes.
- EGElad Gil
Yeah. It's really exciting.
- GBGreg Brockman
Yeah. And I think you can massively increase the parallelism. I think you can increase- I think you can, uh, decrease so many of these steps in terms of, of, of their duration. And I think, by the way, that there are, there are many dimensions to drug discovery, for example, N of one diseases. Um, there's even, like, lots of people who the drug to cure their particular condition exists.
- EGElad Gil
Mm-hmm.
- GBGreg Brockman
It's just that it's just out there somewhere in the literature that there's a paper, and if you can find that one paper that is relevant to your conditions-
- EGElad Gil
Mm-hmm
- GBGreg Brockman
... then you'll be able to cure the person. And, and this, there's plenty of precedent for it, and it can massively scale up those kinds of operations. So I think that impact in the short run is actually very possible. Um, but material science, another example, and I think there's a, a long tail of, of, of other domains where-
- EGElad Gil
Mm-hmm
- GBGreg Brockman
... we should just see real changes in, in kind of what is possible for humanity to accomplish.
- EGElad Gil
It seems, um, just we think about why a drug might take 15 years to go to market. Um, part of it is you're doing, like, successively more expensive trials-
- GBGreg Brockman
Mm-hmm
- EGElad Gil
... that have a, you know, different set of safety considerations resulting in large scale human trials and, and then, uh, these trials today are, um, they're ordained by regulation, right? For a good reason. Uh, it feels like one of the limiting factors if you believe the technology will work and parts of the data can be acquired or generated is going to be convincing regulators that we should change the expectations around, uh, uh, around what drugs are accepted and what the steps are.
- GBGreg Brockman
I think there is a moment here where, and there's more work to be done to reach this point, but if you can really prove that the physics of drug discovery have changed-
- EGElad Gil
Mm-hmm
- GBGreg Brockman
... then of course, it should trickle through to every part of the system. And if you think about, I mean, even just take a very different example, think about self-driving cars, right? The- we have so much of our how roads operate and safety and all these things that are really tuned for human drivers. And if you have- if you reach a point where self-driving cars are at ten times or a hundred times safer than, than human ones, right? That you've reached that point where AI is actually able to deliver the results in a domain that just are so unambiguously the thing that you want, of course, you should then say like, "Okay, how do we rethink the whole transportation system?" Maybe you should have regulation that says that you only are allowed to have self-driving cars in certain areas, like that there are a lot of, of potential, uh, sort of changes to the, to the, the way that you think about what is even trying to come out of a system that needs to trickle back into
- 16:51 – 19:19
Dots the Proactive Agent
- GBGreg Brockman
regulation as well. And of course, regulation is not uniform across the world, right? That there's very different regulations in Australia versus the US, uh, when it comes to clinical trials, and you're already seeing a lot of, of, of, of people moving their, their trials to places where the regulatory environment makes more sense for how, how things are, how they want to pursue, um, and, and you know, what people think is, is eff- efficacious for, for them. And so I think that the exactly how things should change, I think will depend a lot on what we actually can prove, right? Is it the case that you actually reach the point that you can get better results from a neural net than from actually running a clinical trial?
- EGElad Gil
Mm-hmm.
- GBGreg Brockman
Like, we're not there-
- EGElad Gil
Yes
- GBGreg Brockman
... but you could imagine we will get there.
- EGElad Gil
But if they were more predictive on efficacy or tox or something, then obviously you should change it.
- GBGreg Brockman
That-
- EGElad Gil
Yeah
- GBGreg Brockman
... of course. And I think that of, of areas, of areas where I think society should, and I hope will be very sort of leaned into the what is possible has fundamentally changed, and let's very quickly then reorient around it. And again, you have to do it, you have to really think through all the, all the consequences, right? And all of the implications and that one of the, the, you know, if you're thinking about long-term studies, people and like question of like, you know, is this neural net actually, in terms of what's predicting the simulation, actually accurate for long-term outcomes? It's pretty hard to not have at least had, you know, one long time tick, uh, to, uh, to, to correspond to that. But- I think that, that I think we will see like 80% of what is possible, uh, come to fruition very quickly.
- SGSarah Guo
You're, uh, a little ways out from the Astra release and Dev Day now. Uh, is there anything in terms of how, uh, people internally or externally are using some of the new products or capabilities that surprises you?
- GBGreg Brockman
Well, I think Dots has really changed how many of us work, and the thing that Dots represents is it's-
- SGSarah Guo
Can you describe Dots briefly?
- GBGreg Brockman
Yes.
- SGSarah Guo
Yeah.
- GBGreg Brockman
So Dots is a proactive agent. It's always on, always working. You stop working, it keeps working. And the kind of thing that my Dots does, right? So I have, I have a dot that's, um, looking out for work that I was supposed to do, like messages I was supposed to send, um, things I said I would do that I haven't gotten to yet, and I, I always wake up in the morning, there's like a list of things that I was like, "Oh yeah, this is my to-do list." Um, and that I- it often notices things that I never even asked it to notice. Uh, if there's like a conflict on my calendar in terms of scheduling, it'll point that out. If it's like, "Hey, you actually
- 19:19 – 22:02
Unifying Work and Consumer Agents
- GBGreg Brockman
need to leave this meeting earlier in order to get to the other thing." And so it's like so contextually aware. It knows what I'm doing with my day. It understands the projects we're working on. It understands I sort of, you know, it knows what's in my inbox, knows what's in my Slack, and is able to integrate across these and, and knows the questions I've been asking about, so it knows what areas are most of top of mind for me. And I think that having, like in some ways, what Dots is, is a change to the form factor, not the capability, right? It's like, it's an Astra level model. It's got its own cloud computer, but the, the change in that form factor in a workplace setting with this level of intelligence, it's a game changer.
- EGElad Gil
And d- do you have multiple Dots running or you just have one that's sort of covering all your background tasks or anything?
- GBGreg Brockman
I've got, I've got one. I've got one.
- EGElad Gil
Yeah.
- GBGreg Brockman
Uh, it's, it's a little owl is the, uh, is the icon.
- EGElad Gil
Ah.
- GBGreg Brockman
You can ask to change the icon. Uh, and uh, I- it's uh, I just sort of doing everything across, across my work life.
- SGSarah Guo
OpenAI obviously has, um, you know, research efforts and then a consumer and an enterprise and a developer business, platform business today. Um, do you think that there's gonna be a separation between, uh, let's say, assistants that help you at work, like Dots, which is how I primarily think of it, and then like consumer assistants, like the Instincts, Muses of the world?
- GBGreg Brockman
Uh, there is some... Look, I think these things are going to converge, no question, and I think that there are some pressures that are very different in different environments. So for a mass market consumer product, really figuring out how to scale and to provide things for free or at very low cost is, is very important, whereas in the workplace, and if you're-
- EGElad Gil
Mm-hmm
- GBGreg Brockman
... productivity, if you're the executive, individual contributor, whatever your role is, then it, it is much easier to say peak intelligence and really, uh, as long as you're getting returns to paying more, it's worthwhile to throw more compute at it. And so I think that that is the main distinction is really around cost, and we've seen this in ChatGPT, right? That ChatGPT, we put in a lot of effort to have the largest scale free tier and bringing things like memory to all of our free users was an incredible endeavor, like a real huge engineering effort, and it's just very easy to implement the same functionality at much higher cost for a very small number of people. And so I think that what we're seeing in, in the personal assistant workspace is that there is, there, there are gonna be these different market segments where different amounts of compute are going to be expended fundamentally. And so sometimes when there's different levels of compute, it then means the product can look a little different, right? That it can be that there's just more functionality that's embedded in one versus the other. Um, and there's of course different use cases when you think about, um, things like, you know, payments and travel and things like that are much more for the consumer. But I don't think there's any fundamental difference, right? It's like really
- 22:02 – 26:08
How UI Will Evolve
- GBGreg Brockman
just like an AI that's doing things, and it's just like happens to be like slight sort of pressure in one way or another. And so one of the strengths of OpenAI is the fact that we have 1.2 billion consumers on ChatGPT, and we have also a leading coding and enterprise business.
- EGElad Gil
Mm.
- GBGreg Brockman
And no one else has both in-house. And so then a lot of our strategy is to say, "Let's unify these so we're not sort of, you know, sort of competing on two fronts." It's really competing on one front. And I think that this is also the general direction of travel of AI is to blur the distinction between what is consumer, what is enterprise. We're gonna have this renaissance of entrepreneurs. Like we're already seeing it. I mean, I imagine you're, you're seeing this very concretely. Um, I know people who are, are quitting their job to go start companies who say, "I never would've done it if I didn't have an AI that I knew I could rely on. It could take care of so much of the ki- of the bar- of the normal barriers to entry." And so I think that we're going to see, just like the distinctions have held for so long, I think they're going to change.
- EGElad Gil
So one of the things that traditionally has separated the enterprise and consumer world is how you think about UI. Obviously, there's your point on cost and, um, you know, underlying ability to deliver something for somebody at a certain level of fidelity, but the other part of it is just the user interface. And often the user interface in a enterprise setting or how you access it is very different from the consumer setting. To your point, you're, you're looking towards unifying these layers. You've als- you've also been thinking quite a bit about like dynamic UIs, and that's always been kind of, um, one of the things people have talked about quite early is how do you just dynamically generate a UI that's useful for a user? Or in some cases, these things kind of move into the background as just part of your chat. How do you think UI will evolve for these different use cases, or how do you think about that as a problem as you sort of address both of these segments?
- GBGreg Brockman
So at place-- So first of all, I think that the best UI is no UI.
- EGElad Gil
Mm-hmm.
- GBGreg Brockman
And I think in AI, that is where we're going.
- EGElad Gil
Mm-hmm.
- GBGreg Brockman
Just you want a thing you can talk to, and you can s-speak to it verbally. You can talk to it over Slack, iMessage, any of the surface you can call it, and that's literally what you can do with Dots, like literally today. Um, but there are some fundamental differences between personal setting and a workplace setting. And a workplace, you have an admin, right? You have kind of your company security team. You have just more stakeholders.
- SGSarah Guo
Mm-hmm.
- GBGreg Brockman
And it's not just sort of a- AI that's for you, that's representing you, that you own, and you own its outcomes. And so I think that that is the main distinction I see between the enterprise and the, and the home use case. And of course, this leads to product differences as well. And sometimes they're very small things, like for example, when we release a new feature that enterprises want control over when it's introduced. And so I- that we have admin controls and toggles, and so you can have a, an experience where there's just less functionality available to you as a result of the fact that it is in the workplace, and that does then change the well, we need somebody to surface that to you. And this comes back to what the whole point was that there was no UI, right? So it's like, what does it mean for there to be functionality that's missing? How do you even surface it and let people know that that's the case? So that's an ongoing challenge, and I think that that will not magically go away. I think that you need to lean into that, that complexity. Um, but yeah, to me, fundamentally, it's, it's kind of crazy and beautiful if you think about it, that ChatGPT is a text box, right? That's where it started. It was a text box. And what we're heading to, there isn't even a text box.
- EGElad Gil
Mm-hmm.
- GBGreg Brockman
Right? It's just like that is, that is the AI we were promised.
- SGSarah Guo
When I think about what might make a product that doesn't have a UI better, there's like, you tell me, but I think there's like, how much compute can I spend on it? Um, how good is the model itself? Uh, there's a memory system. There's like, I don't know, decisions about behavior. Um, how good are m-m-models at being calibrated on, uh, you know, how hard they should think about something now?
- GBGreg Brockman
So that's something we're getting very good at. And with the release of GPT-6 to everyone, that we have the ability now for the AI, if it's going to go think hard about a problem, it actually can give you a quick answer and then keep thinking and then give you the more correct, the more fulsome answer. And also to the point of no UI, I-- and, and to the thing you, uh, you were saying earlier too, is that we introduced intelligent UI, so now the AI can do
- 26:08 – 32:55
Cybersecurity in the AI Age
- GBGreg Brockman
generative UI on the fly. And so I think that even though there's no fixed UI, there's no buttons, there's no menus to learn, having an AI that can actually craft the result to be visually exactly what you want. Like you think about even something like flight booking, you want kind of a complex UI there, right? So you can see all the different options, and [lip smack] that for any question you might ask, like how do I assemble a bicycle or something, you might want some very sort of bespoke app that normally a person would have gone off and written for a month, and of course you're never going to hire someone to write a one-off app for you to help assemble a bike. But totally fine for an AI to go do that for you in real time in the moment you need it. And so I think that there is something about these, like we're, yeah, we're now in a world where the AI is molding itself much more to you, right? That the user interface is becoming exactly the thing you need at the moment you need it. And that is a lot of our focus, and we're doing that across every aspect of how we think about the product.
- EGElad Gil
One of the biggest shifts in the discourse around AI recently has been around cyber, and how do you build secure systems that are resistant to AI-driven, um, cyber, uh, approaches. And so I'm just a little bit curious how you're thinking about that, how you're building guardrails, or how you're approaching the different aspects of cybersecurity.
- GBGreg Brockman
Well, first of all, I do think the physics of cybersecurity are changing, and we're in what we call the defender's window.
- EGElad Gil
Mm-hmm.
- GBGreg Brockman
And the way that I think about this window is that we have peak frontier AI capabilities that can help defenders secure themselves. They're not broadly diffused yet, but that the broadly diffused capabilities are ratcheting. And you can see this from each model release to model release from providers across the world. The capabilities on cyber that are-
- EGElad Gil
Mm-hmm
- GBGreg Brockman
... available to everyone are, are going up, and you're starting to see the leading edges of some of the impacts, right? You're starting to see, for example, in South Korea, that there were some high-profile hacks of, of, of banks that were driven by different, uh, models. And I think that the picture that is so critical is that defenders need to use this time. And so we have been working very hard to be able to responsibly give access through our Daybreak program to defenders to be able to use our peak intelligence or to use very capable models to find and fix vulnerabilities in their systems. And one thing that is very important to realize is these flaws have existed, right? It's, it's every line of human-written code in some ways that you have to ask, "Is this secure? Was the developer trained in the right way?" And you just start to realize that the way in which we built systems were kind of fundamentally insecure, and we always knew it, right? There's never been a CISO who's been over-resourced.
- EGElad Gil
Yeah, right.
- SGSarah Guo
I mean, you can look at XKCD in the comic of like all the world's infrastructure reliant on like one open source project written by one dude in his basement, right? Or Heartbleed or anything-
- GBGreg Brockman
Exactly
- SGSarah Guo
... uh, pr- predated like all these AI issues.
- GBGreg Brockman
Exactly. And so I think that to me, and I think very importantly, it's very important to realize that these are really human issues, right? That these are the way that we chose to build the internet. It was security got kind of bolted on, right? And we had high-profile incidents, right? You think about early worms and viruses, and then people started to realize, well, we need virus scanning software, right? And we need to, I have encryption for I- for requests, you know, over HTTP should be over HTTPS. All of these mechanisms were ones where I think that we kind of took the slower route-
- EGElad Gil
Mm-hmm
- GBGreg Brockman
... in order to add security on afterwards. Like the internet's really been built for resilience, not necessarily for security. And I think that we're- what we're going to see now is a moment where a lot of that debt, a lot of that tech debt is going to come to the surface. It's time for us to pay it down, and that as a company, we are doing-- we are really leaning into trying to help with this moment. So, for example, we have a billion-dollar commitment that we've made to help frontline defenders get access to our models and, and utilize them for defense. That we're studying and trying to find different vulnerabilities out there and then thinking about how do we help the world respond? How do we coordinate incident response? How do we work with government? How do we work with the community in order to land these as well as possible and to help people navigate through? But I think that people have not yet really internalized how much the physics around cybersecurity are going to change. I think we will end up, I think there's an opportunity to end up with a much more secure world, right? You think about the fact that AI lets you pay down your tech debt-
- SGSarah Guo
Mm-hmm
- GBGreg Brockman
... in a way that was just previously unthinkable. The fact that you could do things like formal verification of software. Like, these models are obviously great at proving things. Why not prove security properties of software? That's something that the technology has kind of been there for people, but it's just so much work.
- SGSarah Guo
Painful, niche, expensive.
- EGElad Gil
Yeah.
- GBGreg Brockman
Exactly. No one does it for anything significant. And so I think all of that can change, and I think the world we're, we're moving to right now, and we've done this internally within OpenAI, is every time a new model drops, you need to apply it to secure yourself, find your vulnerabilities, and then saturate. And so for example, we took about 25% of our production engineers and said, "All of your projects are on hold. You are just securing now," and took our peak intelligence model at the time-
- SGSarah Guo
Mm-hmm
- GBGreg Brockman
... had it poke at all of our infrastructure, rating a bunch of things, built some tools so that it's easy to do it again over time, and we found a number of issues. We fixed it, and at some point we saturated the issues that this model was capable of finding. And that's a very good story, right? It's like, I think that, that the thing to realize is that we're gonna have a next model, we're gonna have to repeat that process, and that that will continue. But at some point, again, I think if you think about, well, the code that's being written, we're actually, so much of it is now AI-assisted.
- SGSarah Guo
Mm-hmm.
- GBGreg Brockman
We can actually train these models, and we are training these models to write secure code from, from the beginning.
- SGSarah Guo
Mm-hmm.
- GBGreg Brockman
And so I think we can have sort of fundamentally more secure systems through the use and applications of these AI models in the right way.
- EGElad Gil
So it sounds like basically there's gonna be a period of time where maybe we're gonna see more of these cyberattacks, more incidents, et cetera, as humanity or as people sort of catch up in terms of their code bases getting more and more secure, using more AI-generated code that's sort of preset to be more secure. And so we'll probably end up with some transitionary period over time where, you know, we'll, we'll have more offense than defense, and then defense will catch up. I mean, that's kind of the consensus I've been hearing in the industry in general, and-
- GBGreg Brockman
Look, I-
- EGElad Gil
... it seems like the most likely forward case at least.
- GBGreg Brockman
Yeah. Look, I, I have, I have a lot of optimism about how we can navigate this moment.
- EGElad Gil
Mm-hmm.
- 32:55 – 35:49
Shift in Security Investment
- GBGreg Brockman
level of cyber capability they've used to defend themselves. And as we shift to that world, I think that we can be in a world where defenders are able to outstrip attackers, but it is going to take a lot of-
- SGSarah Guo
Mm-hmm
- GBGreg Brockman
... of change, right? It's going to take a sort of change in terms of how we think about every organization operating and how we collectively think about critical infrastructure and resourcing those that have sort of got, you know, sort of not had those resources to date.
- SGSarah Guo
I think your example, I mean, your description of this is like, let's say like internet-wide tech debt, and then your response to it internally is a really good one because I'm like, okay, I've been part of companies where, you know, tech debt is very painful to address. And to say, "We're gonna take 25% of the engineers," or God forbid, you know, we're gonna do a feature freeze for a quarter until we fix some stuff that really needs to be, uh, fixed, that is, that doesn't feel like the state that the world has decided on quite yet.
- GBGreg Brockman
Mm-hmm.
- SGSarah Guo
Um, when you think about where the entire world is from a security investment perspective, uh, you know, traditionally instead of as like, oh, maybe it's like low single digits percent of the IT budget, like what do you think it should be at this moment of time? And like, is it all of, all of this other stuff that you are investing in from a cyber tooling perspective, network endpoint, traditional corporate security is less relevant, or we just need to go spend twice as much?
- GBGreg Brockman
I, I have a feeling that cyber spend, security spend should actually vastly outstrip sec- software spend. Like, I really think that especially-
- SGSarah Guo
Wow, that's a statement. Yeah
- GBGreg Brockman
... yeah, I, I really believe it, and I may not be right, but when I look at the world we're going to be in where software in some ways is becoming, like the barrier to entry... Exactly. It's, it's-
- SGSarah Guo
Free-ish [laughs]
- GBGreg Brockman
Exactly. It's becoming so cheap.
- SGSarah Guo
Yeah.
- GBGreg Brockman
And so of course making sure, you don't just want software, right? You want software that is reliable, that is secure, that you can believe in. And so to me, the resilience of that software is the sort of-
- SGSarah Guo
That's the value
- GBGreg Brockman
... that's, exactly. That's going to become even more important. And so I think that we have this moment, we have this opportunity to, you know, to your point of the XKCD with the little block at the bottom of some open source maintainer-
- SGSarah Guo
Yeah
- GBGreg Brockman
... like, like that never made any sense.
- EGElad Gil
Mm-hmm.
- SGSarah Guo
[laughs]
- GBGreg Brockman
And the reason we had that world was because of some of this physics, right? Of kind of how hard it is to write software and to write reliable software, and that everyone has this supply chain, and so few companies audit their supply chain, right?
- EGElad Gil
Mm-hmm.
- GBGreg Brockman
If there's, we've seen this with supply chain vulnerabilities where someone uploads a malicious package, and then a number of companies get hit. All of that needs to change, and it was totally impossible to change with human software developers 'cause there's so few, right? There's so few people who have this expertise in this very obscure thing of like, you know, sort of knowing different packages and like-
- EGElad Gil
Yeah, yeah
- GBGreg Brockman
... different security techniques.
- EGElad Gil
There's a third-party software now like Socket and others who will do this as an example where they're, they'll scan through your open source supply chain and try and find vulnerabilities and identify them for you or, you know, to your,
- 35:49 – 38:28
OpenAI’s Human-Centric Ethos
- EGElad Gil
there's the human element of it where maintainers will suddenly take over a project and then, uh, in- install something that would be malicious relative to people then, uh, using that packet. So it's, it's really interesting to see that shift in terms of the third-party ecosystem as well developing to support the efforts that OpenAI and others are doing in terms of this market.
- GBGreg Brockman
Exactly, and I think it's so important. So we're doing this with the community. We're partnering with companies like Cr- CrowdStrike, and I think that it is, again, a coordinated response, but we really view it as a core priority for OpenAI to lead, right? For us to really, because we have the frontier model, we have the peak intelligence model. Certainly in cybersecurity, we think that there is transformative potential for the good possible- But that means that we as a company, and we've been going through a security transition, right? That over the past couple months we've talked about safety, security, alignment of our development process, but we're also thinking about that for the world, of how to really help the world become more fundamentally secure and help people through this whole period.
- EGElad Gil
One of the things about OpenAI is that it's always been very pro-human and very pro-human agency, human progress. Let's use AI to better everyone. I think the original premise of OpenAI was let's have something that can counterbalance other companies in terms of creating AI that can be used very broadly and universally in a positive way. Has that ethos continued at OpenAI, or how do you think about that in the context of the AI community?
- GBGreg Brockman
I think that ethos is very core to our mission, right? To ensure AGI benefits all of humanity, and the humanity there is very key. We think that humans should be firmly in the driver's seat, should have control over the future, and th- this technology should amplify human agency.
- SPSpeaker
Even as models surpass humans in capability.
- GBGreg Brockman
And, and I think this is, this is absolutely critical, right? That I think that the picture of... And there, keep in mind, these models are very jagged, right? That there are places where obviously these AIs are more capable than, than anyone today, right? Even GPT-4, you know, is far more than any person. But the thing that is so important, and I'm reminded for example of the, there's the story of, of why Steve Jobs put the handle on the iMac, right? So that that way, uh, that people could feel that they could control the machine, right? That you could always pick it up and throw it out the window. Um-
- SPSpeaker
[laughs]
- EGElad Gil
[laughs]
- GBGreg Brockman
And I think that the same spirit needs to apply to AI. The fact of the spirit of humans are in the driver's seat, that these, like human judgment, human values, and maybe you should think of how humans will operate in the, in certain fields, in certain dimensions in the future, whatever it is, is we become more like CEOs or like board members. But it's important that we have that level of agency, and that I think that we're going to build machines just like, you know, if you're a CEO, you clearly are gonna have domain experts, you're clearly gonna have teams that are gonna
- 38:28 – 39:20
Conclusion
- GBGreg Brockman
have deep knowledge across so many things-
- SPSpeaker
Mm-hmm
- GBGreg Brockman
... and maybe even better ideas than you on many different axes. But fundamentally, the question is, are you happy? Is this what you wanted? Is this what makes your life better? And that, that to me is something that we should all collectively... It's not just about AI, it's about technology, right? Technology is to lift up human civilization. It's the single most fundamental driver of improvement of quality of life, and that is what we should be seeking from AI. That is the belief of OpenAI.
- SPSpeaker
Thank you so much for doing this, Greg.
- EGElad Gil
Yeah, thanks for the time.
- GBGreg Brockman
Thank you both. Appreciate it.
- SPSpeaker
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Episode duration: 39:22
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Transcript of episode AwuTTOJGEi0
