Re:Thinking with Adam GrantSam Altman on the future of AI | ReThinking with Adam Grant
EVERY SPOKEN WORD
40 min read · 8,388 words- 0:00 – 3:54
Getting fired from OpenAI
- AGAdam Grant
[upbeat music] Sam Altman does his own tech check.
- SASam Altman
[chuckles]
- AGAdam Grant
How did that happen?
- SASam Altman
Uh, you know, I don't know. It's fine.
- AGAdam Grant
There's no handler here.
- SASam Altman
Sometimes.
- AGAdam Grant
I have to start where I'm sure many conversations have kicked off over the past year, which is what did it feel like to be fired from your own company?
- SASam Altman
Uh, this, like, surreal haze. Uh, the confusion was kind of the dominant first emotion. Then there were, like... I went through everything, but confusion was the first one.
- AGAdam Grant
And then?
- SASam Altman
Then, like, frustration, anger, sadness, gratitude. I mean, it was everything.
- AGAdam Grant
Wow.
- SASam Altman
It was like a full range of human emotion. It was quite... It was, like, impressive in the breadth.
- AGAdam Grant
What did you do with those emotions in that, in that 48 hours?
- SASam Altman
Honestly, there was so much to do just, like, tactically that there was not a lot of time for, like, dealing with any emotions. So in those 48 hours, not much, and then it was, like, hard after when the dust was settling and I had to, like, get back to work in the midst of all of this.
- AGAdam Grant
I remember Steve Jobs saying years later after he was forced out of Apple that it was awful-tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it.
- SASam Altman
[chuckles]
- AGAdam Grant
Is that relatable in any way, or is the situation just too different?
- SASam Altman
Maybe it hasn't been long enough. I have not reflected deeply on it recently. I think it was so different from the Steve Jobs case in all of these ways, and it was also just so short. The whole thing was, like, totally over in five days. It was like a very strange fever dream and then, like, back to work picking up the pieces.
- AGAdam Grant
I guess five days versus a decade is a slightly different learning curve.
- SASam Altman
Right. [chuckles]
- AGAdam Grant
But what, what did you learn lesson-wise?
- SASam Altman
I actually... Maybe I was wrong. Maybe it was only four days. I think it was four days. I learned a bunch of stuff that I would do differently next time about how we communicated during and after that process and, like, the need to just sort of be direct and clear about what's happening. I think there was this, like, cloud of suspicion over OpenAI for a long time that we could have done a better job with. I knew I worked with great people, but seeing how good the team was in a crisis and in a stressful situation with uncertainty, one of the proudest moments for me was watching the executive team kinda operate without me for a little while and knowing that any of them would be perfectly capable of running the company. And I felt a lot of pride both about picking those people, about teaching them to whatever degree I did, uh, and just that the, the company was in a very strong place.
- AGAdam Grant
I'm surprised to hear you say that. I, I had assumed your proudest moment would have been just the sheer number of employees who stood behind you. I, I thought as an organizational psychologist, that was staggering to see the outpouring of loyalty and support from inside.
- SASam Altman
It did feel nice, but that's not the thing that, like, sticks in... I mean, I, I remember feeling, like, very proud of the team, but not, uh, not for that reason.
- AGAdam Grant
I guess that's also very, uh, very Jobsian then. When he was asked what his proudest achievement was, it wasn't the Mac or the iPod or the iPad. It was the team that built those products.
- SASam Altman
I don't do the research. I don't build the products. I mean, I make some decisions, but not most of them. Um, the thing I get to build is the company, so that is certainly the thing I have pride of authorship over.
- AGAdam Grant
So what do you actually do? Like, how do you spend your time?
- SASam Altman
It's a great question. Somehow the early mornings are never that chaotic, but then it often, like, all goes off the rails by the afternoon, and there's all this stuff that's happening. And, you know, you're kind of in reaction mode and firefighting mode. So I've learned to get the really important things done early in the day. Um, I spend the m- majority of my time thinking about research and compute and the products that we build and then less on everything else. But what that could look like at any given time, uh, is, is very different.
- AGAdam Grant
So
- 3:54 – 6:02
What's going to happen to humans?
- AGAdam Grant
one of the things that, that I've been very curious about as I've watched you turn the world upside down in the last couple years is, like, what, [chuckles] what's gonna happen to humans? I've been tracking w- what I think is the most interesting research that's been done so far, and [chuckles] humans are losing a lot faster than I hoped. [chuckles] A lot faster. We're already behind on creativity, on empathy, on judgment, on persuasion, and I wanna get your reactions to some data points in each of those areas. But first, like, just your commentary on the overall. Are you surprised by how quickly AI has surpassed a lot of human capabilities?
- SASam Altman
Our latest model feels smarter than me in almost every way, and it doesn't really impact my life.
- AGAdam Grant
Really?
- SASam Altman
I still care about the same kinds of things as before. I can work a little bit, maybe a lot more effectively. I assume as society digests this new technology, society will move much faster. Certainly scientific progress I hope will move much faster. And we are coexisting with this amazing new artifact, tool, whatever you wanna call it. But how different does your day-to-day life feel now from a few years ago? Kinda not that different, right? I think that over the very long term, AI really does change everything. But I guess what I would have naively thought a decade ago is the day that we had a model as powerful as our most powerful model now, everything was gonna change. And now I think that was a naive take.
- AGAdam Grant
I think this is the, the standard, [chuckles] like, we overestimate change-
- SASam Altman
Right
- AGAdam Grant
... in the short run and underestimate-
- SASam Altman
Exactly
- AGAdam Grant
... it in the long run, right? So you're living a version of that.
- SASam Altman
So eventually, uh, I think the whole economy transforms. We'll find new things to do. I have no worry about that. We'll, we always find new jobs, even though every time we stare down a new technology, we assume they're all gonna go away. It's true that some jobs go away, but we find so many new things to do and hopefully so many better things to do. So I think what's gonna happen is this is just the next step in a long unfolding exponential curve of technological progress.
- 6:02 – 12:55
The AI revolution
- AGAdam Grant
I think in some ways the AI revolution looks to me like the opposite of the internet because back then people were running companies, they didn't believe that the internet was gonna change the world, and their companies died because they, they didn't make the changes they needed to make. But the people who bought in- It was really clear what the action implications were. Like, I need to have a functioning website. I need to know how to sell my products through that website, right? It was not rocket science to adapt to the digital revolution. What I'm hearing right now from a lot of founders and CEOs is th- the reverse, which is everybody believes that AI is game-changing, and nobody has a clue what it means for leadership, for work, for organizations, for products and services. [laughs] Like, they're, they're all in the dark.
- SASam Altman
In that sense, it's more like the Industrial Revolution than the computer revo- than the Internet Revolution. There are huge known unknowns of how this is gonna play out, but I think we can say a lot of things about how it is gonna play out, too.
- AGAdam Grant
So I wanna, I wanna hear those things. So, um, a couple hypotheses that, that I have. One is that we're gonna stop valuing ability and start valuing agility in humans.
- SASam Altman
There will be a kind of ability we still really value, but it will not be raw intellectual horsepower to the same degree.
- AGAdam Grant
What do you think the new ability is that matters?
- SASam Altman
I mean, the, like, kind of dumb version of this would be figuring out what questions to ask will be more important than figuring out the answer.
- AGAdam Grant
That's consistent with, with what I've seen even, even just in the last couple years, which is we used to put a premium on how much knowledge you had collected in your brain, and, like, if you were a fact collector, that made you smart and respected. And now I think it's much more valuable to be a connector of dots than a collector of facts, that if you can synthesize and recognize patterns, you have an edge.
- SASam Altman
You ever watch that TV show Battlestar Galactica? One of the things they say again, again and again in the show is, "All this happened before, all this will happen again." And when people talk about the AI revolution, it does feel different to me in some super important qualitative ways, but also it reminds me of previous technological panics. When I was a kid, this thing came out, new thing launched on the internet. I thought it was cool. Other people thought it was cool. It was clearly way better than the stuff that came before. I was not quite old enough yet for this to happen directly to me, but the older kids told me about it. The teachers started banning the Google because-
- AGAdam Grant
Did they call it the Google?
- SASam Altman
The Google. If you could just, uh, look up every fact, then what was the purpose of going to history class and memorizing facts? Like, we were gonna lose something so critical about how we teach our children and what it means to be a responsible member of society if, and if you could just look up any fact instantly. You didn't even have to, like, fire up the combustion engine, drive to the library, find, you know, look in the card catalog, find a book. It was just there. It felt unjust. It felt wrong. It felt like we were gonna lose something, and we weren't gonna do that. And with all of these, what, what happens is, like, we get better tools, expectations go up, but so does what someone's capable of, and we just learn how to do more difficult, more impactful, more interesting, whatever things. And I expect AI to be like that, too. If you asked someone a few years ago, A, will there be a system as powerful as o1 in 2024, and B, if an oracle told you you were wrong and there will be, how much would the world change? How much would your day-to-day life change? How would we face an existential risk or whatever? Almost everybody you asked would've said definitely not on the first one, but if I'm wrong and it happens, like, we're pretty fucked on the second. And yet this amazing thing happened, and here we are.
- AGAdam Grant
In the realm of innovation, there's a new paper by Aidan Toner-Rogers which shows some great news for R&D scientists, that when they're AI-assisted, they file 39% more patents, and that leads to 17% more product innovation. Um, and a lot of that is in radical breakthroughs, novel chemical structures being discovered, and the major gains are for top scientists, not bottom. There's very little benefit if you're in the bottom third of scientists, but the productivity of the top ones almost double. Um, and that doubling seems to be because AI automates a lot of idea generation tasks and al- it allows scientists to focus their energy on idea evaluation, where the great scientists are really good at recognizing a promising idea and the bad ones are vulnerable to false positives. So that's all good news, right? [laughs] Incredible unlocking of scientific creativity, but it comes with a cost, which is in the study, 82% of scientists are less satisfied with their work. They feel they get to do less creative work, and their skills are underutilized. And [laughs] it seems like humans are, in that, in that case, are being reduced to judges as opposed to creators or inventors. I would love to know how you think about that evidence and what, what do we do about that?
- SASam Altman
I have two conflicting thoughts here. One of the most gratifying things ever to happen at OpenAI for me personally is as we've released these new reasoning models, we give them to legendary scientists, mathematicians, coders, whatever, and ask what they think, and hearing their stories about how this is transforming their work and they can work in new ways. I have certainly gotten, you know, the greatest professional joy from having to really creatively reason through a problem and figure out an answer that no one's figured out before. And when I think about AI taking that over, if it happens that way, I do feel some sadness. What I expect to happen in reality is just there's gonna be a new way we work on the hard problems, and it's being an active participaint- participant in solving the hardest problems that brings the joy. And if we do that with new tools that augment us in a different way, I kinda think we'll adapt, but I'm uncertain.
- AGAdam Grant
What, what does that look like in your job right now? Like, how do you, how do you use ChatGPT, for example, in solving problems that you face at work?
- SASam Altman
Honestly, I use it in the boring ways. I'm not the one who's here, like, using it to, like, help me come up with new scientific ideas, but I use it for, like, you know, help me process all of this email or help me summarize this document or just the, the very boring things.
- AGAdam Grant
It sounds like then you're, you're hopeful that we'll adapt in ways that allow us to still participate in the creative process.
- SASam Altman
I, I am h- I am hopeful. I, I mean, I think that that's so deeply the human spirit and the way I think this all continues kinda no matter what, but, but it will have to evolve and it will be
- 12:55 – 17:16
Empathy and AI
- SASam Altman
somewhat different.
- AGAdam Grant
Another domain where I expected humans to have an edge much [laughs] longer than, than we've stuck it out so far is empathy. My favorite experiments that I've read so far basically show that if you're having a, a text conversation and you don't know whether it's a human or a ChatGPT, um, and then afterward you're asked how seen did you feel, how heard did you feel, how much empathy and support did you get, you feel that you got more empathy and s- support from AI than you did from a human unless we tell you it was AI, and then you don't like it anymore. I look at that evidence as a psychologist and I have a couple reactions. One is I think it's not that AI is that good at empathy, it's that our default as humans is pretty bad and poor. We slip into, into conversational narcissism way too quickly where somebody tells us a problem and we start to relate-
- SASam Altman
Right
- AGAdam Grant
... it to our own problem as opposed to showing up for them.
- SASam Altman
Right.
- AGAdam Grant
And so I think maybe that's just a, an indictment of human empathy having a, a poor baseline. But also I wonder how long [laughs] this I don't want it if I know it's from an AI is gonna last as we start to humanize and anthropomorphize this tech more and more.
- SASam Altman
Let me first talk about the sort of general concept of people sometimes preferring the actual output of something if it's AI until they're told that it's AI and then they don't like it, that you see that over and over again. I saw a recent study that even among people who claim that they really hated AI art the most that the scale let you choose, they still selected more output of AI than humans for the pieces of art they liked the most until they were told which was AI and which wasn't, and then of course it was different. We could pick many other examples, but this trend that AI has in many ways caught up to us and yet we are hardwired to care about humans and not AI I think is a very good sign. We're all in speculation here and I'll, so I'll say I have a very high uncertainty on all of this but, and although you will pro- you will probably talk more to an AI than you do today and yet you will still really care about when you're talking to a human. That this is something very deep in our biology and our evolutionary history and our social functioning, whatever you wanna call it.
- AGAdam Grant
Why do you think we will still want human connection? It, it, it sounds like a version of the, the Robert Nozick argument that led to the matrix of people preferring real experience over, you know, sort of simulated pleasure. Do you think that's what we're craving? We just want the real human connection even if it's flawed and messy? Which of course AI is gonna learn to simulate too.
- SASam Altman
You'll find very quickly that talking to a flawless, perfectly empathetic thing all of the time, you miss the drama or the tension or wh- I, I, I... There'll be something there. Um, I think we're just so wired to care about what other people think, feel, how they view us, and I don't think that translates to an AI. I think you can have a conversation with an AI that is helpful and that you feel validated and it's a good kind of entertainment in a way that playing a video game is kind of entertainment, a good kind of entertainment. But I don't think it fulfills the sort of social need to be part of a group and a society in a way that is gonna register for th- with us. Now I might be wrong about this and maybe AI can so perfectly hack our psychology that it does and I'll be really sad if that's the case.
- AGAdam Grant
Yeah, me too. You're right. It's hard for AIs to substitute for belonging. It's also hard to get status from a bot, right? [laughs] To feel important or cool or respected in ways that, like, we rely on other human eyeballs and ears for.
- SASam Altman
That was kinda what I was trying to get at. Like I can imagine a world soon where AIs are just like unbelievably more capable than us and doing these amazing things and, and when I imagine that world and I imagine the people in it, I imagine those people still caring about the other people quite a lot, still thinking about relative status and sort of these silly games relative to other people quite a lot. But I don't think many people are gonna be measuring themselves against, you know, what the AI is doing and capable of.
- 17:16 – 22:43
Using chatbots to rethink your beliefs
- AGAdam Grant
So one of the things that I've been really curious about is in a, in a world where information is increasingly contested and, and facts are, are harder and harder to, to persuade people of, we see this for example in the data on conspiracy theory beliefs. Like people believe in conspiracies because it makes them feel special and important, um, and like they have access to knowledge that other people don't. It's not the only reason of course, but it's one of the driving reasons. And what that means is it's really hard for another human to talk them out of those beliefs because they're kind of admitting that they're wrong. And I was fascinated by a recent paper, this is Costello, Pennycook and Rand. They showed that if you have a single conversation with an AI chatbot it can even months later, uh, basically get people to unbelieve a, a bunch of their conspiracy theories. It starts by essentially just targeting a false claim that you believe in-
- SASam Altman
Yeah
- AGAdam Grant
... and debunking it. And I think it works in part because it's responsive to the specific reasons that you have attached to your belief and in part because like nobody cares about looking like an idiot in front of a machine like they do a human. And not only do people, I think about 20% of, of people let go of their absurd conspiracy beliefs, it just after a single e- exchange, a couple months later, but also they let go of some other beliefs that the AI didn't even target. And so I think that that door opening is very exciting. Obviously, this can be used for evil as well as good. But I'm really curious to hear about what, what your take is on this, this newfound opportunity we have to correct people's-
- SASam Altman
Yeah
- AGAdam Grant
... misconceptions with these tools.
- SASam Altman
There are people in the world that can do this, that can kind of expand our mind in some way or other, and it's, it's very powerful. There's just not very many of them, and it's like a, a rare privilege to get to talk to them. But if we can make an AI that is like the world's best dinner party guest, super interesting, knows about everything, incredibly interested in you, and takes the time to like understand where they could push your thinking in a new direction, that seems like a good thing to me. And I've also had this experience with AI where I had the experience of talking to a real expert in an important area, and that changing how I think about the world, which for sure there is some human that could have done that, but I didn't happen to be with him or her right then.
- AGAdam Grant
It also obviously raises a lot of questions about the h- the hallucination problem and accuracy. As an outsider, it's really hard for me to understand why this is such a hard problem. Can you explain this to me in a way that [laughs] that will make sense-
- SASam Altman
Yeah
- AGAdam Grant
... to somebody who's not a computer scientist?
- SASam Altman
I think a lot of people are still stuck back in the GPT-3 days, ancient history back in 2021-
- AGAdam Grant
[laughs]
- SASam Altman
... when none of this stuff worked really, and the th- it did hallucinate a lot. If you use the current ChatGPT, it still hallucinates some for sure, but I think it's like surprising that it's generally pretty robust. And we train these models to make predictions based off of all the words they've seen before. There's a bunch of wrong information in the training set. There's also sometimes cases where the model fails to generalize like it should. And teaching the model when it should confidently express that it doesn't know something versus, you know, like make its guess, is still an area of research, but it's getting a lot better. And with our new reasoning models, there's big stuff forward there too.
- AGAdam Grant
I've, I've prompted ChatGPT in various iterations. Like, "Is this true? Can you please make sure this is an accurate answer?" That should be built in as, you know, as a required step in the iteration. So is that where we're heading then, that that just becomes an automatic part of the process?
- SASam Altman
I think that will become part of the process. I think there will be a lot of other things that make it better too, but that will be part of the process.
- AGAdam Grant
There's some brand-new research, and there have been a bunch of these kinds of studies over the last year or two, but the, the one that, that sort of blew my mind, uh, this past week was that when you compare AI alone, um, to doctors alone, of course, like AI wins, but AI also beats doctor-AI teams. And my read of that evidence is that like doctors aren't benefiting from AI assistance because they override the AI when they disagree.
- SASam Altman
There's, you see versions of this throughout history. Like when AI started playing chess, there was a time where humans were better. Then there was a time when the AIs were better. And then for some period of time, I forget how long, the AI plus humans working together were better than AIs alone because they could sort of bring the different perspectives. And then there came a time where the AI was again better than an AI plus a human because the human was overriding and making mistakes that, where they just didn't see something. If you view your role as to try to override the AI, uh, in all cases, then it turns out not to work. On the other hand, the second thing, I think we're just early in figuring out how humans and AI should work together. Like, the AI is gonna be a better doc- diagnostician than the human doctor, and that's probably not what you wanna fight. But there will be a lot of other things that the human does much better, or at least that the people, the patients want a person to be doing, and I think that'll be really important. I've been thinking about
- 22:43 – 26:42
Adapting to an AI-driven world
- SASam Altman
this a lot. I'm expecting a kid soon. My kid is never gonna grow up being smarter than AI. The world that, you know, kids that are about to be born will, the only world they will know is a world with AI in it, and that'll be natural, and of course, it's smarter than us. Of course, it can do things we can't, but also who really cares?
- AGAdam Grant
[laughs]
- SASam Altman
And so I think it's only weird for us in this one transition time.
- AGAdam Grant
In some ways, that's a force for humility, which I think is a good thing. On the other hand, we don't know how to work with these tools yet-
- SASam Altman
Right
- AGAdam Grant
... and maybe some people are getting a little too dependent on them too quickly.
- SASam Altman
You know, I can't spell complicated words anymore because I just trust that autocorrect will save me. I feel fine about that.
- AGAdam Grant
I, I think it's easy to have moral panics about these things.
- SASam Altman
[laughs]
- AGAdam Grant
Even if people are more dependent on their AI to like help them express thoughts, maybe that is just the way of the future. I've seen students who like, who don't wanna write a paper without having ChatGPT handy because, you know, in front of a blank page or a blinking cursor. And I, I do think there is a little bit of that, of that dependency that's building. Uh, do you have thoughts on, on how we prevent that? Or is that just the future, and we ought to get used to it?
- SASam Altman
I'm not sure that is something we should prevent. For me, writing is outsourced thinking and very important. But as long as people replace a better way to do their thinking with a new kind of writing, that seems directionally fine. The thing that I think is really silly, a reasonably common workflow is that someone will write the bullet points of what they want to say to somebody else, have ChatGPT write it into a nice multi-paragraph email, send it over to somebody else. That person will then put that email in ChatGPT and say, "Tell me what the three key bullet points are." And so I think there is some vestigial formality of writing and communication or whatever that probably doesn't still have a lot of value. And I'm fine to get to a world where the social norms evolve that everybody can just send each other the bullet points
- AGAdam Grant
I really want a watermark or at least some internal memory where [laughs] ChatGPT can say back, "Hey, like, this was already generated by me, and, like, you should go back and tell this person you wanted bullet points so that you all can communicate more clearly in the future."
- SASam Altman
One of the sad things about getting more well-known is I don't phrase everything perfectly for very little benefit to me or to OpenAI. I just, like, open up a ton of attacks or, or whatever, and that is a bummer.
- AGAdam Grant
I, I do think that is, that is a privilege you, you lose, the ability to just riff and play with ideas publicly and, and be partially wrong or have incomplete thoughts.
- SASam Altman
Mostly wrong. Mostly wrong with some gems in there.
- AGAdam Grant
But, but that-
- SASam Altman
That was what I went for
- AGAdam Grant
[laughs] I mean, that being said, like, some of us are grateful that you're a little more circumspect than some of your peers who don't exercise any self-reflection or self-control.
- SASam Altman
Well, that's a different thing. Like, there, there, there's also something about just, like, being a thoughtful, somewhat careful person, which, yes, I think more people should do.
- AGAdam Grant
I think, in part, what's going on is, is a lot of people are, are slow to adapt to the tools. We are seeing some really interesting human ingenuity. So the, the evidence that, that jumps to mind for me is a, a, a study by Sharon Parker and her colleagues. Um, this is in the, the realm of robotics technology. So they go into a manufacturing company that's essentially starting to replace humans with robots, and instead of getting panicked that people are no longer gonna have, gonna have jobs, a bunch of employees say, "Well, we need to find a unique contribution. We need to have meaning at work," and they get that by outsmarting the robots. [laughs] They study the robots. They figure out what they suck at, and then they're like, "Okay, we are gonna make that our core competence." You know, this... I think the scary thing with o1 and the advances in reasoning, um, is that, like, a lot of the skills that we thought would differentiate us last year are now already obsolete, right? Like, the, the, the prompting tricks that a lot of people were using in 2023 are no longer relevant, and some of them are, are never gonna be necessary again.
- 26:42 – 28:02
What are humans for?
- AGAdam Grant
Uh, so what, what are humans gonna be for in 50 or 100 or 1,000 years?
- SASam Altman
No one knows. The- But I think the more interesting answer is what is a human useful for today? And I would say being useful to other people, and I think that'll keep being the case. A thing that someone said to me, this was Paul Buchheit, um, many, many years ago that really stuck with me is he had been thinking and thinking and thinking, this is, like, before OpenAI started, and he thought that someday there was just gonna be human money and machine money, and they were gonna be completely separate currencies, and one wouldn't care about the other. I don't expect that to be literally what happens, but I think it's a very deep insight.
- AGAdam Grant
Fascinating. I've never thought about machi- [laughs] machines having their own currency. Uh, but-
- SASam Altman
You will be thrilled that the AI has invented all of the science for you and cured disease and, you know, made fusion work and just impossible triumphs we can't imagine, but will you care about what an AI does versus what some friend of yours does or some person running some company does? I don't know. Probably not that much.
- AGAdam Grant
No.
- SASam Altman
Like, maybe some people do. Maybe there's, like, some really weird cults around particular AIs, and I would bet we'll be surprised the degree to which we're still very people-focused.
- AGAdam Grant
Okay,
- 28:02 – 29:46
Lightning round
- AGAdam Grant
I think it might be time for a lightning round.
- SASam Altman
This is me in, like, um, GPT-4 mode instead of o1 mode, where I just have to, like, one-shot it, you know, as quickly as I can. I'll put the next token.
- AGAdam Grant
First question is, what's something you've rethought recently on AI or changed your mind about?
- SASam Altman
I think a fast takeoff is more possible than I thought a couple of years ago.
- AGAdam Grant
How fast?
- SASam Altman
Feels hard to reason about, but something that's in, like, a small number of years rather than a decade.
- AGAdam Grant
What do you think is the worst advice people are given on adapting to AI?
- SASam Altman
AI is hitting a wall, which I think is the laziest fucking way to try to not think about it and just, you know, put it out of sight, out of mind.
- AGAdam Grant
What's your favorite advice on how to adjust? Or what advice would you give on how to adapt and succeed in an AI world?
- SASam Altman
This is so dumb, but the obvious thing is, like, just use the tools. One thing that OpenAI does that I think is really cool, we put out the most powerful model that we know of that exists in the world today, o1, and anybody can use it if you pay us 20 bucks a month. If you don't wanna pay us 20 bucks a month, you can still use a very good thing. So the, it's out there. Like, the, the leading edge, the most capable person in the world and you can access the exact same frontier, and I think that's awesome. And so go use it and figure out, you know, what you like about it, what you don't, what you think is gonna happen with it.
- AGAdam Grant
What's your hottest hot take or unpopular opinion on AI?
- SASam Altman
That it's not gonna be as big of a deal as people think, at least in the short term. Long term, everything changes. I kind of genuinely believe that we can launch the first AGI, and no one cares that much.
- AGAdam Grant
People in tech care, and philosophers care. [laughs] Those are the, those are the two, two groups I've, I've heard react consistently.
- SASam Altman
And even then, they care, but, like, 20 minutes later, they're thinking about what they're gonna have for dinner that
- 29:46 – 31:35
Organizational resilience at OpenAI
- SASam Altman
night.
- AGAdam Grant
What's a question you have for me as an organizational psychologist?
- SASam Altman
What advice do you have for OpenAI about how we manage our collective psychology as we kind of go through this crazy superintelligence takeoff? Like, how do we keep the people here sane, for lack of a better word? We're not really in the, like, superintelligence part of the takeoff, but I imagine as we go through that, it'll just feel like this unbelievably high-stakes, immensely stressful thing. I mean, even now as we're in sort of the AGI ramp, it feels a little bit like that. But I think we need much more organizational resilience for what's to come.
- AGAdam Grant
And when you think about organizational resilience, what does that look like? Does that mean people are not as stressed as they're likely to become? Does that mean they're able to roll more quickly with change than they might naturally?
- SASam Altman
Good decisions in f- the face of incredible, incredibly high stakes- uncertainty and also adaptability as the facts on the ground, and thus the actions that we need to consider or to take change at a very rapid rate.
- AGAdam Grant
I think for me, the place to start on that is, is to draw a two by two and ask everybody at OpenAI to think about how consequential each, each choice they make is. How high are those stakes? And then how reversible is each choice? Are they walking through a, a revolving door, or is it gonna lock behind them? And I think where you really have to slow down and do all of your thinking and rethinking up front is the highly consequential irreversible decisions, because they really matter, and you can't undo them tomorrow. I think the other three quadrants, it's fine to act quickly, experiment, pilot, stay open to doubting what you think you know, but that quadrant is where it's really important to get it right, and that's where I want people to put their best thinking and, and probably their best prompting. [laughs]
- SASam Altman
Makes sense.
- AGAdam Grant
So I wanna,
- 31:35 – 34:37
Sam on self-belief
- AGAdam Grant
I wanna ask you about something you wrote. You did a, a blog about how to be successful.
- SASam Altman
So long ago.
- AGAdam Grant
It was a long time ago.
- SASam Altman
I don't have that loaded in memory anymore.
- AGAdam Grant
That's okay. I have it, I have it right here. One section of it that I thought was particularly fascinating on self-belief. So I'll quote you to you here. You wrote, "Self-belief is immensely powerful. The most successful people I know believe in themselves almost to the point of delusion. Cultivate this early. As you get more data points that your judgment is good and you can consistently deli- deliver results, trust yourself more." Do you still agree with that?
- SASam Altman
I think so. When we were starting OpenAI, we believed this thing. That was like right about the time of like maximum skepticism in OpenAI relative to what, on the outside relative to what we believed inside. And I think my most important contribution to the company in that phase was I was-- I, I just kept reminding people like, "Look, the external world hates anything new, hates anything that like might go in a different direction than established belief, and so people are saying all of these crazy negative things about us, and yet we have this incredible progress. And I know it's early, and I know we have to suspend disbelief to believe it'll keep scaling, but it's been scaling, so let's push it ridiculously far." And now it seems so obvious, but at the time, I truly believe that had we not done that, it might not have happened for a long time, because we were the only people that had enough like self-belief to go do what, what seemed ludicrous, which was to spend a billion dollars scaling up a GPT model. So I think that was important.
- AGAdam Grant
I think it's all true. I think it's also scary because those same people are the ones [laughs] when they believe in themselves to the point of delusion or almost delusion, who make terrible decisions outside of their domains of expertise. And I think, [laughs] I think if I were gonna modify what you wrote, [laughs] I would say, as you get more data points that your judgment is good in a given domain-
- SASam Altman
Yes
- AGAdam Grant
... then you should trust yourself-
- SASam Altman
In that-
- AGAdam Grant
... in that domain more. Not in life.
- SASam Altman
Yes. That would've been a much better way to phrase it. I don't think it's true that experience and ability doesn't generalize at all, but many people try to generalize it too much. I should've said something about like i- in your area of expertise, but there's nuance because I also think you should be willing to like do new things. You know, I was a investor and not a AI lab executive, uh, you know, six or seven years ago.
- AGAdam Grant
So it also really matters whether you're in a stable or dynamic environment, because you can trust your judgment that's based on intuition in a stable environment because you have subconsciously internalized patterns of the past that are still gonna hold in the future. Whereas if you're in a more volatile setting, um, oftentimes [laughs] your, your gut feeling, um, is essentially trained on data that don't apply, right?
- SASam Altman
Yeah. I, I, I... In that world, I think you wanna get even more towards the like really core underlying principles that you believe in and that work for you. Um, that's-- it's-- because, yeah, even more valuable.
- 34:37 – 40:06
The ethics of AI
- AGAdam Grant
The last topic that I wanted to, to talk with you about, which is ethics. I know this is also something you've been thinking a lot about, talking a lot about. This is the domain in which most people are most uncomfortable outsourcing any kind of judgment to AI.
- SASam Altman
Good.
- AGAdam Grant
Uh, and I think this is where we, we have to rely on humans at the end of the day. Um, I'm hearing a lot of nuclear deterrence kinds of metaphors of like, "Okay, what we need is we need to race ahead of bad actors, and then we'll have mutually assured destruction." Like, wait a minute. [laughs] Like, the arms race metaphor doesn't work here because-
- SASam Altman
No
- AGAdam Grant
... a lot of bad actors are not state actors, and they don't, they don't face the same risk or consequences. And then also, [laughs] like, now we're gonna trust a private company as opposed to elected officials? This feels very complicated and like it doesn't map. So like talk to me about that and how you're thinking about the, the ethics and safety problems.
- SASam Altman
First of all, I think humans have gotta set the rules. Like AI can follow them, and we should hold AIs to following whatever we collectively decide the rules are, but humans have gotta set those. Second, I think people seem incapable not to think in historical analogy, and I understand that, and I don't think it's all bad. But I think it's kinda bad because the historical examples just are not like the future examples. So what I would encourage is people to ground the discussion as much as they can in what makes AI different than anything before, based off what we know right now, not kind of wild speculation, and then trying to design a system that works for that. One thing that I really believe is deploying AI as a tool that significantly increases individual ability, individual will, whatever you wanna call it, a very good strategy for our current situation and better than, you know, one company or adversary or person or whatever kind of using all the AI power in the world today. But I will also- cheerfully admit that I don't know what happens as the AIs become more agentic in the big way. Not like we can go give them a task where they program for three hours, but where we can have them go off and do something very complicated that would normally require, like, a whole organization over many years. And I suspect we'll have to figure out new models. Again, I don't think history will serve us that well.
- AGAdam Grant
No, and it, it, it frankly hasn't in the software world. I think that, like, any other technology this powerful is regulated in the US, and, um, I think, [chuckles] you know, it seems like the EU might be a little bit more competent when it comes to Congress. [laughs] But-
- SASam Altman
Uh, I think what the EU is doing with AI regulation is not helpful for another reason. Like, for example, when we finish a new model, we can launch it even if it's not that powerful. We can launch it in the US well before we can launch it in the EU 'cause there's a bunch of regulatory process. And what- if that means that the EU is always some number of months behind the frontier, I think they're just gonna build less fluency and, you know, economic engine and understanding and kind of whatever else you wanna put in that direction. So, so it's really tricky to get the regulatory balance right, and also we clearly, in my opinion, will need some.
- AGAdam Grant
So if you were, if you were gonna map out where should responsible regulations start, like, what would you do?
- SASam Altman
Testing. Just testing and understanding. I think that's, like, a great place to start.
- AGAdam Grant
And when it comes to, you know, people being able to engineer biological weapons and maybe do it cheaply, like, what, what kind of regulation is gonna help us there?
- SASam Altman
Hmm. I mean, I think you can already do a lot of that with the world of, with Google today. It does matter a lot if it's more capable or easier, but we have some regulations in place. You know, if maybe they need to be better than they are, maybe they need to get more stringent.
- AGAdam Grant
What worries you the most when you look ahead th- in the next decade or so?
- SASam Altman
I think just the rate of change. I, I really believe in the sort of human spirit of solving every problem, but we got a lot to solve pretty quickly here.
- AGAdam Grant
I think the, one of the other things that I've been grappling with when I think about ethics and future impact is, [chuckles] like, we, we've thought so many digital technologies were gonna be democratizing, and we thought they were gonna, you know, sort of prevent or at least chip away at inequality. And very often it's been the opposite, that the rich have gotten richer because they have had better access to these tools. Um, now, you pointed out that, [chuckles] o1 is, you know, is pretty cheap by American standards. There's still, I think, an access discrepancy. Um, what, what is it gonna take to change that? What does it look like for AI to be a force for good in the developing world?
- SASam Altman
We've been able to drive the price per unit of intelligence down by roughly a factor of 10 every year. Can't do that for that much longer.
- AGAdam Grant
No. [laughs]
- SASam Altman
But we've been doing that for a while.
- AGAdam Grant
There's a limit to that.
- SASam Altman
And, you know, I, I think it's amazing how cheap intelligence has gotten.
- AGAdam Grant
I guess in some ways, though, that, that works against the problem of [chuckles] well, at least right now, the only players that can afford to make really powerful models are governments and huge companies that are accountable.
- SASam Altman
For now to train it, yes. But to use it is very different.
- AGAdam Grant
So as,
- 40:06 – 44:16
Why pursue AI?
- AGAdam Grant
as you sit back and [chuckles] like, look at the last, I mean, three years, it's gotta be like you've gone through a lifetime of change.
- SASam Altman
It's been weird.
- AGAdam Grant
Like, why are you doing this, [laughs] I guess is one way to, one way to put it.
- SASam Altman
I am a techno-optimist and science nerd, and I think it is the coolest thing I could possibly imagine and the best possible way I could imagine spending my work time to get to be part of what I believe is the most interesting, coolest, important scientific revolution of our lifetimes. So, like, what a fucking privilege. Unbelievable. Um, and then on the, on the kinda like non-selfish reason, I feel a, a sense of duty to scientific progress as a way that society progresses. And of all of the things that I have a personal capacity to contribute to, or maybe just of all of the things, this is the one that I believe will drive scientific progress, and thus standards of living, the quality of the human experience, whatever you wanna call it, forward the most. And I feel a sense of duty, but not in a negative sense, like a, a, a duty with a lot of gratitude for holding it, that I get to contribute in whatever way.
- AGAdam Grant
Sounds like responsibility.
- SASam Altman
Sure.
- AGAdam Grant
With a, [chuckles] with a child on the way, as a, as a soon-to-be father, what kind of world are you hoping to see for the next generation?
- SASam Altman
Abundance was the first word that came to mind. Prosperity was the second. But, you know, generally just a world where people can do more, like be more fulfilled, live a better life, however we define that for each of ourselves. All the, all those things.
- AGAdam Grant
Mm-hmm.
- SASam Altman
Probably the same thing every other soon-to-be dad has ever wanted for his kid.
- AGAdam Grant
[laughs] There's been a lot of hand-waving about designer babies for a long time now, but it does seem like some of the work that you've done is gonna make that more possible more quickly than I expected.
- SASam Altman
It doesn't seem that far away where a couple can make a million embryos and fully genetically sequence each of them and, you know, pick the best on whatever axis if they want.
- AGAdam Grant
Does that worry you at all that [chuckles] we're gonna, we're gonna short-circuit the, [chuckles] like, the biological imperative for diversity?
- SASam Altman
Something about that feels deeply tre- uh, yeah, unsettling.
- AGAdam Grant
I mean, you can hope, right? [chuckles] That, like, humans just have enough different preferences that we still get a lot of variety. But you can also imagine people starting to weed out things that they don't want-
- SASam Altman
I can totally-
- AGAdam Grant
... that actually have, you know, unexpected benefits.
- SASam Altman
I can more see the mode collapse than the diversity, yeah.
- AGAdam Grant
So are you gonna fix that one for us?
- SASam Altman
Haven't thought about it. Why don't you fix that one? I'll keep working on this.
- AGAdam Grant
[laughs] Not qualified. Uh, no, we, we need to find somebody to think about that. I, I don't think I've, I've heard you express as strongly as you did today how much you're also a believer in humans, not just in technology. And I think in some ways that that's a risky place to operate, like we've seen that with social media. But I think it's also, like, it is table stakes when it comes to building technology, is you have to care about and believe in humans.
- SASam Altman
I skew optimistic even though I try to, I try to just be accurate. But if there's... Being too optimistic about technology, like, whatever. If you're too optimistic about humans, that could be a danger for us. You know, we put these tools out and we're like, "Yeah, people will use it for way more good than bad," and we're just somehow really wrong about human nature. That would be a flaw with our strategy. But I don't believe that.
- AGAdam Grant
Well, fingers are crossed. Sam, thank you for taking the time to do this. I, uh, I learned a lot and thoroughly enjoyed it.
- SASam Altman
Thanks for having me. This was fun. [upbeat music]
Episode duration: 44:24
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