OpenAI COO Brad Lightcap on the Future of AI | Ep. 46

1. 0:00 – 0:39

   Intro

   1. BLBrad Lightcap0:00

      Ninety-nine percent of people, uh, get to use bad tools or don't have any tools at all. The quality of experience of the people that exist as their customers and users is not very good. Everyone has like lived the bad experience of going-

   2. JAJack Altman0:12

      Yeah

   3. BLBrad Lightcap0:12

      ... through modern life-

   4. JAJack Altman0:13

      Yes

   5. BLBrad Lightcap0:13

      ... uh, and dealing with the things that we have to deal with. I think if you're kind of sitting there lamenting the idea that, you know, there's no more good ideas and no more new ideas, like it's just kinda lazy. [upbeat music]

   6. JAJack Altman0:22

      All right.

   7. BLBrad Lightcap0:22

      Do you like, do you film an intro?

   8. JAJack Altman0:23

      Do I film an intro?

   9. BLBrad Lightcap0:24

      Or you just go-

   10. JAJack Altman0:25

       No, I just kinda go-

   11. BLBrad Lightcap0:26

       ... hard in?

   12. JAJack Altman0:26

       I just start.

   13. BLBrad Lightcap0:27

       Okay.

   14. JAJack Altman0:27

       Yeah, this probably is the intro.

   15. BLBrad Lightcap0:28

       All right.

   16. JAJack Altman0:29

       So Brad, thanks for doing this with us. I'm excited.

   17. BLBrad Lightcap0:31

       Yeah, me too.

   18. JAJack Altman0:31

       Do you have enough drinks? Would you like one more?

   19. BLBrad Lightcap0:33

       Well, yeah. I'll take whatever I can get.

   20. JAJack Altman0:34

       We can load up. Well, I really appreciate you making time for this. I've been really looking forward to it. Um,

2. 0:39 – 3:47

   The early days of OpenAI

   1. JAJack Altman0:39

      what I wanted to start with actually was I was just like thinking about this last night, and you joined OpenAI in twenty eighteen, and then like four years, you know, as like research lab, you guys are like beating Dota. And then like four years in, like ChatGPT launches, and then it's like this whirlwind that's been, I guess like three years, but I'm sure it feels like a lot more.

   2. BLBrad Lightcap0:57

      Mm-hmm.

   3. JAJack Altman0:58

      I was just curious if you could like share your narrative or recollection of like what the journey's been like and like what are like the chapters, like what's just your experience been like as you like look back on this so far?

   4. BLBrad Lightcap1:10

      Yeah, chap-chapters is the right word. Um, it's the kind of journey of OpenAI which I think tracks the journey of AI as a, as a field, as an industry is, uh, has kind of been broken up into these weird periods. Like, when I joined, it was no one had really heard of OpenAI. Our, our work was, uh, you know, relegated mostly to, uh, kind of small, uh, niches of San Francisco tech culture that followed such things as, you know, us beating the Dota, you know, best Dota players in the world-

   5. JAJack Altman1:39

      Yeah

   6. BLBrad Lightcap1:39

      ... and things like that. Really it was kind of, you know, I didn't really like have anyone to talk to about it. It was like e-everyone was kinda, "What are you, like what are you doing there?" Um, "What," and, "What do you do there?"

   7. JAJack Altman1:47

      And you were like the CFO when you joined, right?

   8. BLBrad Lightcap1:48

      I was our CFO. Um, I spent-

   9. JAJack Altman1:50

      What-

   10. BLBrad Lightcap1:50

       Yeah.

   11. JAJack Altman1:51

       Uh, you, like what, what were you thinking when you joined? Like, what, what did you expect it was gonna be?

   12. BLBrad Lightcap1:54

       Well, I didn't know. Um, I was twenty-seven, and so I was just kind of like, you know... I, I, and I, I maybe back up a minute. I, I was at, uh, Y Combinator prior working with Sam, um, and I was starting to spend a lot more time with what I call our hard tech portfolio in YC, so all the companies that are building everything that wasn't pure kind of SaaS and internet, you know, consumer internet. So spending a lot of time with, you know, everything from nuclear fusion to satellites to biotech to, you know, anything that would kind of fit outside. And OpenAI was kind of in that camp. Like AI was kind of one of those things that was like, it was promised as this like future technology, but, you know, it wasn't really sure like who, who's like actually building this. Um, OpenAI started, as you know, as like a YC research project.

   13. JAJack Altman2:36

       Yeah.

   14. BLBrad Lightcap2:36

       And so it was kind of in the family. And, um, Sam had called me and was like, "Hey, I need someone to help basically do everything that isn't just the research at this, at this company. Um, do you know anyone that, that would be good?" And I tried to help him find someone. Couldn't find anyone. Um, and so I was like, "I'll just help you, you know, myself on the side." But I started spending a lot of time with Greg and Ilya and the team that was there at the time. I kinda realized that they, they had this like crazy... They're the, these crazy properties that apply to AI, which now we understand to be basically the scaling laws. And so uh, consistently the field was starting to discover that when you make things bigger, um, the results just get predictably and consistently better. At that point then, it's like, okay, really this is just a compute problem actually, and intelligence basically can just be bootstrapped from basically scaling up very basic general architectures that, um, that can turn into a gen, more general intelligence. And I was like, well, I don't know if this is true, and I don't know if this will hold. I'm certainly not qualified to judge that. But if it does, and these guys seem convinced that it is true, it's gonna be the most important thing ever.

   15. JAJack Altman3:41

       Yeah.

   16. BLBrad Lightcap3:42

       And at twenty-seven I was like, I don't know, that just seems more interesting than investing in tech.

   17. JAJack Altman3:46

       Yeah.

3. 3:47 – 7:32

   A research centric culture

   1. JAJack Altman3:47

      So you started doing that, and then what happened in those early years? Like, obviously like people are build... They're, they're building things that were working-

   2. BLBrad Lightcap3:53

      Yeah

   3. JAJack Altman3:53

      ... like beating, beating the game and, you know, a lot of-

   4. BLBrad Lightcap3:55

      Yeah

   5. JAJack Altman3:55

      ... other projects. But like what were you seeing on the inside from, let's say like twenty eighteen to twenty twenty-two?

   6. BLBrad Lightcap4:00

      Obviously, it was much, much more of a research centric culture. It's... OpenAI is still highly research centric. I feel like people, people kind of think post-ChatGPT it became much more of this product-centric culture, but research really drives everything, and I think, um, uh, that's started because of how much that was cemented in that period as, call it the cl- kind of cultural foundation of the company. So I, I spent a lot of my time really just trying to figure out what researchers needed to be successful, and that spanned from, you know, the capital that we need to invest in supercomputers to working with partners to do the supercomputer design, uh, and build out, to, uh, things as kind of trivial and pedestrian as like our robots keep breaking and, you know, uh, it takes too long to like drop ship parts from, uh, you know, this one supplier that ex- sits in some small town in England or something like that.

   7. JAJack Altman4:49

      Yeah.

   8. BLBrad Lightcap4:50

      How do we like tighten that loop and, and, and go faster? So it was this like very like, like kind of diverse set of problems early on that were really just about pure research acceleration.

   9. JAJack Altman4:59

      Mm.

   10. BLBrad Lightcap4:59

       Obviously now, you know, uh, it's, uh, it's, it's, it's kind of both research, uh, and, and deployment, uh, in our business. But, um, it gave me an early on like an appreciation of just like I, I just spent all my time with researchers, and so it was really like it gave me a firsthand understanding of kind of like what was happening, um, before I think anyone else really appreciated it.

   11. JAJack Altman5:17

       So then there was chat in twenty-Twenty two.

   12. BLBrad Lightcap5:20

       Yeah.

   13. JAJack Altman5:20

       End of twenty twenty-two. Did you guys on the inside feel like, oh, this is gonna be something? Like when you were playing with it before it got released, was the vibe inside like this is like another cool thing, let's just... it's like a playground?

   14. BLBrad Lightcap5:31

       Yeah.

   15. JAJack Altman5:31

       Or were people like, "Mm, this is, this is something"?

   16. BLBrad Lightcap5:34

       There's a word that sometimes people use in, in AI as w- to describe kinda when there's an indication of something that's happening, but you don't... it's not quite happened yet, but you kinda get these like little, uh, these little sparks. And that was kinda how I would describe the pre-ChatGPT period, is there were a lot of sparks. Um, you could see that the models were now starting to get good enough that they could kind of emulate, um, you know, humans in a conversational format. Um, you could see that there was an interest that people had in directly prompting the model. People forget that this was not the way that we originally engaged with language models. Um, we thought of language models as completions engines. So you start a text string, and then it basically, uh, takes that as an input, and then it continues the text string on. This kind of more conversational, you know, dialogue-based format is not the original invention of language models. And so, um, but what we were seeing is we had, uh, we had an API that was a completions API, and we had a, an interface that basically let people, uh, put text into an interface that, um, would then, you know, show a preview of what the model would actually produce as an output. But people were trying to use that interface in a more kinda dialogue, um, kinda conversational turn-based format. And so we-- You could see it. You could just... If you kinda paid attention, you listen-

   17. JAJack Altman6:48

       Mm.

   18. BLBrad Lightcap6:49

       You could see that people wanted to talk to the model, and that was the natural, intuitive way that people wanted to engage with it, but it wasn't actually quite built that way. The other thing that we saw ahead of time was, um, we had trained an early version of DALL-E, uh, as a... Uh, it was our first image model. It wasn't very good, but, um, it was really a breakthrough at the time. And so for the first time, you could now generate images, and we had seen some adoption of that model in a more kinda consumer prompt-based format. And so we had guesses leading up to ChatGPT that it was gonna be, uh, it was going to be something important, but we didn't appreciate the scale. I think-

   19. JAJack Altman7:23

       Yeah

   20. BLBrad Lightcap7:23

       ... my guess at the time, we, we all took guesses 'cause we had to do the compute planning, um, was at the, at peak, there'd be a million concurrent users. And, uh, you know, obviously

4. 7:32 – 11:54

   Post-ChatGPT chapters

   1. BLBrad Lightcap7:32

      we were very wrong.

   2. JAJack Altman7:32

      So what are the chapters since? Like, if you look back the last three years, what are the phases? Like, if you were sort of like describing to a friend, "Here's the phases of my journey post-ChatGPT"-

   3. BLBrad Lightcap7:42

      Yeah.

   4. JAJack Altman7:42

      How would you bucket it?

   5. BLBrad Lightcap7:43

      There's, you know, there's phases of the company's life, and then I think there's, there's phases of the industry and, um, and, and the, and the technology. And, uh, o-on the technology side, I would say it's, it's obviously there was this kind of proto period of, of, of research just starting to work, and I think I call that kind of the scaling period of where we just realized that you actually could go some... from something that was unusable to something that was kinda usable across, you know, basically most, um, model formats that was kind of before mass consumer adoption. I-- That was kinda twenty eighteen to twenty twenty-two.

   6. JAJack Altman8:12

      Mm-hmm.

   7. BLBrad Lightcap8:13

      I think twenty twenty-two to kinda twenty twenty-four, uh, was really the period of, of, of chatbots, um, where all of a sudden now it was okay, you know, it was generative AI. It was, um, it was, uh, people realizing that, you know, you actually could, could have something that was useful, but it was not totally clear exactly what it was useful for. Um, you know, it was, it was new and, and novel, and I think there was a, there was a, um, uh... People had an appreciation for that, but, you know, the utility was still not totally there. Like, it was kind of like a slightly better version of search. And then the next chapter, and I think what the one that we're in now is, is this kind of period of agents, which is AIs that actually can go do things for you. They run asynchronously. Um, you can give them instructions, and they can take an arbitrary amount of time and tokens to go off and think and figure it out. Um, they can use tools. Um, and I think we're in the middle of that period. I think that started in, uh, for me in, in, um, December of twenty twenty-four, uh, with the release of o1 and then kinda through twenty twenty-five and, and into twenty twenty-six.

   8. JAJack Altman9:12

      And you think we're, like, in the middle of that now?

   9. BLBrad Lightcap9:15

      Yeah, I think so. I think weirdly in each of these things because the, the kinda utility quotient on the models goes up by some enormous factor, I actually think it takes... there's almost more time it takes in each of these eras-

   10. JAJack Altman9:25

       Mm

   11. BLBrad Lightcap9:25

       ... to, to explore the kind of full potential of the model. I've always said to-- I say to our customers and partners all the time is like, "You could stop progress right now," and I still think there's kind of-

   12. JAJack Altman9:34

       Oh, yeah

   13. BLBrad Lightcap9:34

       ... a ten or twenty-year diffusion and innovation cycle that just comes-

   14. JAJack Altman9:37

       Just to get it into the economy.

   15. BLBrad Lightcap9:38

       Just to get it into the economy-

   16. JAJack Altman9:39

       Yeah

   17. BLBrad Lightcap9:39

       ... and for people to realize what these things are capable of. With chatbots, that maybe would've been five years or something like that.

   18. JAJack Altman9:45

       Yeah.

   19. BLBrad Lightcap9:45

       Um, but, you know, with agents, it's probably some multiple. And then the question is, obviously, as the technologies... the, the technology will progress much faster than that. And so that dissonance of the diffusion period being kind of much longer than the actual kind of innovation cycle is gonna be something interesting to watch.

   20. JAJack Altman10:00

       How far away are we from the, like, completion of what agents can do? Like, is it the beginning of a thing that will never end? Are we halfway up an S-curve? What is y- the current sentiment for, like, what the endpoint of, you know, agents' capabilities will be?

   21. BLBrad Lightcap10:17

       I... Personally, I feel totally unmoored here. I don't know, um, and, you know, I, I... the, the kind of historian, uh, and, you know, kind of, uh, you know, technological economist in me kind of wants to think that everything has to fit into these very nice kind of S-curve-shaped paradigms-

   22. JAJack Altman10:34

       Yeah

   23. BLBrad Lightcap10:34

       ... and that, you know, everything will... the innovation cycle will kind of look-

   24. JAJack Altman10:36

       Yeah

   25. BLBrad Lightcap10:36

       ... exactly as, as it is and-

   26. JAJack Altman10:38

       And even if there isn't an S-curve, that we could be-

   27. BLBrad Lightcap10:39

       Yeah

   28. JAJack Altman10:39

       ... we could be right here but-

   29. BLBrad Lightcap10:39

       Yeah, the kind of Carlota Perez, like, you know, okay, like, this will all, all, all, all be the, the way that it has been. Um, but, uh, I... you know, there's, there's a lot of meta levels to this. I think y- we don't quite understand that when you, you've got systems that now have, in some sense, their own agency, there's almost kind of infinite levels of, of things that can happen, right?

   30. JAJack Altman10:59

       Yeah.
5. 11:54 – 15:26

   Sci-Fi future or good software

   1. JAJack Altman11:54

      One of the interesting things, um, that I've experienced is right before, right after ChatGPT, I think a lot of the conversation around AI was, like, living in sci-fi land of are we gonna have, like, the next species take over? Are there Dyson spheres? Like, it was very, like, big.

   2. BLBrad Lightcap12:10

      Yep.

   3. JAJack Altman12:10

      And then what I've experienced over the last few years is it's been extremely commercial, in a good way, but in a very down-to-earth way, like in a, in the economy, operated by humans. It doesn't feel scary.

   4. BLBrad Lightcap12:24

      Yeah.

   5. JAJack Altman12:24

      It just feels like insanely sick software.

   6. BLBrad Lightcap12:26

      Yeah.

   7. JAJack Altman12:27

      But it's still, there's this, like, lingering thing in the background that I think gets talked about a little bit less of, like, is there sentience? Like, does it go to this other place? Like, does that still-- is that still a conversation that matters? Is it something that's still thought about? Or is it just like, "Hey, we actually feel now like this is just really good software. There's nothing to be worried about. It's just like an insane technical revolution."

   8. BLBrad Lightcap12:47

      Yeah. This is a really interesting question. I think in some sense, the, the better the technology gets and the more it pushes toward that sci-fi future, the more we actually end up having the conversation about it, diminishing it almost to just being a tool. Um, and it's a weird paradox, uh, and I've noticed the same thing 'cause I, I used to, I used to sit at the OpenAI that was very much talk- having the conversation about Dyson spheres because in twenty eighteen that was-

   9. JAJack Altman13:09

      Yeah

   10. BLBrad Lightcap13:09

       ...kind of all you could talk about.

   11. JAJack Altman13:11

       Yeah.

   12. BLBrad Lightcap13:11

       You basically had something that was kind of barely working at the beginning, and then you could try and see-

   13. JAJack Altman13:15

       You think about the whole thing.

   14. BLBrad Lightcap13:16

       Exactly.

   15. JAJack Altman13:17

       But then once you're in the middle of it-

   16. BLBrad Lightcap13:18

       Once you're in the middle of it

   17. JAJack Altman13:18

       ...you gotta think about the steps right in front of you.

   18. BLBrad Lightcap13:19

       Yeah. There's a local linearity that starts to set in, where you're a little bit like, okay, like I, I appreciate that this thing is a gazillion times better than what it was, you know, in twenty eighteen, um, and the capabilities are multitudes more than what they were even two years ago. But-

   19. JAJack Altman13:34

       Like as an example, you know, you talked about DALL-E.

   20. BLBrad Lightcap13:36

       Yeah.

   21. JAJack Altman13:36

       When that came out, I was like, "Oh, that's cute."

   22. BLBrad Lightcap13:38

       Yeah.

   23. JAJack Altman13:38

       But now not much, you know, just a few years later, I can't tell if a video is fake or real half the time.

   24. BLBrad Lightcap13:44

       Yes.

   25. JAJack Altman13:44

       You know, it's like that's gonna get all the way there where you'll have no idea.

   26. BLBrad Lightcap13:47

       No, yeah. A-and, and I think that i-like in some sense this, there will be this kind of like these parallel conversations that happen. Like, there will be the kind of like enterprise productivity-

   27. JAJack Altman13:55

       Mm-hmm

   28. BLBrad Lightcap13:55

       ...conversation because that is something that actually people are thinking about-

   29. JAJack Altman13:59

       Totally

   30. BLBrad Lightcap13:59

       ...want to talk about. Everyone's gonna kinda glob on to, you know, what is the narrative there that is, uh, sort of-
6. 15:26 – 18:57

   AI’s impact on rural communities

   1. JAJack Altman15:26

      this sort of topic of, like, what is the thing, I'm sort of watching it all, and j- I'm from St. Louis.

   2. BLBrad Lightcap15:31

      Yeah.

   3. JAJack Altman15:31

      Now I'm living in, you know, Silicon Valley. There's a very different perception of AI in, like, the St. Louis' of the world-

   4. BLBrad Lightcap15:37

      Yeah

   5. JAJack Altman15:37

      ...and in, like, Silicon Valley. And, like, I think here the general sentiment is like, "This is amazing. Thank goodness this happened." And I think around the country, maybe world, there's, like, real skepticism and anxiety and fear and-

   6. BLBrad Lightcap15:51

      Yeah

   7. JAJack Altman15:51

      ...um, and I think people here have that too. But, like, it's this interesting reckoning for people where you're grappling with, you know, simultaneously, like, "Oh my God, that's amazing and that's awesome," versus like, "Oh my God, that's amazing. That's kind of a threat."

   8. BLBrad Lightcap16:03

      Yeah.

   9. JAJack Altman16:04

      How do you think about, like, what the right way to interpret this is? Like, what are, like, the genuine concerns and fears that, like, we're gonna need to work through, and, like, what are the things that you think are misunderstandings that will actually just be really positive?

   10. BLBrad Lightcap16:16

       Yeah, and look, I, I, no one knows the future exactly, so I think everything here is speculation on all sides. Um, I think... And I, I come, I come at this kind of from a, more of a, like, m-you know, economics kind of, um, uh, history of markets background, uh, which was more where I spent my time in college, uh, and trying to still spend a lot of my time trying to understand the world through that lens. So first of all, I think it, it is really a bummer that the world's view of AI is what it is, and I think I, I, I blame no one other than the industry basically for, for that.

   11. JAJack Altman16:49

       Mm-hmm.

   12. BLBrad Lightcap16:49

       I think we as an industry have done a horrible job of being able to paint for pic- people a picture of a future that is way better than the future, than the c- the world we live in today. Um, and the, the crazy thing is I actually think that that is the reality. I think, you know, the, the, the stories of, like, the one of the guy who is curing his dog's cancer are going to become much more commonplace. Um, and I, I, I tend to find a lot of comfort in the idea of, like, I come back to individual empowerment of, like, anyone anywhere on Earth can have an idea, and the time to value from conception of idea to thing that exists in the world starts to collapse to zero. You know, not only from a time to value perspective, but also a cost of creation perspective.And I just, I think amazing things are gonna happen when that, when you reduce that friction and you increase that access. Like, people are incredibly innovative. They are incredibly creative. Everyone is motivated by their own set of circumstances and the problems that are in front of them to wanna improve the world they live in. And like, I think ninety-nine percent of it is there's a tools problem, which is they historically had no means to be able to do that. And when you give people something that now enables them to start a business, do research, um, uh, create a new thing, build a new service, um, serve customers, uh, more efficiently or cheaply, like only good things can happen in my mind. Now, obviously, there's, there are things that come with that, and we, you know, we have to be thoughtful about what the technology presents in terms of the flip side because it's as capable of, in some cases, doing harm as it is of doing good. Um, but I tend to think that we will figure that out. Like, we are resilient and I would say also equally creative as a species. And I tend to think that when, uh, whenever we're, we're-- whenever we've been confronted with the opportunity to create something that has potential for greatness, we also have been really thoughtful about how we build institutions that protect against the downsides. So I have a more optimistic view. I think that the industry has a more of a duty to help-

   13. JAJack Altman18:48

       Yeah

   14. BLBrad Lightcap18:48

       ... people appreciate and understand what's happening, um, and to help people also, like, live the experience of it, to like, to use these tools to do the types of things we're talking about.

7. 18:57 – 24:04

   Codex and coding of the future

   1. JAJack Altman18:57

      An interesting instance of this sort of conundrum is in coding. And like, I feel, um, this is like something that's easy for us to talk about 'cause we're very familiar-

   2. BLBrad Lightcap19:05

      Yeah

   3. JAJack Altman19:06

      ... with it, and it's one of the best applications of AI so far. And so, you know, now obviously like AI is really good at coding. And so then you could bump that up into the real worl- real world and say, are we gonna have more developers? Are they gonna be more people doing more things?

   4. BLBrad Lightcap19:18

      Yeah.

   5. JAJack Altman19:18

      Is it gonna replace people?

   6. BLBrad Lightcap19:19

      Yeah.

   7. JAJack Altman19:19

      I think the data I've seen so far is actually that there's more engineering jobs being posted every month than, like, ever before.

   8. BLBrad Lightcap19:24

      Yeah.

   9. JAJack Altman19:24

      But I'm curious how you think about this with like coding for-

   10. BLBrad Lightcap19:27

       Yeah

   11. JAJack Altman19:27

       ... for like as an example of like what's gonna happen when it bumps up into the real world of people doing stuff.

   12. BLBrad Lightcap19:32

       This is where I come back to things. I try and, uh, uh, and, and come back as, as rationally as I can to this kind of economics-based, kind of markets-based view of, of, of how things have worked in the past, um, where you have, uh, you know, distortions in kind of supply, demand, and cost-

   13. JAJack Altman19:47

       Yeah

   14. BLBrad Lightcap19:47

       ... that create these points that are these weird inflection points in, in, in, in human productivity. If you reduce the cost of software engineering, for example, to virtually zero on the margin, um, then it-- the, the, the simple thing to, to, to think would be, okay, well, software engi- engineers won't exist anymore. The thing we're seeing in reality, um, with tools like Codex and other things is, um, actually the, when you reduce the cost of something to zero, the demand for it goes up significantly. Um, and the job of the people who were previously described as software engineers-

   15. JAJack Altman20:19

       Yeah

   16. BLBrad Lightcap20:19

       ... who were kind of hand typing every character of code-

   17. JAJack Altman20:22

       Who are now guiding agents

   18. BLBrad Lightcap20:23

       ... are now just doing a slightly different version of the job.

   19. JAJack Altman20:26

       Well, I think, um, you know, some of this is the cost is lower, but it's not zero. And so, you know-

   20. BLBrad Lightcap20:30

       That's true

   21. JAJack Altman20:31

       ... which is a good thing, I think, because between two companies that are competing for a new market, let's say they're doing, you know, AI for construction.

   22. BLBrad Lightcap20:38

       Yeah.

   23. JAJack Altman20:38

       If you have two companies, the one-- even if engineering got much cheaper, if one just still decides to spend ten times more than the other, presumably those people are not gonna do nothing to improve the product. And so I think we're just gonna... It should be better software rather than fewer people working on it.

   24. BLBrad Lightcap20:53

       Software is wildly under-penetrated in the world. I think if you actually zoomed out and basically said of all the places where software, and good software, not just software-

   25. JAJack Altman21:01

       Yeah. Yeah. And by the way, there's still so much bad software. Like cra-

   26. BLBrad Lightcap21:05

       Everywhere

   27. JAJack Altman21:05

       If you like go to a hotel and you like look behind their screen, you're like, "What are you typing on?"

   28. BLBrad Lightcap21:09

       Yeah.

   29. JAJack Altman21:09

       You know? There's a lot of work to do.

   30. BLBrad Lightcap21:11

       It's crazy. And that to me is also, by the way, if you wanna talk about risks, like that's actually where I think the risk surface exists. It's the sys- the software systems that hospitals use, that our power grid uses, that, um, you know, store like, uh, you know, customer information through a hotel or re- like, these are all fairly archaic systems for, uh, you know, institutions that actually spend meaningful percents of the world's kind of GDP. And so I would kind of look at this as like in some sense this is almost the greatest thing to ever happen, is that you've now got systems that can help update all of the, that software. That can bring software into places that there's zero percent penetration of, of software where, where there should be. Um, that can help reinforce and harden systems that, uh, are exploitable or vulnerable. And in some sense, like, you know, you kind of look at like where were we from a, um, uh, i-in terms of how much like we actually needed software relative to kinda how much we'd penetrated. I think if you actually could measure that, I think we'd be at one percent, um, today. And so I have a maybe a slightly different view of this, and it's a personal view, of course, is if you have AI that can write really, really good and obviously safe software, um, I think that is gonna be one of the greatest gifts to the world. Uh, and I, I think the, the speculation around, you know, will, will there be software engineers in the future or not is kind of the wrong question. Um, there are going to have to be people who oversee the design, implementation, and maintenance of what we could be ten thousand X the amount of software and the amount of code that gets written in the world. And that is gonna create a unique demand cycle that may not look exactly like what we do today in software engineering-
8. 24:04 – 27:55

   Doing a lot of things at once

   1. BLBrad Lightcap24:04

      people think they're kinda pedestrian.

   2. JAJack Altman24:05

      Obviously, like OpenAI started, you know-In chat and then moved into all these different things. And over time, I think has become probably, you know, it's one of the most unique companies in general, but included in that uniqueness is like you guys have done a lot of things. How are you thinking about that now? Obviously, like the market is starting to somewhat mature. You guys have had new companies come out, you know-

   3. BLBrad Lightcap24:28

      Yeah

   4. JAJack Altman24:28

      ... spin out of OpenAI and, you know, focus on areas that have, you know, turned out to be really productive. I'm sure that's like changing the way you guys are thinking. So I'm just curious of like the state of the union. You know, in early twenty twenty-six, when you like, look at, you know, here's where we are, here's what's around us, what matters now? Like, what do you care about? Like, what do you, what do you say, "This got us here, this is what's gonna get us there." What's the focus?

   5. BLBrad Lightcap24:52

      One of the cool things about OpenAI is it, it has a, um, a very wide aperture on, I think, how it, it looks at what its kind of ultimate mission is. The-these lines that people, I think, drew maybe in the, in the world, uh, prior, um, of, you know, your, your B2B or your B2C, or you're hard tech or you're software. Um, you know, all of the things that kinda the VC ecosystem segments themselves by-

   6. JAJack Altman25:13

      Got it. Lane.

   7. BLBrad Lightcap25:14

      Yes. We don't see those walls. We kind of see AI as having, um, being this enabling technology that drives, is gonna drive innovation cycles across all of the above. Um, and that could be in, you know, it could be in, in the enterprise, it could be in consumer, it could be in, you know, in, in, in creativity, it could be in robotics, um, it could be in hardware. And I think what we wanna understand is what do each of those bets look like? And OpenAI has an operating model that we've-- has been kinda tried and true for us really since the company started, which is being able to be experimental, being able to k-kind of try and iterate, um, uh, being able to, uh, be very kind of model forward, I think, in how we think about a problem and not really feeling like we have the incumbency of the kinda last generation. And then, um, trying to kind of see if we can build the thing that we think is possible. And if it works, you kind of build an effort around it, and if it doesn't work, then you kind of, you shut it down, and you recycle those people back into a new thing.

   8. JAJack Altman26:10

      Yep.

   9. BLBrad Lightcap26:11

      Um, and that was really the way that OpenAI operated early on, and still somewhat is, is this kind of expansion contraction, uh, model in research where you've got, okay, maybe there's twenty projects that are kind of all trying different things and going on at the same time. Maybe two or three of them will really work. You scale those up, you consolidate people kinda back into those projects to scale them up, and then over time, as you kind of shift into a next paradigm, you start to kind of, you know, you, you, you, you, you spread back out again and see if you can, you can take more bets. And I think that's gonna be how this goes. I, I don't-- I, I think that same-- Everything is, is, is in my, in my mind, downstream of research. And so if, if that's the kinda cycle of how research is working, in some sense, I think the product, uh, and, and, and deployment cycle should look similarly.

   10. JAJack Altman26:52

       I also feel like I can just tell from the way that it's a unified model, the way the product's feeling, it's gonna all just be a unified thing at some point here soon. Like it's already kind of going that direction, and that thing will just be used by people whether they're at home or work, and, you know, it's like people use Google at home and at work, and it's just like, you know, becomes the tool.

   11. BLBrad Lightcap27:09

       Yeah. We need, we need the models to start doing more work for users, is what I would say. I think, um, if there's been one really big gap in my mind in kinda the user consumer experience in AI so far, it's been that users have to do too much work. And you're kinda promised this future of these really smart models, and, you know, they're, they kind of can solve all your problems very dynamically, and yet here we are, like with eighteen things in a model picker and, you know, do you want like thinking fast mode and, you know, or do you want pro-thinking hard mode?

   12. JAJack Altman27:37

       It's crazy.

   13. BLBrad Lightcap27:37

       It's just like, it, like it seems-

   14. JAJack Altman27:39

       It's time, it's time to move on.

   15. BLBrad Lightcap27:39

       Yeah.

   16. JAJack Altman27:40

       Yeah.

   17. BLBrad Lightcap27:40

       It's time to move on. That, to me, feels like the direction where-

   18. JAJack Altman27:43

       Yeah

   19. BLBrad Lightcap27:43

       ... I think you're describing of this more of this consolidated, like, I just don't wanna think about it. I just want, I just want intelligence, and I'm gonna let the model kinda decide, uh, how to allocate that, you know, on a token level most efficiently.

   20. JAJack Altman27:54

       Okay, I wanna

9. 27:55 – 35:43

   What VCs should invest in

   1. JAJack Altman27:55

      move the conversation to a selfish place now.

   2. BLBrad Lightcap27:57

      Okay.

   3. JAJack Altman27:57

      Um, you've been an investor before, and my question is, what should I invest in?

   4. BLBrad Lightcap28:01

      [chuckles]

   5. JAJack Altman28:01

      And like, um, you know, like w- maybe to put a little like framing around it, there's, um, there's like a frequent worry among founders of OpenAI releasing something-

   6. BLBrad Lightcap28:13

      Yep

   7. JAJack Altman28:13

      ... and I'm gonna get my face blown off, and, you know, what's safe from AI-

   8. BLBrad Lightcap28:18

      Yeah

   9. JAJack Altman28:18

      ... and what will or won't the models do? Where can a startup like predictably add value? You know, Sam talked about you should build your company such that you're planning for the models to get smarter, and if them getting smarter is good for you, that's a good thing. If them getting smarter is bad for you, you know, that's gonna be really tough.

   10. BLBrad Lightcap28:33

       Yeah.

   11. JAJack Altman28:34

       But like maybe can you like unpack it a little bit more now just with, as months and, you know, years have gone on? What are like the safe places for a startup to try to like do work that they, you know, can expect to still be available to them in three years?

   12. BLBrad Lightcap28:47

       Yeah, I mean, I'll, I'll get back to what I said-

   13. JAJack Altman28:48

       Or should they just all join OpenAI?

   14. BLBrad Lightcap28:50

       [chuckles] I don't think they should all join OpenAI. First of all, we, we... The, the level of like energy in the ecosystem right now is like nothing I've ever seen. Uh, like the, the quality of, of founders and the like-

   15. JAJack Altman29:01

       And the effort

   16. BLBrad Lightcap29:02

       ... the effort, and just like there's like this intensity, and there's this like urgency that-

   17. JAJack Altman29:05

       Do you remember the startup ecosystem like right before ChatGPT? Like, you know, like-

   18. BLBrad Lightcap29:09

       Yeah

   19. JAJack Altman29:09

       ... afters are like, you know, we had-

   20. BLBrad Lightcap29:10

       Yes

   21. JAJack Altman29:10

       ... like come down from like the SaaS, you know, glory moment.

   22. BLBrad Lightcap29:14

       Yeah.

   23. JAJack Altman29:15

       And that was tough.

   24. BLBrad Lightcap29:15

       Yeah. I mean-

   25. JAJack Altman29:16

       Like I don't know where we'd be right now without, you know, AI. It would be not-

   26. BLBrad Lightcap29:18

       Yeah

   27. JAJack Altman29:19

       ... fun.

   28. BLBrad Lightcap29:19

       I was at YC in, you know, in kinda twenty sixteen, uh, mid twenty eighteen, and like-

   29. JAJack Altman29:23

       That was good

   30. BLBrad Lightcap29:23

       ... it, it was the like front end of that was a fun time to in, to, to invest at growth. It was-
10. 35:43 – 38:23

    The software sell off

    1. JAJack Altman35:43

       I guess related to this, how do you feel about the sort of like sell-off in public markets? Like obviously outside of like, you know, the big companies which have done great, but sort of like, you know, public software companies have like taken a pretty bad beating. When you think about the work that you've been doing with them and what you've been seeing, are you watching that and you're like, "This makes sense," or are you like, actually this is like sort of a misunderstanding and you're, you know, feeling bullish about those companies?

    2. BLBrad Lightcap36:08

       Hard to comment on, on, on specifically. The like, the, the market is, is, is, uh, is f- like a very frenetic thing as you know. Um, here's what I kind of live day to day is so we, we work with-Basically every company that, you know, sits in the Nasdaq that you could, uh, you could imagine. Um, and A is like all of these companies are kind of as motivated and moving as quickly as any, as any startup. B is they've got amazing customer relationships, um, they've got amazing kind of depth of understanding of the problems they're trying to solve, the areas that they serve. Um, obviously, they've got years and years of, of perspective that have been built. And I think, like now in some sense, they're, you know, able to leverage and, and, and benefit from the same tools that anyone else is. And so the conversations we're having with them are really about them starting to rethink, you know, end to end, their entire customer experience, their product, uh, starting to think about, you know, how do they serve adjacent markets, um, starting to think about, um, ways that they can pass capability through to their users, so like, uh, creating entirely new experiences that, that, that weren't possible before. Uh, so I think you could take the other side, actually.

    3. JAJack Altman37:16

       Yeah.

    4. BLBrad Lightcap37:16

       I think you could basically take a very long view here, which is that-

    5. JAJack Altman37:19

       Yeah, like in some ways, the software itself is like the easiest thing at this point.

    6. BLBrad Lightcap37:22

       Yeah.

    7. JAJack Altman37:23

       Like having all the relationships, the team, the trust with all the customers, that's actually the hardest, you know, pole of the tent to have now.

    8. BLBrad Lightcap37:29

       You know, if that class, if that segment was asleep, I would say, okay, maybe that, you know, concern is more warranted, but-

    9. JAJack Altman37:35

       Yeah. But they're not.

    10. BLBrad Lightcap37:36

        Um, no. And, uh, and it's, it's happening at the CEO level and the founder level in some cases where everyone is as motivated to figure this out and figure out, you know, how to create value for their customers and their business as anyone else is. And so I think, you know, it's the beginning of a new cycle is my guess. Um, you're always gonna get, uh, new companies that form that are trying to take a fresh and new approach. Often, the benefit that those new companies have is that the incumbents don't realize what's going on and are too slow to move. Here, you actually don't have that dynamic. You've got everyone, uh, running, trying to run at the same speed.

    11. JAJack Altman38:10

        Yeah.

    12. BLBrad Lightcap38:10

        Um, and so I think that's exciting. Um, and I would say if you're kind of long, long AI, uh, and long, you know, startups, then it might even make sense maybe, you know, the contrarian opinion to be long, long, uh, legacy software too.

11. 38:23 – 42:32

    Using Codex over ChatGPT

    1. JAJack Altman38:23

       I don't know if you're experiencing it one way or another, like what you think it takes for more experience. It doesn't have to be founders, but just like even people joining OpenAI from some old company, you know, that had not been AI native. Like, how do you help people reset? Like, what does it take for people who have lived in the pre-AI era to like, you know, work the new way?

    2. BLBrad Lightcap38:42

       I think like you gotta like see it firsthand. And if you're not like playing with Codex every day, like I think it's hard to intuitively grok just like how disruptive and crazy it is.

    3. JAJack Altman38:52

       Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

    4. BLBrad Lightcap38:52

       Like Codex for me has replaced ChatGPT on a kind of daily driving-

    5. JAJack Altman38:56

       Really?

    6. BLBrad Lightcap38:56

       ... basis. And I'm not even technical. Like I don't, I don't write software for a living.

    7. JAJack Altman39:00

       Wow.

    8. BLBrad Lightcap39:00

       But it has a general capability that... And I, I, I'm specific enough about the set of things that I want that I know, and I, I've kind of developed enough like familiarity with its, with its capabilities.

    9. JAJack Altman39:09

       What are the like not-- What are you doing with it? Like what's like the, a daily quick use case?

    10. BLBrad Lightcap39:13

        My life is basically a kind of daily struggle of like thing that I would like to see get done, and then there's a question-

    11. JAJack Altman39:18

        I was gonna say, my life is a daily struggle.

    12. BLBrad Lightcap39:19

        Well, that too.

    13. JAJack Altman39:20

        Yeah.

    14. BLBrad Lightcap39:20

        But, um, of, you know, thing that I would like to see get done, and then kinda how fast can our team mobilize and operationalize to kind of get it done. And, uh, at a busy, you know, a fast-growing, very busy company, like sometimes those timelines drag. And then when those timelines drag, it means like the thing that I kind of wanna see us do starts to drag.

    15. JAJack Altman39:38

        Yeah. Yeah.

    16. BLBrad Lightcap39:38

        And everything kind of elongates into this kind of like, okay, something that really should take... If everyone a hundred percent focused on this thing, something that should take two days-

    17. JAJack Altman39:46

        Mm-hmm

    18. BLBrad Lightcap39:46

        ... you know, now takes basically kind of a month. And so one of the things I've started, you know, using it for basically is like kind of supplementing that, uh, uh, that thing. It gives me like a first version of everything. So for example, um, I, uh, we're building a, a fairly substantial, uh, uh, for deployed engineering org, which we can talk about, but recruiting for that has been like challenging. Like recruiting's hard.

    19. JAJack Altman40:07

        Oh, so you're using it to recruit?

    20. BLBrad Lightcap40:08

        Well, I'm using it actually to, to, to basically kind of go figure out, you know, of, of lists of people that are-

    21. JAJack Altman40:13

        Yeah

    22. BLBrad Lightcap40:14

        ... that we're, we're thinking about recruiting. Um, how do you, how do you navigate and stack rank among that list before you start getting into, you know, the, the candidate engagement?

    23. JAJack Altman40:22

        Wow.

    24. BLBrad Lightcap40:22

        And it's crazy 'cause like everyone today kinda has this like online presence and, you know, a lot of people have blogs and X accounts and all that.

    25. JAJack Altman40:29

        Yeah.

    26. BLBrad Lightcap40:29

        And so I just told Codex, I was like, "Here, take this list and basically go figure out like what public presence any of these people have, um, and you know, basically come up, come back to me, uh, and effectively like read, you know, read their online thing and score it against how you think about some of the kind of technical elements of our work, um, and what, you know, the job descriptions are of the things that we're doing." It works for even what is kind of a non-technical task like that. It, it, it basically writes a program, uh, and it, it will come up and, and, and figure out how to like go efficiently look at each of these profiles and come back and, and give me kind of these scores on-

    27. JAJack Altman41:01

        Wow

    28. BLBrad Lightcap41:01

        ... how good, you know, it thinks each of the, each of these candidates' kind of online writing has been.

    29. JAJack Altman41:05

        Yeah.

    30. BLBrad Lightcap41:06

        Uh, and it's cool because it actually surfaced for me, you know, three or four candidates who I couldn't have picked off the list staring at a list of two hundred names, um, but where I was like, "Okay, like let me go double click on this," and now it gives me an opportunity to go like really look into that candidate's, you know, profile and their blog and whatever and start to just get to know them better. Um, and that process would've taken, you know, a kind of a normal busy recruiter probably a couple weeks, right? It's a lot of names.
12. 42:32 – 44:53

    FDEs and Private Equity

    1. JAJack Altman42:32

       Yeah. On, on the topic of like the forward deployed stuff and-

    2. BLBrad Lightcap42:35

       Yeah

    3. JAJack Altman42:35

       ... private equity, like what's the thinking there?

    4. BLBrad Lightcap42:37

       The thinking is, is very much what I was kind of talking about earlier, which is, um, i-if you think about kind of like the way that software is gonna get built in the future, um, in some sense now, any specific problem within any company, um, in any part of their process, historically it would not have made sense economically to have spent a lot of time thinking about how to solve that one-

    5. JAJack Altman43:00

       Right

    6. BLBrad Lightcap43:01

       ... ah, corner of a problem. It's too expensive to, uh, to hire a bunch of people, um, to build a bunch of, you know, software, um, and, ah, you know, for that software to, to then have to be maintained. Um, and obviously for the most important problems and most large enterprises, you could hire people to do that type of thing, and there's entire industries that have gotten built around that. But for, you know, ninety-nine percent of problems, for kinda ninety-nine percent of businesses, that's totally out of reach. Um, you'd have to either decide that you wanted to hire a couple people to try and build something on their own that maybe didn't work super well, or you look to see if the market offers a solution. And the problem-- but the problem is that solution doesn't necessarily fit exactly what your shape of problem is. So now you've got people kinda contorting themselves trying to figure out how to adopt the thing off the shelf that wasn't really built for their company. It was just built as a kinda general purpose tool. Um, and I think that that entire era is, is over.

    7. JAJack Altman43:56

       Mm-hmm.

    8. BLBrad Lightcap43:56

       I think like now you actually can reason how almost every problem inside of a business can have solutions that are kind of custom-built for it. And it goes back to this kind of weird paradox of what do you think's gonna happen with, with jobs where, you know, we wouldn't be wanting to hire FDEs, uh, as aggressively as we would if it felt like software engineering jobs were going away. The jobs of those FDEs are different. You know, if you'd hired an FDE five years ago, they'd be doing something different than what they're gonna do in the future. But the amount of demand and the amount of opportunity that we see to be able to go address surgically every area in a business that could benefit from solution design, and s- not solution design that happens on the order of eighteen months, as is the kind of industry norm. Solution design that happens on the order of maybe eighteen days-

    9. JAJack Altman44:40

       Yeah

    10. BLBrad Lightcap44:41

        ... if not faster. That to me is like an incredibly large opportunity, uh, that I think will be the story somewhat of how the next few years goes.

    11. JAJack Altman44:48

        Hmm.

    12. BLBrad Lightcap44:49

        And so the FDEs we're hiring i-is really to help address that.

13. 44:53 – 49:33

    Working with Sam

    1. JAJack Altman44:53

       Last question I have is-

    2. BLBrad Lightcap44:54

       Yeah

    3. JAJack Altman44:55

       ... um, just sort of your reflections working with Sam. It's kinda funny, um, just, you know, obviously know him as a brother. You know him as someone you've worked with for a long time now. I'm curious sort of like what the evolution you've seen has been like, you know, now that he's obviously, you know, gotten to a different place in like the public sphere and, you know, there's this whole public persona and he's, you know... Then you obviously work with him on a daily basis. Just like what's the whole experience like for you with him?

    4. BLBrad Lightcap45:19

       Yeah. You know, I think, um, well, so we worked together for ten years, uh, ten years in January.

    5. JAJack Altman45:24

       And the first year or two was YC.

    6. BLBrad Lightcap45:26

       Yeah, first two and a half years was YC, and then, um, I got to OpenAI before he did. So-

    7. JAJack Altman45:30

       Oh, wow

    8. BLBrad Lightcap45:30

       ... I would say I recruited him at OpenAI.

    9. JAJack Altman45:31

       I love that.

    10. BLBrad Lightcap45:32

        Um, but, uh, uh, you know, he's, he's like a, he's a remarkable individual. You know that. Um, and, uh, I wish more people could spend more time with him kind of off the record. I think he's not innately, I think, someone that enjoys being a kind of a public face of things. I think certainly it's, it feels like an unnatural-

    11. JAJack Altman45:51

        Yeah

    12. BLBrad Lightcap45:52

        ... thing for him. Um, he is someone who much prefers spending his time-

    13. JAJack Altman45:56

        Yeah

    14. BLBrad Lightcap45:56

        ... sitting in a huddle of like five people talking about the future and having a deeply technical conversation about some niche topic. That's kind of who he is internally at OpenAI. It's what I've always known him to be and, and I think that that, uh, if, if you could spend, more people could spend more time with him, um, you'd realize he's like an infinite optimist.

    15. JAJack Altman46:14

        That's crazy 'cause the way I experienced it, it's almost like this like sacrifice to have done to put himself out so publicly, which is a requirement, I think, to make all of this happen and like show the world that by accumulating talent, compute, and all these ideas in one place, like that's what made all of this possible, then everybody can see it. But like that's such an uncomfortable thing to have done.

    16. BLBrad Lightcap46:36

        Yeah. Well, you know, it's, it's, it's interesting 'cause like his, he thinks on a timescale that's like more like a decade-plus, and I think the, the world kind of struggles to think beyond like a quarter forward.

    17. JAJack Altman46:47

        Yeah.

    18. BLBrad Lightcap46:48

        I've always felt like there's this kind of mis-mismatch in-

    19. JAJack Altman46:51

        There's a total mismatch. And so it's like he'll say something, and everybody's like, "That's crazy."

    20. BLBrad Lightcap46:56

        Yes.

    21. JAJack Altman46:56

        And then three years later, it's exactly where we are.

    22. BLBrad Lightcap46:59

        Yes.

    23. JAJack Altman46:59

        Sometimes sooner than that.

    24. BLBrad Lightcap47:00

        Yes.

    25. JAJack Altman47:00

        And then it's like, you know, there's no like reconciliation backwards.

    26. BLBrad Lightcap47:04

        Yeah.

    27. JAJack Altman47:04

        Just like now he's saying a new crazy thing, and people are like, "Oh, you've been crazy all along." And that's like a weird thing to watch, and there's no, there's no sort of way to tie that together really.

    28. BLBrad Lightcap47:13

        No. Every-everyone's trying to figure out what's happening right now. 'Cause I think in some sense the whiplash is so real, and I have like a lot of empathy for that as, you know... I, I spend a lot of time with, like, our customers, with, you know, friends, family, like, that are kind of like looking at me and calling me, being like, "What is going-- Like, what is happening? What is this Codex thing? Like, why, [chuckles] why, why is everyone obs-" Like, a-and I think in Sam's head, we're already so far beyond that point-

    29. JAJack Altman47:34

        Totally

    30. BLBrad Lightcap47:35

        ... in terms of what's coming, um, that it's trying to kind of bridge for people, like, where we're going relative to where we are, and I think it's disorienting.

Episode duration: 49:33