Joe Rogan Experience #2044 - Sam Altman

(drumming) Joe Rogan podcast. Check it out. The Joe Rogan Experience.

Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night. All day. (heavenly music) Hello, Sam. What's happening?

Not much. How are you?

Thanks for coming in here. Appreciate it.

Thanks for having me.

So, what have you done? (laughs)

Like, ever?

No. I mean, what have you done with AI? I mean, it's, um ... one of the things, um, about this is, I mean, I think everyone's fascinated by it. I mean, everyone is, uh, absolutely blown away at the current capability and wondering what the potential for the future is and whether or not that's a good thing.

I think it's gonna be a great thing, but I think it's not gonna be all a great thing. And that, that is where I think that's where all of the complexity comes in for people. It's not this, like, clean story of, "We're gonna do this, and it's all gonna be great."

Right.

"It's we're gonna do this." It's gonna be net great, but it's gonna be, uh, like a technological revolution. It's gonna be a societal revolution, and those always come with change. And even if it's like net wonderful, you know, there's things we're gonna lose along the way, some kinds of jobs, some kind, parts of our way of life, some parts of the way we live are gonna change or go away. And e- no matter how tremendous the upside is there, and I, and I believe it will be tremendously good, you know, there's a lot of stuff we gotta navigate through to make sure. Um, that's, that's a complicated thing for anyone to wrap their heads around, and there's, you know, deep and super understandable emotions around that.

That's a very honest answer that it's not all gonna be good, but it seems inevitable at this point.

I- i- it's, yeah, I mean, it's definitely inevitable. My, my view of the w- world, you know, when you're like a kid in school, you learn about this technological revolution, and then that one, and then that one. And my view of the world now, sort of looking backwards and forwards, is that this is like one long technological revolution f- and we had, sure, like, first we had to figure out agriculture, so that we had the resources and time to figure out how to build machines. Then we got this industrial revolution, and that made us learn about a lot of stuff and a lot of other scientific discovery too, let us do the computer revolution, and that's now letting us, as we scale up to these massive systems, do the AI revolution. But it really is just one long story of humans discovering science and technology and co-evolving with it, and I think it's the most exciting story of all time. I think it's how we get to this world of abundance, and although, you know, although we do have these things to navigate, then there, there will be these downsides. If, if you think about what it means for the world and for people's quality of lives, if we can get to a world, uh, where the, the cost of intelligence and the abundance that comes with that, uh, the cost dramatically falls, the abundance goes ways up, goes way up, I think we'll do the same thing with energy. And I think those are the two sort of key inputs to everything else we want. So if we can have abundant and cheap energy and intelligence, that will transform people's lives largely for the better. And I think it's gonna, in the same way that if we could go back now 500 years and look at someone's life, we'd say, "Well, there, there's some great things, but they didn't have this. They didn't have that. Can you believe they didn't have modern medicine?" That's what people are gonna look back at us like but in 50 years.