Sam Altman x Nikhil Kamath: How to Win When AI Changes Everything | People by WTF | Episode 13

[upbeat music] Uh, but please check where Nikhil is. Nikhil?

You've told him five minutes?

Like, he has two minutes, no?

Yeah, two minutes.

Everything looks good, just the monitor, the main monitor, uh, went off.

Everyone who's done can leave. [upbeat music] Hi, Sam.

Hey, Nikhil.

How are you?

I'm good. Sorry I'm late. I got caught up in getting ready for the launch tomorrow and lost track of time and excitement with the final results, but-

Hey, no worries. I'm guessing it must be really hectic, right?

It is a very hectic day.

[upbeat music] I have the model, and I've been playing with it a little bit. How is it different, Sam? I'm not an expert at this, so yeah.

There's all these ways we can talk about, you know, it's better at this metric, or it's, you know, can do this amazing coding demo that the, you know, GPT-4 couldn't. But the thing that has been most striking for me is, in ways that are both big and small, going back from GPT-5 to our previous generation model, is just so painful. It's just, like, worse at everything, and I've taken for granted that there is a fluency and a depth of intelligence with GPT-5 that we haven't had in, in any previous model. Um, it's an integrated model, so you don't have to, like, pick on our model switcher and know if you should use GPT-4o or o3 or o4 mini or any of the complicated things. It's just one thing that, that works, and it is like having PhD-level experts in every field available to you twenty-four seven for whatever you need. Not only to ask anything, but also to do anything for you. So if you, you know, need a piece of software created, it can kind of do it from scratch all at once. If you need a, um... If you need a research report on some complicated topic, it can do that for you. If you needed to, you know, plan an event for you, it could do that too.

Is it more agentic in nature in the sense that sequential tasking, you're one, one step closer to it? 'Cause I was trying that-

It's much better at things like that. The, the sort of the robustness and reliability, uh, has greatly increased, and that, that's very helpful for agentic workflows. So I, I'm, like, very impressed by how, uh, long and complex of a task it can carry out.

So we did a call a couple of weeks ago when I was bugging you about what sectors and themes to invest in for the next-

Yeah

... decade. Uh, so I don't want to talk about that too much. I thought we'll keep today about first principles and how the world is changing by virtue of all that is changing in the world that you dominate. So the very first thing I want to start with is, if I were a twenty-five-year-old boy or girl living in Mumbai or Bangalore in India, uh, I know you've said a bunch of times that colleges are not, are not holding on to the place of relevance they might have had when I was growing up, but what do I do now? A, what do I study? If I'm starting a company, what kind of company do I start? Or if I were to even find a job, what industry do you think has some kind of tailwind? I'm not talking ten years down the line, but even as close as three to five years down the line.