The man who helped OpenAI to go from millions to billions in revenue - Zack Kass [Open AI]

26:33Zack Kass:I just remember being blown away I remember multiple times being blown away by the scale and there's this line I don't know Guillaume have you seen Jaws the American film? No I don't think so Okay well you should see it it's a good American film and it's one of our great films and there's a line in Jaws they're hunting a great white shark the premise of the film is they're trying to get a great white shark

26:54Billions Host:Jaws okay sorry yeah yeah yeah yeah

26:57Zack Kass:they've been paralyzing this coastal town and they don't know how they haven't seen the shark yet and so finally did this one of the great what truly one of the great scenes in in american film they see the shark and they you know they're wrestling with it and the shark just rips the rips the lime or maybe take drags the boat down i can't remember exactly and then the protagonist of the show turns to to his sort of you know tough but but but sort of stoic friend and goes we're gonna need a bigger boat and that line that i like delivering like that line has become synonymous with sort of anytime someone realizes the scale of the challenge they face and you know it's it's used probably thousands of times a day in the American social lexicon.

27:53Zack Kass:And I said it to myself and people around me so many times because once ChadGBT arrived and once we knew that GBT4 was coming, the confluence was just wild. ChadGBT, November 30th, 2022. GBT5 starts coming down in price and improving in quality and GBT4 is coming. once it's clear this thing is going to collide sometime in March we don't know exactly when everyone's like okay we're going to need a much bigger boat and this is when you know I sprinted out ahead to to to form the Bain and OpenAI alliance um which was the first of its kind in the industry and sort of changed uh you know that that changed Bain's commercial outlook for for the next uh 48 months right rebooted their their their their sales started calling up every um uh you know premium services vendor getting them ready and and just sort of saying to everyone like get yourself ready batten down the hatches because pretty soon everyone and their mom is going to want to be building with this and sure enough i mean sure enough it really did feel like that like it became like the phones didn't stop ringing there wasn't there weren't enough people around and i think um there was uh uh yeah just this the zone flooded it was it was a low pressure zone and everyone entered um competitors partners customers and what was like the

29:31Billions Host:most stressful time for you at the time? Because, I mean, you had to deal with a scale that eventually, like, you hadn't seen in the past. So how do you approach it?

29:44Zack Kass:Apart from buying a bigger boat, obviously. Yeah, I will tell a personal story here because I think this is, it would be an easy moment for me to say, well, the thing that was most stressful was the pressure that Sam and Brad had put on me. I don't think that's true. eyeing the thing that was most stressful is that i hadn't actually taken care of myself for the last i had been sprinting at startups in silicon valley for at the time 15 years and i had not taken care of myself i was very overweight i was sleeping badly i had terrible hypertension and was like basically nearing a stroke. And I had just lost all sense of habit and time.

30:31Zack Kass:And when you're in this cycle, it's easy to sort of perpetuate. I didn't even drink that much. I can't even attribute a lot of this dysfunction to addiction. But this is my reminder to the folks listening right now, you have one life and you have one body and you have one soul and one spirit and there is no cost that you are willing to pay to neglect these things. And I learned this in some ways in a beautiful way and in some ways a hard way, which is I ran so hard and so fast at this incredible moment. I probably was manic in some respect and abandoned all the things that that mattered most. Um, and that to me, that to me was the greatest source of stress that I could, that I would wake up in the morning truly with a splitting hypertension headache, you know, at 6am every morning and just start working because I couldn't, uh, you know, I, I, there was, I had not created space to actually, um, make sense of it or, or to, or to, or to be, or to treat myself well.

31:38Zack Kass:And everyone learns this. This is what I've learned. When I share this story, everyone shares a similar one. Mine happened to come at this like exceptional moment at this exceptional company, but everyone has something similar and you either learn it late in life or you learn it early in life or somewhere in between. But everyone has an epiphany or some moment in time where they go, this is actually what I need to care about. And in my case, it came at this moment where both my parents were sick and I was sick and I basically woke up one day and was like, I'm going to die. I'm going to die. I mean, I fainted.

32:17Zack Kass:I had a blood pressure off the charts. I was like, I'm going to have a stroke. I need to go home. And it wasn't even clear at the time that how much time I was going to have left with my parents. So I packed my bag, packed my car, drove my car home to Santa Barbara and I never left. I moved in with my parents at the time and i started doing advisory work um against this backdrop of of everything going incredible and rebuilt my life around the thing that mattered most to me and i'm now you know here in santa barbara with uh with my with my now wife and daughter in the other room you know two miles from my parents two miles from my sister and her husband in you know it and having comfortably said i've you know i've been i've gone through it to know that you can but

33:04Billions Host:everyone pays this price. You just, you know, when you pay it, you don't know. Congrats. I mean, it's nice to see the way you've come through. And I think you're right. Like, most important thing down the line is always like your life, your health, and the rest is, of course, interesting and important. But still, I mean, yeah, now you're advising like tons of amazing companies. So I think you did well and that was maybe the path you needed. And talking about your advisory also, I remember I think you said AI could be the last technology humans ever invent. Can you explain a bit why you were saying this?

33:52If you believe, which I think is a reasonable belief.

33:56Zack Kass:And what I, what the line is, I think technology, AI may be the last technology that humans invent on our own. And it's, it's already looking like that will be true in many respects. I mean, if, if, if, if GPT 5.2 can solve a lot of reduced problems, these, these complex open-ended math problems, what technology are we ever going to invent again on our own? I mean, it would have to be, it would be an anomaly at this point for us to discover a new technology or to have some scientific breakthrough that wasn't aided by or done by artificial intelligence at this point. And that, that feels like a reason that, that used to feel like a hot take.

34:43Zack Kass:That feels like quite a reasonable take now. And that's super exciting because that puts us on a new trajectory of, of scientific discovery. And my part of, part of the reason I wrote the book and part of the reason that I live this life and part of the values that I, that I stand for is this idea that the purpose of technology is to allow humans to live a more full life, whatever that may be. right if i like if you and i were having this conversation a thousand years ago let's say we could have it a thousand years ago but you know if we were and i would like yeah do you just try to be happy you would be like well against the backdrop of of a lot of despair that's that's pretty callous of you to say right i mean searching for happiness in a world of dysentery and and and sort of you know starvation is is much is much harder and i think that we are approaching a a future where scientific discoveries and technological automation, principally, drive down the cost of goods and services and expand what we are capable of doing.

35:45Zack Kass:And then we will have to be forced to ask ourselves, why are we actually here? And the book, The Next Renaissance, the book that just came out, is an homage to John Maynard Keynes, the father of modern macroeconomics, who wrote in 1930, The Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren. and in this paper he writes and i quote i must now disembarrass myself to take flight into a future that i will certainly not live to see one in which humans may have solved the economic problem and be faced with something more profound so the modern the father of modern macroeconomics is proposing that technology will eventually accelerate to the point where we can house feed and care for every person on earth and then what and then we have to figure out why we're here and for me my own journey through ai my own journey in writing this book and now my journey today actually is sort of a microcosm for much of this which is once you've once you solve for what you need then then you actually have to find something greater and i think it's this i think it's a spiritual battle

36:51Billions Host:that human and me now faces and do you feel like this is uh the case with ai like do you feel like we are actually gonna you know solve from most of the people like the basic needs so they can actually like search for a higher level of consciousness if you want to call it that way and or do you do you feel like it's actually the opposite and that ai is creating like a gap that is getting bigger and bigger between the ones who are actually using technology and the one who actually don't?

37:26Zack Kass:Well, those are two different things. And I actually think part of the problem is that we don't ground the debates. Is the debate that the floor is rising? Because that shouldn't really be a debate. The floor globally is rising all the time. So being poor in the world is way less harsh than it was to be poor a hundred years ago or a thousand years ago. And this just sort of continues to be true that the Indian economic miracle, the Chinese economic miracle. I mean, billions of people are pulled out of poverty over the last 30 years because of automation and industrial farming and industrial agriculture.

37:59Zack Kass:And you don't have to like that we slaughter 80 billion animals a day, but you have to acknowledge that in order for us to feed everyone, we needed to arrive here. And the only way we can do that is by automating these slaughterhouses and doing all these other things. And so there is a, there's a cost, but you it's very hard to argue that it is that it has never been better to be to be poor or or on earth that being said and and and by the way people are even these statements can really bother people and so i try to talk about them economically but i also appreciate that like part of the reason that no one wants to not not know it that some people don't see this as a great moment is that we are overexposed to negative information that's the other thing i remind people constantly is that part of the reason that people have lost hope in the future is not because we don't have lots of reason for it.

38:47Zack Kass:It's because we never talk about it anymore. It's very unpopular to talk about how good things are getting to the point that I get a lot of vitriol online for being aloof because I talk about things that are getting better without acknowledging all the things that are breaking. And my point is there are plenty of things that are breaking. They're just often less broken than they used to be. Now, the other problem is, are we creating a bigger gap between the rich and everyone else. And that is true. Like the amount of influence that an individual can have on elections, et cetera, continues to be a huge problem.

39:22Zack Kass:And even though we have democracies, it does feel like a small percentage of the population actually control the outcomes of those democracies. So that is true. And that sort of has been true for quite some time. And it's something we should continue to point at things like campaign finance reform, etc i don't really care how wealthy elon musk is as long as he can't buy elections right it like the number of yachts he has doesn't bother me what bothers me is that he can buy elections or control media narratives or or jeff bezos or or the coke brothers or or anyone for that matter with with that much with that much money and i would also say that like when you start to look at this when you start to peel back why it is that people believe that we aren't going to have everything we need, that we aren't going to give everyone everything we need.

40:09Zack Kass:They can recognize that we have discretionary income beyond our great grandparents' comprehension. They can recognize that we've advanced so many things so far that even the idea that we would have, you know, the thing, you and I would have the things on our desk is sort of mind blowing to most people 50 years ago. Where people get really upset is when we talk about cost of living, standard cost of living. and that principally comes back to housing, healthcare, and education. And this is where I have to remind people that housing, healthcare, and education are not expensive and they are prohibitively expensive for too many people.

40:44Zack Kass:Let's be very clear. I want to make that so clear. But they are not prohibitively expensive for too many people because we don't have the technology to make them cheap. They are prohibitively expensive for many people because we choose not to. And one of the crusades I'm on is to help people see that we are not far from a self-driving Waymo taking you across Los Angeles, maybe in a flying car for$5. But a trip to the emergency room in the ambulance five blocks away might actually bankrupt you. And you look at these problems and you suddenly realize that it is a policy failure, not a technology one.

41:24Zack Kass:that the technology exists to give people the housing need. Technology exists to provide everyone an exceptional education. The technology exists to give everyone exceptional healthcare. We just aren't doing it. We've lost our way. And every generation's greatest privilege was to pass their luxuries to the next generation as commodities, and our ruling class broke the promise. And instead of pointing at technology and saying, this is only going to make matters worse, we should point at technology and say, finally, they won't have any excuse. Finally, the policymakers won't have a single excuse for why everything is prohibitively expensive for everyone except them.

42:02Zack Kass:They can live in these mansions. They can have this exceptional healthcare. They can send their kids to the best colleges and everyone else has to pick up scraps. And finally, people can say, well, now there's a reckoning and it's coming. I mean, it's clearly coming. People like Mondani are winning exclusively on cost of living and housing. He and I don't necessarily agree with the solution, but it is clearly the problem. And when I talk about technology, when I spouse technology as a means to make the world better, my big asterisk is as long as the policymakers see it as a tool to do so, as long as we leverage unmetered intelligence to unlock these gates and people like, well, how would that happen?

42:42Zack Kass:I'm like, well, look, robotics are going to drive down the cost of construction. They're going to drive down the cost to actually build. We've already seen this, right? You can pre-fab homes are like, I think like$100 a square foot now. So why don't we put them on every corner where we need to be built? Well, because permitting takes three years. Why did we stop building universities in the United States? And I went to Berkeley, acceptance rate was 10%. Today it's like 3%. I would not have gotten in today. Why? Well, we stopped building seats for students and we stopped building great American universities despite the fact that the United States kept growing.

43:17Zack Kass:so now we have a problem now we have to figure out how we how we can offer this to everyone and technology affords us that and and you and you look at the problem like you know the the health care problem it's like well what's going on here well we require that everyone come to a box we require that everyone pay for overpriced sort of like grossly um uh uh overwrought care when actually the problem sits so further upstream we just don't let companies actually provide good preventative care unless they're in the box. And this is why you see companies like Function Health taking off because people are finally like, oh, I can figure out or Pronovo.

43:53Zack Kass:Oh, I can finally figure out if there's something wrong with me and then I can actually start to solve my problems much further upstream. And even by the way, breakthroughs like GLP-1s are going to save hundreds of millions of lives, right? We are just, we are discounting what will happen to a population when it is no longer obese. And that is technology. Like we get to celebrate so many of these things, let's not forget that so much of our lives continue to get better, not worse, because of technology. And that this is probably not going to be an exception. As long as we put pressure on policymakers to do the right things, and as long as we avoid our sort of traditional traps, the addiction to the device, the addiction to gambling or porn or social media, these are the things that we can avoid to actually discover a panacea where everyone has what they need and can spend time with friends and family.

44:43Zack Kass:I mean, this is well within our grasp.

44:46Billions Host:And since you talk about policy and a bit politics, I'm curious to have your take on AI from a global standpoint. So typically, at first, I think the US were extremely dominant when it came to AI, and they are still definitely. But we're seeing models like DeepSeek being also like really strong competitors. So how do you see like the world and the different like models globally?

45:22Zack Kass:So if AI is a race, so first I think that the open source pressure to drive down cost has been a great thing. Like I think DeepSeek, I celebrated DeepSeek in January last year and I would celebrate it again and again. Like it is, regardless of how it was trained, we should always celebrate when a commodity gets less expensive and we should celebrate the people who make it so. Driving down the cost of inference is such an important task that will save a bunch of energy in the future and also guarantee access. I mean, you can run GBT 4.5 locally on your device now. That's thanks to all the work that the model compression and hardware updates have done.

46:18Zack Kass:If you, on a geopolitical basis, we talk about this in the book, is this North Star problem. Not everyone believes in the same sense of alignment. Not everyone wants the same thing with superintelligence. But my argument is that actually, if this is a race, it is a prize that will be shared equally. and whereas there are other prizes that are harder to be shared equally super intelligence leads to an exceptional new understanding of the known universe which almost certainly unlocks a bunch of shared value and what isn't necessarily shared is things like energy supply you know or or or resources so i sort of point at the ai race is actually something that like we all like i don't care if China comes up with a cure for cancer.

47:05Zack Kass:And I don't think you do either. I don't know many Americans who - As long as it's cured. I want these problems solved. What I think we need to do in the United States, if we acknowledge that we have political adversaries, if we acknowledge that we have a North Star problem, what the United States wants or sees as a panacea is not necessarily what other nations see as a panacea, then what we need to do is actually reinforce ourselves with other infrastructure, energy principally. We are losing the race to create more energy, natural resources, education, healthcare, housing, the tenants of a society that are good, that produce a really strong sense of national pride.

47:46Zack Kass:These are the things that we really need to focus on investing in so that we can actually make the most use of AGI when it arrives.

47:58Billions Host:When do you think it will arrive?

48:00Zack Kass:I think AGI is already here. I think we're sort of at AGI. But again, AGI is such a marketing term. There's no shared definition. So we're probably at AGI. We're a ways off from super intelligence, but you could argue we're at AGI.

48:19Billions Host:What's one problem you really want to see being solved and you feel like we are very close from solving it?

48:28Zack Kass:well when people are like why should i care about ai you know i get a lot of vitriol uh online from people who are like it's ai slop your ai slop this is all destroying the earth and i can remind them that we discovered our first antibiotic in 60 years recently because of ai i can remind them we split hiv out of dna recently because of ai i can remind them that baby KJ received the first custom gene therapy thanks to CRISPR and AI last year in May. And, but what I think actually has to happen is AI has to solve such a big pressing problem that no one can call it irrelevant. And I think it's either going to be something like fusion energy, where people actually see what unmetered energy looks like, or quantum computing, or ideally something even more tangible like cancer.

49:18Zack Kass:Like we cure a cancer with AI and the heads of the oncology research lab go on TV and say, we couldn't have done this without this technology. And then people realize it's not the app. It's not chat GBT that they are yelling at. It's actually unmetered intelligence. It's something way, way, way more profound.

49:37Billions Host:Okay. And in your book called The Next Renaissance, if you compare it to the… sounds way better it sounds way better when you say I can say the French way Renaissance so in the original like Renaissance the people who controlled like printing press like they got extremely rich and in the AI Renaissance like who do you think will win

50:08Zack Kass:I think everyone who so this is going to be a proliferation and diffusion of, of intelligence. And if you are, if your business gains when intelligence gets less expensive, then you're going to do really well. And for many people, this is novel science research. This is, um, you know, this is businesses that would do really well if they better understood the known universe. And, uh, and then businesses that will do less well are businesses that are used to sort of hoarding intelligence.

50:41Billions Host:And we'll sort of see how that shakes out. So when you look at different industries, where do you feel like there's going to be the biggest shift, if you had an example? Life sciences, healthcare, education.

50:55Zack Kass:I mean, it's just not close. We are going to see a renaissance of education over the next 10 years that is going to fundamentally change how parents, what parents expect the system to provide, how children are raised. And we are going to probably see the end of the industrial education system that we have practiced for 150 years at the cost of the soul of every child, right? Sitting for eight hours a day in a classroom, staring at a chalkboard is not what children are supposed to do. and we've we forgot we've totally forgotten and there are lots of solutions we write about tons of them and um and we are we are very close to i think a really magical moment in how we actually um and how we actually educate the next generation and to say nothing of how we how we care for them

51:51Billions Host:you have like a young daughter so in a in an ideal world how would you like her to to learn new things.

51:59Zack Kass:I want only for my daughter to love her friends and family and love nature. And my belief is if my wife and I can instill the importance of those two things, some of which are genetically predisposed and some of which are learned, then she will do really well. And my belief is that she is going to have tools and technology beyond our comprehension to explore the world. And I just want to make sure she cares about the right things and that she believes that she can't, that she has agency and personal responsibility to explore beyond our imagination today, a world that I think is going to continue to unfold in front of us.

52:37Billions Host:We're almost running out of time. So before saying goodbye, where can people follow you and where can people buy your book?

52:46Zack Kass:My website, ZachCast.com. I have a sub stack. That's where I really like to engage with people. I send weekly to bi-weekly updates on everything that's happening in AI my book The Next Renaissance AI and the Expansion of Human Potential I'm very proud of that and I have an Instagram the team will post clips from me social media makes me anxious so I'm not on there but it's the best way I know to engage with everyone who doesn't want to necessarily read my sub stack

53:12Billions Host:Awesome, thanks a lot Zach have an amazing day Thanks Gil

53:22All right.