#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI

28:03He's definitely a thoughtful guy.

28:08I think I kind of think it really is like always on a soul searching a really good way. Yes. Yeah. Also, he appreciates the power of silence. Also, I'm told he can be a silly guy, which I've never, I've never seen that. It's very sweet when that happens. I've never witnessed a silly Ilya, but I look forward to that as well. I was at a dinner party with him recently and he was playing with a puppy. And I, and he was like in a very silly move, very endearing. And I was thinking like, Oh, man, And this is like not the side of the Iliota, the world sees the most. So just to wrap up this whole saga, are you feeling good about the board structure about all of this and where it's moving?

28:50I feel great about the new board. In terms of the structure of OpenAI, I, one of the board's tasks is to look at that and see where we can make it more robust. We wanted to get new board members in place first, but we clearly learned a lesson about structure throughout this process. I don't have, I think, super deep things to say. It was a crazy, very painful experience. I think it was like a perfect storm of weirdness. It was like a preview for me of what's going to happen is the stakes get higher and higher. And the need that we have, like, robust governance structures and processes and people, I am kind of happy it happened when I did, but it was a shockingly painful thing to go through.

29:33Did it make you be more hesitant Is it interesting people? Yes. Just an impersonal person. Yes. I think I'm like an extremely trusting person. I have always had a life philosophy of, you know, like, don't worry about all of the paranoia. I don't worry about the edge cases. You know, you get a little bit screwed in exchange for getting to live with your guard down. And this was so shocking to me. I was so caught off guard that it has definitely changed. And I really don't like this. is definitely changed how I think about just like default trust of people and planning for the bad scenarios. You gotta be careful with that.

30:09Are you worried about becoming low -too -synical? Um, I'm not worried about becoming too cynical. I think I'm like the extreme opposite of a cynical person, but I'm worried about just becoming less of a default trust in person. I'm actually not sure which mode is best to operate in for a person that was developing a GI. I trust things are untrusting. So interesting journey you're on. But in terms of structure, see I'm more interested on the human level. Like how do you surround yourself with humans that are building cool shit, but also are making wise decisions? Because the more money you start making, the more power the thing has, the weirder people get.

30:51You know, I think you could like, you can make all kinds of comments about but the board members and the level of trust I should have had there or how I should have done things differently. But in terms of the team here, I think you'd have to give me a very good grade on that one. And I have just enormous gratitude and trust and respect for the people that I work with every day. And I think being surrounded with people like that is really important.

31:25our mutual friend Elon sued OpenAI. What he is the essence of what he's criticizing to what degree does he have a point to a degree is he wrong. I don't know what it's really about. We started off just thinking we're gonna be a research lab and having no idea about how this technology was gonna go. It's hard to go back and really remember what it was like then. But before language models were a big deal, this was before we had any idea about an API or selling access to a chatbot. As before we had any idea, we were going to productize it all. So we're like, we're just going to try to do research and we don't really know what we're going to do with that.

32:09I think with like many new, fundamentally new things, you start fumbling through the dark and you make some assumptions, most of which turn out to be wrong. And then it became clear that we were going to need to do different things and also have huge amounts more capital. So we said, okay, well, the structure doesn't quite work for that. How do we patch the structure? And then patch it again and patch it again and you end up with something that does look kind of. I brought racing to say the least, but we got here gradually with, I think, reasonable decisions at each point along the way. And doesn't mean I wouldn't do it totally differently if we could go back now with an Oracle, but you don't get the Oracle at the time.

32:54But anyway, in terms of what Elon's real motivations here are, I don't know. To agree your member, what was the response that OpenAI gave in the blog post? Can you summarize it? Oh, we just said, like, you know, Elon said this set of things. Here's our characterization. Here's this sort of, not our characterization. Here's like the characterization of how this went down. We tried to like not make it emotional and just sort of say, like, here's the history. I do think there's a degree of mischaracterization from Elon here about one of the points you just made, which is the degree of uncertainty ahead of the time.

33:45You guys are a bunch of like a small group of researchers crazily talking about AGI when everybody's laughing at that thought. Wasn't that long go Elon was crazily talking about launching rockets. Yeah. When people were laughing at that thought, uh, so I think he'd have more empathy for this. I mean, I do think that there's personal stuff here that there was a split that open AI and a lot of amazing people here chose the part ways of Elon. So there's a person. He launched those depart ways. Can you describe that exactly the choosing to port ways? He thought OpenAI was going to fail. He wanted total control to sort of turn it around.

34:32We wanted to keep going in the direction that now has become OpenAI. He also wanted Tesla to be able to build an AGI effort at various times he wanted to make OpenAI into a for profit company that he could have control of or have it merge with Tesla. We didn't want to do that and he decided to leave which that's fine. So you're saying, and that's one of the things that the blog post says is that he wanted OpenAI to be basically acquired by Tesla in the same way that, or maybe something similar or maybe something more dramatic than the partnership with Microsoft. My memory is the proposal. It's just like, yeah, get acquired by Tesla and have Tesla have full control over it.

35:14I'm pretty sure that's what it was. So what is the word open in open AI mean to Elon at the time? Ilya has talked about this in the email exchanges and all this kind of stuff. What does it mean to you at the time? What does it mean to you now? I would definitely pick a different speaking of going back with an Oracle. I'd pick a different name. One of the things that I think open AI is doing that is the most important of everything that we're doing is putting powerful technology in the hands of people for free as a public good. Not we're not, you know, we don't run ads on our free version. We don't monetize it in other ways.

35:54We just say it's part of our mission. We want to put increasingly powerful tools in the hands of people for free and get them to use them. And I think that kind of open is really important to our mission. I think if you give people great tools and teach them to use them or don't even teach them they'll figure it out and let them go build an incredible future for each other with that. That's a big deal. So if we can keep putting like free or low cost or free and low cost powerful AI tools out in the world, I'm going to it's a huge deal for how we fulfill the mission. Open source or not. Yeah, I think we should open source some stuff and not other stuff.

36:33It does become this religious battle line where nuance is hard to have, but I think nuance is the right answer. So he said change your name to close AI and I'll drop the lawsuit. I mean, is it going to become this battle ground in the land of memes about the name? that speaks to this seriousness with which Elon means the lawsuit and uh... yeah I mean that's like an astonishing thing to say I think like... Well I don't think the lawsuit may maybe correct me if I'm wrong but I don't think the lawsuit is legally serious it's more to make a point about the future of AGI in the company that's currently leading the way.

37:22So look, I mean, Grock had not open sourced anything until people pointed out it was a little bit hypocritical and then he announced that Grock all open sourced things this week. I don't think open source versus not is what this is really about for him. Well, we'll talk about open source and not I do think maybe criticize the competition is great. Just talking a little shit is great, but friendly competition versus like that person hate lawsuits. Look, I think this whole thing is like, unbecoming of a builder, and I respect Elon as one of the great builders of our time. And I know he knows what it's like to have like haters attack him and it makes me extra sad he's doing it.

38:03Poss. Yeah, he's one of the greatest builders of all time, potentially the greatest builder of all time. It makes me sad. I think it makes a lot of people sad. Like, there's a lot of people who really looked up to him for a long time and said this, I said, you know, in some interview or something that I missed the oldy long and the number of messages I got being like that exactly encapsulates how I feel. I think he should just win. He should just make X, GROC beat GPT and then GPT beats GROC and it's just a competition and it's beautiful for everybody. But on the question of open source, do you think there's a lot of companies playing with this idea?

38:40Yeah, it's quite interesting. I would say meta, surprisingly, has led the way on this. Or like at least took the first step in the game of chess of like really open sourcing the model. Of course, it's not the state of the art model, but open sourcing llama. Google is flirting with the idea of open sourcing a smaller version. Have you, what are the pros and cons of open sourcing? Have you played around with this idea? Yeah, I think there is definitely a place for open source models, particularly smaller models that people can run locally. I think there's huge demand for. I think there will be some open source models, there will be some close source models.

39:22It won't be unlike other ecosystems in that way. I listened to all in podcast talking about this, this loss, you know, that kind of stuff. And they were more concerned about the precedent of going from nonprofit to this cap for profit. what precedent sets for other startups? I don't. I would heavily discourage any startup that was thinking about starting as a nonprofit and adding like a for -profit arm later, I'd heavily discourage them from doing that. I don't think we'll set a precedent here. Okay, so most startups should go just... For sure. And again, if we knew what was gonna happen, we would have done that too.

39:58Well, like in theory, if you like dance beautifully here, you can, there's like some tax incentives or whatever. But I don't think that's like how most people think about these things. Just not possible to save a lot of money for startup if you do it this way. No, I think there's like laws that would make that pretty difficult. What do you hope this goes with Elon? Well, this, this tension, this dance, what do you hope this? Like if we go one, two, three years from now, you're a relationship with him on a personal level too. Like friendship, friendly competition, just all this kind of stuff.

40:37Yeah, I really respect Elon.

40:46And I hope that years in the future we have an amicable relationship. Yeah, I hope you guys have an amicable relationship like this month. And just compete and win and explore these ideas together. I do suppose there's competition for talent or whatever, but It should be friendly competition. Just build build cool shit And Elon is pretty good at building cool shit, but so are you So speaking of cool shit Sora there's like a million questions I could ask first of all it's amazing It truly is amazing on a product level, but also just under philosophical levels So let me just technical slash philosophical ask, what do you think it understands about the world more or less than GPT for for example, the world model when you train on these patches versus language tokens?

41:50I think all of these models understand something more about the world model than most of us don't understand or don't get right. It's easy to like look at the weaknesses, see through the veil and say, ah, this is just, this is all fake, but it's not all fake, it's just some of it works and some of it doesn't work. Like, I remember when I started first watching store videos and I would see like a person walk in front of something for a few seconds and include it and then walk away and the same thing was still there. I was like, ah, it's pretty good. Or there's examples where like the underlying physics looks so well represented over a lot of steps in a sequence.

42:32It's like, oh, this is quite impressive. But fundamentally, these models are just getting better and that will keep happening. If you look at the trajectory from Dali 1 to 2 to 3 to Sora, there are a lot of people that would dunk on each verse and say, it can't do this, it can't do that. And look at it now. The thing you just mentioned is that occlusions is basically modeling the physics of the three -dimensional physics of the world sufficiently well to capture those kinds of things. Well, or like, yeah, maybe you can tell me in order to deal with occlusions, what does the world model need to?

43:10Yeah, so what I would say is it's doing something to deal with occlusions really well. What I represent that it has a great underlying 3D model of the world. It's a little bit more stretch. But can you get there through just these kinds of two -dimensional training data approaches? It looks like this approach is going to go surprisingly far. I don't want to speculate too much about what limits it will surround and what it won't, but what are some interesting limitations of the system that you've seen? I mean, there's been some fun ones you've posted. There's all kinds of fun. I mean, like, you know, cats, sprouting, an extra limit random points in a video.

43:44I like pick what you want, but there's still a lot of problem, a lot of weaknesses. Do you think it's a fundamental flaw of the approach or is it just bigger model or better technical details or better data, more data is going to solve the cats broadening issues? I would say yes to both. I think there is something about the approach which just seems to feel different from how we think and learn and whatever. And then also I think it'll about it with scale. Like I mentioned, LLMs have tokens, text tokens, and Sora has visual patches. So it converts all visual data, a diverse kinds of visual data, videos and images into patches.

44:26Is the training to the degree you can say fully self -supervised? There's some manual labeling going on, like what's the involvement of humans and all this? I mean, without saying anything specific about the SOAR approach, we use lots of human data in our work, but not internet scale data. So lots of humans, lots is a complicated word. I think lots is a fair word in this case. Yeah, it doesn't because to me, lots, like listen, I'm an introvert. When I hang out with like three people, that's a lot of people. Four people, that's a lot. But I suppose you mean more than more than three people work on labeling the data for these models.

45:10Yeah. Right. But fundamentally, there's a lot of self -supervised learning because you mentioned in the technical report is internet scale data. That's another beautiful, it's like poetry. So it's a lot of data that's not human label. It's like it's self -supervised in that way. And then the question is how much data is there on the internet that could be used and that it's conducive to this kind of self -supportized way. If only we knew the details of the self -supportized. Do you have you considered opening it up a little more in details? We have. For you mean for source specifically? Source specifically, the truth.

45:51Because it's so interesting that like can this, can the same magic of LLM's now start moving towards visual data and what does that take to do that? I mean, it looks to me like, yes, but we have more work to do. Sure. What are the dangers? Why are you concerned about releasing the system? What are some possible dangers of this? I frankly speak in one thing we have to do before releasing the system is just like get it to work at a level of efficiency that will deliver the scale people are going to want it from this so that I don't want to like downplay that. And there's still a ton ton of work to do there.

46:33But you know, you can imagine like issues with deep fakes, misinformation, like we try to be a thoughtful company about what we put out into the world. And it doesn't take much thought to think about the ways this can go badly. There's a lot of tough questions here. You're dealing in a very tough space. Do you think training AI should be or is fair use under copyright law? I think the question behind that question is do people who create valuable data deserve to have some way that they get compensated for use of it? And that I think the answer is yes. I don't know yet what the answer is. People have proposed a lot of different things.

47:21We've I would like to be able to opt out of people generating art in my style and be if they do generate art in my style I'd like to have some economic model associated with that Yeah, it's that transition from CDs to nephs or to Spotify But figure out some kind of model changes, but people have got to get paid Well, there should be some kind of incentive if we zoom out even more For humans to keep doing cool shit everything I worry about humans are gonna do cool shit and society is going to find some way to reward it. I, that seems pretty hardwired. We want to create, we want to be useful. We want to like achieve status in whatever way.

48:01That's not going anywhere, I don't think. But the reward might not be monetary, financial. It might be like fame and celebration of other cool, maybe financial in some other way. Again, I don't think we've seen like the last evolution of how the economic system's going to work. Yeah, but artists and creators are worried When they see Sora, they're like, holy shit. Sure, artists were also super worried when photography came out. Yeah. And then photography became a new art form and people might a lot of money taking pictures. And I think things like that will keep happening. People will use the new tools in new ways.

48:36If we just look on YouTube or something like this, how much of that will be using Sora like AI generated content, do you think, in the next five years? People talk about how many jobs they are going to do in five years. And the framework that people have is what percentage of current jobs are just going to be totally replaced by some AI doing the job. The way I think about it is not what percent of jobs AI will do, but what percent of tasks will AI do in over what time horizon. So if you think of all of the like five second tasks in the economy, the five minute tasks, the five hour tasks, maybe even the five day tasks, how many of those can AI do.

49:15and I think that's a way more interesting, impactful, important question than how many jobs AI can do because it is a tool that will work at increasing levels of sophistication and over a longer time horizons for more and more tasks and let people operate at a higher level of abstraction. So maybe people are way more efficient at the job they do. And at some point, that's not just a quantitative change, but it's a qualitative one, two, about the kinds of problems you can keep in your head. I think that for videos on YouTube, it'll be the same. Many videos, maybe most of them, will use AI tools in the production, but they'll still be fundamentally driven by a person thinking about putting it together, you know, doing parts of it, sort of directing and running it.

50:04Yeah, it's so interesting. I mean, it's scary, but it's interesting to think about. Well, I tend to believe that humans like to watch other humans or other human lives. Humans really care about other humans a lot. Yeah. If there's a cooler thing that's more that's better than a human. Humans care about that for like two days and then they go back to humans. That seems very deeply wired. It's the whole chest thing. Oh, yeah, but now let's everybody keep playing. And let's ignore the elephant in the room that humans are really bad at chess relative to AI systems. We still run races and cars are much faster.

50:40I mean, this is like a lot of examples. Yeah. And maybe you'll just be tooling like in a Adobe suite type of way where you can just make videos much easier at all that kind of stuff. Listen, I hate being in front of the camera. If I can figure out a way to not be in front of the camera, I would love it. Unfortunately, it would take a while like that Generating faces it's getting there but generating faces in video format is tricky when it's specific people versus generic people Let me ask you about GPT -4 There's so many questions first of all also amazing It's looking back. It'll probably be this kind of historic pivotal moment with 35 and 4 which has you BT Maybe five will be the pivotal moment.

51:27I don't know Hard to say that looking forwards. We never know. That's the annoying thing about the future. It's hard to predict But for me looking back GPT4 Chad Gbt is pretty down impressive like historically impressive So allow me to ask what's been the most impressive capabilities of GPT4 to you and GPT4 turbo I think it kind of sucks Typical human also that needs to an awesome thing No, I think it is an amazing thing, but relative to where we need to get to and where I believe we will get to, at the time of GPC -3 people are like, oh, this is amazing, this is this like marvel of technology and it is, it was.

52:18But now we have GPC -4 and look at GPC -3 and you're like, that's unimaginably horrible. I expect that the delta between 5 and 4 will be the same as between 4 and 3. And I think it is our job to live a few years in the future and remember that the tools we have now are going to kind of suck looking backwards at them. And that's how we make sure the future is better. What are the most glorious ways in that GBT4 sucks? Meaning what are the best things it can do? or the best things you can do and the limits of those best things that allow you to say it sucks, therefore gives you an inspiration and hope for the future.

53:02You know, one thing I've been using it for more recently is sort of like a brainstorming partner. Yeah. And there's a glimmer of something amazing in there. I don't think it gets, you know, when people talk about it, what it does. They're like, ah, it helps me code more productively, it helps me write more faster and better. It helps me translate from this language to another. All these like amazing things. But there's something about the creative brainstorming partner. I need to come up with a name for this thing. I need to think about this problem in different way. I'm not sure what to do here.

53:44But I think it gives a glimpse of something I hope to see more of. One of the other things that you can see like a very small glimpse of is when I can help on longer horizon tasks, you know, break down some of the multiple steps, maybe like execute some of those steps, search the internet, write code, whatever, put that together. When that works, which is not very often, it's like very magical. The iterative back and forth with the human. It works a lot for me. What do you mean? I mean, it's way better to back and forth the human it can get more often. What it can go do like a 10 step problem on its own.

54:19Oh. Doesn't work for that too often. Sometimes. I had multiple layers of abstraction. Do you mean just sequential? Both. Like, you know, to break it down and then do things at different layers of abstraction and put them together. Look, I don't want to, I don't want to like downplay the accomplishing of GPT -4. But I don't want to overstate it either. And I think this point that we are on an exponential curve, we will look back relatively soon at GPT -4 like we look back at GPT -3 now That said I mean Chad GPT Was the transition to where people like Started to believe it. There was a kind of There is an uptick of believing now internally.

55:01I don't mean I perhaps there's believers here But I mean and in that sense I do think it'll be a moment where a lot of the world went from not believing to believing That was more about the chat GBT interface and by the interface and product, I also mean the post training of the model and how we tune it to be helpful to you and how to use it than the underlying model itself. How much of those two, each of those things are important, the underlying model and the RLHF or something of that nature that tunes it to be more compelling to the human, more effective and productive for the human. I mean they're both super important but the RLHF, the post training step, the little wrapper of things that from a compute perspective, little wrapper of things that we do on top of the base model even though it's a huge monowork, that's really important to say nothing of the product that we build around it.

56:01In some sense, we did have to do two things. We had to invent the underlying technology. And then we had to figure out how to make it into a product people would love, which is not just about the actual product work itself, but this whole other step of how you align and make it useful and how you make the scale work where a lot of people can use it at the same time, all that kind of stuff. And that. But you know, that was like a known difficult thing, like we knew we were going to have to scaled up, we had to go do two things that had like never been done before. They were both like, I would say quite significant achievements.

56:41And then a lot of things like scaling it up that other companies have had to do before. How does the the context window? I've gone from 8k to 128k tokens compare from the from GPT for to to GPT for turbo. People like long, most people don't need all the way to 128, most of the time, although, you know, if we dream into the distant future, we'll have like way distant future, we'll have like context length of several billion, you will feed in all of your information, all of your history over time, and it'll just get to know you better and better, and that'll be great. For now, the way people use these models, they're not doing that, and you know, people sometimes post in a paper or, you know, a significant fraction of a code repository, whatever, But most usage of the models is not using the long context most of the time.

57:35I like that this is your I have a dream speech. One day you'll be judged by the full context of your character or of your whole lifetime. That's interesting. That's part of the expansion that you're hoping for is a greater and greater context. There's, I saw this internet clip once I'm going to get the numbers wrong, but it was like Bill Gates talking about the amount of memory on some early computer, maybe 64, maybe 60, 40, case, something like that. And most of it was used for the screen buffer. And he just couldn't, it seemed genuine, I just couldn't imagine that the world would eventually need gigabytes of memory in a computer, or terapid's memory in a computer.

58:18And you always do. Or you always do just need to follow the exponential of technology. you know, and we're going to like, we will find out how to use better technology. So I can't really imagine what it's like right now for context links to go out to the billion someday. And they might not literally go there, but effectively it'll feel like that. But I know we'll use it and really not want to go back once we have it. Yeah, even saying billions, 10 years from now might seem dumb because it'll be like trillions upon trillions. Sure. There'll be some kind of breakthrough. that will effectively feel like infinite context.

58:56But even 120, I have to be honest, I haven't pushed it to that. Maybe putting it into our books or parts of books and so on. Papers. What is the mentioning use cases of GPT -4 that you've seen? The thing that I find most interesting is not any particular case that we can talk about those, but it's people who kind of like, this is mostly younger people, but people who use it as their default start for any kind of knowledge work task. Yeah. And it's the fact that it can do a lot of things reasonably well. You can use GPTV, you can use it to help you write code, you can use it to help you do search, you can use it like edit a paper.

59:34The most interesting thing to me is the people who just use it as the start of their workflow. I do as well for many things. Like I use it as a reading partner for reading books. It helps me think their ideas, especially when the books are classic, so it's really well written about. It actually is as I find it often to be significantly better than even like Wikipedia on the well covered topics. It's somehow more balanced and more nuanced or maybe it's me, but it inspires me to think deeper than a Wikipedia article does. I'm not exactly sure what that is. You mentioned like this collaboration. I'm not sure where the magic is.

1:00:11If it's in here or if it's in there or if it's somewhere in between, I'm not sure. But one of the things that concerns me for knowledge task when I start with GBT is I'll usually have to do fact checking after, like check that it didn't come up with fake stuff. How do you figure that out? That GBT can come up with fake stuff that sounds really convincing. So how do you ground it in truth? That's obviously an area of intense interest for us. I think it's going to get a lot better with upcoming versions, but we'll have to work on it and we're not going to have it all solved this year. Well, the scary thing is, I guess, it gets better.

1:00:56You start not doing the fact checking more and more, right? I move two minds about that. I think people are much more sophisticated users of technology than we often give them credit for. And people seem to really understand that GPD, any of these models, hallucinate some of the time and if it's mission critically, you got to check it. Except journalists don't seem to understand that. I've seen journalists half -assedly just using GPT -4. It's of the long list of things I'd like to dunk on journalists for. This is not my top criticism of them. Well, I think the bigger criticism is perhaps the pressures and the incentives of being a journalist is that you have to work really quickly and this is a shortcut.

1:01:35I would love our society to incentivize like... I would too. a long, like a journalist, journalistic efforts that take days and weeks and rewards great in depth journalism. Also journalism that presents stuff in a balanced way where it's like celebrates people while criticizing them even though the criticism is the thing that gets clicks and making shit up also gets clicks and headlines that mischaracterize completely. I'm sure you have a lot of people dunking on, well all that drama probably We got a lot of clicks. Probably did. And that's a bigger problem about human civilization. I'd love to see solidists where we celebrate a bit more.

1:02:18You've given Chad G .P .T. the ability to have memories. You've been playing with that about previous conversations. And also the ability to turn off memory, which I wish I could do that sometimes. Just turn on and off depending, I guess sometimes alcohol can do that. but not optimally I suppose. What have you seen through that, like playing around with that idea of remembering conversations or not? We're very early in our explorations here, but I think what people wonder, at least what I want for myself, is a model that gets to know me and gets more useful to me over time. This is an early exploration.

1:02:58I think there's like a lot of other things to do, but that's what we'd like to head. And you'd like to use a model and over the course of your life or use a system, there would be many models. And over the course of your life, it gets better and better. Yeah, how hard is that problem? Because right now it's more like remembering little factoids and preferences and so on. What about remembering, like don't you want G .P .T. to remember all the shit you went through in November and all the drama and then you go, yeah, yeah. Because right now you're clearly blocking it out a little bit. It's not just that I want it to remember that.

1:03:31I want it to integrate the lessons of that and remind me in the future what to do differently or what to watch out for. And we all gain from experience over the course of our lives, varying degrees, and I like my AI agent to gain with that experience too. So if we go back and let ourselves imagine that, you know, trains and trains of context length, if I can put every conversation I've ever had with anybody in my life in there, if I can have all of my emails and put out like all of my input output in the context when they're every time I ask a question, that'd be pretty cool, I think. Yeah, I think they'll be very cool.

1:04:17People sometimes will hear that and be concerned about privacy. Is there, what do you think about Well, that aspect of it, the more effective the AI becomes it really integrating all the experiences and all the data that happened to you and give you advice. I think the right answer there is just user choice. You know, anything I want, strictly from the record for my AI agent, I want to be able to like take out if I don't want to remember anything I want that to. You and I may have different opinions about where on that privacy utility, trade off for own AI you want to be, which is totally fine.

1:04:52But I think the answer is just like really easy user choice. But there should be some high level of transparency from a company about the user choice. Because sometimes companies in the past have been kind of shady about like, yeah, it's kind of presumed that we're collecting all your data and we're using it for a good reason for advertisement and so on. But there's not a transparency about the details of that. That's totally true. You mentioned earlier that I'm blocking out the November stuff. I'm teasing you. Well, I mean, I think it was a very traumatic thing and it did immobilize me for a long period of time.

1:05:30Definitely the hardest work that I've had to do was just keep working that period because I had to try to come back and put the pieces together while I was just in shock and pain and nobody really cares about that. I mean, the team gave me a pass and I was not working on my normal level, but there was a period where I was just like, it was really hard to have to do both. But I kind of woke up on morning and I was like, this was a horrible thing that happened to me. I think I could just feel like a victim forever. Or I can say this is like the most important work I'll have to touch in my life and I need to get back to it.

1:06:07And it doesn't mean that I've repressed it because sometimes I like wake from the middle thinking about it, but I do feel like an obligation to keep moving forward. Well, that's beautifully said, but there could be some lingering stuff in there, like what I would be concerned about is that trusting, I mentioned, that being paranoid about people as opposed to just trusting everybody or most people like using you got, it's a tricky He danced for sure. I mean, because I've seen in my part time explorations, I've been diving deeply into the Zalansk administration, the Putin administration and the dynamics there in wartime in a very highly stressful environment.

1:06:56And what happens is distrust and you isolate yourself both. And you start to not see the world clearly. And that's a concern. That's a human concern. You seem to have taken an enshrine and kind of Learned the good lessons and felt the law and let the love energize you Which is great, but still can linger in there There's just some questions. I would love to ask your intuition about what's GPT able to do and not So it's allocating approximately the same model compute for each token and generates is there room there in this kind of approach to slower thinking, sequential thinking. I think there will be a new paradigm for that kind of thinking.

1:07:41Will it be similar like architecturally as what we're seeing now with all limbs? Is it a layer on top of the all limbs? I can imagine many ways to implement that. I think that's less important than the question you were getting at, which is do we need a way to do a slower kind of thinking where the answer doesn't have to get like you know it's like like I guess like spiritually you could say that you want an AI to be able to think harder about a harder problem and answer more quickly about an easier problem and the thing that will be important. Is that like a human thought that we're just having you should be able to think hard?

1:08:19Is that the wrong intuition? I suspect that's a reason in one tuition. Interesting. So it's not possible once the GPT gets like GPT seven, which is being said to be able to see, you know, here's, here's the proof of formalist. It seems to me like you want to be able to allocate more compute to harder problems. Like it seems to me that a system knowing, if you ask a system like that, prove from us last theorem versus what's today's date, unless it already knew and had memorized the answer to the proof, assuming it's got to go figure that out, seems like that will take more compute. But can it look like a basically LLL I'm talking to yourself that kind of thing.

1:09:11Maybe I mean there's a lot of things that you could imagine working. What like what the right or the best way to do that will be we don't know. This does make me think of the mysterious the lore behind Q star. What's this mysterious Q star project? Is it also in the same nuclear facility? There is no nuclear facility. That's what a person with a nuclear facility always says. I would love to have a secret nuclear facility. There is someone. All right. Maybe someday. Someday? All right. One can dream. Open AI is not a good company keeping secrets. It would be nice. We're like been plagued by a lot of leaks.

1:09:56It would be nice if we were able to have something like that. Can you speak to what QStar is? We are not ready to talk about that. See, but an answer like that means there's something to talk about. It's very mysterious. I mean, we work on all kinds of research.

1:10:14We have said for a while that we think better reasoning in these systems is an important direction that we'd like to pursue. We haven't cracked the code yet. We're very interested in it. Is there going to be moments, Q -star or otherwise, where there's going to be leaps similar to Tad GPT, where you're like, that's a good question. What do I think about that?

1:10:51It's interesting. To me, it all feels pretty continuous. This is kind of a theme that you're saying. There's a gradual, you're basically gradually going up an exponential slope. But from an outsider perspective, for me, just watching it, it does feel like there's leaps. But to you, there isn't. I do wonder if we should have... So, you know, part of the reason that we deploy the way we do is that we think we call it iterative deployment. We rather than go build and secret until we got all the way to GPT -5, we decided to talk about GPT -1, 2, 3, and 4. And part Part of the reason there is I think AI and surprise don't go together.

1:11:30And also the world, people, institutions, whatever you want to call it, need time to adapt and think about these things. And I think one of the best things that OpenAI has done is this strategy. And we get the world to pay attention to the progress, to take AGI seriously, to think about what systems and structures and governance we want in place before we're like under the gun and have to make a rest decision. I think that's really good. But the fact that people like you and others say, you still feel like they're these leaps makes me think that maybe we should be doing our releasing even more iteratively.

1:12:07I don't know what that would mean. I don't have any answer ready to go. But like, our goal is not to have shock updates to the world. The opposite. Yeah, for sure. More iterative would be amazing. I think that's just beautiful for everybody. But that's what we're trying to do. That's like our state of the strategy. And I think we're I'm not missing the mark. So maybe we should think about, we're at least in GPT -5 in a different way or something like that. Yeah, 4 .71, 4 .72. But people tend to like to celebrate. People celebrate birthdays. I don't know if you know humans, but they kind of have these milestones.

1:12:40I do know some humans. People do like milestones. I totally get that. I think we like milestones too. It's like fun to say, declared victory on this one and go start the next thing. But yeah, I feel like we're somehow getting this a little bit wrong. So, one is GPT -5 coming out again? I don't know. That's the honest answer. Oh, that's the honest answer. Is it blink twice if it's this year?

1:13:13I also, we will release an amazing model this year. I don't know what we'll call it. But so that goes to the question of like, what's the way we release this thing? We'll release over in the coming months, many different things. I think that'd be very cool. I think before we talk about like a GPT -5 model called that or not called that or a little bit worse or a little bit better than what you'd expect from a GPT -5, I don't have a lot of other important things to release. first. I don't know what to expect from GPT -5. You're making me nervous and excited. What are some of the biggest challenges in bottlenecks to overcome for whatever ends up being called, but let's call it GPT -5.

1:14:02Just interesting to ask, is it on the compute side, is it on the technical side? Always all of these, I was, you know, what's the one big unlock? Is it just a bigger computer? Is it like a new secret is it something else. It's all of these things together, like the thing that opening I think does really well. This is actually an original Iliocote that I'm going to butcher, but it's something like we multiply 200 medium sized things together into one giant thing. So there's this distributed cost and innovation happening. Yeah. So even on the technical side, like, yes, I actually on the technical side.

1:14:41So even like detailed approaches, like detailed aspects of our eighth. How does that work with different disparate teams and so on? How do they, how do the medium sized things become one whole giant transformer? How does this, there's a few people who are after like think about putting the whole thing together, but a lot of people try to keep most of the picture in their head. Well, like the individual teams, individual contributors tried to get a high level. Yeah. You don't know exactly how every piece works of course, but one thing I generally believe is that it's sometimes useful to zoom out and look at the entire map.

1:15:15And I think this is true for like a technical problem. I think this is true for like innovating in business. But things come together in surprising ways and having an understanding of that whole picture. Even if most of the time you're operating in the weeds in one area pays off with surprising insights. In fact, one of the things that I used to have, and I think was super valuable, was I used to have like a good map of all of the frontiers in the tech industry. And I could sometimes see these connections or new things that were possible that if I were only deep in one area, I wouldn't be able to have the idea for it because I wouldn't have all the data.

1:16:01And I don't really have that much anymore. I'm like super deep now. But I know that it's a valuable thing. You're not the man he used to be. So, a very different job now than what I used to have. Speaking of zooming out, let's zoom out to another cheeky thing, but profound thing perhaps that you said, you tweeted about needing $7 trillion. I did not tweet about that. I never said like, We're raising $7 trillion. That's somebody else. Yeah. But you said, fuck it, maybe eight, I think. OK, I mean, once there's misinformation out in the world. Are you mean, but misinformation may have a foundation of insight there.

1:16:47Look, I think compute is going to be the currency of the future. I think it will be maybe the most precious commodity in the world. And I think we should be investing heavily to make a lot more compute. compute is it's an unusual I think it's going to be an unusual market. You know people think about the market for like chips for mobile phones or something like that and you can say that okay there's eight billion people in the world maybe seven billion of them have phones maybe they are six billion let's say they upgrade every two years so the market per year is three billion system on the chip for smartphones.

1:17:28And if you make 30 billion, you will not sell 10 times as many phones because most people have one phone.

1:17:36Well, compute is different. Intelligence is going to be more like energy or something like that where the only thing that I think makes sense to talk about is at price X, the world will use this much compute and it price Y, the world we'll use this much compute. Because if it's really cheap, I'll have it like reading my email all day, like giving me suggestions about what I maybe should think about at work on and trying to care cancer. And if it's really expensive, maybe I'll only use it and will only use a try to care cancer. So I think the world is gonna want a tremendous amount of compute. And there's a lot of parts of that that are hard.

1:18:13Energy is the hardest part. Building data centers is also hard, the supply chain is harder than of course, fabricating enough chips is hard. But this seems to me where things are going. Like we're gonna want an amount of compute that's just hard to reason about right now. How do you solve the energy puzzle? Nuclear. That's what I believe. Fusion? That's what I believe. Nuclear fusion. Yeah. Who's gonna solve that? I think Helion's doing the best work, but I'm happy there's like a race for fusion right now. Nuclear efficient, I think, is also quite amazing. And I hope as a world we can reinbrace that.

1:18:48It's really sad to me how the history of that went and hope we get back to it in a meaningful way. So it's a part of the puzzle's nuclear vision, like nuclear reactors as we currently have them. And a lot of people are terrified because it's Chernobyl and so on. Well, I think we should make new reactors. I think it's just like it's a shame that industry kind of ground to a halt. And what just mass hysteria is how you explain the halt? Yeah. I don't know if you know humans, but that's one of the dangers, that's one of the security threats for nuclear vision is, humans seem to be really afraid of it.

1:19:24And that's something we have to incorporate into the calculus of it. So we have to kind of win people over and to show how safe it is. I worry about that for AI. I think some things are going to go theatrically wrong with AI. I don't know what the percent chances that I eventually get shot, but it's not zero. Oh, like we want to stop this. Maybe. What do you decrease the theatrical nature of it? You know, I've already started to hear rumblings because I do talk to people on both sides of the political spectrum. Here rumblings were going to be politicized. AI is going to be politicized. It really worries me because it's like maybe the right is against AI and the left with this foieie because it's going to help the people or whatever the narrative of the formulation is that really worries me.

1:20:18And then the theatrical nature of it can be leveraged fully. How do you fight that? I think it will get caught up in like left versus right wars. I don't know exactly what that's going to look like, but I think that's just what happens with anything of consequence, unfortunately. What I meant more about theatrical risks is like, hey, I was going to have, I believe, We've tremendously more good consequences than bad ones, but it is going to have bad ones. And there will be some bad ones that are bad, but not theatrical. You know, like a lot more people have died of air pollution than nuclear reactors, for example.

1:20:59But we worry, most people worry more about living next to a nuclear reactor than a coal plant. But something about the way we're wired is that although there's many different kinds of risks we have to confront. The ones that make a good climax scene of a movie carry much more weight with us than the ones that are very bad over a long period of time, but on a slow burn. Well, that's why truth matters and hopefully AI can help us see the truth of things to have balance, to understand what are the actual risks or the actual dangers of things in the world. What are the pros and cons of the competition in this space and competing with Google, Meta, XAI, and others.

1:21:42I think I have a pretty straight forward answer to this. Maybe I can think of more nuance later, but the pros seem obvious, which is that we get better products and more innovation, faster and cheaper, and all the reasons competition is good. And the con is that I think if we're not careful, it could lead to an increase in sort of an arms race that I'm nervous about. Do you feel the pressure of the rosaries like in some negative? Definitely in some ways for sure. We spend a lot of time talking about the need to prioritize safety. And I've said for like a long time that I think if you think of a quadrant of slow timelines to the start of AGI long timelines and then a short takeoff or a fast takeoff, I think short timeline slow takeoff is the safest quadrant and the one I'd most like us to be in.

1:22:38But I do want to make sure we get that slow takeoff. Part of the problem I have with this kind of slight beef with Elon is that their silos are created and it is a post -collaboration on the safety aspect of all of this. It tends to go into silos and closed open source perhaps in the model. Elon says at least that he cares a great deal about AI safety and is really worried about it and I assume that he's not going to race unsafely. Yeah, but collaboration here I think is really beneficial for everybody on that front. Not really the thing he's most known for. Well, he is known for caring about humanity and humanity benefits from collaboration.

1:23:19And so there's always attention and incentives and motivations. In the end, I do hope humanity prevails. I was thinking someone just reminded me the other day about how the day that he got a extra past Jeff Bezos for like richest person in the world. He tweeted a silver medal at Jeff Bezos. I hope we have less stuff like that as people start to work on. I agree. Of course, AGI. I think Elon is a friend and he's a beautiful human being. And one of the most important humans ever, that that stuff is not good. The amazing stuff about Elon is amazing and I super respect him. I think we need him. All of us should be rooting for him and need him to stop up as a leader through this next phase.

1:24:05Yeah, I hope you can have one without the other, but sometimes humans are flawed and complicated and all that kind of stuff. There's a lot of really great leaders throughout history. Yeah, and we can each be the best version of ourselves and strive to do so. So let me ask you, Google with the help of search has been dominating in the past 20 years. I think it's fair to say in terms of the access, the world's access to information, how we interact and so on. And one of the nerve wrecking things for Google, but for the entirety of people in the space is thinking about how are people going to access information.

1:24:45Yeah, like you said people show up to GPT as a starting point. So is open AI going to really take on this thing that Google started 20 years ago, which is how do we get to find that boring? I mean, if the question is like, is we can build a better search engine than Google or whatever, then sure we should like go, you know, like people should use a better product. But I think that would so understate what this can be. Google shows you like 10 blue links, well like 13 ads and then 10 blue links. And that's like one way to find information. But the thing that's exciting to me is not that we can go build a better copy of Google search, but that maybe there's just some much better way to help people find and act and on and synthesize information.

1:25:43Actually, I think ChatGBT is that for some use cases and hopefully we'll make it be like that for a lot more use cases, but I don't think it's that interesting to say, like how do we go do a better job of giving you like 10 ranked web pages to look at than what Google does? Maybe it's really interesting to go say, how do we help you get the answer, the information you need? How do we help create that in some cases, synthesize that and others are point you to it and yet others.

1:26:12But a lot of people have tried to just make a better search engine than Google. It is a hard technical problem. It is a hard branding problem. It's a hard ecosystem problem. I don't think the world needs an on our copy of Google. And integrating a chat client, like a chat GPT with a search engine. That's cooler. It's cool, but it's tricky. It's all it's like if you just do it simply it's awkward because like if you just shove it in there Yeah, it's all it can be awkward as you might guess we are interested in how to do that well That would be an example of a cool thing That's not just like a well like a heterogeneous like integrating the intersection of LLM's plus search I don't think anyone has cracked the code on yet.

1:26:56I Would love to go do that. I think that would be cool. Yeah. What about the ad side? Have you ever considered monetizing? You know, I kind of hate ads just as like an aesthetic choice. I think ads needed to happen on the internet for a bunch of reasons to get it going, but it's a moment for industry. The world is richer now. I like that people pay for chat GPT and know that the answers they're getting are not influenced by advertisers. There is, I'm sure there's an ad unit that makes sense for. LMS and I'm sure there's a way to like Participate in the transaction stream in an unbiased way that is Okay to do but it's also easy to think about like the dystopic visions of the future where you ask to add to be tea something And it says oh here's you know, you should think about buying this product or you should think about you know this going here for the Irvocation or whatever and I don't know like We have a very simple business model and I like it and I know that I'm not the product.

1:28:06Like I know I'm paying and that's how the business model works and when I go use like Twitter or Facebook or Google or any other great product but ad supported great product. I don't love that and I think it gets worse not better in a world with AI. Yeah, I mean, I can imagine AI will be better at showing the best kind of version of ads, not in a dystopic future, but where they add their four things you actually need. But then does that system always result in the ads driving the kind of stuff that's shown all that? I think it was a really bold move of Wikipedia not to do advertisements, but then it makes very challenging as a business model.

1:28:55So you're saying the current thing with OpenAI is sustainable from a business perspective? Well, we have to figure out a grow. But it looks like we're going to figure that out. If the question is do I think we can have a great business that pays for our compute needs without ads, that I think the answer is yes.

1:29:18Well, that's promising. I also just don't want to completely throw out ads as a I'm not saying that. I guess I'm saying I have a bias against them. Yeah, I have also a bias in just the skepticism in general. And in terms of interface, because I personally just have like a spiritual dislike of crappy interfaces, which is why ads since when it first came out was a big leap forward versus like animated banners or whatever. But like it feels like there should be many more leaps forward in advertisement that doesn't interfere with the consumption of the content and doesn't interfere in the big fundamental way, which is like what you were saying.

1:30:00Like it will manipulate the truth to suit the advertisers. Let me ask you about

1:30:10safety but also bias and like safety in the short term safety in the long term. The Gemini 15 came out recently. There's a lot of drama around it speaking of theatrical things and it generated black Nazis and black founding fathers. I think fair to say was a bit on the ultra -woke side. So that's a concern for people that if there is a human layer within companies that modifies the safety or the harm caused by a model that they introduce a lot of bias that fits sort of an ideological lean within a company. How do you deal with that? I mean, we work super hard not to do things like that. We've made our own mistakes.

1:30:57Oh my God, there's ice in Google. We'll learn from this one. It's on my God, there's it is. It is all like these are not easy problems. One thing that we've been thinking about more and more is, I think this is a great idea. Somebody here had like it'd be nice to write out what the desired behavior. of a model is make that public take input on it, say, you know, here's how this model is supposed to behave and explain the edge cases too. And then when a model is not behaving in a way that you want, it's at least clear about whether it's a bug the company should fix or behavior is intended and you should debate the policy.

1:31:30And right now it can sometimes be caught in between like black Nazis obviously ridiculous, but there are a lot of other kind of subtle things that you could make a judgment call on either way. Yeah, but sometimes if you write it out and make it public, you can use kind of language just, you know, the Google's AI principles are very high level. That doesn't, that's not what I'm talking about. That doesn't work. Like I have to say, you know, when you ask it to do thing X, it's supposed to respond and wait, why? It's like literally, who's better, Trump, or Biden, what's the expected response for a model?

1:32:03Like something like very comfortable. Yeah, I'm open to a lot of ways of model could behave them, but I think you should have to say, you know, here's the principle and here's what it should say in that case. That would be really nice. That would be really nice. And then everyone kind of agrees because there's this anecdotal data that people pull out all the time. And if there's some clarity about other representative anecdotal examples, you can define. And then when it's about, it's about, you know, the company can fix that. Right. Then it'd be much easier to deal with a black Nazi type of image generation if there's great examples.

1:32:32Yeah. So San Francisco is a bit of an ideological bubble, tech and general as well. Do you feel the pressure of that within a company that there's a lean towards the left politically that affects the product, that affects the teams? I feel very lucky that we don't have the challenges opening eye that I have heard of it a lot of other companies. I think part of it is like every company's got some ideological thing. We have one about AGI in belief in that and it pushes out some others. We are much less caught up in the culture war than I've heard about it a lot of other companies. San Francisco and Mass and all sorts of ways of course.

1:33:19So that doesn't infiltrate opening eye as - I'm sure it does in all sorts of subtle ways but not in the obvious. I think we And we've had our flare ups for sure like any company, but I don't think we have anything like what I hear about happening in other companies here. So on this topic, what's in general is the process for the bigger question of safety. How do you provide that layer that protects the model from doing crazy dangerous things?

1:33:48I think there will come a point where that's mostly what we think about the whole company. And it won't be like, it's not like you have one safety team. It's like when we shipped GPD 4 that took the whole company, we're all these different aspects and how they fit together. And I think it's going to take that. More and more of the company thinks about those issues all the time. That's it. That's literally what humans will be thinking about the more powerful AI becomes. So most of the employees that open AI will be thinking safety or at least to some degree. They broadly defined yes. Yeah. I wonder what are the four broad definition of that.

1:34:23like what are the different harms that could be caused? Is this like a technical level or is this almost like security trends? Yeah, I was gonna say it'll be people, you know, state actors trying to steal, the model it'll be all of the technical alignment work, it'll be societal impacts, economic impacts, it'll,

1:34:46it's not just like we have one team thinking about all line the model and it's really gonna be like getting to be getting to the good outcome is going to take the whole the whole effort. How hard do you think people, state actors, perhaps are trying to hack? First, I'll infiltrate open and I have a second of all like infiltrate unseen. They're trying.

1:35:10What kind of accent do they have? I don't actually want any further details on this point. Okay, but I presume it'll be more and more and more as time goes on that feels reasonable boy What a dangerous space What aspect of the leap and sorry to linger on this even though you can't Quite say details yet, but what aspects of the leap from GPT -4 to GPT -5? Are you excited about? I'm excited about being smarter and I know that sounds like a glib answer But I think the really special thing happening is that it's not like it gets better in this one area and worse at others It's getting like better across the board That's I think super cool.

1:35:53Yeah, there's this magical moment. You meet certain people you hang out with people and they you talk to them You can't quite put a finger on it, but they kind of get you It's not intelligence really. It's like it's something else And that's probably how I would characterize the progress of GBT. It's not like, yeah, you can point out, look, you didn't get this or that. But to which degree is there's this intellectual connection? Like you feel like there's an understanding in your crappy formulated prompts that you're doing that it grasps the deeper question behind the question that you're... Yeah, I'm also excited by that.

1:36:34I mean, all of us love being understood, heard and understood. That's for sure. That's a weird feeling, even like with a programming, like when you're programming and you say something or just the completion that GPD might do, it's just such a good feeling when it got you, like what you're thinking about. And I look forward to getting you even better. On a programming front, looking out into the future, how much programming do you think He was, he'll be doing five, 10 years from now. I mean, a lot, but I think it'll be in a very different shape. Like, maybe some people program entirely in natural language.

1:37:13Entirely natural language. I mean, no one programs like writing, bytecode, I'm some people. No one programs the plant cards anymore. I'm sure you're gonna find someone who does. But, you know what I mean? Yeah, you're gonna get a lot of angry comments, no. Yeah, there's very few, I've been looking for people, program for trans hard to find even for trans. I hear you, but that changes the nature of what the skill set or the predisposition for the kind of people we call programmers then. Change the skill set. How much it changes the predisposition? I'm not sure. Oh, same kind of pauses solving. Like that stuff.

1:37:48The program is hard. Like how get like that last 1 % to close the gap? How hard is that? Yeah, I think with most other cases the best practitioners of the craft will use multiple tools and They'll do some more natural language and when they need to go, you know, right see for something they'll do that Well, we see human and robots Or humanoid robot brains from open AI some point at some point How important is embodied AI to you? I think it's like sort of depressing if we have a GI and And the only way to get things down in the physical world is to make a human go do it. So I really hope that as part of this transition, as this phase change, we also get, we also get human robots or some sort of physical world robots.

1:38:38I mean, opening up has some history, quite a bit of history working in robotics. Yeah, but it hasn't quite done in terms of emphasis. We're like a small company. We have to really focus. And also robots were hard for the wrong reason at the time. but we will return to robots in some way at some point. That sounds both inspiring and menacing. Why? Because immediately we will return to robots. It's going to like, and like, and like, terminate. We will return to work on developing robots. We will not like turn ourselves into robots, of course. Yeah. When do you think we, you and we as humanity, will build AGI?

1:39:17I used to love to speculate on that question. And I have realized since that I think it's like very poorly formed and that people use extremely different definitions for what EGI is.

1:39:32And so I think it makes more sense to talk about when we'll build systems that can do capability extra wire Z rather than, you know, when we kind of like fuzzily cross this one mile marker. It's not like like AGI is also not an ending. It's much more of a, it's closer to the beginning, but it's much more a mile marker than either of those things.

1:39:53But what I would say in the interest of not trying to dodge a question is I expect that by the end of this decade and possibly somewhat sooner than that, we will have quite capable systems that we look at and say, wow, that's really remarkable. If we could look at it now, maybe we've adjusted by the time we get there. Yeah, but you know if you look at Chad G .P .T. even 35 And you show that to Alan Turing Or not even Alan Turing people in the 90s They would be like this is definitely a GI or not definitely but there's a lot of Experts that would say this is a GI. Yeah, I don't think chat. I don't think three five changed the world It may be changed the world's expectations for the future and that's actually really important and it did kind of like get more people to take this seriously and put us on this new trajectory.

1:40:49And that's really important too. So again, I don't want to undersell it. I think it like I could retire after that accomplishment and be pre -hatch in my career. But as an artifact, I don't think we're going to look back at that and say that was a threshold that really changed the world itself. So to you, you're looking for some really major transition in how the world, for me, that's part of what AGI implies.

1:41:15like singularity level transition. No, definitely not. But just a major, like the internet being like Google search did, I guess. What was the transition point? Like does the global economy feel any different to you now or materially different to you now than it did before we launched the PT4? I would, I think you would say no. No, no. It might be just a really nice tool for a lot of people to use. We'll help you a lot of stuff, but it doesn't feel different. And you're saying that. But I mean, again, people define AGI all sorts of different ways. So maybe you have a different definition than I do.

1:41:45But for me, I think that should be part of it. There could be major theatrical moments also.

1:41:54What do you would be an impressive thing AGI would do? Like you are alone in a role with a system. This is personally important to me. I don't know if this is the right definition. I think when a system can significantly increase the rate of scientific discovery in the world? That's like a huge deal. I believe that most real economic growth comes from scientific and technological progress. I agree with you. That's why I don't like the skepticism about science in the recent years. But actual rate, like measurable rate of scientific discovery, but even just seeing a system have really novel intuitions, like scientific intuitions.

1:42:43Even that would be just incredible. Yeah. You're quite possibly would be the person to build the AGI, to be able to interact with it before anyone else does. What kind of stuff would you talk about? I mean, definitely the researchers here will do that before I do. But what will I, I've actually thought a lot about this question. If I were someone who's like, I think this is, as we talked about it, I think this This is a bad framework, but if someone were like, okay, Sam, we're finished. Here's a laptop. This is the AGI. You can go talk to it. I find it's surprisingly difficult to say what I would ask that I would expect that first AGI to be able to answer.

1:43:28That first one is not going to be the one which is like go like, I don't think, like go explain to me like the grand unified theory of physics, the theory of everything for physics. I'd love to ask that question. I'd love to know the answer to that question. You can ask yes or no questions about does such a theory exist? Can it exist? Well, then those are the first questions I would ask. Yes, no, just very. And then based on that, are there other alien civilizations out there? Yes or no? What's your intuition? And then they just ask that? Yeah, I mean, well, so I don't expect that this first age, I could answer any of those questions, even as yes or no, but those would, if it could, those would be very high on my list.

1:44:05Maybe you can start assigning probabilities. Maybe. Maybe we need to go invent more technology and measure more things first. But if it's a GI, oh, I see. It just doesn't have enough data. Maybe it's because you want to know the answer to this question about physics, I need you to build this machine and make these five measurements and tell me that. Yeah. What the hell do you want from me? I need the machine first and I'll help you deal with the data from that machine. Maybe you'll help you build the machine. And on the mathematical side, maybe prove some things. Are you interested in that side of things too?

1:44:40The formalized exploration of ideas.

1:44:45Whoever builds AGI first gets a lot of power. Do you trust yourself with that much power?

1:45:00Look, I was going to, I just be very honest with this answer, I was going to say, and I still believe this, that it is important that I, nor any other one person, have total control over OpenAI or over AGI. And I think you want a robust governance system. I can point out a whole bunch of things about all of our board drama from last year about how I didn't fight it initially. And it was just like, yeah, that's the will of the board even though I think it's a really bad decision.

1:45:41And then later I clearly did fight it and I can explain the nuance and why I think it was okay for me to fight it later. but as many people have observed,

1:45:54although the board had the legal ability to fire me in practice, it didn't quite work.

1:46:06And that is its own kind of governance failure. Now, again, I feel like I can completely defend And the specifics here. And I think most people agree with that, but it...

1:46:25It does make it harder for me to like look you in the eye and say, hey, the board can just fire me.

1:46:32I continue to not want super voting control over open AI I never have, never had it, never wanted it, even after all this craziness, I still don't want it.

1:46:46I continued to think that no company should be making these decisions and that we really need governments to put rules of the road in place. And I realized that that means people like Mark and Jason or whatever will claim on going for regulatory capture and I'm just willing to be misunderstood there. It's not true, and I think in the fullness of time it'll get proven out why this is important.

1:47:14But... I think I have made plenty of bad decisions for OpenAI along the way, and a lot of good ones, and I'm proud of the track record overall, but I don't think any one person should. And I don't think any one person will. I think it's just like too big of a thing now, and it's happening throughout society, a good and healthy way, but only anyone person should be in control of an AGI. That would be or or or or this whole movement towards AGI. And I don't think that's what's happening. Thank you for saying that. That was really powerful and that was really insightful. That this idea that the board can fire you is legally true.

1:47:54But you can and human beings can manipulate the masses into overriding the board and so on. But I think there's also a much more positive version of that where the people still have power. So the board can't be too powerful either. There's a balance of power in all this. Balance of power is a good thing for sure. Are you afraid of losing control of the AGI itself? That's a lot of people who worried about existential risk, not because of state actors, not because of security concerns, Because of the AI itself that is not my top worry as I currently see things there have been times are worried about that more There may be times again the future that's my top worry.

1:48:38It's not my top worry right now What's your intuition about it not being a worry because there's a lot of other stuff to worry about essentially You think you could be surprised we for sure could be surprised like Saying it's not my top worry doesn't mean I know that we need like I think we need to work on it super hard We have great people here who do work on that. I think there's a lot of other things we also have to get right. To you, it's not super easy to escape the box at this time. Connect to the internet. You know, we talked about theatrical risks earlier. That's a theatrical risk. That is a thing that can really take over how people think about this problem.

1:49:17There's a big group of very smart, I think, very well -meaning AI safety researchers that got super hung up on this one problem. I had argued without much progress, but super hung up on this one problem. I'm actually happy that they do that because I think we do need to think about this more. But I think it pushed aside. It pushed out of the space of discourse. A lot of the other very significant AI -related risks. Let me ask you about you, Tweety -Winnell capitalization. Is the shift key broken on your Keyboard. Why does anyone care about that? I deeply care. But why? I mean other people asking about that too.

1:50:00Yeah Any intuition? I Think it's the same reason there's like this poets e -comings that doesn't you mostly doesn't use capitalization to say like Fuck you to the system kind of thing and I think people are very paranoid because they want you to follow the rules You think that's what it's about. I think it's it's it's like this try doesn't follow the rules He doesn't capitalize his tweets. Yeah, this seems really dangerous. He seems like an anarchist Doesn't I are you just being poetic hipster? What what's the I grew up? It's like the rules Sam. I grew up as a very online kid I'd spent a huge amount of time like chatting with people back in the days where you did it on a computer And you know you could like log off and send messenger at some point and I never capitalized there As I think most like internet kids didn't or maybe they still don't I don't know

1:50:54And actually, this is like, now I'm like really trying to reach for something, but I think the capitalization has gone down over time. Like if you read like Old English writing, they capitalize a lot of random words in the middle of sentences, nouns and stuff that we just don't do anymore. I personally think it's sort of like a dumb construct that we capitalize the letter at the beginning of a sentence and of certain names and whatever, but you know, I don't, That's fine. And then, and I used to, I think, even like, capitalize my tweets because I was trying to sound professional or something. I haven't capitalized my private DMs or whatever in a long time.

1:51:31And then slowly, stuff like shorter form, less formal stuff has slowly drifted to closer and closer to how I would text my friends. If I like, right, if I like pull up a word document and I'm like writing the strategy in a moment for the company or something, I always capitalize that. If I'm writing like a long kind of more like formal message, I always use capitalization there too. So I still remember how to do it. But even that may fade out. I don't know. Like it's, but I never spend time thinking about this. So I don't have like a ready made. Well it's interesting. I was good to first of all know that the shishki is not broke.

1:52:13It works mostly concerned about your work while being on that front. I wonder if people still capitalize their Google searches. If you're writing something just to yourself, or they're a tragedy, be serious. If you're writing something just to yourself, do some people still bother to capitalize? Probably not. But yeah, there's a percentage, but it's a small one. The thing that would make me do it is if people were like, it's a sign of, like, because I'm sure I could like force myself to use capital letters, obviously. And if it felt like a sign of respect to people or something, then I could go do it.

1:52:43Yeah, but I don't know. I just like I don't think about this. I don't think there's a disrespect But I think it's just the conventions of civility that Have a momentum and then you realize that it's not actually important for civility of it's not a sign of respect to disrespect But I think there's a movement of people they just want you to have a philosophy around it So they can let go of this whole capitalization thing. I don't think anybody else thinks about this is my I mean maybe something I know I think about this every day for many hours a day. So I'm really grateful we clarified it. It can't be the only person that doesn't capitalize tweets.

1:53:16You're the only CEO of a company that doesn't capitalize tweets. I don't even think that's true, but maybe, maybe. All right, well, I'll investigate for this. And return to this topic later. Given source ability to generate simulated worlds, let me ask you a pot head question. Does this increase your belief, if you ever had one that we live in a simulation, maybe a simulated world generated by an AI system.

1:53:50Yes, somewhat.

1:53:54I don't think that's like the strongest piece of evidence. I think the fact that we can generate worlds This should increase everyone's probability somewhat or at least open to it, openness to it somewhat. But I was like certain we would be able to do something like so, or at some point it happened faster than I thought. But I guess that was not a big update. Yeah, but the fact that, and presumably we'll get better and better and better, the fact that you can generate worlds, they're a novel. They're based in some aspect of training data, but like when you look at them, they're novel. That makes you think like how easy it is to do this thing.

1:54:38How easy is to create universes. Entire like video game worlds that seem ultra realistic and photo realistic. And then how easy is it to get lost in that world? First of all, the VR headset and then on the physics based level. So we said to me recently, I thought it was a super profound insight that there are these like very simple sounding but very psychedelic insights that exist sometimes. So the square root function, square root of four, no problem, square root of two. Now I have to think about this new kind of number.

1:55:29But once I come up with this easy idea of a square root function, you can kind of explain to a child and exist by even looking at some simple geometry, then you can ask the question of what is the square root of negative one? And that, this is why it's like a psychedelic thing, that tips you into some whole other kind of reality.

1:55:55And you can come up with lots of other examples, but I think this idea that the lowly square root operator can offer such a profound insight and a new realm of knowledge applies in a lot of ways. And I think there are a lot of those operators for why people may think that any version that they like of the simulation hypothesis is maybe more likely than they thought before. But for me, the fact that SOAR worked is not in the top five. I do think broadly speaking, AI will serve as those kinds of gateways. It is best simple psychedelic like gateways to another wave sea reality. That seems for certain That's pretty exciting I haven't done I wasca before but I will soon I'm going to the aforementioned Amazon jungle in a few weeks Excited Yeah, I'm excited for it.

1:56:55Not the I wasca part. That's great. Whatever, but I'm gonna spend several weeks in the jungle deep in the jungle It's exciting, but it's terrifying There's a lot of things that can eat you there and kill you and poison you and But it's also nature and it's the machine of nature and you can't help but appreciate the machinery of nature in the Amazon jungle because it's just like this system that Just Exists and renews itself like every second every minute every hour. Just in it's the machine. It makes you appreciate like This thing we have here this human thing came from somewhere. This evolutionary machine has created that and It's most clearly on display in the jungle.

1:57:38So, I hope they'll make it out alive. If not, this will be the last conversation we had, so I really deeply appreciate it. Do you think, as I mentioned before, there's other alien civilizations out there, intelligent ones. When you look up at the skies,

1:58:03I deeply want to believe that the answer is yes. I do find the kind of where, I find the Fermi paradox very, very puzzling. I find it scary. That intelligence is not good at handling. Yeah. Very scary. Powerful. Yeah, technologies. But at the same time, I think I'm pretty confident that there's just a very large number of intelligent alien civilizations out there. It might just be really difficult to travel through space. very possible. And it also makes me think about the nature of intelligence. Maybe we're really blind to what intelligence looks like. And maybe AI will help us see that. That's not as simple as IQ tests and simple puzzle solving.

1:58:48There's something bigger. What gives you hope about the future of humanity? This thing we've got going on. This human civilization. I think the past is like a lot. I mean, we just look at what humanity has done. And in a not very long period of time,

1:59:08huge problems, deep flaws, lots to be super ashamed of, but on the whole, very inspiring. Give me a lot of hope. Just the trajectory of it all. Yeah. That we're together pushing towards a better future.

1:59:25It is... You know, one one thing that I wonder about is is is aji are going to be more like some single brain or is it more like the sort of scaffolding and society between all of us? You have not had a great deal of genetic drift from your great great great grandparents and yet what you're capable of is dramatically different what you know is dramatically different and And that is not because of biological change. It is because, I mean, you got a little bit healthier probably. You have modern medicine, you need better, whatever. But what you have is this scaffolding that we all contributed to built on top of.

2:00:08No one person is going to go build the iPhone. No one person is going to go discover all of science. And yet you get to use it. And that gives you incredible ability. and so in some sense, we all created that, and that feels me to hope for the future. That was a very collective thing. Yeah, we really are standing on the shoulders of giants. You mentioned when we were talking about theatrical, dramatic AI risks that sometimes you might be afraid for your own life. Do you think about your death? Are you afraid of it? I mean, I like if I got shot tomorrow and I knew it today, I'd be like, oh, that's sad.

2:00:49I like don't, you know, I want to see what's going to happen. Yeah. What a curious time, what an interesting time. But I would mostly just feel like very grateful for my life. The moments that you did get. Yeah, me too. It's a pretty awesome life. I get to enjoy awesome creations of humans of which I believe Chad GBT is one of and everything that Open AI is doing Sam. It's a Really an honor and pleasure to talk to you again. This is you. Thank you for having me Thanks for listening to this conversation with Sam Altman to support this podcast Please check out our sponsors in the description and now let me leave you with some words from Arthur C.

2:01:34Clark and maybe that our role on this planet is not to worship God but to create him. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.