Sam Altman on OpenAI’s next model and the AI backlash

22:04And that is this fundamental part of our mission, like, you know, putting this in people's hands, benefiting all of humanity, the spirit of editor deployment. I think we have such a strong track record there that without that, I would understand it. But, you know, if we're saying, hey, we need a little more time, we don't want an unsafe race. We want to make sure we can deliver a safe, robust, reliable product and then let you use it however you want. and you know we believe that our more than billion users have the right to do that we believe our businesses have a right to business serenity business privacy we want them to succeed and we want them to use the model in whatever creative ways they can but you know like safety is an inherent part of our mission and so give us some grace on this i think that's i think that's okay

22:45Alex Heath:yeah can you specify exactly what is being paused because i think people think of training and they think of you know all of it yeah so we definitely have not slowed down or paused or delayed all training um this is specifically about frontier rl runs okay where we think uh the biggest risk surface currently is and previously um we delayed some other training uh to put more monitoring in place uh of training runs themselves so but that's not all of training it's not like the clusters are sitting there idle. We're still doing work, but we're doing the work that we're more confident on the safety case of.

23:23Alex Heath:You don't seem phased about the implications of pausing training and it sounds like you think the business will be okay. I'm sure you're still going to get concerns from people, but it does seem like that's a momentum slower. Look, I think there is this caricature of me, which is like, I don't care about AI safety and I'm just trying to make revenue go up and you know like just a YOLO CEO I believe someone once said. Someone did say that. Dario Amade. I don't remember who did or didn't but you know I think I did. I do for you. Thank you but I think I've been very consistent over the 10 years of OpenAI more than 10 years almost 11 of talking about the risks and the upsides and the need to balance those and I don't think we're perfect I don't think our company is perfect I don't think our model is perfect I don't think I am perfect.

24:10But I think unlike some other people running various AI efforts, like I've said the same thing through actions and words match. And this is a moment we always talked about. And we always said this would, you know, we put this ahead of profits or revenue or anything else. I still think we will build a phenomenally successful company. But, you know, maybe we're like not the company you would have expected to say, hey, we're going to slow down because we see these new risks. But that is always the company we've thought we are.

24:39Alex Heath:How are you feeling about AGI these days? I mean, at best, you could say it's a very poorly defined term. I was going to say it's like an irrelevant marketing term. Well, last I checked, your else charter defines it as a highly autonomous system that outperforms humans at most economically valuable work. I think there are many people that would look at current models and say like, okay, it's there. Yeah. Do you think it's there? Sort of. Close, at least. I've heard varying versions of like what people on your team think. I think there are a lot of people who would look at our latest internal models and say, this is very AGI-like.

25:16I think there are people who would say, here's something I can point to that it doesn't do, or it's really bad at, and it's not. But if you look at the value people are getting with, say, five, six soul, to say nothing of what I expect people to get from Astra, if you look at the way people have totally transformed their ability to be effective at work or do new kinds of things or just use this in their personal life in all kinds of wonderful ways. Big and small. Like you hear people who are like, I got this life-saving diagnosis I couldn't otherwise get. And I use this Chachapiti work session that went for 34 hours and read 2000 papers.

25:5034 hours? I've heard even longer ones than that. But yeah, many people can get it to run for more than a day. Wow. If you say like read every paper you can possibly find. And then also people who are just like, I planned my toddler's birthday party and it did all this stuff and and coordinated these local vendors and found them a special cake and like.

26:05Alex Heath:I had to have a post office pickup at my house and I didn't wanna fill out the post office website form. So I just had Codex do it. And it probably did a great job. And I put the package out and it was gone the next day. Stuff like that. It's like little, but it's like, that was 20 minutes of my time before. I get that. At this point I get those 20 minute wins all of the time. And so, you know, if you could go back to 2020 and have a system that could get you a 20 minute win in every category of your life and discover new science and start a whole, help you start a whole company and write a complicated piece of code.

26:38Would you call that AGI? Probably you would have.

26:41Alex Heath:What is the significance of you declaring AGI? I don't think it matters. There isn't any. It's just so interesting because we're in this research building you guys have and it's on the walls when you walk around like we're building AGI, but it's a thing you're always building. It's not an end state anymore. Is it something like? I don't want to say we've declared victory on the AGI point and moved on, but I think if you listen to the words people use, they would talk much more about this like continuous ramp of super intelligence and all the ways that's going to benefit the world and what the challenges are going to be than like are we or are we not AGI?

27:10I have not heard at a cafeteria table a debate about are we or are we not at AGI and when will we get there in a very long time.

27:17Alex Heath:But then yeah the word super intelligence is now out there and people who don't follow AI are like okay now it's another we've like moved the goalpost and now we're talking about super intelligence. In your mind Sam today what is the difference for you between AGI and super intelligence? AGI felt like a milestone and super intelligence feels like this thing that can just scale indefinitely. Indefinitely. Yeah. So it's not like some final all-knowing, all-powerful. They will never be declared victory on that. I mean, I mean, like, again, this is why all these terms are dumb. Someone uses that word in one way, someone else uses that word in some other way.

27:50So someone might mean it mean as like a definitive understandable milestone, and then some other people might mean it to be this infinitely scaling thing. I think the important part of any of this is not any milestone in any term, but it's that we are on this exponential of increasing capabilities and potential, and that looks like it's just going to keep going.

28:10Alex Heath:Yeah, you see no sign that that exponential slows. Air pocket above. Because that has implications for, I mean, the compute build outs, all of it. I mean, everyone is waiting for a sign that there's a slowdown. And I guess, you know, you could interpret like we have to slow down frontier training as a slowdown, but it doesn't sound as... That's not a capability. That's the opposite of a slowdown. Yeah. Of what you mean by slowdown. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But like, if you could see any reason for concern right now in this Jenga of the world that AI has now constructed, what do you see? One of the benefits of having like a harder time last year is you really appreciate how good the good times are and you really see like, man, when you're firing on all cylinders throughout a business, what it feels like.

28:56and given what we see across research, even with the safety alignment challenges and our ability to solve those and like watching the team come together on that, across product, across our compute build out, across all the pieces that are coming together to sort of make AI abundant and low cost, across our go-to-market machine, across our partnerships, all of that stuff coming together, we could screw up in all parts of ways and I don't wanna get overconfident here because we clearly had stumbles in the past and will in the future. But the potential in front of us, watching what has happened as the models have scaled from 5.4 to 5.5 to 5.6, and what we're getting is early feedback on the new models, looking at what we have coming in terms of product improvements, watching the revenue ramp, watching the compute build-out ramp.

29:46I feel very good about all of that.

29:47Alex Heath:So you don't feel like it's as, you know, there's a lot of people externally that look at and go like, Anthropic has run away, their IRR is higher, they're going to IPO first and it seems like you're saying there's a lot more ahead that maybe people from the outside can't quite see in terms of the growth that's coming i would not want to trade positions and we haven't touched on this much but it seems like you guys are in the middle of like a next turn on the compute strategy and like really up leveling that yeah i would actually yeah love to hear you reflect on stargate one as it was concepted and then what you had to learn to reboot it in the path you guys are now on?

30:23Well, first of all, I should talk about why we have to do this. Like, our mission is to ensure the AGI benefits all of humanity. Right now, there is a small percentage of humanity that uses much more AI than everybody else. And if you think about, we would like everybody in the world to be able to use as much as AI as the top 0.001 % of AI users today, then you like sit back in your chair and you're like, man, we are not going about this compute build out in the right way. Like if people want this broadly and if the models are going to get bigger and more capable and they can do even more value so people are going to want even more of it and it takes more compute to run, then we have to think very differently about rising to the moment to be able to deliver all of that.

31:06So a few years ago, we made a very ambitious compute bet that people thought was both silly and impossible to deliver on at the time. It was a good bet. I think we need to do something like that again.

31:17Alex Heath:Again? Yeah. So like that's just, it's committing even more capital. That's not what I meant. Although it also will be that. What I meant is figuring out how we are going to bring the costs of AI and the amount of it, the abundance of it, way down and way up. So this is like a technological, I meant it as a technological statement, not a financial one. This is like the chip you guys have in development. That was like a great, I think that's a great example. robotics. Yeah, I think the ability to make supply chains go faster will be very important. You're talking about giving everyone in the world AI.

31:49Alex Heath:What do you say to the people right now who don't want more AI? They want less of it. They hate the data center in their community, whether it's yours or someone else's. This is actually a thing I see a lot with teenagers that I run into. They won't touch an AI service. They won't use ChatGPT on principle. Yeah. And there's this active anti-AI trend. How much is it that they don't like data centers versus they don't like ChatGPT I mean, purely anecdotal. I think it's data centers are a big problem for people. I think they see them as like, yeah, a problem. It's something they don't want. And that AI is wasteful, that it's not bringing the value that you read about the water consumption and all that, which has been disproven.

32:27Alex Heath:But like, you know, that the value they're getting, and maybe this is what we're talking about with like, most people are not using agents, most people, but like, is that the answer is like, you gotta. Generally speaking, I think the right way to get people to like something is to deliver them value yeah like the you know before chat gpt maybe people thought of ai is this very abstract thing that all of a sudden people could use it and people found value now i think there are a lot of people who think ai is still just um chat gpt and they don't know that it can do that thing with the post office and the form and the pickup for you and probably if a lot of people use that which they will over time and understand that it's not actually like better google search and that's it you know fusing and destroying huge amounts of water or whatever um then then there'll be more excitement but i the field is moving so fast i think it just takes a while to diffuse through society there are a lot of people using ai like this has been the fastest adopted technology ever as far as i know and there are people getting tremendous value out of it and you know i get a biased sample but i hear more from people i was able to get a cure to this horrible disease then you know i think that chat chubiti is using up all the water in the world there is clearly that too and the industry has got work to do in terms of how we make these products easy to use and these people get a lot of value out of you know i saw this thing going around about the the water usage of chat chubiti and it was like every time you run a single chat chat to be tea query it's like you know you run your shower for like six hours and the water never comes back and it's just it's done i don't have the exact calculation in front of me but i i think the real number is something like doing this from memory it might be wrong but it's close for every 38 000 chat to be tea queries um that is the same amount of water that is used in the production of a single almond in california which is like really and this is like the full-on you know total true water accounting, not just what's running in one data center.

34:33There's a question of where this came from because the people that are scarfing down 12 almonds at a time don't feel like they're doing something horrible from a water perspective for the most part. It is true that data centers at one point used evaporative cooling, but they have not done that in a long time. If you look at a modern, very large data center, uses the like equivalent amount of water as an office building in terms of you know people like running the sinks and the toilets and whatever um so that has been a um robust meme and difficult to disprove but i don't think holds up to any scrutiny i mean and the other one is it's going

35:10Alex Heath:to take my job it's going to replace me i think those are it's like the water it's replacing me um and it's stealing content and it's you know it's stealing content and not giving me the value back. But not energy, interestingly. Well, energy I would put in the bucket of water, just consumption, resource consumption. On the jobs front, I have two minds of this. One, I think there is going to be real jobs impact. I don't think it's going to be that there's nothing for people to do. I just don't think that's how we work at all. We're so wired to care about other people, want to work with other people.

35:40We have such a great intuition as the world evolves for what people want. I think that's a fundamentally human thing, no matter how smart AI gets, but it doesn't mean the jobs aren't going to transition. And there will be like there is every other technology, some things that are done better and better by technology. And then people move on to hopefully better and better jobs. This has been going for a long time. I wouldn't want to take away all technology and have us all like toiling in the fields again. On the other hand, the job impact has been like lower than I would have expected, maybe even hoped for.

36:10Like, I think we should all want better jobs available to people. and we should all want like you know human drudgery and toil to get addressed and maybe there hasn't been enough of that or as much of that as we thought there would be at this level of technology i think it's actually like a fair criticism of the ai industry um on the stolen content point i actually don't hear that one as much anymore uh i think it's more content creators

36:31Alex Heath:that that's like you see that it's pretty popular on social media to see you know this video was made without ai or whatever yeah i believe very strongly that there will be new kinds of content to create new kinds of art. You know, I remember once looking back at some of the things people said when the camera was first developed about what it was going to mean for the impact on painters. And at that time, I didn't think people thought of photography as a new art medium. I'm actually, I would bet pretty confidently they didn't. And I think there will be new kinds of content creation. And also we may not care about most of it.

37:05Like, you know, our relationship with creators may be very deeply about them as people and it doesn't matter if they use AI to

37:10Alex Heath:make better videos or whatever do you think your foundation which uh based on what i can see is maybe the best capitalized in the world can do more here on engagement in communities on content creators in particular no just generally addressing this like very negative sentiment and saying you know we're going to show up and build libraries whatever i mean there were a lot of lessons from the industrial revolution of people who reinvested yeah their wealth i think the most important thing we can do is to make great AI products that are useful to people, make sure that power and economic power continues to be spread throughout the world, that people have access to these tools and the benefits of these tools, that we kind of advocate for what we are seeing.

37:54And also, secondarily to that, yes, of course, I think we should invest more in communities, and I think AI is going to enable the abundance required to do that on massive scale. I really do think we are going to see transformatively powerful benefits by putting this technology in the hands of people that use it for the benefit of their own community and not us coming and telling them what unit is a library and what unit is a school.

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41:13Alex Heath:Assign them work directly or connect your tools through MCP. All of this lets you spend less time digging through endless links and messages, chasing down what got decided and by who, and spend more time actually shipping. Learn more at jira.com. That's J-I-R-A dot com. You said we did not have our best last 12 months ever, which is mostly my fault, but we are about to have our best 12 months. What did you mean by that? Best 12 months? Yet. Yet. I think we clearly had some missteps as a company, which will happen periodically. I mean, part of trying to make a portfolio of bets is that sometimes more of them work and sometimes less of them work.

41:52But I think both in terms of product direction and specifically on pre-training in research, we fell behind where we wanted to be. I think we are now executing not only the best we have ever executed, but the best of kind of any company in the space. And it is very fun to like, the upswing is more fun after the downswing. So just looking at the pace of models that we really have come in, the way the company has come together and focused and made a bunch of hard decisions in very different parts of the company, but done sort of in unison in one direction, it feels great right now.

42:28Alex Heath:And I want to get to all that, but to dwell on this for a second, because the last year a lot has happened. Were there specific decisions you can look back on that you made that cost the company momentum. I mean, you mentioned pre-training. I know you've always been very close to the research team, but can you elaborate on that? I think we were trying to do too much on the product side. And so there was like, you know, and these were all things that were actually very good things to do. They were just not as good as the most important thing to do, which was sort of push on the general capability of the intelligence.

42:59So we were doing things like a browser and Sora, and we now have a very relentless focus on being this intelligent service to people. And I think our models are, they have gotten to be the best in the world and they will get much, much better over the coming months. And people are really doing remarkable things, but that is what we should have been focused on. And I should have been holding everybody to, this is the one thing, we'll not worry about these sort of side quests more.

43:25Alex Heath:Looking at the leadership changes you had, about a year ago, you brought in Fiji Simo to help run large parts of the company. she had to step back due to her health and now you and Greg Brockman your co-founder are effectively splitting responsibilities running the company together is this the setup that you envision will continue or is this something temporary um I think it's going super well I I we will continue to bring in and promote uh you know new new leaders but uh it feels and I'm you know extremely me sad about Fiji, hard to like fill her shoes, but it feels good. And I think Greg and I are executing well in the company is, you know, you can like really tell when things are moving in the right direction and it feels like things are moving in the right direction.

44:11Alex Heath:How do you all make decisions, you and Greg together? Like who decides what? Do you ever have a tie you have to break? I mean, we talk a lot, like a lot, like all of the time. It's not like, it's like a big company. It's not just Greg and I. There's like an incredibly talented set of people managing the research program. There's an incredibly talented set of people managing the business. And we all just talk a lot. And at an earlier scale, I thought it was good to just sort of try something and adapt quickly if it works and not spend as much time really trying to debate the decision. At our scale now, I've learned that it's much better to spend a lot of time trying to get to the right decision and kind of a measure twice cut once approach.

44:52Alex Heath:We were together at a dinner you hosted here in San Francisco almost exactly a year ago. It was around the launch of GPT-5. We should do another one of those. I forgot about that. Yeah, it was. And a lot was said. But a thing that I came away with from that was, it seemed like you were maybe not excited about being CEO forever. And I'm wondering if the last year has changed that for you? I'm having a much better time now than a year ago. I'm really having fun. I plan to do this for a long time. The vibes were more challenged last year, I would say. Yeah, totally. Like, it's, I think it was not just the vibes of opening.

45:28Like, it was like a hard time for the tech industry, for AI.

45:31Alex Heath:AI bubble was a big concern. Yeah, it was all the stuff was just exhausting. This is obviously like, I think we have done an amazing thing. It has been a painful personal experience. But I think it's like totally worth it and I would happily do it again. And I'm having a good time at this point. The other big thing that stood out to me when I saw the demo of Astra is the computer use that you're talking about. The implications of that, of agents using computers, using all kinds of enterprise software, which you guys have been showing people it doing, feels profound at scale. And I'm curious if you've been thinking through that and how you think the world needs to adapt for that.

46:08The computer use caught me by surprise. Like I had been excited about this for a long time and I had always been disappointed. like the models were just never that good at clicking around a computer it was always too slow or it didn't quite work yeah and astra feels like it kind of reached human parity on using computers and i don't know why that hit me as like one of those steps along the path to agi where i was like wow this is really doing it but it did hit me that way um and like an emotional level i think it's awesome and i'm like oh man i there are all of these like mundane tasks i do on my computer you know like i don't remember where someone sent me a message and i click around through all these messaging things and try to search and now i just ask the model and i'm like i cannot i don't want to go back to a world where i had to like painfully kind of try to find things on my computer i just want to like explain what i want i want it to happen and i want it to like i'm a very lazy user so i don't want to have to like click or like connect you're a lazy user computer i don't like to set things up i don't want to like do a bunch of connectors all of that I just like use my computer to do the thing.

47:08I think there are a lot of implications about it being able to use software, but I think they're mostly quite positive in that there's a lot of drudgery that people do behind a computer. And an experience I have had, not really before any pre-Astro models and now several times, is like there was a thing, it was gonna take me some time, it was gonna not be very pleasant. Instead, I just like tell the model what I want it to do. And then I go play with my kids and I come back in 30 minutes and it's all ready. And I find that very awesome.

47:42Alex Heath:We're now in a world, though, where the U.S. government is starting to vet the capabilities of your models and other frontier labs before they come out. This is a new era we're in. And you have warned. I mean, you said it during a 2025 Senate hearing. You said that this kind of vetting could be, quote, disastrous for U.S. competitiveness against rivals like China. And then, I mean, more recently, the GPT 5.6 initial rollout, the Trump administration requested you all gate that. And you had said at the time that shouldn't become the norm. So it seems like you've been saying this is not where things should go, and yet they're going there.

48:15Alex Heath:No, no, no. I have been saying this. I think I've been calling for some sort of international regulatory framework for years. Particularly the government vetting models before they come out. I think what I was pushing back on was the government picking individual customers who's allowed to use a model. I think government testing of a model and shared standards is a super good idea. I don't, ideally, I don't think the government should be saying you can give access to this company, not this one. So what are the implications for competitiveness geopolitically now that the U.S. is starting to embrace this approach and other countries haven't?

48:48Alex Heath:Have you thought about that? Again, I think the right approach is an international one, but right now the leading efforts are all American companies. And so I think starting here, Like, we have enough of a lead that being slowed down a little bit is okay. And I'm confident that we will be able to both build safe, robust, reliable models and kind of do great commercially and make sure the U.S. is leading. Things could shift a lot, you know, if there's open models put out by other countries that lead to some huge cyber incidents before we can come up with new security paradigms, things could shift a little bit.

49:26Do you think that could happen? Of course it could happen. But you know, we're like, I also think we have a chance to totally reimagine how cybersecurity works. And although these agents can do bad things, they can do amazing things. And if we can have kind of defense agents running all the time, maybe that's the right paradigm.

49:46Alex Heath:Are you prepared for the US government to potentially tell you you can't ship a model? Have you thought about this? My strong belief is we would decide not to ship a model before they would tell us not to. Shifting to competition, Anthropic catapulted to where they are now by single shot, focused on coding. Yeah. And you started this conversation by saying you guys were placing a lot of bets and that cost you some momentum. I'm curious if you could reflect on how Anthropic saw that opening that you guys didn't at the time. I don't think it was a question of us not seeing it. It was a question of like, we had this tremendous thing of this runaway consumer growth.

50:24We always wanted to do coding, but we were like, ah, we have this very urgent thing, and it's great. It's a great thing to have. And so we missed it from a prioritization standpoint. I now think we have the best coding product in the market, and it's growing crazily quickly. And most people I know, even the people that were like the diehard Anthropic product users, have switched over. So I don't think it's catastrophic to be behind on any one phase. We can catch up with better models.

50:49Alex Heath:I'm curious. I think a lot of people are trying to understand how zero-sum the AI market is. And is your growth on Codex taking from Anthropic or vice versa? Do you have a sense of that? I think right now everybody's growing. I mean, it may, it may, this is going to be a very big market. It may become more zero-sum later. But for now, like, I think everybody is just, like, the growth rates we are seeing are just nothing that I had, like, in my frame of imagination for a company at this scale. And I think it just speaks to how much people, like, are getting value out of the products. but I think it's happening across most of the industry.

51:24Alex Heath:And on the product side, you're doing what is being called internally the merge, taking chat, GPT, and Codex and building a super app that combines them. And you've started this. There's, I would say, there's still some rough edges. More than rough edges. That's a very polite way of you to say it. Yeah. And I'm curious, when you get there, what does that look like? And what are the implications of that? The thing that I want is just like an interface to an AI that can kind of do whatever I need. If I have a quick question like ChatGPT style, it can just answer it. If I need a complex thing built, piece of software built, it can do that.

52:01If I need something in the middle, it can do that. And if it needs access to my computer or my context, it can go use my computer and find my context. And I don't have to like, I mentioned I'm like a very lazy user. I don't have to like think about what tab I'm on. I don't want to have to think about what mode I'm in. The AI is... An AI that is smart enough to discover novel mathematics should be able to intuit what it's supposed to do.

52:24Alex Heath:ChatGPT just hit a billion users. Big milestone. But I think hitting that took maybe longer than you guys originally thought. The growth was explosive early on. Yeah, I'm curious to hear from you about that. Has it grown slower than you'd expected in the last 12 months? Well, we decided to... When we focused on coding, we decided that we were going to reallocate a lot of our compute that we could have otherwise put into the chat product into coding so no that didn't surprise us like that was a we decided this was like an urgent thing so growth is a direct function of where you decide to put the computer 100 yeah the i am always hopeful that the compute constraints are about to soften because we're going to make more efficient models and someday i hope it's true but every time we find efficiency gains, the world token demand just goes up and up and eats it.

53:12Alex Heath:I hear that. But at the same time, I'm curious, how does chat get to the next billion? Is that as linear as the internet has grown or social media grew? Is it going to be choppier? How much does that even matter to you now? Because you've got Codex and the API business. I kind of think what we're, we talked about the merge, but I kind of think what's going to happen is that they're all gonna like come together. For a while, pre-merge, I had stopped using ChatGPT and I just asked Codex all my chat questions because yeah, again, lazy user. Now, I think there are a lot of people who never thought they were going to be having an agent do stuff for them because they just kind of used ChatGPT that clicked on this work tab and were like, whoa, I can do this crazy thing.

53:57So I think it's kind of all gonna come together and people are going to have this general purpose ai subscription that they don't really think about like if it's chatter codex or work just like i have a thing i want it to happen soon it will even you won't even need to ask it it'll hopefully be much more proactive and it'll be constantly running and trying to do useful stuff so the

54:18Alex Heath:end state of this is just one ultimate subscription that is what i want as a user we've been dancing around this but you did really stick your neck out about a year ago on the massive compute build out you guys have been doing and caused all this AI bubble fear. And at the same time, while people thought you were overshooting, you had people like Dario, the CEO of Anthropic, saying you were YOLOing. And now, I will say, you seem pretty vindicated on this front. The world is still starved of compute. Sounds like you guys still are too, even though you have more than some of your competitors. And at the same time, you're driving the cost of tokens, it seems like, way down.

54:53Alex Heath:and you're about to release Jalapeno, your first custom chip for inference. Is there still, though, any part of this compute build-out that you're on and the astronomical numbers associated with this that you feel is at risk at all when you look at all of this? I'm not worried about our compute build-out plans. I am worried about the world's compute build-out plans. I think we are going to be able to use all of the compute very profitably that we are planning to build. but I am seeing the first signs of what feels to me like unsustainable silliness of random new neocloud popping up people claiming that they're going to build gigantic amounts of compute next year that I think they don't have the revenue to support or a buyer.

55:35Yeah, I definitely feel like some fear about what the world is doing as a whole, although I think we feel very good about what we've committed to.

55:42Alex Heath:But the contagion of what you're describing could certainly impact you. if the whole economy blows up yes that could impact us in terms of like being able to confidently pay for the compute we are committed to um i feel good about that like i i think people right now are kind of in a cost is no object we're just going to build out crazy amounts of compute and somebody will pay an even higher price for it and if we are able to succeed with our efforts to hugely drag down the cost of compute and the efficiency of compute up a lot then And you can imagine a world where there are some people that made dumb financial decisions.

56:19That happens in kind of like every boom or most of them. So not like a crazy surprise if it does.

56:27Alex Heath:Do you see a world where OpenAI becomes a supplier of compute to the industry? Not anytime soon. Like we just, we need to compute. The vibe I'm getting is you all are discussing this internally and it's not decided. So people talk a lot about recursively self-improving. Yes. AI models. They do not talk as much about the ability to do this in the physical world. But if our robotics program comes together, our chip program comes together, some of our supply chain investments come together, we get really great at building data centers way more cheaply and better chip than anybody else has. Would we consider it?

57:01Maybe. Do we have any current plans that still is outside of... We don't have the luxury of focusing on that yet.

57:08Alex Heath:You brought up recursive self-improvement. I'm glad you did. people are talking about RSI a lot in San Francisco right now. There was a note you sent to employees that leaked when you guys filed for the IPO, where you said that the faster the potential RSI takeoff looks like it could be, the more it could be advantageous to delay an IPO. Yeah. What did you mean by that? I think it's a difficult transition to become a public company. People respond to incentives and they want their stock price to go up and they don't want to miss a quarter or whatever else. I never want us I want it to be as easy as possible for us to make a decision in the interest of safety of the world and if it's like hey we're gonna have to stop training or stop the point or whatever and we're gonna like you know there's gonna be a big revenue slide on in the short term it'd be nice not to have a newly public company and that pressure at the same time now I did not think we were going to be on a kind of like you know like a short-term trajectory of super intelligence a year ago now I think it may happen.

58:06I'm not confident it's going to happen. It's just like we're making extremely fast progress. And I think our mission is way more important than being a public company on any particular timeframe. So we'll make the best decision for the mission.

58:22Alex Heath:You mentioned robotics. I'd love to hear from you the state of your robotics effort. What are you building? Is it a humanoid? Is it a robotic data center? Both? We will definitely do a humanoid. We will do other form factors as well. The world is very much designed for people. So if you think about like the ability to open a door and type on a computer and drive a piece of equipment and, you know, clean a kitchen and whatever else, we've kind of built this world for people. And I want to make sure that we keep building this world for people. So matching that form factor seems good. There will of course be data center robots that have like different form factors.

58:53I think all of that is less important than really figuring out like the brain that makes the robot work.

58:59Alex Heath:So you are building a humanoid. We will. How do you think that's going to work in the world? Do you imagine that being like a personal robot for everyone? Someday. I don't think that's the most important first thing to do. You talked about the ability to build data centers or even build more robots or whatever else. But yes, someday I think everyone should have a personal robot. I would love to have a personal robot that could do the tasks that I don't want to do. That'd be great. You also have the consumer device work with Johnny Ive. I know you can't talk a lot about it and we'll probably see the first device here at some point soon.

59:32Alex Heath:Soon-ish. Soon-ish. And you've talked a lot about how I've been hearing you say, like, my dream is a product that just is ambiently listening to me and taking everything in and giving me context. We were talking about this earlier with computer use. And I agree, that seems very helpful in a lot of contexts. It also seems like a privacy surveillance nightmare. And I'm curious if you've been thinking about that and how the world will react to that. We've taken a very strong stance on privacy. I think that the, you know, business privacy too, not just consumer privacy, but like the way we, the commitments we make about not training on businesses data and about zero data retention.

1:00:07I think this is very important. And as AI becomes more and more embedded in our lives, privacy becomes extremely important. And one thing I worry about is there are other efforts that think differently and will push on, hey, the safety risks are so big that AI privacy can't exist. in the same kind of way. I think that there should be like an AI privilege law. I don't even think the government should be allowed to like compel, you know, a company to give them your chat history or whatever. Like, you know, if you talk to a doctor or a lawyer, there's a concept of privilege. You don't have that talking to chat chupiti.

1:00:42I think you should.

1:00:43Alex Heath:In that context though that you just described, there's also a lot of limits on what a lawyer or a doctor can do with your data. It's not just sharing it externally. Do you think that that kind of oversight should extend to how you use the data? Yeah, no, I was gonna get to that. Yeah, yeah. So I think there should be legal limits of what the government can do. I also think companies should have a lot of restrictions on data shared with an AI. And especially if you have this thing watching your computer, listening to your messages, talking to you. Like, yeah, I think that this is, I think there should be so many people are much more animated about than they are.

1:01:10Alex Heath:How, before that happens, how do you at OpenAI govern that, self-govern the use of data? You probably have some of the most powerful profile data that's ever been amassed in the history of the world. We have extremely strong internal controls about how that's used. and we make the privacy guarantees to users that we do. As we get closer to launching this device, we'll be talking about kind of the new privacy controls and technology we're building for a device that's like kind of ambiently computing. But yeah, I think we have one of the more personal databases ever. Apple has very publicly sued you guys for allegedly stealing trade secrets and hiring their employees to work on this device with Johnny.

1:01:56Alex Heath:and you've responded to it and you've said it's meritless. But I'm wondering, do you worry about this slowing down the device efforts? No, look, if... First of all, I'm like a mega Apple fanboy and I was very sad about that. And from when I first heard about it, I was like, man, this sounds egregious. Someone must have done something badly. And if someone... We don't want any company's IP and we certainly don't want people who are going to take a company's IP and bring it to us. and if we did an investigation and found that about somebody, we would of course just terminate them and deal with it.

1:02:32But we're also going to defend someone if they didn't do something wrong. And I believe after we looked into this that this was a case of someone not doing something wrong. And we tried to explain some of that and more of that will play out in a process. Given my understanding, I don't think this is going to slow things down.

1:02:50Alex Heath:How are you thinking about form factors? Do you like, I've heard you say you don't in the past. Do you like glasses? Do you like glasses? I don't because I find it very uncomfortable talking to people with like a camera and a light. Yeah, it's a lot. Yeah. Yeah. But there's a lot of other form factors. There's a lot of great form factors. I think we'll do a small handful of form factors. There's, I think there's like something that belongs on a table. There's something that belongs in your pocket. And there's something that like belongs on your body. and it'll take us some time to launch all of those things.

1:03:25But I think the big adjustment is going to be getting used to this idea of a proactive computer.

1:03:33Alex Heath:When you're thinking about OpenAI's roadmap and the business, are consumer devices existential in a sense? Are they purely additive? And the mission that you guys talk about, you've got a lot of things still happening even though you've whittled things down as we talked about. I think we don't know yet. Like, I just like, it is my strong intuition that there is a major new kind of computer and a sort of a new category that only comes up every, or historically has only come up every couple of decades for how we use technology. But that's an unlikely claim. So I think you shouldn't let me make it.

1:04:11You should just like wait to see what you think of the devices. The way OpenAI is thought of now, how do you think it will be thought of in a couple of years? I'm pretty simple. Like I hope people love the products we put out into the world. You know, these stories of, we talked about a few earlier, but you know, I was able to start a business. I was able to, you know, do a great birthday party for my kid. I was able to get cured of this disease. I met a guy recently who used Chai Chibuti to help design a mRNA cancer vaccine for his dog and now started a company to like do that for other people.

1:04:45I hope those stories all look small in comparison to what the technology is doing for people in a few years. And then I hope that a lot of the current AI fears, people said, man, that was the most responsible company at every step. They made very good calls in the interest of all of us. And I'm glad they're doing well because I think they're being good stewards of technology. You see lots of other companies that have taken very other different approaches. I think we've been pretty consistent on our beliefs about safety, but willing to adapt when we've been wrong but you know when we started this strategy of iterative deployment that was like deeply hated by the air safety community and i think in retrospect it was obviously correct um and i'm glad we've had the courage to do the things we really believe in even when they're very unpopular and that we've mostly been right and we've adapted we've been wrong i think that is you know i think that is the way to build sort of safe and robust systems And so I hope we continue to do that and people recognize it.

1:05:47Alex Heath:And you're building towards super intelligence. I'd be curious to know how you personally are preparing for that. Do you have a view of what life will look like on the other side of what you're building? I think it will look surprisingly similar to how it looks now. People are going to hang out with their families and fall in love and get into fights and do their hobbies and be entertained and have a very human experience and get stressed and get anxious and create value for each other and play all kinds of strange games and care about other people a lot, I hope it'll not be that different. I hope it'll be human experience is richer, people have more autonomy, more freedom, more wealth, can do more, can be healthier, can kind of have like more power to collectively define the future and the world gets better faster, but that the human experience stays like a very human thing.

1:06:43Alex Heath:If you look out over the next 12 months, what is the biggest risk for open AI? I think it's like getting safety, alignment, security wrong. I mean, I think it's possible at 12 months from now, we have extremely capable models. And if we are able to navigate the transition to super intelligence in a world where we have figured out how to empower people, how to make sure power is not too concentrated, how to deliver safety across the entire spectrum, how to let people feel very in control of improving their own lives in the future. That would be like a phenomenal success. Sam Altman, thank you. Thank you.

1:07:59Alex Heath:Thank you. Jira.com slash sources for 30 % off. Rules and restrictions may apply. Jira by Adlassing is where your team and your agents work from the same context. Try it free at Jira.com. That's J-I-R-A dot com.

1:08:34Thank you.