FULL INTERVIEW: Sam Altman Responds to Anthropic’s Attack Ads, Live on TBPN

0:00Well, we have our first guest of the show, Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI. he's in the restream waiting room welcome to the show sam how are you doing welcome back good thank you guys for having me back thanks so much big day big day kick us off with where should we start should we start with uh the model or frontier can we start with the model just because let's do it yeah absolutely break it down what'd you launch uh 5.3 codex is i think the best coding model in the world we took a lot of the feedback that people had about 5.2 5.2 codex and got it into So one model, it is much smarter at programming, but it's also way faster.

0:34You can interact with it mid-turn. I think it's got a much better personality. It's really good at computer use. So it feels like a very big step forward. It was funny as we were deploying it this morning. A couple of very extremely experts at using these models noticed and said, man, something's really different with codecs. And they caught it mid-deploy. So I think you can really feel it quickly. Oh, you're saying people outside of OpenAI just everyday use it? I like the half hour that we put it out before we, you know. Talk about interacting with a mid-turn. How does that work? Why is that important?

1:06What does that unlock? So people are starting to use these tools for very long pieces of work at one time, you know, multi-hour tasks. And sometimes you don't specify it correctly, right? Sometimes something's not set up right, something just screws up. The ability, they can do amazing things with no steering, but they can do much more amazing things if you steer them along the way. So this is one of the things I felt most knew about this model. So talk about orchestration, how this fits into Frontier, because I imagine that - Yeah, one second. It's notable, like if you see a coworker making a mistake and you don't interrupt them, that's rude, right?

1:42It's deeply inefficient. It is incredible what these models can do without any feedback. Like if you think about a new coworker, especially, you train them and you give them a lot of feedback early on and they learn the job and you correct them and they kind of get practice in the models. They will soon do that, but right now they don't do that. So we just rely on either they get it right one shot or we collect them, correct them along the way. Yeah. So, you know, I think there's a lot of people that are running multiple agents and multiple tabs. They're starting to think about orchestration. It feels like Frontier is a piece of that, but if you're interacting with a model that's running mid-turn, like how does the user experience change for developers with 5.3 and then what will it look like in the frontier world i i think we will be heading towards a workflow where a lot of people just feel like they're managing a team of agents and they'll keep as the agents get better they'll keep operating at a higher and higher level of abstraction which at least watching what's happening so far is a is a jump that people are going to make pretty well um the the models are so good now there's such a capability overhang that building better tools to let people do that, which the Codex app that we launched on Monday was a great step forward for, will be very, very important.

3:00But you will be managing very complex workflows. The agents will keep getting better. So you'll keep working at the maximum of your management bandwidth or cognitive ability to keep track of all the stuff. And the tools to make that easy to do will matter, I think, more than intelligence for a little while, because there's such an intelligence overhang already. What's the role of a forward deployed engineer today at OpenAI towards the end of the year? Capability overhang that feels like raw meat for a forward deployed engineer. It's like they solve that problem, right? It's the opportunity. Yeah, I mean, look, eventually the models will get so good that they'll help companies deploy themselves and the forward deployed engineers will again get to work at a higher level of abstraction.

3:43But for now, you go into a company that is not AI native and say, okay, you've said you want to, you know, they say they want to deploy AI. They really are not sure what to do. How do I hook this up to my systems? Do I need to fine tune a model on my code base? How do I think about orchestrating agents and using things from different companies? Most of all, or at least what we hear most frequently is, how do I think about security of my data? And how do I know that these like AI co-working agents are not going to go access a bunch of information and share it in ways they shouldn't or get a context exploit or something like that.

4:18So the forward-to-play engineers take this incredible new technology and a platform like Frontier and say, we will connect your company to an AI platform so that you can use all these agents and workflows and everything else you want. How important are these metaphors or how temporary are them? I was very interested in reading about gas town and you have these pole cats and it's this whole Mad Max world and that feels like maybe just a temporary aberration where you're setting up agents for specific tasks, but also that could be incredibly valuable in explaining to a large corporation of how they're going to integrate AI across the whole organization.

4:55Yeah, I suspect like everything else that's happening when an industry is moving so fast, all of this is somewhat temporary on like a long enough time scale. And you, as these models become more capable, these agents are operating on very long time horizons with the ability to just kind of figure it out and our trust in their robustness keeps going up, then maybe you don't need a lot of the abstractions we need today. You know, maybe you just like have a single AI bot that runs at your company and you can say, hey, I want to like launch this new product and it does everything an ambitious this person would do.

5:37But that's not where we are today. So today we have to put in a little more to get the pieces put together. Yeah. How are you thinking about the meter benchmark for long task horizon? You're at the top of the charts. At the same time, it feels like we might need a new chart if we're talking about agent swarms, because they'll be able to do things that go for weeks, but they will subdivide the work. There's some subdivision that happens within a reasoning model, but it doesn't truly parallelize, at least that I'm aware of. So what does it look like in a world where you go to a model, but now it's spinning up a whole bunch of different models underneath?

6:13I think there's two of the key insights of the whole field are in this question. Number one, the implication that no chart in AI lasts more than a few years is right. And like this one, kind of, you know, we'll see how much longer it's really useful. The second is a lot of people thought that, okay, we're going to just need a super long task horizon, so we need a super long context. And definitely what people have already seen with coding agents is by agents breaking up work, orchestrating it well, farming it off to sub-agents. Even with the current limitations of the technology, we can do something, which should not be surprising because it's similar to how people do things, and get amazing amounts of work done.

6:55So that's been cool to watch. I think that will keep going.

7:01A joke that some people at OpenAI make is that soon the chart that matters is just going to be GDP impact. And then the question is, what's the one that comes after that? But everything else, a lot of these proxy metrics, there's now so much economic value in what the models are doing. What do you think could come after? I have no idea. Do you have an opinion? Happiness? I don't know. When you look back at some of your blog posts from 10 years ago, your predictions were usually pretty on point. Yeah. Maybe it's hard to predict. Thank you. Thank you. Specifically the merge. The merge, yeah. Like basically calling.

7:34I mean, there's a bunch that are good. Like right now we're getting, you know, thousands of messages in the chat about 4.0 and you predicted in 2016 that people could, would become, you know, very attached to a chat bot. Yeah. I'm working on like a big prediction blog post for the next 10 years seems too far, but the next five. But because it's like, I'm sure a lot of it will be wrong. And it, you know, it's still fun to try.

8:03The sort of like relationships with chatbots, clearly that's something that we've got to worry about more and is no longer an abstract concept. Even the question of what comes after GDP, like one reason I think that's interesting is the way we measure GDP now could start going down, even though quality of life goes way up. And we don't have a lot of practice with things like that, but the massively deflationary impact it. Isn't that just Europe? Not just Europe. We want quality of life going up too. Yeah. Not just going down, you know? Yeah. Switching gears, what do you think about the work, the NeoLab boom, the research efforts that are happening all over Silicon Valley?

8:47It feels like there's an acknowledgement that there's research breakthroughs that need to happen, and everyone's taking different shots at those. Do you think that those companies will just find a breakthrough and join a lab or launch their own products? I think it's fantastic, first of all. One of the meta things that we wanted to do when we started with OpenAI is when we started OpenAI is there had been a period where the technology industry in Silicon Valley in particular was amazing at new research labs or just doing new research in industry in general. And then it kind of fell apart, and there hadn't been a good one in a while.

9:21And part of what we hope to show, and this was not only us, like a lot of people were excited about new research labs, is that industry could do research again. So seeing that now become like fashionable and all of these new labs, I think it's totally awesome. Some will succeed, some will fail, some will kind of go into some other effort. But having industry support research in, you know, startup style, I think it's wonderful. Over the next two years, would you expect to acquire more individual product companies or more research labs?

9:54Good question. I don't have a strong opinion there. I would bet. Well, I'd say the very best ones will often look like a mixture of both. Like the one that I have in mind right now is something that very much looks like a mixture of both. So maybe the shape of things to come is the really, truly extraordinary product work will have more and more research component. and it'll be kind of a more of a hybrid thing. Is data the new oil? Is there a value? Yeah, we were joking a couple of days ago. A bunch of data, but they don't understand AI. They don't know how to monetize it. Well, and that phrase was effectively wasted a decade ago.

10:33Yeah. And so to say it now sounds really silly, but it feels like it could be more true now than ever. You know, certainly, yeah, man, they really did waste it a decade ago. I was just thinking of the kind of people that used to say that and came out of it. TED Talks. You're not supposed to call them out. They're nice people over at Ted. You know, definitely like the sort of the magic relationship of this last eight years, whatever you want to call it, has been like, you know, that we can put in more and more resources, compute data, new ideas, whatever, into creating an artifact. And it gets like, the log of it gets better.

11:18So you can throw in, you know, that's why we have this huge exponential increase in resources, but we keep getting better and better models. And for all of the concern people have about it's, it's going to like top out or it's slowing down or whatever. Like no one's been right about that. I mean, sometimes they, it looked like they were for a couple of months as we digested a new model or came to a new form factor, but it has been incredibly smooth last six or eight years of this. uh what those resources are there can be some trade-off between you know sometimes it's better to spend your money on better data sometimes on more compute sometimes something else on the whole uh compute power is the new oil is the statement that feels closest to true to me but there will be other parts too makes sense is software dead It's different.

12:09It's definitely not dead. But what software, like how you create it, how you're going to use it, how much you're going to have written for you each time you need it versus how much you'll want sort of a consistent UX. That's all going to change. There have been a number of these big sell-offs of SaaS stocks over the last few years as these models have rolled out um there i expect there will continue to be more i expect there will be big booms in software i think it's just going to be volatile for a while as people figure out what this um looks like the statement that uh someone said to me that has stuck in my mind most these last couple of weeks is that every company is an api company now whether they want to be or not oh yeah um because agents are just going to be able to write a series yeah we had we had dara we had dara from uber on yesterday and he had a pretty refreshing kind of approach we were asking about integrating agents with uber and and he recognized that yeah the ad business could potentially be threatened if you can order an uber and chat should be t but he basically said like you have to think of the consumer the consumer wants to order an uber via their preferred agent you should let them otherwise you're you're gonna have other problems yeah That is the right take for sure.

13:25And I don't, or I think so at least. And, you know, we've been through platform shifts like this before where you, I mean, Uber wouldn't have existed without one. It wasn't until the iPhone where you could like have it make sense to order an Uber to write where you were as you were out in the world. So I think there will be totally new things that happen. Other things you'll use in new ways. But definitely as I've started using Codex, my excitement about having agents go off and do things for me and still use other services, pay other services, I'm sure we'll need to figure out new business models and how revenue gets shared around.

13:59But that will happen. Yeah, talk more about Codex desktop. One more question on SaaS. Have any public market SaaS companies tried to get a soft landing with OpenAI? And do you think there's any value? you just let's say no one has no public sas companies that i'm aware of have tried that with open ai um look but some of them some of them some of them will certainly be durable and and are on sale right now and and potentially just need new energy and and uh need kind of a new an entirely new approach and maybe open ai could provide that yeah yeah i think some will be incredibly valuable. Some do feel like a thinner layer now.

14:40But I don't know, like I was talking recently to a bunch of SaaS companies and they do not, they do not feel unexcited. Like they're like, we're going to go through a big transformation here. And, you know, yeah, sure. Other people can instantly write software now, but so can we, and we've got a great system of record and seems reasonable. Some won't make it, of course. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Talk more about the the Codex desktop rollout, it feels like a successful amount of downloads, but a key shift for people who are maybe lightly technical but don't have time to set up an IDE and configure an environment to actually start writing software.

15:21I want to know about plans to integrate to the phone. That was a big moment, I think, for a lot of people with the clawed bot, mold bot, open claw thing was like oh i can text something and it will go and write code and that's valuable and that unlocks a new agentic experience like where do you see the codex desktop ecosystem going i am so codex desktop has been a somewhat of a surprise to me um in terms of how much people love it including how much i love it myself you know the i think it's a great example of 10 of polish of the experience of using these models, especially when there's so much capability overhang, goes an extremely long way to what you can build and how you interact with this stuff.

16:09Of course, we should have an ability to kick off new tasks from mobile and we'll do that. I mean, really what you want is like your single AI that's working for you on a unified backend, access to all of your data and your ideas and your stuff and your memory and all the context and the ability to work across a lot of surfaces. and often you'll be at your desktop. Often you'll be on your phone and you just want to add something in. But it is a pretty profound shift in my own workflow, not just for coding tasks, but more general purpose tasks. It's still kind of hard to use if you're not at least reasonably technical, but obviously we'll find a version of this product that can do other knowledge work tasks and control your computer and things like that where you don't have to be.

16:52And it'll bring the magic of building stuff really to a lot of people because even if you never look at code, you'll be able to build something reasonably sophisticated. One of the things that I have built when I was playing around with the new Codex app is this thing I had always wanted, just like this magic auto-completing to-do list. I really work with to-do lists and this idea that I could just put tasks in and it would try to go do them. If it could complete them, it could complete them. If it needed questions, it would ask me questions. if it needed, you know, if I had to do something, I could still do it the old fashioned way.

17:25But an interface like that, where, you know, all the stuff you want to do, you just sort of explain to a computer or your AI, and it tries to go off and do them. And sure, if you're on your phone, you're going to just add a task on your phone. Or, you know, if you want to easily import something from email, you're going to do that, like, felt feels really good. So I'm excited about all of the ways that this will just become a general knowledge work agent. Yeah. Were you unsurprised to see a product like OpenClaw come from open source? Because it's certainly that kind of user experience is not, I would imagine this is something that you knew would be a thing.

18:04And yet, I think part of the magic of OpenClaw is that it would be very, very difficult for a large tech company. Peter didn't make many phone calls to hyperscalers to say, hey, I'm going to be integrating with your API. It just went out. And you guys, you know, and when I think back on like the Sky acquisition, this kind of experience was probably very top of mind and things that you're working towards internally. I love the spirit of everything about OpenClaw. Yeah. And you are totally right that it's much easier to imagine a one person open source project doing something like that than a company who is going to be afraid of lawsuits.

18:42data privacy and everything else. You know, they're like, I think this is kind of how innovation works there. Something like that starts. It's clearly amazing. There will be a way to make a mass market version of that product, but letting the builders build the equivalent of the homebrew, homebrew computer club spirit go here is so important. Yeah, totally. All right. Can we switch to social? I feel like if I Google Sam Altman social, I get pure AI and Sora, and then also demand or predictions about a human-only social network. Where do you see social going broadly? How do you want to integrate it with it and power it in the future?

19:21The mold book thing was like a very interesting social experiment to watch and I think points to agents interacting in some sort of social space, hopefully on behalf of people, at least in some degrees. Could be quite interesting. I don't think we know what to do there yet, but it feels like social is going to change a lot. And I am interested in the space of what a social experience can look like when your agent is talking to my agent and coming up with new stuff. Clearly, putting a lot of AI bots on the existing social platforms is just making everyone crazy and not that fun. So that's not the right answer.

20:01But I think we can design something new for what this technology is capable of that will feel good and useful. Yeah. Is there a solution to the bot problem that's just all the labs sort of integrating with all the other platforms? And even if you can't detect it's AI generated, you can literally say, we just generated those tokens. Like those exact tokens are in our database. You probably can't do that because their open source models are like good enough to write things at this point. I am excited about sort of like assertion of humanity instead of trying to like detection of AI as a thing here.

20:40I don't know if the social platforms, it's like in their interest to solve this. It is cause it's creating like, at least in the short term, it creates like a lot of engagement and increased usage. So I believe they could solve it if they wanted to. I'm not sure it's in their interest. I'm actually not even like it is. I don't like it, but it is. Some people do seem to enjoy it. Yeah. Can you talk a little bit more about where Sora as a video generation model is going? It feels like tool use is maybe under discussed, adding reasoning. It's not just the diffusion model. It's giving these models the ability to make linear cuts and overlay motion graphics.

21:21When I scroll the Instagram reels that I see, they're like vibe reels with cutouts. It flips negative, and it's all color graded. and stuff that like, yeah, you could probably diffuse it all, but it's pretty cool just to teach a model to also use After Effects or whatever video, you know, motion graphics suite you want to use. Is that an interesting unlock? What do you see going on? So all of that stuff will happen. And I agree with you, the models will get really great at doing that. People love generating videos. I would say people, we have not yet found a way that people really love watching other people's videos.

21:56This is true for a lot of other AI. People love talking to ChatGPT or whatever. It's not that compelling for most people to read other people's ChatGPT generation. So I think there is something. But isn't that for all writing and all video? Yeah, it seems stronger to me in this case than the general case, but maybe you're right. Maybe this is not. Yeah, but if somebody says, hey, I generated a 15-minute video, I'm really excited for you to watch it. And you watch the first 10 seconds and you're not that captured by it. I don't care that it was human made. Maybe you're right. And this is, it's not a, it's not a special case.

22:31Do you see that in the data with, with Sora downloads? Because I've noticed that I'll generate stuff on Sora, download it and share it to a group chat. And then it's this little in joke that me and five other people get. And we see this like family group chats of, oh, it's our dog and our kids. But like, there's not really like, okay, yeah, this is a business. You know, everyone likes this. absolutely that i would say that the most common use case is something like that sure you know like memes on group chats is a real killer use case how is the disney rollout going i was super excited about it jordy was extremely bullish on it from a business strategy perspective yeah when you look at how image models have grown various lms historically and now you're going to have an image image and video model that can do something that no other lm can do at least legally yeah And is Bob Iger joining OpenAI?

23:21Bob Iger, I love it. No credit for that. He's going to be looking for a job. Free agent. He's a free agent. You've got to pick him up. Hit him up for us. Do some recruiting. That'd be great. I think that generating characters in images and videos is going to be very important to people, and they really like that. Like other, like we were saying otherwise, I don't think many people like want to watch me and some Star Wars character doing something together, but I might think it's cool. It's, you know, there's like a real trend going on right now with ChatGPT where it's make a caricature of me and my job based off of everything you know about me.

23:59And those kinds of things people actually do like looking at other people's media. Yeah, it's almost like a face filter or something. There's like enough of, it's the Studio Ghibli moment. Like there's enough of the human still in there that it's not, it's not, you can't, yours is not the same as mine. So it's still personalized. It's personalized and it says something about you. And, you know, the, the, the, like a lot of these things, a lot of what's gone viral before with image gen. I think it's like, if you can make people look a little bit more attractive or cool than they look in, than they are in real life.

24:32Yeah. Without sort of having to ask for that. Yeah. How are you thinking about the actual, the actual rollout? We were debating between like open the floodgates. You can generate any Disney property versus like it's Spider-Man week and everyone's posting Spider-Man. And then it's, you know, Mickey Mouse week. And there's another viral moment. I'm not sure what the team is planning there. I know Disney's had some different opinions about what they want to do and try to be a good partner there. But I'd be excited to open the floodgates personally. Oh, that'd be fun. Cool. Talk about your first, speaking of video, your first Super Bowl ad.

25:04It felt like not generated. lots of motion graphics, the black dots coming together. What was the goal with that ad? Who were you trying to speak to? It didn't feel like a direct response QR code, download the app. No. What was the mission? I love that ad. I think that was such a cool one. It was clearly not meant to be like a mass market or direct response ad. But speaking to the people who are at the center of this revolution and just trying to like celebrate everything that has come before and everything that will come after.

25:43We didn't hear a lot about it from like average users of ChatGPT, but we heard a lot about it from like researchers in the field and a lot of residents there. It was definitely not generated. It was done the old-fashioned way. And, you know, it had like a lot of people loved it, a lot of people hated it, and then many people in the middle didn't get it, and I felt okay about that. That's a great encapsulation. I like our ad for Sunday. okay it's about codex no surprise but yeah talk about the evolution of the advertising to be more uh just clear about the actual use case the value like what are you trying to say with your advertising strategy now as it refers as it relates to like video um