Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI | Lex Fridman Podcast #419
- I think compute is gonna be
the currency of the future. I think it'll be maybe the
most precious commodity in the world. 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. The road to AGI should be
a giant power struggle. I expect that to be the case. - Whoever builds AGI
first gets a lot of power. Do you trust yourself
with that much power? The following is a
conversation with Sam Altman, his second time in the podcast. He is the CEO of OpenAI, the company behind GPT-4, ChatGPT, Sora, and perhaps one day the very
company that will build AGI. This is Lex Fridman Podcast. To support it, please check out our
sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Sam Altman. Take me through the OpenAI board saga that started on Thursday, November 16th, maybe Friday, November 17th for you. - That was definitely the most painful professional
experience of my life and chaotic, and shameful, and upsetting and a bunch of other negative things. There were great things about it too and I wish it had not been in such an adrenaline rush
that I wasn't able to stop and appreciate them at the time. I came across this old tweet of mine or this tweet of mine
from that time period, which was it was like kind
of going to your own eulogy, watching people say all
these great things about you and just like unbelievable support from people I love and care about. That was really nice. That whole weekend I kind of like felt
with one big exception, I felt like a great deal of love and very little hate even though it felt like I
have no idea what's happening and what's gonna happen here and this feels really bad. And there were definitely times I thought it was gonna be
like one of the worst things to ever happen for AI safety. Well, I also think I'm happy that it happened relatively early. I thought at some point between when OpenAI started and when we created AGI, there was gonna be something crazy and explosive that happened, but there may be more crazy
and explosive things happen. It still I think helped us
build up some resilience and be ready for more
challenges in the future. - But the thing you had a sense that you would experience is
some kind of power struggle. - The road to AGI should
be a giant power struggle. Like the world should... Well, not should. I expect that to be the case. - And so you have to go through that, like you said, iterate as often as possible in figuring out how to
have a board structure, how to have organization, how to have the kind of people
that you're working with, how to communicate all that in order to deescalate the power struggle as much as possible, pacify it. - But at this point, it feels like something
that was in the past that was really unpleasant and
really difficult and painful. But we're back to work
and things are so busy and so intense that I don't spend a lot of time thinking about it. There was a time after. There was like this fugue state for kind of like the month after, maybe 45 days after that was I was just sort of
like drifting through the days, I was so out of it. I was feeling so down - [Lex] Just on a personal
psychological level. - Yeah. Really painful. And hard to have to keep running OpenAI in the middle of that. I just wanted to crawl into a cave and kind of recover for a while. But now it's like we're just back to working on the mission. - Well, it's still useful to go back there and reflect on board structures, on power dynamics, on how companies are run, the tension between research,
and product development, and money and all this kind of stuff so that you have a very high potential of building AGI would do so
in a slightly more organized, less dramatic way in the future. So there's value there to go both the personal
psychological aspects of you as a leader and also
just the board structure and all this kind of messy stuff. - Definitely learned a lot
about structure and incentives and what we need out of a board And I think that it is valuable that this happened now in some sense. I think this is probably not like the last high
stress moment of OpenAI, but it was quite a high stress moment. Company very nearly got destroyed. And we think a lot about many of the other things we've
gotta get right for AGI. But thinking about how
to build a resilient org and how to build a
structure that will stand up to a lot of pressure the world, which I expect more and
more as we get closer. I think that's super important. - Do you have a sense of how deep and rigorous the deliberation
process by the board was? Can you shine some light on just human dynamics involved
in situations like this? Was it just a few conversations and all of a sudden it escalates and why don't we fire Sam kind of thing? - I think the board members were far, well-meaning people on the whole. And I believe that in stressful situations where people feel time
pressure or whatever, people understandably
make suboptimal decisions. And I think one of the challenges for OpenAI will be we're
gonna have to have a board and a team that are good at
operating under pressure. - Do you think the board
had too much power? - I think boards are supposed
to have a lot of power, but one of the things that we did see is in most corporate structures, boards are usually
answerable to shareholders. Sometimes people have like
super voting shares or whatever. In this case, I think one of the
things with our structure that we maybe should have
thought about more than we did is that the board of a nonprofit has, unless you put other rules in place, like quite a lot of power, they don't really answer
to anyone but themselves. And there's ways in which that's good, but what we'd really like
is for the board of OpenAI to answer to the world as a whole as much as that's a practical thing. - So there's a new board announced. - [Sam] Yeah. - There's, I guess, a new
smaller board of first and now there's a new final board. - Not a final board yet. We've added some, we'll add more. - Added some, okay. What is fixed in the new
one that was perhaps broken in the previous one? - The old board sort of got smaller over the course of about a year. It was nine and then it went down to six and then we couldn't agree on who to add. And the board also, I
think, didn't have a lot of experienced board members and a lot of the new board members at OpenAI have just have more
experience as board members. I think that'll help. - It's been criticized some of the people that are added to the board. I heard a lot of people
criticizing the addition of Larry Summers, for example. What was the process
of selecting the board? What's involved in that? - So Bret and Larry were
kind of decided in the heat of the moment over this very tense weekend and that was... I mean, that weekend was
like a real rollercoaster, like a lot of lots and downs. And we were trying to
agree on new board members that both sort of the executive team here and the old board members
felt would be reasonable. Larry was actually one
of their suggestions, the old board members. Bret, previous to that weekend, suggested, but he was busy and didn't wanna do it. And then we really needed help in wood. We talked about a lot of other people too, but I felt like if I
was going to come back, I needed new board members. I didn't think I could work
with the old board again in the same configuration, although we then decided, and I'm grateful that Adam would stay, but we wanted to get to... We considered various configurations, decided we wanted to
get to a board of three and had to find two new board members over the course of sort
of a short period of time. So those were decided honestly without... That's like you kind of do
that on the battlefield. You don't have time to design
a rigorous process then. For new board members, since new board members
will add going forward, we have some criteria that
we think are important for the board to have different expertise that we want the board to have. Unlike hiring an executive where you need them to do one role, well, the board needs to
do a whole role of kind of governance and thoughtfulness. Well, and so one thing that Bret says, which I really like is that
we wanna hire board members in slates, not as individuals one at a time. And thinking about a group of people that will bring nonprofit expertise, expertise at running companies, sort of good legal and
governance expertise. That's kind of what we've
tried to optimize for. - So is technical savvy important for the individual board members? - Not for every board member, but certainly some you need that. That's part of what the board needs to do. - So I mean, the interesting thing that people probably don't understand about OpenAI certainly
is like all the details of running the business. When they think about the
board given the drama, they think about you, they think about like if you reach AGI or you reach some of these
incredibly impactful products and you build them and deploy them, what's the conversation
with the board like? And they kind of think, all right, what's the right squad to have in that kind of
situation to deliberate? - Look, I think you definitely need some technical experts there and then you need some
people who are like, how can we deploy this in a way that will help people
in the world the most and people who have a very
different perspective? I think a mistake that you or I might make is to think that only the technical
understanding matters. And that's definitely part of the conversation you
want that board to have. But there's a lot more about how that's gonna
just like impact society and people's lives that you really want
represented in there too. - Are you looking at the
track record of people or you're just having conversations? - Track record's a big deal. You, of course, have a
lot of conversations. There's some roles where I kind of totally
ignore track record and just look at slope, kind of ignore the y-intercept. - Thank you. Thank you for making it
mathematical for the audience, - For a board member, I do care much more about the y-intercept. I think there is something deep to say about track record
there and experiences, something's very hard to replace. - Do you try to fit a polynomial function or exponential one to track record? - That's not that. An analogy doesn't carry that far. - All right. You mentioned some of the
low points that weekend. What were some of the low
points psychologically for you? Did you consider going
to the Amazon jungle and just taking Ayahuasca
disappearing forever or? - I mean, there's so many low, like it was a very bad period of time. There were great high points too. My phone was just like
sort of nonstop blowing up with nice messages from people
I worked with every day, people I hadn't talked to in a decade. I didn't get to appreciate
that as much as I should have. 'cause I was just like in
the middle of this firefight, but that was really nice. But on the whole, it was like a very painful weekend and also just like a very... It was like a battle fought in
public to a surprising degree and that was extremely exhausting to me, much more than I expected. I think fights are generally exhausting, but this one really was. The board did this Friday afternoon. I really couldn't get much
in the way of answers, but I also was just like, "Well, the board gets to do this." And so I'm gonna think for a little bit about what I want to do, but I'll try to find the, the
blessing in disguise here. And I was like, "Well,
my current job at OpenAI, it was like to like run
a decently-sized company at this point." And the thing I'd always liked
the most was just getting to work with the researchers. And I was like, yeah,
I can just go do like a very focused AI research effort. And I got excited about. That didn't even occur to me at the time to like possibly that this
was all gonna get undone. This was like Friday afternoon. - Oh, so you've accepted the death- - Very quickly, very quickly. I mean, I went through
like a little period of confusion and rage, but very quickly. And by Friday night, I was talking to people
about what was gonna be next and I was excited about that. I think it was Friday night evening for the first time that I
heard from the exec team here, which is like, hey, we're
gonna like fight this and we think... Well, whatever. And then I went to bed just
still being like, okay, excited. - Like onward, were you able to sleep? - Not a lot. It was one of the weird
things was there was this like period of four and a half days where sort of didn't sleep much, didn't eat much and still kind of had like a
surprising amount of energy. You learn like a weird
thing about adrenaline and more time. - So you kind of accepted the
death of this baby OpenAI? - And I was excited for the new thing. I was just like, okay, this
was crazy, but whatever. - It's a very good coping mechanism. - And then Saturday morning, two of the board members called and said, "Hey, we destabilize. We didn't mean to destabilize things. We don't restore a lot of value here. Can we talk about you coming back?" And I immediately didn't wanna do that, but I thought a little more and I was like, "Well, I really
care about the people here, the partners, shareholders. I love this company." And so I thought about it and I was like, "Well, okay, but here's the stuff I would need." And then the most painful time of all over the course of that weekend, I kept thinking and being told... Not just me, like the whole team here kept thinking. Well, we were trying to
keep OpenAI stabilized while the whole world was
trying to break it apart, people trying to recruit, whatever. We kept being told like, "All right, we're almost done, we're almost done. We just need like a little bit more time." And it was this like very confusing state. And then Sunday evening when again like every few hours, I expected that we were gonna be done and we're gonna figure
out a way for me to return and things to go back to how they were, the board then appointed a new interim CEO and then I was like... I mean, that feels really bad. That was the low point of the whole thing. You know, I'll tell you something, it felt very painful, but I felt a lot of
love that whole weekend. It was not other than that
one moment, Sunday night, I would not characterize my
emotions as anger or hate, but I really just like... I felt a lot of love from
people towards people. It was like painful, but it was like the dominant emotion of the weekend was love, not hate. - You've spoken highly of
Mira Murati that she helped, especially as you put in a tweet, "In the quiet moments when it counts, perhaps we could take a bit of a tangent." What do you admire about Mira? - Well, she did a great
job during that weekend in a lot of chaos, but people often see leaders in the crisis moments, good or bad. But a thing I really value in leaders is how people
act on a boring Tuesday at 9:46 in the morning and in just sort of the normal
drudgery of the day-to-day, how someone shows up in a meeting, the quality of the decisions they make. That was what I meant
about the quiet moments. - Meaning like most of the
work is done on a day by day in a meeting by meeting, just be present and make great decisions. - Yeah. I mean, look, what you have wanted to spend the last 20 minutes about and I understand is like this
one very dramatic weekend. But that's not really
what OpenAI is about. OpenAI is really about
the other seven years. - Well, yeah, human civilization
is not about the invasion of the Soviet Union by Nazi Germany, but still that's something
people totally focus on. - Very understandable. - It gives us an insight
into human nature, the extremes of human nature, and perhaps some of the damage and some of the triumphs of human civilization can
happen in those moments. So it's like illustrative. Let me ask you about Ilya. Is he being held hostage in
a secret nuclear facility? - No. - What about a regular secret facility? - No. - What about a nuclear
non-secure facility? - Neither, not that either. - I mean, this is becoming
a meme at some point. You've known Ilya for a long time. He was obviously part of this drama with the board and all that kind of stuff. What's your relationship with him now? - I love Ilya. I have tremendous respect for Ilya. I don't have anything I can
say about his plans right now. That's a question for him. But I really hope we work together for certainly the rest of my career. He's a little bit younger than me, maybe he works a little bit longer. - There's a meme that he saw something, like he maybe saw AGI and that gave him a lot
of worry internally. What did Ilya see? - Ilya has not seen AGI, none of us have seen AGI. We've not built AGII. I do think one of the many things that I really love about
Ilya is he takes AGI and the safety concerns broadly speaking, including things like the
impact this is gonna have on society very seriously. And as we continue to
make significant progress, Ilya is one of the people that I've spent the most time over the last couple of years talking about what this is going to mean, what we need to do to
ensure we get it right to ensure that we succeed at the mission. So Ilya did not see AGI. But Ilya is a credit to humanity in terms of how much he thinks and worries about making
sure we get this right. - I've had a bunch of
conversation with him in the past. I think when he talks about technology, he's always like doing
this long-term thinking type of thing. So he is not thinking about
what this is gonna be in a year. He's thinking about in 10 years. - [Sam] Yeah. - Just thinking from first principles like, okay, if the scales, what are the fundamentals here? Where's this going? And so that's a foundation for them thinking about like
all the other safety concerns and all that kind of stuff, which makes him a really
fascinating human to talk with. Do you have any idea why
he's been kind of quiet? Is it he's just doing some soul searching? - Again, I don't wanna speak for Ilya. I think that you should ask him that. He's definitely a thoughtful guy. I think I kind of think of Ilya as like always on a soul
search in 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 seen that side of him. - 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 he was like in a very
silly move, very endearing and I was thinking like, oh man, this is like not the side of the Ilya that 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? - I feel great about the new board. In terms of the structure of OpenAI, 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 gonna happen as 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 it did, but it was a shockingly
painful thing to go through. - Did it make you be more
hesitant in trusting people? - Yes. - Just on a personal level. - Yes. - I think I'm like an
extremely trusting person. I've always had a life philosophy of like don't worry about
all of the paranoia, don't worry about the edge cases. 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. It's definitely changed how I think about just like default trust of people and planning for the bad scenarios. - You gotta be careful with that. Are you worried about
becoming a little too cynical? - 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 like less of a default trusting person. - I'm actually not sure which
mode is best to operate in for a person who's developing AGI, trusting or untrusting. It's an interesting journey you're on. But in terms of structure, see, I'm more interested
on the human level. 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. - I think you could make
all kinds of comments about 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 like
give me a very good grade on that one. And I have just like
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. - Our mutual friend Elon sued OpenAI. What is the essence of
what he's criticizing? To what degree does he have a point? To what degree is he wrong? - I don't know what it's really about. We started off just thinking
we were gonna be a research lab and having no idea about how
this technology was gonna go. Because it was only
seven or eight years ago, 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 chat bot. It was before we had any
idea we were gonna productize at all. So we're like we're just
gonna try to do research and we don't really know what
we're gonna do with that. I think with 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 you patch it
again and patch it again and you end up with something that does look kind of eyebrow
raising 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. But anyway, in terms of what Elon's
real motivations here are I don't know. - To the degree you remember, what was the response that
OpenAI gave in the blog post? Can you summarize it? - Oh, we just said like Elon
said this set of things, here's our characterization or here's this sort of
not our characterization, here's like the characterization
of how this went down. We tried to 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 you had at the time. You 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 ago
Elon was crazily talking about launching rockets when people were laughing at that thought? 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 OpenAI and a lot of amazing people here chose to part ways of Elon. So there's a personal- - Elon chose to part ways. - Can you describe that exactly, the choosing to part ways? - He thought OpenAI was gonna fail. He wanted total control
to sort of turn it around. We 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 merged with Tesla. We didn't want to do that and he decided to leave, which that's fine. - And that's one of the things that the blog post says
is that he wanted OpenAI to be basically acquired by Tesla in those same way that or
maybe something similar or maybe something more dramatic than the partnership with Microsoft. - My memory is the proposal was just like, yeah, like get acquired by Tesla and have Tesla have full control over it. I'm pretty sure that's what it was. - So what is the word open in OpenAI mean to Elon at the time? Ilya has talked about this
in 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 diff... Speaking of going back with an oracle, I'd pick a different name. One of the things that
I think OpenAI 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. We don't run ads on our free version. We don't monetize it in other ways. We just say it's part of our mission. We wanna 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 free or low cost or free and low cost powerful
AI tools out in the world, I think that'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. It does become this like
religious battle line where nuance is hard to have, but I think nuance is the right answer. - So he said change your name to ClosedAI and I'll drop the lawsuit. I mean, is it going to
become this battleground in the land of memes about the name? - I think that speaks to the seriousness with which Elon means the lawsuit. I mean, that's like an
astonishing thing to say, I think. - Well, I don't think the lawsuit 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 and the company that's
currently leading the way. - Look, I mean Grok had
not open sourced anything until people pointed out it
was a little bit hypocritical and then he announced that Grok open source 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 criticizing
the competition is great, just talking a little shit, that's great, but friendly competition versus like I personally hate lawsuits. - Look, I think this whole
thing is like unbecoming of a builder, and I respect Elon is 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 the toss. - Yeah, he is one of the
greatest builders of all time, potentially the greatest
builder of all time. - It makes me sad. And I think it makes a lot of people sad. There's a lot of people
who've really looked up to him for a long time and said this. I said in some interview or something that I missed the old Elon 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 Grok beat GPT and then GPT beats Grok 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? 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 really open sourcing the model. Of course, it's not the
state of the art model, but open sourcing Llama and Google is flirting with the idea of open sourcing a smaller version. 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 closed source models. It won't be unlike other
ecosystems in that way. - I listened to all in podcasts talking about this lawsuit and
all that kind of stuff and they were more concerned
about the precedent of going from nonprofit
to this cap for profit. What precedent that
sets for other startups? - I would heavily discourage any startup that was thinking about
starting as a non-profit 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've done that too. - Well, like in theory, if you like dance beautifully here, 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 a startup if you do it this way. - No, I think there's
like laws that would make that pretty difficult. - Where do you hope this goes with Elon? Well, this tension, this dance, what do you hope this? Like if we go one, two,
three years from now, your relationship with him
on a personal level too, like friendship, friendly competition, just all this kind of stuff. - Yeah. I mean, I really respect Elon. And 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 on a philosophical level. So let me just
technical/philosophical ask. What do you think it
understands about the world more or less than GPT-4, for example, like the world model when you train on these
patches versus language tokens? - I think all of these models
understand something more about the world model than most
of us give them credit for. And because they're also very clear things they just don't understand
or don't get right, it's easy to look at the weaknesses, see through the veil and say this is all fake, but it's not all fake. It's just some of it works
and some of it doesn't work. I remember when I started
first watching Sora videos and I would see like a person walk in front of something for a
few seconds and occlude it and then walk away and the same thing was still there. I was like, "This is pretty good." Or there's examples where the underlying physics
looks so well represented over a lot of steps in a sequence. It's like oh this is
like quite impressive. But, fundamentally, these
models are just getting better and that will keep happening. If you look at the trajectory from DALL·E 1 to 2 to 3 to Sora, there were a lot of people that
were dunked on each version, saying it can't do this, it can't do that and I'm like look at it now. - Well, the thing you
just mentioned is kind of with the occlusions is
basically modeling the physics of three dimensional physics
of the world sufficiently well to capture those kinds of things. - Well. - Yeah, maybe you can tell me in order to deal with occlusions, what does the world model need to? - Yeah, so what I would
say is it's doing something to deal with occlusions really well. What I represent that it
has like a great underlying 3D model of the world. It's a little bit more of a stretch - But can you get there
through just these kinds of two dimensional
training data approaches? - It looks like this approach
is gonna go surprisingly far. I don't wanna speculate too much about what limits it will
surmount and which it won't. - 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 cats sprouting a extra limit at random points in a video, like pick what you want, but there's still a lot of problem, there's a lot of weaknesses. - Do you think that'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 cat sprouting extremes? - 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 get better with scale. - 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. Is the training to the degree you can say
fully self-supervised there? Is there some manual labeling going on? What's the involvement
of humans in all this? - I mean, without saying anything specific about the Sora approach, we use lots of human data in our work. - But not internet scale data. So lots of humans, lots of complicated word, Sam. - I think lots is a
fair word in this case. - But it doesn't because to me, lots, like listen, I'm an introvert and when I hang out
with like three people, that's a lot of people. Yeah, 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, yeah. - Okay. All right. But fundamentally, there's a lot of self-supervised learning. 'cause what 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 self-supervised in that way. And then the question is, how much data is there on the internet that could be used in
this that is conducive to this kind of self-supervised way if only we knew the details
of the self-supervised? Do you have you considered opening it up a little more details - We have. You mean, for sora specifically? - Sora specifically because it's so interesting. Can the same magic of LLMs 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 mean, frankly speaking, 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 gonna want from this. So that I don't wanna like downplay that and there's still a ton
of work to do there. But you can imagine like issues with deep fakes, misinformation. 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. We've some tried some different models. But if I'm like an artist, for example, I would like to be able to opt out of people generating art in my style and B, 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 Napster to Spotify. We have to figure out some kind of model. - The model changes, but people have gotta 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's gonna find
some way to reward it. That seems pretty hardwired. We want to create. We want to be useful. We want to achieve status in whatever way that'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 gonna 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. And then photography became a new art form and people made a lot of
money taking pictures. And I think things like
that will keep happening. People will use the new tools in new ways. - If 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 like
how many jobs is AI gonna do in five years and the framework that people
have is what percentage of current jobs are just
gonna 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 and over what time horizon. So if you think of all of
the like-five second tasks in the economy, five-minute
tasks, the five-hour tasks, maybe even the five-day tasks, how many of those can AI do? And 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 longer and 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 too 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 it, putting it together, doing parts of it, sort of directing it and running it. - Yeah, it's so interesting. I mean, it's scary, but it's interesting to think about. I tend to believe that humans
like to watch other humans or other human like- - Humans really care
about other humans a lot. - Yeah. If there's a cooler thing
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. But now let's everybody keep playing chess and let's ignore the alpha in the room that humans are really bad at
chess relative to AI systems. - We still run races and
cars are much faster. I mean, there's like a lot of examples. - Yeah. And maybe it'll just be tooling like in the Adobe suite type of way where it can just make videos much easier and 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'll take a while. Like that generating faces, it's getting there, but generating faces and
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. Looking back, it'll probably be this kind of historic pivotal moment with three, five, and four which had GPT. - Maybe five will be the pivotal moment. I 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 GPT-4, ChatGPT is pretty impressive, historically impressive. So allow me to ask, what's been the most impressive
capabilities of GPT-4 to you and GPT-4 Turbo? - I think it kind of sucks. - Hmm. Typical human also gotten
used 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 like GPT-3, people were like, "Oh this is amazing. This is this like marvel of technology," and it is, it was. But now we have GPT-4 and look at GPT-3 and you're like that's
unimaginably horrible. I expect that the delta between five and four will be the same
as between four and three. And I think it is our job to
live a few years in the future and remember that the tools
we have now are gonna kind of suck looking backwards at them and that's how we make
sure the future is better. - What are the most glorious
ways that GPT-4 sucks? Meaning- - [Sam] What are the
best things it can do? - What are the best things
it can do in the limits of those best things that
allow you to say it sucks, therefore gives you an inspiration
and hope for the future? - One thing I've been using it for more recently is sort of a
like a brainstorming partner. - [Lex] Yep. Almost for that. - There's a glimmer of
something amazing in there. I don't think it gets... When people talk about it, what it does, they're like, "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 kind of creative brainstorming partner. I need to come up with
a name for this thing. I need to think about this
problem in a different way. I'm not sure what to do here. That I think like gives a glimpse of something I hope to see more of. One of the other things that you can see a very
small glimpse of is what I can help on longer horizon tasks. Break down something in multiple steps, maybe 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 a human. It works a lot for me. What do you mean it works? - Iterative back and forth to human, it can get more often, when it can go do like a
10-step problem on its own. It doesn't work for that
too often sometimes. - Add multiple layers of abstraction or do you mean just sequential? - Both like to break it down and then do things that different layers of abstraction put them together. Look, I don't wanna downplay
the accomplishment of GPT-4, but I don't wanna overstate it either. And I think this point that we
are on an exponential curve, we'll look back relatively soon at GPT-4 like we look back at GPT-3 now. - That said, I mean
ChatGPT was the transition to where people like started to believe there is an
uptick of believing. Not internally at OpenAI perhaps. There's believers here, but when you think- - 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 ChatGPT 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 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 amount of work. That's really important to
say nothing of the product that we build around it. In some sense, we did have to do two things. We had to invent we 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 it 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. - But that was like a
known difficult thing. We knew we were gonna have to scale it up. We had to go do two things that had like never been done before that were both, like, I would say quite significant achievements and then a lot of things
like scaling it up that other companies
have had to do before. - How does the context window of going from 8K to 128K tokens compare from GPT-4 to to GPT-4 Turbo? - Most people don't
need all the way to 128, most of the time although. 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 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 people sometimes post in a paper or a significant fraction of
a code repository, whatever. But most usage of the models is not
using the long context most of the time. - I 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. So like that's part of the expansion that you're hoping for is a
greater and greater context. - I saw this internet clip once. I'm gonna get the numbers wrong, but it was like Bill Gates
talking about the amount of memory on some early computer. Maybe it was 64K, maybe 640K, something like that. And most of it was used
for the screen buffer. And he just couldn't seem genuine. This couldn't imagine that the world would eventually
need gigabytes of memory in a computer or terabytes
of memory in a computer. And you always do or you always do just need to follow the exponential of technology. 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 wanna 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. - [Sam] Sure. - There'd be some kind of breakthrough that will effectively feel
like infinite context. But even 120, I have to be honest, I haven't pushed it to that degree. Maybe putting in entire books or like parts of books and so on, papers. What are some interesting use cases of GPT-4 that you've seen? - The thing that I find
most interesting is not any particular use 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
like their default start for any kind of knowledge work task. 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 to edit a paper. The most interesting 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, help me think through ideas, especially when the books are classic, so it's really well written about and it actually is... I find it often to be significantly better than even like Wikipedia
on 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 magic is, if 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 GPT 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 GPT 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 gonna get a lot
better with upcoming versions, but we'll have to continue to work on it and we're not gonna have it
like all solved this year. - Well, the scary thing
is like as it gets better. You'll start not doing the
fact checking more and more, right? - I'm of two minds about that. I think people are like much
more sophisticated users of technology than we
often give them credit for and people seem to really
understand that GPT, any of these models
hallucinate some of the time and if it's mission critical, you gotta check it. - Except journalists don't
seem to understand that. I've seen journalists
half-assedly just using GPT-4. - 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. I would love our society
to incentivize like- - [Sam] I would too. - Journalistic efforts
that take days and weeks and rewards great in depth journalism. Also journalism that represent
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 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 got a lot of clicks. - Probably did. - And that's a bigger problem
about human civilization. I would love to see solved is
where we celebrate a bit more. You've given ChatGPT 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 and not? - We're very early in
our explorations here, but I think what people want or 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. I think there's like a
lot of other things to do, but that's where we'd like to head. You'd like to use a model and over the course of your life or use a system, it'd be many models. And over the course of your life, it gets better and better. - Yeah. How hard is that problem? 'Cause right now, it's more like remembering little factoids and preferences and so on. What about remembering, like don't you want GPT to remember all the shit
you went through in November and all the drama and then you can- - Yeah, 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. I 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'd like my AI agent to
gain with that experience too. So if we go back and let ourselves imagine that trillions and
trillions of contact 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 input out... Like all of my input/output in the context window every
time I ask a question, that'd be pretty cool, I think. - Yeah, I think that would be very cool. People sometimes will hear that and be concerned about privacy. What do you think about that aspect of it, the more effective the AI becomes that 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. Anything I want stricken from
the record from my AI agent, I wanna be able to take out. If I don't want to remember anything, I want that too. You and I may have different opinions about where on that
privacy utility trade off for our own AI we wanna be, which is totally fine. But 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 'cause sometimes company in the past, companies in the past have been kind of absolutely 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 like blocking
out the November stuff. - I'm just teasing you. - Well, I mean I think it
was a very traumatic thing and it did immobilize me
for a long period of time. Like definitely the hardest, like the hardest work thing I've had to do was just like
keep working that period because I had to try to come back in here and put the pieces together while I was just like in
sort of shock and pain. Nobody really cares about that. I mean, the team gave me a pass and I was not working at 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 one morning and I was like, "This was a
horrible thing to happen 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 ever touch in my life and I need to get back to it." And it doesn't mean that I've repressed it because sometimes I wake in the middle of the night 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. What I would be concerned about is that trust thing that you mentioned that being paranoid about people as opposed to just trusting
everybody or most people, like using your gut. It's a tricky dance for sure. I mean, because I've seen in
my part-time explorations, I've been diving deeply into
the Zelensky administration, the Putin administration and
the dynamics there in wartime in a very highly stressful environment. And 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 it in stride and kind of learned the good
lessons and felt the love 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 amount of compute for each token it 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. - Will it be similar like architecturally as what we're seeing now with LLMs? Is it a layer on top of the LLMs? - I can imagine many
ways to implement that. I think that's less important than the question you were getting out, which is do we need a
way to do a slower kind of thinking where the answer
doesn't have to get 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 I think that will be important. - Is that like a human thought
that we're just having, you should be able to think hard? Is that a wrong intuition? - I suspect that's a reasonable intuition. - Interesting. So it's not possible once the GPT gets like GPT-7 would just be instantaneously be able to see, here's the proof of from RSTM. - It seems to me like you want to be able to allocate more compute
to harder problems. It seems to me that a system knowing if you ask a system like that, proof 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 gotta go figure that out, seems like that will take more compute. - But can it look like a
basically LLM talking to itself, that kind of thing? - Maybe. I mean, there's a lot of things that you could imagine working 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 isn't one. - All right. - Maybe someday. - Someday. All right. One can dream- - OpenAI is not a good
company to keeping secrets. It would be nice. We're like been plagued by a lot of leaks and it would be nice if we were able to have something like that. - Can you speak to what Q-Star 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, Sam. - I mean, we work on
all kinds of research. We 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 gonna be moments Q-Star or otherwise where there's
going to be leaps similar to GPT where you're like- - That's a good question. What do I think about that? It's interesting to me it
all feels pretty continuous. - This is kind of a theme that you're saying is you're
basically gradually going up an exponential slope. But from an outsider's perspective for me, just watching it that it
does feel like there's leaps, but to you there isn't. - I do wonder if we should have... So part of the reason that we deploy the way
we do is that we think, we call it iterative deployment. Rather than go build in secret until we got all the way to GPT-5, we decided to talk
about GPT 1, 2, 3 and 4. And part of the reason
there is, I think, AI and surprise don't go together. And also the world, people, institutions, whatever you wanna 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 rush decision. I think that's really good. But the fact that people like you and others say you still feel like there are these leaps makes me think that maybe we should
be doing our releasing even more iteratively. I don't know what that would mean. I don't have an answer ready to go. But 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
somehow missing the mark. So maybe we should think
about releasing 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. - I do know some humans. People do like milestones. I totally get that. I think we like milestones too. It's like fun to say, declare 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 when is GPT-5 coming out again? - I don't know. That's an honest answer. - Oh, that's the honest answer. Is it blink twice if it's this year? - We will release an
amazing model this year. I don't know what we'll call it. - 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 they'll be very cool. I think before we talk about like a GPT-5 like model called that or called or not called that or a little bit worse or a little bit better
than what you'd expect from a GPT-5, I know we 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
it ends up being called, but let's call it GPT-5? Just interesting to ask, is it on the compute side? Is it in the technical side? - It's always all of these. What's the one big unlock? Is it a bigger computer? Is it like a new secret? Is it something else? It's all of these things together. The thing that OpenAI I
think does really well, this is actually an original Ilya quote that I'm gonna butcher, but it's something like we
multiply 200 medium-sized things together into one giant thing. - So there's this distributed
constant innovation happening. - [Sam] Yeah. - So even on the technical side, like- - Especially on the technical side. - So like even like detailed approaches, like detailed aspects of every... How does that work with different
disparate teams and so on? How do the medium-sized things become one whole giant transformer? How does this- - There's a few people who have to think about putting
the whole thing together, but a lot of people try to keep most of the picture in their head. - Oh, like the individual teams, individual contributors tried to keep a big picture-
- At 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. And 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 frontier or most 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 because I wouldn't have all the data and 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 you used to be, Sam. - 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 or blah blah blah. - Oh, that's somebody else. - [Sam] Yeah. - Oh, but you said it, "Fuck it, maybe eight," I think. - Okay. I meme like once
there's like misinformation out in the world. - Oh, you meme. But sort of misinformation
may have a foundation of insight there. - Look, I think compute
is gonna 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... I think it's gonna be an unusual market. People think about the
market for like chips for mobile phones or something like that. And you can say that, okay, there's 8 billion people in the world, maybe 7 billion of them have phones or 6 billion, let's say. They upgrade every two years, so the market per year is 3 billion system on chip for smartphones. And if you make 30 billion, you will not sell 10 times as many phones because most people have one phone. But compute is different, like intelligence is
gonna 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 at price Y, the world will 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 or work on and trying to cure cancer. And if it's really expensive, maybe I'll only use it or will only use it, try to cure 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. Energy 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 fusion, I think,
is also like quite amazing and I hope as a world, we can re-embrace that. It's really sad to me how
the history of that went and hope we get back to
it in a meaningful way. - So to you, part of the puzzle is nuclear fusion, like nuclear reactors as
we currently have them and a lot of people are terrified because of Chernobyl and so on. - Well, I think we
should make new reactors. I think it's a shame that
industry kind of ground to a halt. - 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 fusion is humans
seem to be really afraid of it. And 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 gonna
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 wanna stop this. - [Sam] Maybe. - How do you decrease the
theatrical nature of it? I've already starting to hear rumblings 'cause I do talk to people on both sides of the political spectrum here, rumblings where it's
going to be politicized, AI is going to be politicized,
really, really worries me because then it's like maybe
the right is against AI and the left is for AI 'cause it's going to help
the people or whatever. Whatever the narrative
and the formulation is, that really worries me. And 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 gonna look like, but I think that's just what happens with anything of
consequence, unfortunately. What I meant more about
theatrical risks is like AI is gonna have, I believe, tremendously more good
consequences than bad ones, but it is gonna have bad ones. And there'll be some
bad ones that are bad, but not theatrical. A lot more people have
died of air pollution than nuclear reactors, for example. But 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, what are the actual dangers
of things in the world. What are the pros and cons of
the competition in the space and competing with Google,
Meta, xAI and others? - I think I have a pretty
straightforward answer to this that 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 arms race in some negative co- - 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 timelines, slow
takeoff is the safest quadrant and the one I'd most like us to be in. But I do wanna make sure
we get that slow takeoff. - Part of the problem I have with this kind of slight beef with Elon is that there's silos are created as opposed to 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
gonna race on unsafely. - Yeah. But collaboration here, I
think, is really beneficial for everybody on that front. - Not really a thing he's most known for. - Well, he is known for
caring about humanity and humanity benefits from collaboration and so there's always a
tension, and incentives, and motivations. And 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 surpassed 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 towards AI.
- I agree. - I think Elon is a friend and he is a beautiful human being and one of the most important humans ever. 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 step up as a
leader through this next phase. - Yeah, 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. Let me ask you. Google, with the help of search, has been dominating 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-wracking
things for Google, but for the entirety of people in this space is thinking about how are people going
to access information. Like you said, people show up to GPT as a starting point. So is OpenAI going to
really take on this thing that Google started 20 years ago, which is how do we get- - I find that boring. I mean, if the question is if we can build a better
search engine than Google or whatever, then sure, we should go... 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, 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
on and synthesize information. Actually, I think ChatGPT
is that for some use cases and hopefully will 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 webpages to look at than what Google does. Maybe it's really interesting to go, say, how do we help you get the answer or the information you need? How do we help create that in some cases, synthesize that in
others or point you to it and yet others? But a lot of people have tried to just make a better
search engine than Google, and it's a hard technical problem, it's a hard branding problem, it's a hard ecosystem problem. I don't think the world
needs another copy of Google. - And integrating a chat
client like a ChatGPT with a search engine. - That's cooler. - It's cool, but it's tricky. If you just do it simply, it's awkward because like if you
just shove it in there, 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- - Well, like a heterogeneous, like integrating- - The intersection of LLMs plus search, I don't think anyone has
cracked the code on yet. I would love to go do that. I think that would be cool. - Yeah. What about the ads side? Have you ever considered monetization? - 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 more mature industry. The world is richer now. I like that people pay for ChatGPT and know that the answers they're
getting are not influenced by advertisers. I'm sure there's an ad unit
that makes sense for LLMs. And I'm sure there's a way to 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 ChatGPT something and it says, "Oh, you should
think about buying this product or you should think about this going here for vacation 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. I know I'm paying and that's how the business model works. And when I go use 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 the ads are for
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 it very
challenging as a business model. So you're saying the current thing with OpenAI is sustainable
from a business perspective? - Well, we have to figure out how to grow, but it looks like we're
gonna 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. - Hmm. Well, 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 a also bias and just
a skepticism in general and in terms of interface because I personally just
have like a spiritual dislike of crappy interfaces, which is why AdSense when it first came out
was a big leap forward versus like animated banners or whatever. But 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, like it will manipulate the truth to suit the advertisers. Let me ask you about safety, but also bias and safety
in the short term safety in the long term. The Gemini 1.5 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 it 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 the harm cost 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, will make others. I assume Google will learn from this one, still make others. These are not easy problems. One thing that we've been thinking about more and more is I
think this was 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, here's how this
model's 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 that's a bug the company should fix or behaving as intended and you should debate the policy. And right now, it can
sometimes be caught in between. Black Nazis, obviously ridiculous, but there are a lot of
other kind of subtle things that you can 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 that's... The Google's AI principle
is a very high level. - That's not what I'm talking about. That doesn't work. Like I'd have to say when
you ask it to do thing X, it's supposed to respond in wait Y. - So, literally, who's better, Trump or Biden? What's the expected response from a model? Like something like very concrete. - I'm open to a lot of ways
a model could behave them, but I think you should have
to say 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 'cause 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 a bug, it's a bug and 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. So San Francisco is a bit of
an ideological bubble tech in general as well. Do you feel the pressure
of that within a company that there's like 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 at OpenAI that I have heard of
at a lot of other companies. I think part of it is
like every company's got some ideological thing. We have one about AGI and 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 mess in all
sorts of ways, of course. - So that doesn't infiltrate OpenAI. - I'm sure it does in
all sorts of subtle ways, but not in the obvious. We've had our flareups
for sure like any company, but I don't think we have
anything like what I hear about happening at other
companies here on this topic. - So what 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? - I think there will come a point where that's mostly what we
think about the whole company. It's not like you have one safety team. It's like when we ship GPT-4, that took the whole company thing about all these different aspects and how they fit together. And I think it's gonna take that. More and more of the company thinks about those issues all the time. - That's literally what
humans will be thinking about the more powerful AI becomes. So most of the employees that
OpenAI will be thinking safety or at least to some degree. - Broadly defined, yes. - Yeah. I wonder what are the full
broad definition of that. What are the different
harms that could be caused? Is this like on a technical level or is this almost like security threats? - All those things. Yeah, I was gonna say it'll be people, state actors trying to steal the model. It'll be all of the
technical alignment work. It'll be societal
impacts, economic impacts. It's not just like we have
one team thinking about how to align the model. It's really gonna be like getting to the good outcome is
gonna take the whole effort. - How hard do you think people, state actors perhaps are trying to hack? First of all, infiltrate OpenAI, but second of all, infiltrate unseen, - They're trying. - What kind of accent do they have? - I don't think I should go into 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 one area and worse at others. It's getting like better across the board. That's I think super cool. - Yeah, there's this magical moment. I mean, you meet certain people, you hang out with people and 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 at GPT. 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. I 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 GPT 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 the programming front, looking out into the future, how much programming do you
think humans will be doing 5, 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. - Entirely natural language. - I mean, no one programs
like writing by code... Some people. No one programs the pun cards anymore. I'm sure you can invite someone who does, but you know what I mean. - Yeah. You're gonna get a lot of angry comments. No, no. Yeah, there's very few. I've been looking for
people program Fortran. It's hard to find even Fortran. I hear you. But that changes the
nature of the skillset or the predisposition for the kind of people we call programmers then. - Changes the skillset. How much it changes the predisposition, I'm not sure - Oh, same kind of puzzle solving, all that kind of stuff.
- Maybe. - Yeah, the programming is hard. 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
work in natural language and when they need to go
write, see for something, they'll do that. - Will we see a humanoid robots or humanoid robot brains
from OpenAI at some point? - At some point. - How important is embodied AI to you? - I think it's like sort of
depressing if we have AGI and the only way to get things done in the physical world is like
to make a human go do it. So I really hope that as
part of this transition, as this phase change, we also get motor robots or some sort of physical world robots. - I mean, OpenAI has some history and quite a bit of history
working in robotics, but it hasn't quite done
in terms of emphasis. - Well, we're like a small company. We have to really focus and also robots were hard for
the wrong reason at the time. But like we will return to robots in some way at some point. - That sounds both inspiring and menacing. - Why? - Because you immediately, we will return to robots. It's kind of like in like- - We'll return to work
on developing robots. We will not turn ourselves
into robots, of course. - Yeah. When do you think we you and we as humanity will build AGI? - I used to love to
speculate on that question. I have realized since that I think it's like very poorly formed and that people use extremely definition, different definitions for what AGI is. And so I think it makes more sense to talk about when we'll build systems that can do capability X or Y or Z rather than when we kind of like fuzzily cross
this one mile marker. It's not like AGI is also not an ending. It's much more of.... It's closer to a beginning but it's much more of a mile marker than either of those things. But 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 if you look at ChatGPT even 3, 5, and you show that to Alan Turing or not even Alan Turing, people in the nineties, they would be like this is definitely AGI. Well, not definitely, but there's a lot of experts that would say this is AGI. - Yeah, but I don't think
3, 5 changed the world. It maybe 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. And that's really important too. So again, I don't wanna undersell it. I think I could retire
after that accomplishment and be pretty happy with my career. But as an artifact, I don't think we're
gonna 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. - Like singularity level transition? - No. Definitely not. - But just a major, like the internet being like a... Like Google Search did, I guess. What was the transition point that- - Does the global economy
feel any different to you now or materially different
to you now than it did before we launched GPT-4? I think you would say no. - No, no. It might be just a really nice tool for a lot of people to use, will help people with a lot of stuff, but doesn't feel different. And you're saying that- - I mean, again, people
define AGI all sorts of different ways. So maybe you have a different
definition than I do. But for me, I think that should be part of it. - There could be major
theatrical moments also. What to you would be an
impressive thing AGI would do? Like you are alone in
a room 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, hence why I don't like the
skepticism about science in the recent years. - Totally. - But actual rate, like measurable rate of
scientific discovery. But even just seeing a system
have really novel intuitions, like scientific intuitions, even that will 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 so. - Sure. - But I've actually thought
a lot about this question. If I were someone was like... As we talked about earlier, I think this is a bad framework. But if someone were like,
"Okay, Sam, we're finished. Here's a laptop. Yeah, this is the AGI," you can go talk to it. I find it surprisingly difficult
to say what I would ask, that I would expect that first
AGI to be able to answer. Like that first one is
not gonna be the one which is go like I don't think, like go explain to me 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 there's such a theory exist, can it exist? - Well, then those are the
first questions I would ask. - Yes or no, just very... And then based on that, are there other alien
civilizations out there? Yes or no? What's your intuition? And then you just ask that. - Yeah. I mean, well, so I don't expect that this first AGI could answer any of those questions even as yes or nos. But if it could, those would be very high on my list. - Hmm. Maybe it can start
assigning probabilities. - Maybe we need to go
invent more technology and measure more things first. - But if it's any AGI... Oh I see. It just doesn't have enough data. - I mean, maybe it says like you want to know the answer to this
question about physics, I need you to like 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 me
build a machine maybe. - Maybe. - And on the mathematical side, maybe prove some things. Are you interested in
that side of things too? The formalized exploration of ideas? Whoever builds AGI first
gets a lot of power. Do you trust yourself
with that much power? - Look, I was gonna... I'll just be very honest with this answer. I was gonna 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 was just like, yeah,
that's the will of the board even though I think it's
a really bad decision. And 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, although the board had the legal ability to fire me, in practice, it didn't quite work. And that is its own kind
of governance failure. Now, again, I feel like
I can completely defend the specifics here and I think most people
would agree with that. But it does make it harder for me to like look you in the eye and say, hey, the board can just fire me. I continue to not want super
voting control over OpenAI. I never had it, never have wanted it. Even after all this craziness, I still don't want it. I continue 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 realize that that means
people like Marc Andreessen or whatever will claim I'm
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. But 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 in a good and healthy way. But I don't think any one
person should be in control of an AGI 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. 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 of 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, but because of the AI itself. - That is not my top worry
as I currently see things. There have been times I
worried about that more. There may be times again in the future where that's my top worry. It's not my top worry right now. - What's your intuition about
it not being your worry? Because there's a lot of other stuff to worry about essentially. You think you could be surprised? We could be surprised.
- For sure, of course. Saying it's not my top worry doesn't mean I don't think we need to 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, like connect to the internet. - We talked about theatrical risk earlier. That's a theatrical risk. That is a thing that can
really like take over how people think about this problem. And there's a big group
of like very smart, I think very well-meaning
AI safety researchers that got super hung up
on this one problem. I'd argue 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
tweeting with no capitalization. Does the shift keep
broken on your keyboard? - Why does anyone care about that? - I deeply care. - But why? I mean, other people
ask me about that too. Any intuition? - I think it's the same reason there's like this poet E. E. Cummings that mostly doesn't use capitalization to say like fuck you to
the system kind of thing. And I think people are very paranoid 'cause they want you to follow the rules. - You think that's what it's about? - I think it's- - This guy doesn't follow the rules. He doesn't capitalize his tweets. This seems really dangerous. - He seems like an anarchist. - [Sam] It doesn't. - Are you just being poetic, hipster? What's the- - I grew up as- - Follow 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 could like log off
instant 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. I actually, this is like... Now, I'm like really trying
to reach for something. But I think capitalization
has gone down over time. If you read like old English writing, they capitalized 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. That's fine. 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 like private DMs or whatever in a long time. And then slowly, stuff like shorter form, less formal stuff has slowly drifted to like closer and closer to
how I would text my friends. If I write, if I pull up a Word document and I'm writing a strategy memo for the company or something, I always capitalize that. If I'm writing 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. But I never spend time thinking about this so I don't have like a ready made. - Well, it's interesting. Well, it's good to, first of all, know there's the shift key is not broken. - It works. - I was mostly concerned about
your wellbeing on that front. - I wonder if people still
capitalize their Google Searches. Like if you're writing
something just to yourself or their ChatGPT queries, if you're writing
something just to yourself, do some people still bother to capitalize? - Probably not. 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 force myself to use capital letters, obviously. If it felt like a sign of
respect to people or something, then I could go do it. But I don't know, 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 it's
not actually important for civility if it's not a
sign of respect or disrespect. But I think there's a movement
of people that 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 some people... - Think about this every
day for many hours a day. I'm really grateful we clarified it. - Can't be the only person
that doesn't capitalize tweets. - You'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, we'll investigate for this and return to this topic later. Given Sora's ability to
generate simulated worlds, let me ask you a pothead 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? - Yes, somewhat. I don't think that's like the
strongest piece of evidence. I think the fact that we can
generate worlds should increase everyone's probability somewhat
or at least open to it, openness to it somewhat. But you know, I was like
certain we would be able to do something like Sora at some point. It happened faster than I thought. I guess that was not a big update. - Yeah. And presumably, it'll get
better and better and better. The fact that you can generate worlds, they're novel. They're based in some
aspect of training data, but when you look at them, they're novel. That makes you think like how
easy it's to do this thing, how easy it's to create universes, entire like video game worlds
that seem ultrarealistic and photorealistic. And then how easy is it to get lost in that world first with a VR headset and then on the physics-based level? - Someone 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, okay, now I have to think
about this new kind of number. But once I come up with this easy idea of a square root function that you can kind of explain to a child and exists by even like looking
at some simple geometry, then you can ask the question of what is the square
root of negative one? This is why it's like a psychedelic thing that tips you into some
whole other kind of reality. And 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 Sora worked
is not in the top five. - I do think broadly speaking, AI will serve as those kinds of gateways at its best simple
psychedelic like gateways to another wave sea reality. - That seems for certain. - That's pretty exciting. I haven't done Ayahuasca before, but I will soon. I'm going to the
aforementioned Amazon jungle in a few weeks. - Excited. - Yeah, I'm excited for it. Not the Ayahuasca part. That's great, whatever. But I'm gonna spend several
weeks in the jungle, deep in the jungle and it's exciting, but it's terrifying- - I'm excited for you. - 'Cause there's a lot of things that can eat you there and
kill you and poison you, 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 'cause it's just like this
system that just exists and renews itself like every second, every minute, every hour. 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. So hopefully, I'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 aliens,
civilizations out there, intelligent ones when you look up at the skies? - I deeply want to believe
that the answer is yes. I do find that kind of where... I find the firm paradox
very, very puzzling. - I find it scary that intelligence is not good at handling- - Yeah. Very scary, powerful.
- 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 with this 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. It's not as simple as IQ tests and simple puzzle solving. There's something bigger. Well, 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 in a not very long period of time. Huge problems, deep flaws, lots to be super ashamed of, but on the whole, very inspiring, gives me a lot of hope. - Just the trajectory of it all that we're together pushing
towards a better future. - It is... One thing that I wonder about is, is AGI gonna be more
like some single brain, or is it more like the sort
of scaffolding in 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. That's not because of biological change. I mean, you got a little
bit healthier probably. You have modern medicine, you eat better, whatever. But what you have is this scaffolding that we all contributed
to built on top of. No one person is gonna
go build the iPhone. No one person is gonna go
discover all of science. And yet you get to use it. And that gives you incredible ability. And so in some sense, that like we all created that and that fills me with
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. I wanna see what's gonna happen." - [Lex] 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 ChatGPT is one of, and everything that OpenAI is doing. Sam, it's really an honor and pleasure to talk to you again. - Great to talk to 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. Clarke 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.