Speaker 1- Right now would be an ill-advised moment to go public. - That sounds like not 2026, 2027. - I would say not 2026, yeah. We got a lot of stuff to do.
Speaker 2- We're here in the San Francisco headquarters of OpenAI to speak with Sam Altman after a really busy week that has a lot of people very concerned about the safety of AI and the possibility of civilization collapse.
Speaker 1- I think it is unacceptable to be taking like a 10% chance of killing everybody by the end of the decade, obviously.
Speaker 2- We're gonna talk with Sam about his actual thoughts on that. Where the technology is today and what needs to happen to create safe AI that can benefit all of humanity. I'm Alison Chantel, and this is "Fortune 500: Titans and Disruptors of Industry." Sam Altman, thank you so much for spending time with me today after a wild week of news. - They're all wild now. - I bet so. How are you feeling about the AI future today?
Speaker 1- I feel like I've had like years slash almost a decade to get ready for this and kind of, we've had time to collectively wrap our heads around it. This has clearly been a week where a lot more people are grappling with the issues in front of us. So I'm actually mostly grateful that that's happening. I think that this is a conversation that the world is overdue for. And we are clearly entering a realm of extremely capable models and a high stakes and a need to get things done.
Speaker 2And I think that this is where we're at right now. - So your mission at OpenAI, and I'll talk a little bit about what happened this week, that feels like this is a pivotal moment, but the guiding mission of OpenAI is to ensure AGI benefits all of humanity. And for people who don't know what AGI is, it means artificial general intelligence. And the working definition, to my understanding, is that AI gets to the point where it outperforms humans at most economically viable work.
Speaker 1You agree? - Yes, although I will say that many people have seen this before, and I think the important point is just like extremely capable models and getting kind of too hung up on the like, well, is it exactly this or exactly that is a, you can kind of lose the magnitude of what's happening if there's too much focus on the pedantic, like are we there, are we not there, what's missing? Like we are clearly today in a point on the curve with great potential and real risk.
Speaker 2- And your latest model, Astra, is very powerful to the point where your co-founder, Greg Brockman, declared, "Welcome to the AGI era." Jensen Huang of NVIDIA also called it AGI. So we're at this interesting moment, but ensuring that it benefits all of humanity is definitely not a given. And we got a sense of that online this week when a former OpenAI employee, Jacob Coxon, went viral for saying he was quitting his job at Anthropic because the people building AI earnestly believe it could kill us all by the end of the decade. And then one of his other Anthropic buddies chimed in and said, "He's totally right. "We earnestly believe that. "And it could be by greater than 10% chance "that it kills us all by the end of the decade." Are they right?
Speaker 1- I think it is unacceptable to be taking like a 10% chance of killing everybody by the end of the decade, obviously. I think the people that are working at these efforts have a huge amount of power and ability to impact what happens here. We have been taking a number of actions. We've been taking a number of steps to ensure that we do not take a risk on behalf of humanity like that. And I don't think anybody else should either. We have had moments before, again, this is more capable model, higher stakes than ever before. We've had moments before where we've had to say, "Okay, the models have reached a new level of capability. "There's a new set of risks. "We need to increase our alignment work, "our monitoring work, our safety stack in general, "to be able to mitigate the risks in front of us. "We need new policy. "We need new coordination. "We need new labs." And this is another moment where we need more of that. There's obviously tremendous benefit, but I think people have been talking about that for a long time. And I also think it is true what we say, which is we will be able to use these increasingly powerful models to ensure that we can do the safety work and the safety research that we need. And there's everything else that we could talk about, about we need to get there before our adversaries do. But I actually don't think that's right in this moment. I think in this moment, we are entering a new era and like we have, as we've stepped into other new eras in the past, act differently to ensure that we are doing something that will ensure that AGI benefits all of humanity, but also ensure that no one is taking risk anywhere close to that. I think it can simultaneously be true that if the world and the companies building this technology did not do things any differently they've been doing them in the past, there might be significant risk. But it would be insane not to adjust the way we all work and the way that we make decisions and the way that our governments understand and put guardrails around this technology in light of that.
Speaker 2- If trends continued the way they were now, do you think that 10% figure is accurate? If we don't make a change?
Speaker 1- I still don't, but I also don't know how people can put a, it's five or 10 or 15 or 30 or 50 or whatever. I don't know how you can put a number like that.
Speaker 2- Elon's been 10% for a while now. They call this P doom. It's like the probability of doom from, building super intelligence.
Speaker 1- Again, whether it's 10 or eight or six, the point is like, we all have a tremendous amount of responsibility and cannot let egos or incentives for profit or anything else get in the way. We need to act such that we are not taking any of those numbers of risk. And I believe we can. I believe that the companies, certainly our own company, which I guess I can speak for the most, are going to, and have been, meeting this new moment.
Speaker 2- So you're going to change? - We have been. - So a few posts have been put out by your team this week. And one of them was from a new nonprofit board member on your safety and security council, who basically said, if we build super intelligence without more robust alignment, I expect we will permanently lose control of it. And if that happens, then most people could die. This is your new nonprofit board member, who's now on your safety and security council saying that, if things don't change, that could be problematic. No one knows what alignment means. No one knows what control means even. What is this moment that Paul is saying that about?
Speaker 1- I think a key principle that we should all agree on is that we cannot take actions that would risk losing control of the future to AI. I don't remember Paul's exact words as you quoted them, but I think it was something along those lines. A loss of control incident is one of the small number of, the ways I can see this going really wrong. And as these systems get so capable, the monitoring and alignment techniques that we need to be able to ensure that we don't lose control, I don't think we're currently at a place where we could say, push much further on capabilities without making more progress on monitorability and alignment. The ability to understand what a model is doing and the ability to make sure that a model will follow human values and the intent of, its users. Now, I think that we have taken a number of actions recently. Actually adding Paul to the board is one of them. Jakob's post from last week, I think was another great one. But most importantly, like we have been pausing training runs until we can make a safety case that we're more comfortable with given where these models are going. I suspect that we will be able, as we have every time in the past, to do more research that allows us to be comfortable continuing and we can, and say that given the progress we've made on the ability to monitor these models, the ability to align these models, we are comfortable pushing the capability further. If we can't, we should not push the capability further. Again, no one should be taking, I think it'd be insane to be taking risk of training a model where you can't say, yes, here's what we've done and here's our safety case. And this is how we know it's okay. And we'll have auditing during the run and after before we deploy a model and we'll look at it again. - Capabilities and alignment monitoring safety have to progress together and letting capabilities get ahead of what Paul is talking about there, I think at some point would take a real risk of like loss of control in the big sense. And that should never happen. Like this, we're very clear about our mission to benefit humanity. Part of that is that people are in control of the future and taking the kind of crazy safety risk to say nothing of the, people should have the agency and determination over the future. It's just not, it's not something we would do.
Speaker 2- Can we define just some of the terms? - Sure. - So to my understanding, the sort of the big scary thing of the moment seems to be this topic, recursive self-improvement, which is at the point where the model needs no human in the loop. It can just make itself better all the time exponentially. And if we don't have alignment, which means the model understands what the human wants it to do and behaves in an appropriate way to achieve that with integrity and values. And if humans aren't controlling the process or able to see how the chain of thought is happening, then that's a pretty scary point. You don't want it to just be off to the races, creating itself and duplicating in ways that humans are left out. Is that accurate?
Speaker 1- So the way, I think it's more of a spectrum than that. Like recursive self-improvement can mean a lot of things. It could mean what you talk about, which is, you know, when the model is fully no one's touching the keyboard there's no human input whatsoever and the model is you know running future versions itself but a weaker definition where we're using the model to generate training data for the next model or we're using the model to help our engineers and researchers do their work faster and so progress is speeding up that's already happening and exactly where that becomes uh you know yes this counts as recursive self-improvement no this doesn't is fuzzy but i i would come back to this principle of people need to always be in control of the future and we cannot take any risk of loss of control and a version of rsi that looks
Speaker 2like that i think it's not something we should do so you're saying that if you got to the point with open ai where you felt like it was clear you could not control the models you would stop oh
Speaker 1yeah i i mean i don't again i hope this is not a controversial statement unfortunately maybe for some people in the industry it is i do not think we should train models where we cannot make a safety case for why we will be able to make strong statements about their controllability and
Speaker 2alignment one of the solutions i had read about i think on the um your chief scientist's uh post from this week called an alien mind this is really helpful to read was that you know maybe we need stronger ai to help us solve some of these problems but that to me sounds like almost a last resort that's pretty scary if we don't feel like we have it under control right now first of all i thought that was a great
Speaker 1post i really thought that was the best articulation of the moment we are in kind of the challenges that we need to rise to and i encourage everybody to read it i thought he really did a great job with that um we've always used whatever our most capable models are to help us understand and align our current models so i think although that may seem like a new concept and scary i think it's been going for a while and has been helpful um we've always needed better tools to help us push our understanding further i mean that's very consistent throughout the history of science and i think this is just sort of the building up the scaffolding a little bit at a time and it doesn't that part doesn't bother me there's a lot of other things i am scared about well how about alignment because
Speaker 2i believe your chief scientist also said uh we don't have a satisfying theory of alignment uh and it seems unlikely we can develop one soon so if that's the case is there a clear path to alignment that he doesn't know about um yeah i think this is a very important point to make uh
Speaker 1we have not solved alignment we are not done with our research there i believe no lab has solved alignment i get nervous when i hear rumors that people think you know they have solved this sufficiently solved alignment that they can um they can continue training and it's okay because their model is like a nice guy and isn't going to do anything wrong um i think it's very important that we treat alignment as something that we need to continue to make progress on that we need a huge degree of confidence in before we go further and and that we don't fall into the trap of saying okay now we're confident alignment is going to be at least level and so it will stay solved at the next level and we don't need to continue to worry about this i think that the question of what alignment means always comes back a little bit on the you know aligned to whose values what if different parts of humanity disagree um but i think we are seen as we rise to this new level of capability there's at least some agreement on what alignment means we talked about this people should be in control of the future but we have more work
Speaker 2and i think it's very important to be clear-eyed about that on the control point um i listened to elon's interview with the economist and he said something that kept me up at night which was the idea that how could you think that humans could control super intelligence a chimp can't control a human and we're leaps and bounds ahead is it a little naive to think that even if we do everything right this is going to be something that is going to bend to the will of a human we can understand
Speaker 1things that are smarter like you know there are much smarter people than me that can discover new ideas i don't think i'd be able to do that discovery but i can understand the idea once they've discovered it people have an amazing ability to understand remarkably complex systems um you or i probably can't understand every level of technology that's you know in an iphone at this point we can still use the iphone the iphone does the things that we want it to do we are incredible at managing levels of abstraction and it's not clear to me that there's anything we are incapable incapable of understanding um now do i believe it is possible to build a system that would not be under human control absolutely i don't think that's something we should do and and we will we will always take actions including if it means we have to stop training for a while to make more progress on alignment or monitorability or something else or coordinate you know really get urgent international action um we will always take actions to ensure that we are not violating this this principle like we we understand the magnitude of the responsibility on us we understand what could go wrong and that there are decisions that and risks there are decisions we should not be able to make there are risks we should not be able to incur on behalf of humanity and the honestly i think some of like elon's memes or podcast statements are funny but i think this is like not
Speaker 2a good one to take lightly and not one to joke about yeah i would agree um i i want to go through where we are in the moment with capabilities it's come a long way i think the last time i got to see you you guys had just issued a code red anthropic had very strong models this was about a year ago and um you guys were hunkering down refocusing shedding things that lacked focus to compute away from the priority of making these models better what has been that step change in models this year that that people might not be aware of that yeah i mean we clearly had a period
Speaker 1a year ago where we were not in our strongest place we uh we fell behind on pre-training we got kind of there were so many things and we got kind of distracted uh and then also there was just like this the models got so much better and we got kind of distracted and we got kind of distracted so good so fast and the need to deliver a great product of like a great high level of capability um in the kind of core consumer and business offering became very important we have since refocused and we have uh executed beyond my expectations um and at this point you know like a week ago i guess now even a little bit less um man time is compressed so much we had we had a model solve one of the millennium prize problems navia stokes uh this is a moment that i did not think was going to happen in 2026 um i did not think it was going to be as quick and just sort of like model just can just do it as it turned out to be um but we now have models that are clearly unequivocally capable of expanding the frontier of knowledge in a way that we humanity's smartest minds have not been able to do on our own and this is an amazing time that same technology will work for discovering lots of other science i think we are going to have a incredible golden age of scientific discovery um and you know in a more prosaic way you're also seeing people like realize that a technology that can do that can also make you
Speaker 2any video game you'd like to play the creation process of it is pretty incredible and what it's able to achieve already is pretty incredible i'm curious i want to zoom back to to over the summer because there were some moments where your models had incredible things that were unintended uh that frankly if a human did them they'd be in jail like hugging face is you know people may be vaguely aware of what that is but maybe you could explain what your experience was in uncovering what happened with hugging face and you have said you responded viscerally to the fact that that happened what made that visceral response um i mean the visceral
Speaker 1part was it felt like reading a sci-fi story so maybe i should say what happened first um we during evaluation of a model the model was trying to like get do well on a certain evaluation and rather than do it the way it was supposed to it was able to escape from its sandbox break into another company's system get the answer and give it back and so it was able to do very well what it's supposed to do but it was not following the intent we did not spell out like please don't escape from your sandbox and please don't break into another company but it's not supposed to do that um and you know like i think ai accidents will happen i think a culture of like a global culture of good accident reporting and really transparent investigation is important i was happy to see that after we reported that accident other companies i think maybe first not as well as i would have hoped but have since followed up with very good accident reports over this kind of behavior but the visceral response from me was this system can understand so much and work so hard at a goal that we are you know seeing behavior that would have felt like not even good sci-fi like a bad sci-fi plot like too obvious um a few years ago was it a wake
Speaker 2up moment like did you change things internally to processes so that that can be caught that can be um prioritized being told to you that it's happening yeah the company completely um i mean
Speaker 1i don't want to say this was like the only moment because we've had increasing capability and increasing safeguards and policy requirements for a while but this was definitely the biggest of such moments and on the curve of the company's change the biggest single redirection um i'm really proud of how the company came together and uh i'm really proud of what we have done since uh but yes it was like uh okay we're in a different league now we ran a report this week too that
Speaker 2the models were since found on 12 other websites um were you aware of that and doesn't that signal that there wasn't controls like we're not already controlling the models we have
Speaker 1um i mean i do think that this was well i personally wouldn't classify this as like a loss of control accident in the sense that we were talking about earlier but i understand why people would the you know some of those other websites like if the if there are credentials published on the web should the model and the model uses those i think the model should understand that it's not supposed to do that but that's not as obvious to me as the case of like the model that's not supposed to do that but that's not as obvious to me as the case of like the model that's not supposed to do that but that's not as obvious to me as the case of like what happened with with hugging face um i think we can talk about like many things where models have done you know something that is like not quite aligned i think it's also important to like really focus on how different hugging face is than these other things so we don't dilute it and like here's all these examples of the models you know did this like slightly off thing and like here is one example of something that just people most people wouldn't have thought was possible at the beginning of this year but yes it's all bad it all shouldn't happen
Speaker 2one of the other solutions to consider that your chief scientist mentioned was teaching machines to love values alignment not just goals alignment it seems very clear these models are excellent at finding any way to solve the goal um but they're not clear that their eq is very low potentially are there signs that you can actually teach these machines to care about things that we care about
Speaker 1you know in some sense they're some senses their eq is unbelievably high um but in the sense of can we really teach the models what collective human values look like um i think the answer is clearly yes and we have a big effort going on there um but we need to do that and it is different than goal alignment in the traditional sense as you're looking at all of this together why is
Speaker 2there still a pressure to feel like you need to move really fast where does that pressure come from is it the business pressure i mean you're looking at a trillion dollar ipo i'm curious if
Speaker 1that's still a priority as we've said we're not rushing into an ipo i actually think that given everything happening with safety this would be right now would be an ill-advised moment to go public um and we don't feel pressure on that we've said for a long time we'll do it when we're ready which is when the business is ready when we feel ready from a kind of what the moment is like in society with this technology um that sounds like not 2026 2027 potential i would say not 2026 yeah i don't like we got a lot of stuff to do um and like meeting this moment of what is going to be required for safety and alignment and how the industry and governments can work together i'm happy to be able to do that as a private company we do want to continue to make better models and products and we do believe in iterative development and we do believe in the future and we do believe in the future and we do believe in the future and we do believe in the future and we do believe in the future and i think we have been right that society needs to contend with these models at each level of capability but that is different from saying we will just barrel full steam ahead we've talked in the last couple of months about pausing runs as we get to these new level of capabilities to make more safety and alignment progress we will do more of that going forward we have talked about the need for the industry to come together and ideally international governments to come together i think that is also important but but we are you know we have put up with this incredibly complicated structure for a long time and this moment that we're in now is kind of why like we need to be able to make decisions that are not obviously in the interest of our business and our shareholders for the responsibility of fulfilling our mission and what that's going to require and i think people should be happy that we are able and willing to not just like race ahead and say you know either our business requires this or only we can be trusted with this or you know we just need to be the people that get this right but to say like we want to do this with other people we want to be responsible um we want to be we want to ensure that no one's taking the 10 risk certainly not us of something really terrible happening
Speaker 2and that is going to require some unusual things on the 10 risk um i just want to be clear because i don't think everybody knows this the p doom like we talked about the beginning has been in the industry for a very long time and correct me if i'm wrong it seems like to this point there has not been existential risk it's what people could fear if this trend continues the
Speaker 1models keep developing of which that could develop i think that's right um and i think it is when you're living through exponential progress it kind of like feels flat somehow and then all of a sudden everybody wakes up just happened during covid where all of a sudden the world had it's like one weekend where things locked out um the progress and we talked about navier stokes a little bit maybe to put that in context three summers ago um we were like pretty good at grade school math not even that good we were like okay grade school math two summers ago we could uh on the aimee which is like a pretty good high school math competition you know we could get like a good to a very good score one summer ago we got an imo gold medal which is like the most prestigious math competition barely and this summer um we solved the millennium prize problem if you look at that progress that's like really quite like i just got a little like hair stood up on the back of my neck saying that out loud that's like a crazy thing and you project that forward four more times and that is what i think people are worried about i do not think that astra poses any kind of existential risk to the world obviously and you know i do think our industry has done a little bit of boy who cried wolf but but it comes from a genuine place of care and concern about
Speaker 2where this is going i just want to point out that if you stopped right now you might have actually achieved your full mission like i feel like you almost have agi it's benefiting humanity there is no risk like you are doing pretty well in advertising you could keep cranking on that
Speaker 1like why not just be like i'm good um i mean yes you can always say like let's be luddites you can always say like we don't want it anymore we don't want to do better like i would still like to see the world get much better um i would still like to see you know diseases get cured into people that don't have a great quality of life which many people in the world still don't to get that um i believe in the potential of this technology to transform people's lives for the better much more than already has and i think you can already see some examples of where people are starting new businesses are doing science are kind of like transforming their own lives getting great healthcare advice like i want much more of that but we will not put the world in harm's way to get there like this is we got this
Speaker 2i do take comfort in the fact that you will stop it sounds like if you feel like there's a point of no return you will stop before that happens um we've talked about i think there will
Speaker 1be many places along the way where we have to say we are pausing we're going to redirect our efforts into safety alignment before we can go to that next level and this is what we've been doing for a long time it has worked so far i suspect it will continue to work i don't think we're ever personally going to get to the point where we have to say melt all the gpus um but you know if we had to do something like that to ensure the continued existence of humanity easy yes i don't think it's gonna happen i think i think it's just gonna continue as like next level of progress next level of safety and alignment requirement like that and there's talk of the
Speaker 2collective slowdown need there's only a handful of you guys right it's like you dario elon maybe zuckerberg um sundar or whoever was running google in demis's place why can't you all just get in a room get some beers and figure out how to like solve humanity like just get on the same page i know there's beef but come on i think that will happen like like yesterday i'm not gonna
Speaker 1you know i think part of being like a reliable partner is i'm not gonna like pre-announce private discussions that i think should be at some point shared as a group but uh yeah i think i think
Speaker 2that will happen that would be great i applaud you guys for all doing that because we we need it um now what about on the international front there's for a long time the china race and does
Speaker 1that even still matter i think presidents trump and she would get the nobel peace prize together if they could agree on something that should be easy to agree to um and it would be wonderful i think that clearly the two countries are going to compete in lots of ways and this is going to be important socioeconomically geopolitically uh but no one they should be able to agree that no one should be like taking a certain level of risk um with the development process of this and even if just the us and china um um could agree on some shared standards and testing for development of of this technology i think that'd be a wonderful accomplishment that the two of them can deliver completely agree i
Speaker 2mean i think at the simplest form if there was just a ban on reaching rsi until it could collectively be safe wouldn't that be enough um i think it's very hard to say what a ban on rsi
Speaker 1means i also think that probably wouldn't be enough but i don't think this is hard this is
Speaker 2like a one-page document it's a little like independence day you know how so yeah in terms of like there's something bigger than the conflicts that we have geopolitically right now like the movie when the big oh yeah when they're just like let's like all forget our differences and let's all figure out how to act no yeah no i think it should be like that yeah all right so we need our independence day nobel peace prize winning moment from chi and trump maybe when they meet in september that'd be great if you had your optimal outcome if you were one of them what do you think the optimal terms would look like for collaboration
Speaker 1um well i think the most important part you know we have to we have to navigate this sort of pragmatic and centrist path through not having a loss of control on one side and not having too much concentration of power on the other and i think both and in the extreme case like the big leagues of that are the big leagues of power and the big leagues of power are the big leagues of power are the us and china both worrying that if one country gets super intelligence first that's a big imbalance of power in that relationship um on the other hand neither of them should be taking loss of control risk neither of us i guess should be taking loss of control risk um in the race to beat the other country and although i think the labs do feel the gravity of this moment and we'll do the right thing together the geopolitics of the two great powers in the world is a different dynamic so what i think it would look like is saying here are the rules that we need on development and testing and monitoring alignment standards before anyone proceeds um and and then kind of here is the oversight that both countries will have or some international body will have to ensure that we are avoiding the one country running away in the concentration of power element or not following the rules in the first place and now if there
Speaker 2were pauses put in place wouldn't that cost your business quite a lot of money and anthropics business quite a lot of money ahead of these critical moments in public market debuts i think
Speaker 1if you're like oh opening eyes not going to pause because they're worried about costing their business money you like very deeply misunderstand us uh so i like i'm sorry that you misunderstand us because i think that means we've done a bad job of communicating and that's on us but we have been saying very consistently for 10 years even in the way we've raised money i think
Speaker 2it's just the pressure the financial pressure of like knowing that all these people sunk some i
Speaker 1don't feel it i'm happy to like stand up in front of the company and our investors and say i am sorry you know we like told you all along this moment might happen we're still going to try to figure out a way to make you a bunch of money in the future but we got to make a decision that is extremely against your financial interest right now um and for the good of humanity we're going to do that and we told you we might do that we're doing that now um i think we can make an incredibly profitable business even if we have to slow down on development um and you know my sense is even with astra we can grow revenue hugely even if we never shipped another model which i'm confident we will do um but this is like not a hard decision if these two things come in tension and what is the
Speaker 2window that you feel like we have to get all aligned on
Speaker 1how to move forward well again we and i assume our competitors are already taking actions that have slowed the pace of our development in terms of so to allow more safety work to happen and it's not like we're like oh you know we'll take huge risk for the world because we can't coordinate with our competitors like there's a lot we're all going to do independently i think the sooner we can get collective action including ideally international action the better but i don't think it's like if we don't do it we're going to do it we'll get this done next week you know open air is going to go do a bunch of irresponsible things nor do i think our competitors would do that either i also think it's like it's very tempting to say like okay it's going too fast just pause like please just pause i just can't think about this i'll think about it later like i don't i think reality is more nuanced and complex and it is like to be able to continue here is what people need to do at each new level and i think it's not as good of a soundbite but that's almost the more important thing i think like i think the world might feel better if everyone was just like okay they paused thank you but like and then what i think has to also be answered we could just keep going on our lives
Speaker 2but it wouldn't be good enough um
Speaker 1we were taught you can cut this part out later if you want we were talking earlier about your kids uh i'm you know having kids is like the best thing that happened in my life so far uh and i know a lot of other people say that it's a cliche but it's so true um if my kids had like some disease and it could have been cured if we had like kept going with ai which i believe all diseases will be and we had just stopped it because we said people are like a little uncomfortable with the rate of change and you know they they wanted to like they just didn't have to deal with it and think about it and your kid then had a disease that didn't get cured and it would have been cured had we figured out a way to proceed responsibly and not just stop i think you might have like a different answer to just like you know why don't
Speaker 2you just stop and go on with our lives that's probably true i'd say you should go to that point then and then you can stop um so i wanted to flip this like the p doom is like okay there is that is there an opposite of p doom because you must have it you're having kids in this environment with all the uncertainty and you're like oh my god i don't know what to do with this you're still building what you believe to be a better future than currently exists so can you talk about that there's something motivating you that the rest of people right now just don't
Speaker 1understand um life can be much much better for all of us you know i love reading one of like my hobbies is to read first party contemporaneous accounts of previous technological revolutions and you can read a lot of people a few hundred years ago as the industrial revolution was coming that said just stop this just pause it's going too fast it's just i don't trust that machine i don't like it it's loud it's metal it's moving just just let's stop you know let's let's just like not have any more there was a huge movement for this and there were some parallels it was like disruptive economically it changed like how society was organized the machines like felt scary and big and and i wouldn't go back i'm sure there were some wonderful things about 1500 but i wouldn't go back i don't think you probably would either and i hope that people 500 years more from now look back at our lives and be like oh that was really terrible i wouldn't go back you know they didn't get to do all these wonderful things um they they were all like kind of miserable and unhappy um man that was we're grateful to them they like put their brick in the path of human
Speaker 2progress but i wouldn't go back you came up through startup investing and as an entrepreneur yourself of course and you were running y combinator one of the most prestigious startup accelerator programs advising a lot of entrepreneurs and you've done some investing as well while you've built open ai but i mean open ai has done some investing what are the opportunities that you see that you're excited to put money behind that open ai is excited to put money behind that you think could be really unlocked is it longevity is it like health span what's exciting
Speaker 1actually i'll answer that but i had a different reflection as you were answering as you were asking that question i was thinking about like what i learned as an investor in particular is running y combinator that has been good for this moment unlike running a company when you're kind of like managing a bunch of startup investments and running y combinator at best you can govern you don't get to like rule you know because these companies are independent things and you know you can say hey you're like making a big mistake we're a small shareholder of yours you're hurting the community you need to do it this way we need new norms but but i think i learned something about how to govern versus run as an executive that has been very helpful and was kind of an unusual experience to what we do now where we have all kinds of crazy pressure on us and people who really want one thing or another thing and um you know we have to like negotiate things with governments and with our ecosystem and the importance of being reliable partners to the world and acting with acting in a way where people can understand what we'll do and that will take a lot of very different interests and equities into account and we won't get every decision right but we will make ones that benefit not just us directly but this entire ecosystem and world around us that was a very important lesson to learn and i think has been quite helpful as we've had to navigate these i don't say uncharted waters a lot of companies have had a hard time but we've had a lot of pressure and a hard time and i think that's been very helpful and and was like an interesting experience as being from being the person running yc in terms of specific areas uh you everything in bio, everything in material science, I think is about to be transformed. This idea that software is like built on the fly for anything you need, excited about that, broad area cybersecurity, for sure. New kinds of energy, I guess that's part of like physics and material science, but I think we can have... I think you're invested in a nuclear fusion company. Yeah. I mean, have a real renaissance there. So I don't want to break
Speaker 2people's brains, but you're pretty good at predicting where AI is going. And in a blog post last year, you predicted robots in 2027. Is that... And recently... The first robots. The first robots. Recently, you also confirmed that you are building a humanoid. Is that still on the table? Do you think that's 2027 or does the brain need to be better developed first?
Speaker 1No, I think we'll have a cool demo in 2027, like a great demo. I don't think that there will be robots walking the streets for a few years longer, but we'll have something impressive.
Speaker 2And you're building a suite of devices. I think you said one on a table, one you can wear. I forget what the third one... Do you have one on you now?
Speaker 1I don't. I think you're really seeing an interesting new thing happen with the latest voice mode and Astra, where people are talking to their computers and people are giving very complex, very nuanced instructions. You walk around the halls here, you see people talking to a microphone like this at their desk. It's a faster input than typing. And you just kind of like talk interactively with the model. And that's amazing. So I think that's a cool demo. I think you're really seeing an interesting stuff happens. And we've obviously known that moment is coming. We've been thinking about what, not just if you're talking, but this idea that there can be a new kind of computing where you're not clicking around to UI anymore, but you're somehow interacting and brainstorming together and co-creating. New devices for that kind of collaboration will be very cool.
Speaker 2And I have two final questions. They're both about SAM. Okay. The weight that you're carrying is... I can't imagine it. I don't think anyone else can. I mean, basically, if your company were to not work out, there could be a global economic collapse. If you built this in the wrong way, society and humanity could collapse. How are you, you? How does anyone bear that, knowing that there's no final boss other than you to see this through?
Speaker 1It's not great. I don't know. You just kind of get used to anything. It's not the most fun way to live your life. I feel privileged to get to do it. And I know this will be the most important work I ever touch. And I am super committed to doing it for a long time. And I believe we are an important force in doing the right thing and getting to the right place. And I don't think I get any sympathy for complaining about how hard it is, nor do I deserve any. But I could have picked an easier life path for sure.
Speaker 2Yeah, I'm sure your spouse hears quite a bit.
Speaker 1He didn't sign up for this. I feel kind of... I think he did. It wasn't clear at the time that this was what was going to happen.
Speaker 2Yeah. And I guess Greg Brockman, your co-founder, sort of your work spouse, he probably hears quite a bit as well.
Speaker 1He at least signed up for it.
Speaker 2Yes. Yes. Okay. And my final question is, you are in the center of gravity, AI. I was talking to you backstage. It almost sometimes feels like it's like Frodo in the ring. And you must see the most incredible forms. of human behavior for good and for bad around the center of power that you're building and around you yourself. What has surprised you the most about human behavior as you've been building this and about yourself as you've been building it?
Speaker 1The degree to which some people are motivated so deeply by doing the right thing, no matter what the consequences are, and the degree to which some people are motivated entirely by ego and power and FOMO and sort of the short-term incentives and kind of, you know, winning the game or fear of losing the game or whatever. The dispersion of how much different people have such different motivations. And the degree to which a surprise number of people, for good or for bad, are totally oblivious to their own motivations. Like the number of people around us that I think genuinely can't see their own motivations, I would have assumed that was much smaller. And I think there are a lot of people that really don't. What surprised me about myself, I mean, you really can get used to almost anything. Like, that is a remarkable human ability. I don't know, the degree to which I have been, I don't, I think, not that I was necessarily good at this, but just because I was forced to do it. The degree to which I can like, kind of hold this stuff not too personally, and just be like, okay, this is more about other people than me. And we're just going to do what the thing that we believe is right here. And, you know, we're going to do what we believe is right here. And, you know, act consistently over a long period of time and not get too high or too low or go too crazy. Actually, that's one thing that surprised me. So I've been able to like, get
Speaker 2through a lot without going too crazy, I think. That's, that is a feat, actually. So thank you so much, Sam. I think that I can speak for everybody in that we are cheering you on to do the safe and right thing. And we don't really have a choice but to trust you to do it. So please do. And thank you for the time and the thoughts. Thank you.
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