Sam Altman x Nikhil Kamath: How to Win When AI Changes Everything | People by WTF | Episode 13
45m 11s
The conversation centers on the transformative impact of GPT-5 and the broader AI revolution. GPT-5 is highlighted as a major integrated advancement, significantly more robust and capable than its predecessors, acting as a versatile expert for tasks ranging from software creation to complex research. This technological leap creates a historic opportunity for individuals, particularly young people in growing markets like India, to leverage these tools to build companies or pursue careers with unprecedented efficiency and scale. The advice for career building emphasizes mastering the AI tools themselves as the paramount skill, alongside cultivating adaptability and the ability to identify what people want. The discussion extends to philosophical and societal implications, advocating for intellectual humility and a learning-oriented mindset as keys to navigating uncertainty. Finally, it posits that in a future shaped by AI abundance, core human pursuits like family and community will likely regain central importance for fulfillment.
[Music] [Music] You have told him five minutes? Yeah, two minutes. Everything looks good. Just a monitor, the main monitor went up. Everyone who's done can leave. [Music] Hi Sam. Hey Nikhil. How are you? I'm good. Sorry I'm late. I got caught up in getting ready for the launch tomorrow and lost track of time and excitement with the final results. No worries. I'm guessing it must be really hectic, right? It is a very hectic day. [Music] [Music] I have the model and I've been playing with it a little bit. How is it different Sam? I'm not an expert at this. So, yeah. There's all these ways we can talk about, you know, it's better at this metric or it's, you know, can do this amazing coding demo that the, you know, GPT 4 couldn't. But the thing that has been most striking for me is in ways that are both big and small going back from GPT 5 to our previous generation model is just so painful. It's just like worst at everything and I've taken for granted that there's a fluency and adaptive intelligence with GPT 5 that we haven't had in any previous model. It's an integrated model. So, you don't have to like pick on our model switcher and know if you should use GPT 4 or 03 or 04 many or any of the complicated things. It's just one thing that works and it is like having PhD level experts in every field available to you 24/7 for whatever you need. Not only to ask anything but also to do anything for you. So, if you, you know, need a piece of software created, you can kind of do it from scratch all at once. If you need a research report on some complicated topic, it can do that for you. If you needed to, you know, plan an event for you, it could do that too. Is it more agentic in nature in the sense that sequential tasking, you know, one step closer to it? Because I was trying that out. It's much better at things like that. The sort of the robustness and reliability is greatly increased and that's very helpful for agentic workflows. So, I'm like very impressed by how long and complex a taskick can carry out. So, we did a call a couple of weeks ago when I was bugging you about what sectors and themes to invest in for the next decade. So, I don't want to talk about that too much. I thought we'll keep today about first principles and how the world is changing by virtue of all that is changing in the world that you dominate. So, the very first thing I want to start with is if I were 25-year-old boy or girl living in Mumbai or Bangalore in India, I know you've said a bunch of times that colleges are not holding on to the place of relevance they might have had when I was growing up. But what do I do now? A, what do I study if I'm starting a company, what kind of company do I start? Or if I were to even find a job, what industry do you think has some kind of tailwind? I'm not talking 10 years down the line but even as close as 3-5 years down the line. First of all, I think this is probably the most exciting time to be starting out one's career. Maybe ever. I think like that 25-year-old in Mumbai can probably do more than any previous 25-year-old in history could. It's really amazing what you can do with a tool like this. I felt the same way when I was 25 and you know the tools then were not as amazing as tools we have now. But we had the computer revolution and we could do things, you know, a 25-year-old then could do things that no 25-year-old in history before would have been able to. And now that's happening in a huge way. So whether you want to start a company or be a programmer or go work in kind of any other industry, you know, create new media, whatever it is, the ability for one person to use these tools and have great ideas and implement them with what would have taken decades of experience or teams of people is really quite remarkable. In terms of particular industries, I am very excited about what AI is going to mean for science and the amount of science that one person will be able to discover in the rate of which they can do that. Clearly it's transforming what it means to program computers in a huge way and people will be able to create completely new kinds of software and a huge new scale. Definitely for startups, you know, if you have that idea for a new business, the ability for a very tiny team to do a huge amount of work is great. But it feels like this is just now a very open canvas of, you know, people are limited to a degree that they've never been before only by the quality and creativity of their ideas. And you have these incredible tools to help you realize them. Is there anything in particular you want to say about GPT-5? Then I can ask you questions around that. GPT-5 does, does feel to us like it's going to be another big step forward in how people use these systems. The level of capability, the level of robustness, the reliability and the ability to use this just for a lot of tasks in life to create software to answer questions to learn to work more efficiently. This is a pretty significant step forward. Each time we've had one of these, we have been amazed by the human potential on locks. And in particular, India is, India is now our second largest market in the world. It may become our largest. We've taken a lot of feedback from users in India about what they'd like from us. Better support for languages, more affordable access. Much more and we've been able to put that into this model and upgrades to GPT. So we're committed to continuing to work on that. But every time we've had a major leap forward in how the capability we can bring to users, we've been amazed by what those 25-year-olds go off and do in terms of creating new companies or learning better or getting better medical advice or whatever else. Is there anything that I could build on top of GPT-5 today? Is there 25-year-old in India that you think are low-hanging, flutes per se that I should definitely look at? I think you could build an entire startup way more efficiently than you ever could before. Now, this is obviously, I'm biased because this is like near and dear to my heart. But the fact that as a 25-year-old in India or anywhere else, maybe with a couple of friends, maybe just by yourself, you could use GPT-5 to help you write the software for a product much more efficiently. And finally, help you handle customer support, help you write marketing and communications plans, help you review legal documents. All of these things that would have taken a lot of people on a lot of expertise and you now have GPT-5 to help you do all of this. That's pretty amazing. I could push you to be like a bit more specific and say, I get science, but what do I study? Say I've been studying engineering or commerce or arts or something like that. Is there any specific thing I study in order to use AI to develop something in science? I think the most important specific thing to study is just getting really good at using the new AI tools. I think learning is valuable for its on-sake and learning to learn is this like meta-skill that will serve you throughout life. And whether you're learning, you know, engineering, like computer engineering or biology or any other field, like that, if you get good at learning things, you can learn new things quickly. But fluency with the tools is, you know, it's really important. When I was in college or in high school, it seemed to me that the obvious thing to do was learn to program. And I didn't know exactly what I was going to use that for, but there was this new frontier that seemed very high-leveled and important to get good at. And right now, learning how to use AI tools is probably the most important specific hard skill to learn. And the difference between people who are really good at really AI native and think of everything in terms of those tools and don't is huge. There's other general skills learning kind of like to be adaptable and resilient, which I think is something really learnable. That's like quite valuable in a world that's changing so fast. Learning how to figure out what people want is really quite important. Before this, I used to be a startup investor and people had asked me what the most important thing for startup founders to figure out was. And my predecessor, Paul Graham, had this answer that has always stuck with me for people to give to founders. And it became the motto for Y Combinator, which is make something people want. And that sounds like such an easy instruction. I have watched so many people try so hard to learn how to figure that out. And fail. And then I've watched many people work really hard to learn how to do that and get great at it over a career. So that's something as well. But you know, in terms of the specifics, like are you supposed to take the biology class at the physics class, I don't think it matters right now. And if I were to build on top of that, and when you say learn to adapt and change and learn AI tools faster, is there a path? I'm just looking for a light that somebody could begin walking towards. How does one get better at the AI tools that are available out there? Well, one great thing to do, GPT-5 is quite good at helping to create small pieces of software very quickly. And much better than any model that I've used. And in the last few weeks, I have surprised myself how much I've used it to create a piece of software to solve some little problem that I have in my life. And you know, it's been an interesting creative process because I'll ask it for a first draft. I'll start using that. And then I'll say, "Hey, with this feature, it would be better." Or with this other thing, I'd be able to do something differently. Or, you know, I have started using it and realized that with my workflow, I really needed this. And by putting more and more of the things that I have to do in this kind of a workflow, that's been a very interesting way for me to learn how to use this. You mentioned Paul Graham, and I was reading this letter or report he wrote in 2009, where he spoke about five founders to watch out for. And I think you were 19 at the time, and he mentioned you, along with people like Steve Jobs and Larry and Sergey, why was that? You hadn't accomplished anything of note like they had. What did Paul see you see in you? And what do you think is the innate skill set that sets you apart from your peers? That was very nice of him. I remember that. I certainly, I remember at the time feeling that it was very deeply undeserved, but grateful that he said that. I mean, there's like a lot of people who are starting great companies. We got lucky here in many ways. We've also worked super hard. Maybe the one thing that I would, that I think we have done here well is to take a very long time horizon and think very independently. You know, when we started, it was, it was like four and a half years before we had a first product and it was very uncertain. We were just doing research, trying to figure out how to get AI to work. And we had very different ideas than the rest of the world. But I think that ability to sort of trust our own conviction over a long time horizon without a lot of external feedback was was very helpful. Is that a V or a I think because I'm speaking about when you were 19. Oh, sorry, I thought you were asking about opening. I mean, when I was 19, I'd barely remember that. I don't know. I was like a, I was like a naive 19 year old that didn't really know what he was doing. And this is not false modesty. My own self, I think I've done impressive things now, but my own self conception in 19 was like deeply unsure of myself and very unimpressive. If the world were to be the world of tomorrow, to be a AI kingdom of sorts, you're definitely some kind of prince. I don't know if you follow Markia Valley, but he's to say a very interesting thing. He said that the prince should always appear, appear, but not be religious, compassionate, trustworthy, humane and honest. Do you think this particular projection of I've heard you I've watched a lot of your interviews of late and I've heard you say repeatedly that you're not formidable and use words like that. This projection of humility. Is it apt for the world to be live in or the world you're walking into? I'm not sure it's apt for either one, but when I was 19, I go back to what you said, I assumed that the people running these big tech companies really had it all figured out. And there were adults in the room and somebody had a plan and there were these people that were way different than me that understood how to do things and had this like the companies were running very well and there was not much drama and everything was like, you know, just everything was everything was being handled by the adults. And now that I'm supposed to be the adult in the room, I will tell you I think no one has a plan. No one really has it all working smoothly. Everyone or at least I am figuring out as they go. And you know, you have things you want to build and then things go wrong and you bet on the wrong people or the right people and you know, you get a technological breakthrough here or you don't there. You just keep putting in one foot in front of another and you put your head down and work and you, you know, you have these tactics that some of them become great strategies some of them don't. You try something in the market, reacts in some way or competitors react in some way and you do something else and the. And now my conception is everybody is kind of figuring it out as they go everybody is like learning on the job and. I don't think that's like false humility. I think that's just the way the world works and. It's like a little. It's a little strange to be on this side of it, but that is what it seems like. I'm not even some speaking so much about the authenticity of the humility or not. But more again from the lens of somebody starting to build for tomorrow because that's who we speak to is that a good image to project into the world. Does it. The image of humility really work today. You mean should someone project that image. I mean, I certainly have a very negative reaction to. People who are. Projecting certainty and confidence when. They don't really know what's going to happen and the reason is not just because it's annoying, which it is. But also because I think if you have that kind of a mindset, it is harder to have the culture of intellectual openness and. To sort of like listen to other viewpoints and make good decisions. A thing I say all the time to people is no one knows what happens next. And the more you forget that and the more you're like I am smarter than everybody else. I have a master plan. I'm not going to pay attention to like what my users are saying or where the technology takes us or how the world is reacting. But you know, I know better and the world doesn't know as much. I think you just make worst decisions. So having that kind of open mindset and the sort of like curiosity and. Williness to adapt to new data and change your mind. I think that's super important. Like the number of times we have thought we knew something to get smacked in the face by reality here. Has been a lot and one of our strengths as a company is when that happens we change what we're going to do where that that's been. I think that's been really great and a big part of what's helped us succeed. So so maybe there are other ways to succeed and maybe you know projecting a ton of revolve into the world works. But the best founders that I have watched up close throughout my career have all been more like the. Sort of quick learning and adapting style and you probably know more about this than most because if you're role at ViCombinator. I have a lot of data on it at least. Yeah. When we met in Washington a couple of years a couple of years ago at the White House I remember when we were speaking and you went somewhere I was speaking to your partner and you guys had a kid. We did. And how is that? It is my favorite thing ever but I mean I know that like I have nothing that is not a cliche to say here. But it is the coolest most amazing most like emotionally overwhelming in the best ways and hard ways to experience every. Everything everyone said about how great it is how intense it is how it's like a kind of love you didn't know you could feel it's all it's all true I have nothing to add other than I strongly recommend it and I think. It's been really wonderful it's amazing. So I ponder on this a lot Sam kids why people have kids and also questions like what happens to religion and marriage tomorrow can ask you why you had a kid. Like family has always been an incredibly important thing to me and going like it just it felt like. I felt like the most and I didn't even know how much I underestimated what it was actually going to be like but it felt like the most important and meaningful and fulfilling thing I could imagine doing and it is so far so early exceed all expectations. Do you think it's the biological need to procreate? I don't know there's like it this seems like a thing that is so deep it's difficult to put into words but. I feel confident like everyone I know looking back on their life who has had a great career and had a family has either said. You know I'm so glad I took the time to have kids that was one of the most important things I've ever done the best things have ever done or they said that was by far the best thing I've ever done that was way more important than any of the work I ever did. And I was like willing to take the leap of faith that that would be true for me to and it certainly seems like it will be it's like that I yeah it is and if it is just a biological act I don't care I'm so happy. But it you know it like there's a sense of responsibility and kind of like families the word that keeps coming to mind that it's just really great. The world seems to be having lesser kids and do you have an insight into the future of marriage religion and kids. Yeah I hope that creating family creating community whatever you want to call it will become far more important in a sort of post AGI world. I think it's a real problem for society that those things have been in retreat. I think that. That just feels strictly bad to me I have I don't I'm obviously not sure why that's been happening but I hope will really reverse course on that and in a world where people have more abundance more time more sort of. Resources and potential and ability I think it's like pretty clear that family and community are two of the things that make us the happiest and I hope we will turn back to that. As societies get more affluent if one were to bind to the mimetic desires of people we all tend to want what other people want not necessarily what other people have. If we all had more do you think we would still want more if we all had enough. I do sort of think that human demand desire ability to play status games whatever is is like it seems pretty limitless. I don't think that's necessarily bad. Or not all bad but yeah I think we will figure out new things to want and new things to compete over. Do you think the world retains largely the world retains the current model of capitalism and democracy in a way. Let me give you a scenario what happens if a company X. Let's say open a I get to the point where it is 50% of world GDP. Does society allow for that or. I would bet not I don't think that will happen I think this will be a much more distributed thing but if for some reason that did happen I think society would say we don't think so like let's figure out. Let's figure something to do here my my the analogy I like most for AI is the transistor which was this really important scientific discovery that for a while looked like it was going to capture a ton of value and then turned out to be something that just gets built into like tons of products and services and. You don't really think about you know the fact that you're using transistors all day long it's just kind of in everything and all these companies make incredible products and profits from it in this very distributed way. So I would guess that's what happens and it's not like one company is ever half of global GDP I at one point I did worry that that might happen but I think that was a naive take. But do you think the odds of the world moving towards socialism go up or if something gets that that large will it get nationalized and be become more socialist. I don't know if something will get nationalized I don't know if the world will like officially turn towards socialism but I expect that. I expect that like social support or redistribution or whatever you want to call it will increase over time as society gets richer and as sort of the technological landscape shifts I don't know what way it's going to happen and I expect in different countries it'll happen in different ways like. I think you'll see experimentation of like new kinds of sovereign well funds new kinds of like universal basic income ideas redistribution of AI compute I don't know exactly what but I suspect we'll see a lot of experimentation in society here. On universal basic income I think world coin was a very interesting experiment can you tell us a bit about what's happening there. The idea was could we that you know we have all this AI coming we really want to like care about humans is special can we find a way to a privacy preserving way to identify unique humans and then create a new network and a new currency around that. So it's a very interesting experiment still early but growing quite fast if a GI eliminates scarcity is car city by virtue of increasing productivity. Could one also assume that it would be deflationary in nature capital or money loses its ability to return a rate of return and capital no longer remains a mode in the world of tomorrow. I feel confused about this I think if you like look at the basic economic principles it's supposed to be hugely deflationary and yet. If the world decides that you know building out a I compute today is super important to things tomorrow. Maybe something very strange happens with the economy and maybe capital is really really important because every piece of compute is so valuable. I was asking someone at the other night if they thought that interest rates should be minus 2% or 25% and he kind of laughed he's like what that's a ridiculous question it has to be and then he stopped instead actually I'm not sure so I think it's like. Yeah it should be deflationary eventually but I could see it being weird in the short term. It's actually a very interesting thing to say do you suspect it would be minus 2% eventually. But I'm not sure and maybe it's just like we're in this massive expansionary time where you're trying to like build the Dyson sphere in the solar system and your borrowing money at crazy rates to do that and then there's more expansion beyond and more and more and I don't know like. I find it very hard to see more than a few years in the future at this point. The conversation we were having a couple of weeks ago I was doing more research on the sectors you had suggested. I think we agreed on older and sicker world. You also made a case for as discretionary spend goes up gateway luxury brands might do well. What happens to them in a deflationary world because the value of these purchases go down maybe not I mean deflation in a deflationary world some things can face huge deflationary pressure and others can be the sink for all of the extra capital. So I'm actually not sure they do go down in a deflationary world. I would bet they go up actually. Because the extra the excess capital has to flow somewhere when you look at classical economic theory like an Adam Smith and stuff like that. The Austrian school always spoke about the marginal utility of things. If you have one kettle at home to make tea it has X in value when you have two kettles it still has some value but when you have 20 kettles it has no value. Do you think the world goes in that direction? Yeah, so 20 kettles doesn't help you but even if you're only going to you know spend two hours a day playing video games or whatever and that amount of time is fixed. And so you don't need 20 hours worth of video games if that two hours of games gets better and more entertaining forever and ever and ever and just keeps getting more and more compelling that still has value to you. And I think there are a lot of categories where we will find that people can just get much better stuff even if they don't necessarily get more of them. I think we'll see this in a really big way. Do you think there's a use case for the rappers that are getting built on these large models right now? Like I was in the US recently and I met Harvey for example what happens to a rapper like that does it get. You know we did out by the model itself at some point of time. Some of them yes and some of them know and it's you know it's like sometimes you can obviously predict when one is going to go one way or the other and sometimes it really depends on the choices the company makes down. The line the the main thing I would say is using AI itself does not create a defensible business. You see this with every technology boom where people were like well I must start up doing X and because I'm using the latest technology trend the normal rules of business don't apply to me. And that's never true you've always you've always got a you've always got to like parlay that advantage that comes from using the new technology into a durable business with real value that gets created and it's kind of a race against the clock to do that so. You know you can definitely build an amazing thing with AI but then you have to go build a real defensible layer around it. If I were to build a business on top of your model let me give you the example of Amazon for example if I sold a certain kind of t shirt and I sold a lot and Amazon had all the data. Eventually Amazon probably started a white labeled brand which was very similar to mine and cannibalized my business almost should one worry that will happen here as well because you're no longer just a model but you're foring into so many different businesses. I come back to that example of the transistor the. You know we we are building this general purpose technology that you can integrate into something in a lot of ways. But we keep following our equivalent of Moore's law and the general capability keeps going up if you build a business that gets better the business gets better when when that model gets better then you should keep doing. You should keep doing well if we continue to make progress if you build a business where when the model gets better your business gets worse because the rapper was too thin or whatever. Then that's probably bad in the same way that it's been bad and other technology revolutions. So there are clearly companies building on top of AI models that are creating huge value and very deep relationships with their customers for themselves. Cursor is like a recent example of a company that is just exploding in popularity and really durable relationships with their with their customers. And then there's many others that don't and that's kind of that's always the case. It does seem to me like. There are more companies getting created now than in previous technological revolutions that feel like they have a chance at real durability. Maybe an example we could use to ground this is when the iPhone first came out and the app store first came out the first set of apps were pretty light and a lot of them ended up being features that kind of made it into future versions of iOS. You could like sell a flashlight for a dollar that turned on the flash on your on your phone and you made a lot of dollars doing that but it wasn't sticky because eventually Apple just added that into the operating system where belonged. But if you started something that was like complicated and the iPhone was just an able or for it like Uber. That was a very valuable long term thing to do. And in the early days like the GPT three days I think you had a lot of kind of toy applications as you should many of which didn't need to be standalone companies or products. But now is the markets matured you're really seen some of these more durable businesses form. So if you lay emphasis on owning the customer almost like the interface with the customer. Would you say the relationship gets deeper when I sell a service on top of your model versus a product because if it's a product company. The exchange happens once but if it's a service company it happens repeatedly and there is room for me to build in taste in that transaction which is repetitive in nature. Yeah, generally I agree with that. A small part of my world or a part of my world is creating content which I do once a month. If a model to a large extent is able to factor in my vintage, my tenure and my evolution and throughout an output which is predictive in nature with a fair degree of. Fair degree of efficiency. Now if I behave in the same predictable manner tomorrow will be less valuable than me being contrarian. Contrarian not to the world but contrarian to my own behavior almost. So do you think the world inordinately favors contrarian behavior tomorrow? Yeah, that's a good point. I think I think I think how much will the models learn to do that? You want to be contrarian and write most of the time you're contrarian and you're contrarian and wrong and that's not that helpful. But yeah, I bet the ability to come up with the kind of contrarian and write idea that the models today just can't do it all and maybe they'll get better at some point. That value of that should go up over time. Getting good at doing things models can't do seems like an obvious increase in value. Outside of being contrarian is there anything else that I could do that a model will take longer to learn? Look, the models are going to be much smarter than we are but there's a lot of things that people care about that have nothing to do with intelligence. Maybe there can be like an AI podcast host that is much better than you would ask interesting questions and you know kind of engaging whatever. And I personally don't think that podcast host that AI podcast host is likely to be more popular than you. People really care about other humans. This is like very deep people want to know a little bit about your life story. What got you here that want to be able to like talk to other people about this like shared sense of who you are and there's like some cultural and social value in that we are obsessed with other people. And why is that sound? Why do you think that is? I think that's also like deep in our biology and you know again, they're coming you don't fight things that are deep in biology. I think I make a ton of sense of why we would evolve that way but you know here we are. So you know we're going to keep caring about real people and even if the AI podcast host is much smarter than you. I think it's very unlikely he'll be more popular than you. So in a perverse way being stupider will be more novel than being smart. I don't know if it's like a stupider or smarter that has the novelty but I think being a real person in a world of unlimited AI content will increase in value. Is the real person somebody who screws up unlike a model? I mean certainly real people do screw up so maybe that's part of what we associate with a real person I'm not sure. But I do think we just knowing that it's a real person not we really extremely care about. What is the difference between AGI and human intelligence today and tomorrow? So like with GPT-5 you have something that is incredibly smart in a lot of domains at tasks that take you know seconds to a few minutes. It's very superhuman at knowledge at pattern recognition at recall on these shorter term tasks. But in terms of figuring out what questions to ask or to work on something over a very long period of time. We are definitely not close to human performance. And an interesting example that one of our researchers gave me recently is if you look at our performance in math. You know a couple of years ago we could solve math problems that would take like an expert human a few minutes to solve. Recently we got goal level performance on the international math Olympiad. Each of those problems takes about an hour and a half. So we've gone from a problem a thinking horizon of a few minutes to an hour and a half. To prove a new an important new mathematical theorem maybe takes like a thousand hours. And you can predict when we can do a thousand hour problem but certainly in the world today we cannot at all. And so that's like another dimension where AI can't do it. So I was in the US between S.F. Between San Francisco and New York the last couple of months and I met a whole bunch of AI founders. The one thing everybody seemed to agree on is like for AI the US is a few years ahead of most others. They also thought that for robotics China seems to be ahead. Do you have a view on robotics and what happens there like humanoid or other form of robotics? I think it will be incredibly important in a couple of years. I think one of the things is going to feel most. AGI like is seen robots just walk by you on the street doing kind of normal day to day tasks. Is there a reason why they need to have huge energy? Why they need to have human like form? Well you can certainly have non humanoid forms but the world is really built for humans. You know like door handles steering wheels and cars factories like a lot of this is built for. We built it for our own kind of morphology. So there will of course be other specialized robots too but. The world like is built and I hope stays built for for us. So robots that match that form factor it seems like a good idea. If I'm a young guy looking to start a robotics company but somebody else has manufacturing scale and I really want as an Indian guy to be able to build and compete there. How do I make up for manufacturing scale as someone starting up? Well eventually once you build enough robots they can make more copies of themselves. But in the short term I think you probably have to find some really good partners that know a lot about manufacturing. And you know we're interested in robots so we're thinking about this and it's definitely a new skill for us to learn. Sam what happens to the form factor? I've been using the cell phone for a long time. I know you will not likely speak about what you're doing with Johnny Ive and what happens there or maybe you will. But what happens to form factor overall? One of the things that I think will be defining about the difference of AI versus the sort of previous way we've been using computers and technology is you really want AI to be. Have as much context as possible do stuff for you and be proactive. So a computer or a phone you know it's kind of either on or off it's in your pocket or it's in your hand and you're using it. But you might want AI to just be like a companion with you throughout your day. And alerting you in different ways when it can do something to help you or when it's you know there's something really important you need to know or reminding you of something that you said you needed to do earlier in the day. And the current form factors of computers are I think not quite right for that they do have this either on or off binary. That I think isn't quite what we want for like the sort of sci-fi dream of the AI companion so the form factor that enables that you could imagine a lot of things. There's people talking about glasses and wearables and little you know things that sit on your table and. I think the world will experience a lot of those but this idea of sort of ambiently. Aware physical hardware that feels like it's going to be important is that the form factor with Johnny I like a sensor. So we'll try multiple products but but I think this idea of. Trying to build hardware that an AI companion can sort of embody itself in will be an important thread. The last two things I want to ask you Sam is one about fusion because I know you've invested in helium and you're a big proponent of it does that solve the climate change problem. Would you put money on that. What certainly helps a lot I suspect that we've already done sufficient damage to the climate we're going to have to undo some damage to even if we got to switch to fusion right away but it would certainly be a great step forward. And the last question I have for you Sam is the question I care most about. What's in this a realm for India as a country what's the opportunity for us as I mentioned earlier I think India may be our largest market in the world at some point in the not very distant future the excitement. The embrace of AI in India and the ability to for Indian people to use AI to just sort of leap frog into the future and invent a totally new and better way of doing things and the sort of the economic benefits that come from that the societal benefits. If if there is one large society in the world that seems most enthusiastic to transform with AI right now it's India and the energy is incredible I'm looking forward to coming soon. And it's really like quite amazing to watch and I think the it's sort of the momentum is unmatched anywhere in the world. I feel like the question really is how do we transition from being a consumer to be a producer where we can build something that other people use outside of India. That was what I mean there's lots of things happening there go but that that was the thing I meant I think that's really happening already in a big way the entrepreneurial energy around building with AI in India is is quite amazing and we hope to see much more of it. Right. Yeah. Super. Thank you Sam. Great for doing this. Thank you for having me. Thank you. Appreciate it. I'm going to message you. Okay. Good to see you. Thanks for doing this.
Podcast Summary
Key Points:
GPT-5 represents a significant leap in capability, offering integrated, fluent, and adaptive intelligence that excels at complex tasks like coding, research, and planning, making it a powerful, always-available expert tool.
For young professionals, especially in markets like India, this is an unprecedented time to build startups or careers, as AI tools dramatically amplify an individual's ability to execute ideas that previously required large teams or decades of experience.
The most critical skill to learn is fluency with AI tools themselves; specific academic disciplines matter less than the ability to learn quickly, adapt, and figure out what people want.
Success in a rapidly changing world stems from independent thinking, a long-term horizon, intellectual humility, and the adaptability to change course based on new data, rather than projecting false certainty.
Looking ahead, foundational human aspects like family and community are expected to become increasingly important for happiness in a future of potential abundance shaped by AI.
Summary:
The conversation centers on the transformative impact of GPT-5 and the broader AI revolution. GPT-5 is highlighted as a major integrated advancement, significantly more robust and capable than its predecessors, acting as a versatile expert for tasks ranging from software creation to complex research. This technological leap creates a historic opportunity for individuals, particularly young people in growing markets like India, to leverage these tools to build companies or pursue careers with unprecedented efficiency and scale.
The advice for career building emphasizes mastering the AI tools themselves as the paramount skill, alongside cultivating adaptability and the ability to identify what people want. The discussion extends to philosophical and societal implications, advocating for intellectual humility and a learning-oriented mindset as keys to navigating uncertainty. Finally, it posits that in a future shaped by AI abundance, core human pursuits like family and community will likely regain central importance for fulfillment.
FAQs
GPT-5 offers enhanced fluency, adaptive intelligence, and robustness, making it an integrated model that eliminates the need to switch between different versions. It provides PhD-level expertise across various fields and significantly improves reliability for agentic workflows.
Focus on learning to use AI tools effectively, as this is a critical skill. Leverage GPT-5 to build startups efficiently by handling tasks like software development, customer support, and marketing, enabling small teams to achieve more with fewer resources.
Practice by using GPT-5 to create small software solutions for personal problems, iterating on drafts to add features. Engaging in this hands-on workflow helps build fluency and adaptability with the tools.
AI will significantly transform science, programming, and startups. It enables faster scientific discovery, new software creation at scale, and allows small teams to execute complex business ideas more efficiently.
Cultivate humility, intellectual openness, and adaptability. Avoid overconfidence; instead, stay curious, listen to feedback, and be willing to change plans based on new data and realities.
OpenAI has incorporated feedback from Indian users into GPT-5, including better language support and more affordable access. India is a key market, and efforts are ongoing to enhance the model's relevance and accessibility there.
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