Sam Altman: prediction

Transcript context

…Someone put an essay online, and it said, in all the time they worked at OpenAI, they hardly ever sent or received an email, that so many things were done over Slack. Why is that? What’s your model of why email is bad and Slack is good for OpenAI? I’ll agree, email is bad. I don’t know if Slack is good. I suspect it’s not. I think email is very bad. The threshold to make something better than email is not high, and I think Slack is better than email. We have a lot of things going on at the same time, as you observed, and we have to do things extremely quickly. It’s definitely a very fast-moving organization. There are positives about Slack, but there’s also, I dread the first hour of the morning, the last hour before I go to bed, where I’m just dealing with this explosion of Slack, and I think it does create a lot of fake work. I suspect there is something new to build that is going to replace a lot of the current office, productivity suite, whatever you think of docs, slides, email, Slack, whatever, that will be the AI-driven version of all of these things, not where you tack on the horrible — you accidentally click the wrong place and it tries to write a whole document for you or summarize some thread or whatever, but the actual version of you are trusting your AI agent and my AI agent to work most stuff out and escalate to us when necessary. I think there is probably finally a good solution for someone to make within reach. How far are you from having that internally? Maybe not a product for the whole world, that it’s in every way tested, but that you would use it within OpenAI?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.