Sam Altman: belief

Transcript context

…Now, I did a trip through France and Spain this summer with my wife. Every hotel we booked, other than the first one, well, we found it through GPT-5. We didn’t book it through GPT. Almost every meal we ate, right? You didn’t get a dime for this. I’m telling my wife, “Well, this just seems wrong,” right? What is the new world going to look like soon enough? How will that work? To zoom out even before the answer, one of the unusual things we noticed a while ago, and this was when it was a worse problem, ChatGPT would consistently be reported as a user’s most trusted technology product from a big tech company. We don’t really think of ourselves as a big tech company, but I guess we are now. That’s very odd on the surface because AI is the thing that hallucinates, AI is the thing with all the errors, and this was when that was much more of a problem. There is a question of why. Ads on a Google search are dependent on Google doing badly. If it was giving you the best answer, there’d be no reason ever to buy an ad above it. You’re like, “That thing is not quite aligned with me.” ChatGPT, maybe it gives you the best answer, maybe it doesn’t, but you’re paying it, or hopefully, all are paying it, and it’s at least trying to give you the best answer. That has led to people having a deep and pretty trusting relationship with ChatGPT. You ask ChatGPT for the best hotel, not Google or something else. If ChatGPT were accepting payment to put a worse hotel above a better hotel, that’s probably catastrophic for your relationship with ChatGPT. On the other hand, if ChatGPT shows you it’s guessed the best hotel, whatever that is, and then if you book it with one click, takes the same cut that it would take from any other hotel, and there’s nothing that influenced it, but there’s some sort of transaction fee, I think that’s probably okay. With our recent commerce thing, that’s the spirit of what we’re trying to do. We’ll do that for travel at some point. I’m not worried about the payola issue, but let me tell you my worry, and that is there may be a tight cap on the commission you can charge, because we’re now in a world, say where there’s agents, and someone finds the best hotel through GPT-7 or whatever, and then they just talk to their computer or their pendant, and they go to some stupider service, but the stupider service is an agent that books very cheaply, and they only really have to pay OpenAI a commission equal to what the stupidest service will charge.…

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