Sam Altman: belief

Transcript context

…Then it’s the returns to doing what other than learning AI that go up? Like being on the college football team or what? I don’t think the massive returns will accrue to doing AI for a small set of people, but I think the returns to using AI super well will be surprisingly widely distributed. I think the most important thing AI will do is discover new science for all of us, and a lot of people will benefit from that, and people will start companies or get jobs doing that. I’m not a believer that that is the only thing that eventually makes money. I think people will just use AI for all sorts of new kinds of jobs or to do existing jobs better. Maybe the starkest example of this in 2025 is the day-to-day of how the average programmer in Silicon Valley did their workflow at the beginning of this year versus the end of this year. Extremely different. Extremely different. You don’t really have to know how to program AI to do that, but you can get more done, and you probably have much more value, and the world is going to get much more software. I think we’ll see things like that for a surprising number of industries. Say five years out, there’s a so-called normie person. They’re not a specialist. They want to learn how to use AI much better. What will they actually do that will give them a high return to acquiring that skill?…

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