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Published · transcript-backed

Sam Altman: belief

18 Mar 2024 Lex Fridman Podcast #419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI

“I mean, if the question is if we can build a better search engine than Google or whatever, then sure, we should go, people should use the better product, but I think that would so understate what this can be.”

— Sam Altman

Source trail

Everything needed to verify it.

Speaker
Sam Altman
Attribution
Verified speaker
Claim type
belief
Recorded
18 Mar 2024
Publisher
Lex Fridman Podcast

Transcript context

…Yeah, and we can each be the best version of ourselves and strive to do so. Let me ask you, Google, with the help of search, has been dominating the past 20 years. Think it’s fair to say, in terms of the world’s access to information, how we interact and so on, and one of the nerve-wracking things for Google, but for the entirety of people in the space, is thinking about, how are people going to access information? Like you said, people show up to GPT as a starting point. So is OpenAI going to really take on this thing that Google started 20 years ago, which is how do we get- I find that boring. I mean, if the question is if we can build a better search engine than Google or whatever, then sure, we should go, people should use the better product, but I think that would so understate what this can be. Google shows you 10 blue links, well, 13 ads and then 10 blue links, and that’s one way to find information. But the thing that’s exciting to me is not that we can go build a better copy of Google search, but that maybe there’s just some much better way to help people find and act on and synthesize information. Actually, I think ChatGPT is that for some use cases, and hopefully we’ll make it be like that for a lot more use cases. But I don’t think it’s that interesting to say, “How do we go do a better job of giving you 10 ranked webpages to look at than what Google does?” Maybe it’s really interesting to go say, “How do we help you get the answer or the information you need? How do we help create that in some cases, synthesize that in others, or point you to it in yet others?” But a lot of people have tried to just make a better search engine than Google and it is a hard technical problem, it is a hard branding problem, it is a hard ecosystem problem. I don’t think the world needs another copy of Google. And integrating a chat client, like a ChatGPT, with a search engine-…

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