Sam Altman

Bret and Larry were kind of decided in the heat of the moment over this very tense weekend and that was... I mean, that weekend was like a real rollercoaster, like a lot of lots and downs.

Well, she did a great job during that weekend

I think I kind of think of Ilya as like always on a soul search in a really good way.

Also he appreciates the power of silence. Also, I'm told he can be a silly guy, which I've never seen that side of him.

I think this whole thing is like unbecoming of a builder, and I respect Elon is one of the great builders of our time.

he is one of the greatest builders of all time, potentially the greatest builder of all time.

I think he should just win. He should just make Grok beat GPT and then GPT beats Grok and it's just a competition, and it's beautiful for everybody.

I think he should just win. He should just make Grok beat GPT and then GPT beats Grok and it's just a competition, and it's beautiful for everybody.

Meta, surprisingly, has led the way on this or like at least took the first step in the game of chess of really open sourcing the model. Of course, it's not the state of the art model, but open sourcing Llama

I mean, I really respect Elon. And I hope that years in the future,

I think Helion's doing the best work, but I'm happy there's like a race for fusion right now.

AdSense when it first came out was a big leap forward versus like animated banners or whatever

The Gemini 1.5 came out recently. There's a lot of drama around it, speaking of theatrical things. And it generated Black Nazis and Black founding fathers. I think fair to say it was a bit on the ultra woke side

I realize that that means people like Marc Andreessen or whatever will claim I'm going for regulatory capture and I'm just willing to be misunderstood there. It's not true.

There was like this fugue state for kind of like the month after, maybe 45 days after that was I was just sort of like drifting through the days, I was so out of it. I was feeling so down

Definitely learned a lot about structure and incentives and what we need out of a board And I think that it is valuable that this happened now in some sense. I think this is probably not like the last high stress moment of OpenAI, but it was quite a high stress moment. Company very nearly got destroyed.

I think the board members were far, well-meaning people on the whole. And I believe that in stressful situations where people feel time pressure or whatever, people understandably make suboptimal decisions.

I think one of the things with our structure that we maybe should have thought about more than we did is that the board of a nonprofit has, unless you put other rules in place, like quite a lot of power, they don't really answer to anyone but themselves.

I think compute is gonna be the currency of the future. I think it'll be maybe the most precious commodity in the world. I expect that by the end of this decade.

And possibly somewhat sooner than that, we will have quite capable systems that we look at and say, wow, that's really remarkable.

The old board sort of got smaller over the course of about a year. It was nine and then it went down to six and then we couldn't agree on who to add.

the board also, I think, didn't have a lot of experienced board members and a lot of the new board members at OpenAI have just have more experience as board members.

Bret and Larry were kind of decided in the heat of the moment over this very tense weekend and that was... I mean, that weekend was like a real rollercoaster, like a lot of lots and downs.

we wanna hire board members in slates, not as individuals one at a time. And thinking about a group of people that will bring nonprofit expertise, expertise at running companies, sort of good legal and governance expertise.

Not for every board member, but certainly some you need that. That's part of what the board needs to do.

I mean, I went through like a little period of confusion and rage, but very quickly. And by Friday night, I was talking to people about what was gonna be next and I was excited about that.

It was one of the weird things was there was this like period of four and a half days where sort of didn't sleep much, didn't eat much and still kind of had like a surprising amount of energy.

And then Sunday evening when again like every few hours, I expected that we were gonna be done and we're gonna figure out a way for me to return and things to go back to how they were, the board then appointed a new interim CEO and then I was like... I mean, that feels really bad. That was the low point of the whole thing.

Well, she did a great job during that weekend

But a thing I really value in leaders is how people act on a boring Tuesday at 9:46 in the morning and in just sort of the normal drudgery of the day-to-day, how someone shows up in a meeting, the quality of the decisions they make.

Ilya has not seen AGI, none of us have seen AGI. We've not built AGII.

I think I kind of think of Ilya as like always on a soul search in a really good way.

Also he appreciates the power of silence. Also, I'm told he can be a silly guy, which I've never seen that side of him.

I am kind of happy it happened when it did, but it was a shockingly painful thing to go through.

It's definitely changed how I think about just like default trust of people and planning for the bad scenarios.

I really don't like this. It's definitely changed how I think about just like default trust of people and planning for the bad scenarios.

I'm actually not sure which mode is best to operate in for a person who's developing AGI, trusting or untrusting.

I do think maybe criticizing the competition is great, just talking a little shit, that's great, but friendly competition versus like I personally hate lawsuits.

I think this whole thing is like unbecoming of a builder, and I respect Elon is one of the great builders of our time.

he is one of the greatest builders of all time, potentially the greatest builder of all time.

I think he should just win. He should just make Grok beat GPT and then GPT beats Grok and it's just a competition, and it's beautiful for everybody.

Meta, surprisingly, has led the way on this or like at least took the first step in the game of chess of really open sourcing the model. Of course, it's not the state of the art model, but open sourcing Llama

I think there is definitely a place for open source models, particularly smaller models that people can run locally, I think there's huge demand for.

I think there will be some open source models, there will be some closed source models. It won't be unlike other ecosystems in that way.

I would heavily discourage any startup that was thinking about starting as a non-profit and adding like a for-profit arm later. I'd heavily discourage them from doing that.

I mean, I really respect Elon. And I hope that years in the future,

I do suppose there's competition for talent or whatever, but it should be friendly competition.

I think all of these models understand something more about the world model than most of us give them credit for.

I remember when I started first watching Sora videos and I would see like a person walk in front of something for a few seconds and occlude it and then walk away and the same thing was still there.

It looks like this approach is gonna go surprisingly far.

I think there is something about the approach which just seems to feel different from how we think and learn and whatever.

And then also, I think it'll get better with scale.

it's a lot of data that's not human label. It's self-supervised in that way.

it looks to me like yes, but we have more work to do.

one thing we have to do before releasing the system is just like get it to work at a level of efficiency that will deliver the scale people are gonna want from this.

you can imagine like issues with deep fakes, misinformation.

do people who create valuable data deserve to have some way that they get compensated for use of it? And that I think the answer is yes.

I don't know yet what the answer is. People have proposed a lot of different things. We've some tried some different models.

I tend to believe that humans like to watch other humans or other human like- - Humans really care about other humans a lot. - Yeah. If there's a cooler thing that's better than a human, humans care about that for like two days and then they go back to humans.

We still run races and cars are much faster. I mean, there's like a lot of examples.

Listen, I hate being in front of the camera. If I can figure out a way to not be in front of the camera, I would love it. Unfortunately, it'll take a while.

generating faces, it's getting there, but generating faces and video format is tricky when it's specific people versus generic people.

Looking back, it'll probably be this kind of historic pivotal moment with three, five, and four which had GPT. - Maybe five will be the pivotal moment. I don't know. Hard to say that looking forwards. - We never know. That's the annoying thing about the future, it's hard to predict. But for me, looking back GPT-4, ChatGPT is pretty impressive, historically impressive.

I don't wanna downplay the accomplishment of GPT-4, but I don't wanna overstate it either.

I think this point that we are on an exponential curve, we'll look back relatively soon at GPT-4 like we look back at GPT-3 now.

That was more about the ChatGPT interface. And by the interface and product, I also mean the post-training of the model and how we tune it to be helpful to you and how to use it than the underlying model itself.

I mean, they're both super important but the RLHF, the post-training step, the little wrapper of things that from a compute perspective, little wrapper of things that we do on top of the base model, even though it's a huge amount of work.

We had to go do two things that had like never been done before that were both, like, I would say quite significant achievements and then a lot of things like scaling it up that other companies have had to do before.

For now, the way people use these models, they're not doing that. And people sometimes post in a paper or a significant fraction of a code repository, whatever. But most usage of the models is not using the long context most of the time.

We will find out how to use better technology. So I can't really imagine what it's like right now for context links to go out to the billion someday and they might not literally go there, but effectively it'll feel like that. But I know we'll use it and really not wanna go back once we have it.

The thing that I find most interesting is not any particular use case that we can talk about those, but it's people who kind of like... This is mostly younger people, but people who use it as like their default start for any kind of knowledge work task.

That's obviously an area of intense interest for us. I think it's gonna get a lot better with upcoming versions, but we'll have to continue to work on it and we're not gonna have it like all solved this year.

I think what people want or at least what I want for myself is a model that gets to know me and gets more useful to me over time.

I want it to integrate the lessons of that and remind me in the future what to do differently or what to watch out for.

if I can put every conversation I've ever had with anybody in my life in there, if I can have all of my emails input out... Like all of my input/output in the context window every time I ask a question, that'd be pretty cool, I think.

I think the right answer there is just user choice. Anything I want stricken from the record from my AI agent, I wanna be able to take out.

I think it was a very traumatic thing and it did immobilize me for a long period of time. Like definitely the hardest, like the hardest work thing I've had to do was just like keep working that period because I had to try to come back in here and put the pieces together while I was just like in sort of shock and pain.

This is like the most important work I'll ever touch in my life and I need to get back to it.

I think compute is gonna be the currency of the future. I think it will be maybe the most precious commodity in the world.

And I think we should be investing heavily to make a lot more compute.

I think it's gonna be an unusual market. People think about the market for like chips for mobile phones or something like that. And you can say that, okay, there's 8 billion people in the world, maybe 7 billion of them have phones or 6 billion, let's say. They upgrade every two years, so the market per year is 3 billion system on chip for smartphones. And if you make 30 billion, you will not sell 10 times as many phones because most people have one phone. But compute is different, like intelligence is gonna be more like energy or something like that

So I think the world is gonna want a tremendous amount of compute. And there's a lot of parts of that that are hard. Energy is the hardest part. Building data centers is also hard. The supply chain is harder than, of course, fabricating enough chips is hard. But this seems to me where things are going. Like we're gonna want an amount of compute that's just hard to reason about right now.

How do you solve the energy puzzle? Nuclear. - That's what I believe. - Fusion? - That's what I believe. - Nuclear fusion. - Yeah.

I think Helion's doing the best work, but I'm happy there's like a race for fusion right now.

Nuclear fusion, I think, is also like quite amazing and I hope as a world, we can re-embrace that. It's really sad to me how the history of that went and hope we get back to it in a meaningful way.

Well, I think we should make new reactors. I think it's a shame that industry kind of ground to a halt.

Just mass hysteria is how you explain the halt. - Yeah.

that's one of the dangers, that's one of the security threats for nuclear fusion is humans seem to be really afraid of it.

the pros seem obvious, which is that we get better products and more innovation faster and cheaper and all the reasons competition is good.

I personally just have like a spiritual dislike of crappy interfaces, which is why AdSense when it first came out was a big leap forward versus like animated banners or whatever

AdSense when it first came out was a big leap forward versus like animated banners or whatever

The Gemini 1.5 came out recently. There's a lot of drama around it, speaking of theatrical things. And it generated Black Nazis and Black founding fathers. I think fair to say it was a bit on the ultra woke side

I mean, we work super hard not to do things like that. We've made our own mistakes, will make others

One thing that we've been thinking about more and more is I think this was a great idea. Somebody here had like... It'd be nice to write out what the desired behavior of a model is, make that public take input on it. Say, here's how this model's supposed to behave and explain the edge cases too. And then when a model is not behaving in a way that you want, it's at least clear about whether that's a bug the company should fix or behaving as intended and you should debate the policy

I feel very lucky that we don't have the challenges at OpenAI that I have heard of at a lot of other companies.

I'm sure it does in all sorts of subtle ways, but not in the obvious.

That's literally what humans will be thinking about the more powerful AI becomes.

I think there will come a point where that's mostly what we think about the whole company.

It'll be all of the technical alignment work. It'll be societal impacts, economic impacts.

How hard do you think people, state actors perhaps are trying to hack?

I'm excited about being smarter and I know that sounds like a glib answer, but I think the really special thing happening is that it's not like it gets better in one area and worse at others. It's getting like better across the board.

And that's probably how I would characterize the progress at GPT. It's not like, yeah, you can point out, look, you didn't get this or that, but to which degree is there's this intellectual connection?

Like maybe some people program entirely in natural language.

But that changes the nature of the skillset or the predisposition for the kind of people we call programmers then.

I think with most other cases, the best practitioners of the craft will use multiple tools and they'll do some work in natural language and when they need to go write, see for something, they'll do that.

But like we will return to robots in some way at some point.

I think it's like sort of depressing if we have AGI and the only way to get things done in the physical world is like to make a human go do it.

although the board had the legal ability to fire me, in practice, it didn't quite work. And that is its own kind of governance failure.

I continue to not want super voting control over OpenAI. I never had it, never have wanted it.

I continue to think that no company should be making these decisions and that we really need governments to put rules of the road in place.

I realize that that means people like Marc Andreessen or whatever will claim I'm going for regulatory capture and I'm just willing to be misunderstood there. It's not true.

I think I have made plenty of bad decisions for OpenAI along the way and a lot of good ones and I'm proud of the track record overall

I don't think any one person should be in control of an AGI or this whole movement towards AGI.

That is not my top worry as I currently see things. There have been times I worried about that more. There may be times again in the future where that's my top worry.

Saying it's not my top worry doesn't mean I don't think we need to like... I think we need to work on it super hard.

Does this increase your belief if you ever had one that we live in a simulation, maybe a simulated world generated by an AI system? - Yes, somewhat. I don't think that's like the strongest piece of evidence. I think the fact that we can generate worlds should increase everyone's probability somewhat or at least open to it, openness to it somewhat.

I was like certain we would be able to do something like Sora at some point. It happened faster than I thought. I guess that was not a big update.

I don't think there's a disrespect, but I think it's just the conventions of civility that have a momentum and then you realize it's not actually important for civility if it's not a sign of respect or disrespect.