**The Next Frontier: Sam Altman on the Future of A.I. and Society — Transcript & Summary | SozAI**
Source: https://sozai.app/transcript/next-frontier-sam-altman-future-ai-society/

Sam Altman discusses the transformative impact of AI, the launch of ChatGPT, and the future of artificial general intelligence.

## Key Takeaways

- The launch of ChatGPT marked a pivotal moment in mainstream AI adoption and public awareness.
- AI development continues to progress rapidly with improvements in compute, data, and algorithms.
- There is significant uncertainty about when artificial general intelligence will be achieved.
- Ethical, societal, and economic impacts of AI require careful consideration and new governance models.
- Partnerships and competition among tech companies are shaping the AI landscape.

## What the video covers

- Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, reflects on the launch of ChatGPT two years ago and its unexpected rapid impact.
- The conversation covers the scaling of AI models and their growing usefulness in various applications.
- Altman discusses the challenges and ethical questions raised by AI's integration into society and the future of work.
- The video explores the concept of artificial general intelligence (AGI) and the uncertainty around its timeline.
- Key inputs for AI progress include compute power, data, and algorithms, with ongoing improvements in all areas.
- The relationship between OpenAI and Microsoft is highlighted as a significant partnership in AI development.
- There is discussion about competition in AI, including references to Elon Musk and other companies.
- OpenAI’s unique capped-profit model and its impact on funding and alignment with investors are examined.
- The video touches on societal implications and the need for new frameworks to understand and manage AI.
- Altman shares personal reflections on the future world shaped by AI and what it means for the next generation.

## Chapters

1. 00:00 Introduction and Sam Altman Background
2. 02:29 AI Model Scaling and Usefulness
3. 04:00 Transformative Potential of AI and Public Perception
4. 07:48 Timeline and Possibility of Super Intelligence
5. 09:34 OpenAI and Microsoft Partnership
6. 11:42 Competition and Market Dynamics in AI
7. 14:29 OpenAI’s Funding Model and Investor Relations
8. 18:21 Societal Implications and Future Outlook

Answers

## Questions about this video

What was Sam Altman's expectation when launching ChatGPT?

Sam Altman did not expect the immediate and widespread impact of ChatGPT at launch, acknowledging some unpredictability in when AI would 'catch fire' with the public.

What are the key factors driving AI progress according to Sam Altman?

The three key inputs driving AI progress are compute power, data, and algorithms, with ongoing improvements and trade-offs among these factors.

How does OpenAI's relationship with Microsoft influence its AI development?

OpenAI’s partnership with Microsoft is described as a strong collaboration that supports AI development through resource sharing and aligned incentives.

## Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown

00:35

Speaker A

Is here. Thank you so much, Sam. Thanks for having me. For being here. We are super appreciative. Sam, of course, is the co-founder and CEO of OpenAI.

00:44

Speaker A

As I said earlier, one of the most consequential companies of our time. In just the past few years, since the launch of ChatGPT, Sam and his team have brought AI to the mainstream. He has fundamentally really altered how we work, communicate,

00:57

Speaker A

As I said earlier, one of the most consequential companies of our time. In just the past few years, since the launch of ChatGPT, Sam and his team have brought AI to the mainstream. He has fundamentally really altered how we work, communicate,

01:12

Speaker A

pushes towards general or AI, I should say, artificial general intelligence, we're forced to grapple with some very big questions about the future of work, about the balance of power, about ethical questions and so many other things. And we're going to delve into all

01:26

Speaker A

innovate, and now think about what our future is even going to be like. His company is now worth about $157 billion. And I should say, OpenAI didn't just spark an arms race. It really redefined the possibilities of technology. And as he

01:30

Speaker A

Thanks for having me. So here's where we'll start. Two years ago, almost to this week, basically, you launched ChatGPT. And I think it's fair to say that when you press the button, since then, all hell has broken loose. It

01:47

Speaker A

pushes towards general or AI, I should say, artificial general intelligence, we're forced to grapple with some very big questions about the future of work, about the balance of power, about ethical questions and so many other things. And we're going to delve into all

02:02

Speaker A

take us back two years ago, literally almost, as I said, to the day or to the week, and what you thought was going to happen when you press the button. So in the abstract, we always knew there would be some moment

02:16

Speaker A

of that with Sam. So thank you, the man at the center of it all.

02:29

Speaker A

models were going to keep scaling, they were going to do all these useful things.

02:33

Speaker A

Thanks for having me. So here's where we'll start. Two years ago, almost to this week, basically, you launched ChatGPT. And I think it's fair to say that when you press the button, since then, all hell has broken loose. It

02:48

Speaker A

exact moment, I think there is some like chanciness to when it actually catches fire.

02:56

Speaker A

does feel like that. It has changed the global conversation. It has changed fundraising, priorities, the move of resources. Other technology companies have shifted the way they're doing things. There have been lawsuits. All of it. And so I'm very curious if you could just

03:09

Speaker A

where you could like test ideas quickly before you implement the API. They love just talking to the model. They would just sit there and like talk to GPT-3 conversationally about whatever. And that was kind of the main thing people were using it for.

03:20

Speaker A

take us back two years ago, literally almost, as I said, to the day or to the week, and what you thought was going to happen when you press the button. So in the abstract, we always knew there would be some moment

03:30

Speaker A

And so we said, okay, let's make this as a product. Now, we'd actually been planning to launch it with GPT-4. We finished GPT-4 in like August of 2022, but we held it for a while. But did you expect all of this to happen?

03:45

Speaker A

where for whatever reason, like the world would go from not getting it to getting it. And that all of a sudden it would be clear that this technology was working. Like internally at that point seemed very obvious to us that language

03:48

Speaker A

Did we know it was gonna be right then with the launch of ChatGPT? Certainly not. So here we are now, two years later, and the next big question, that we're all asking, I can't believe we're just asking it two years later, and

04:00

Speaker A

models were going to keep scaling, they were going to do all these useful things.

04:15

Speaker A

can do various versions of math on what that means. Well, I mean, there is wide uncertainty and there's also different definitions of what super intelligence is. I Yes, two years ago we thought we were on a pretty steep curve. I mean,

04:31

Speaker A

And why it happened at the launch of ChatGPT, I mean, I have some theories, but why it happened then and not when we launched the GPT-3 in the API earlier, or why it didn't happen until GPT-4 launched several months later, like why that

04:36

Speaker A

And it has gone well, but we hoped it was going to go well. Like we believed in deep learning as this unbelievable new discovery of humanity. And we thought it could go here and we had a duty to get it here and to

04:51

Speaker A

exact moment, I think there is some like chanciness to when it actually catches fire.

04:58

Speaker A

There's a ton of hard work, a ton of research and engineering still to do.

05:01

Speaker A

We had observed though with the API, and GPT-3 that, you know, GPT-3 was a little bit early and it didn't work for that many things. But in some sense, one of the killer use cases of it was developers in the playground, which is

05:17

Speaker A

That does change what? Like what? Agents are the thing everyone is talking about, I think, for good reason. This idea that you can give an AI system a pretty complicated task, like a kind of task you'd give to a very smart human that takes a while to go off and do and

05:35

Speaker A

where you could like test ideas quickly before you implement the API. They love just talking to the model. They would just sit there and like talk to GPT-3 conversationally about whatever. And that was kind of the main thing people were using it for.

05:48

Speaker A

it does, that can really transform things. OK, so what are we supposed to think?

05:51

Speaker A

So we said, well, if that's what people want, we can make it much easier to use. You don't have to sign up for a developer account and do all these other things. And we can sort of tune it to be good at conversations.

05:58

Speaker A

And you put out this, I don't know if it was cryptic or it was very direct, you put out a tweet where you wrote, there is no wall. I don't see how it could be any less cryptic than that. Like, that was an

06:11

Speaker A

And so we said, okay, let's make this as a product. Now, we'd actually been planning to launch it with GPT-4. We finished GPT-4 in like August of 2022, but we held it for a while. But did you expect all of this to happen?

06:22

Speaker A

I've always been struck by how much people love to speculate on, is there a wall? Is scaling going to keep going? And rather than just look at the curve of progress and say, maybe I shouldn't bet against an exponential like that. In any

06:36

Speaker A

Again, at some point, we thought there would be a big moment in the world.

06:48

Speaker A

12 weekdays. And without saying too much about the thing for tomorrow, it is continued progress. And give us a little bit more of a hint then if it's going to start tomorrow. Start today right now. I don't want to spoil your surprise. It's

07:02

Speaker A

Did we know it was gonna be right then with the launch of ChatGPT? Certainly not. So here we are now, two years later, and the next big question, that we're all asking, I can't believe we're just asking it two years later, and

07:25

Speaker A

pure processing power and therefore capital, right? Versus data, where you get that data, this idea of synthetic data, digital data that we're going to recreate data on top of data. What does it actually take to scale at this point? When people even talk about some of the limiting factors, I think

07:44

Speaker A

you actually just wrote about it. You said that it is possible that we will have super intelligence in a few thousand days from now. Two years ago, did you think that? And when you say a few thousand days, I

07:49

Speaker A

So the three key inputs and there are others too, but the three key ones are compute, data and algorithms. And you can trade them off sometimes.

07:58

Speaker A

can do various versions of math on what that means. Well, I mean, there is wide uncertainty and there's also different definitions of what super intelligence is. I Yes, two years ago we thought we were on a pretty steep curve. I mean,

08:10

Speaker A

us with compute. More recently, we've had a lot of algorithmic gains. But kind of You want to push on all of those inputs at the same time. And at different times, there may be differential returns to one or the other, but I kind

08:23

Speaker A

we started OpenAI because we thought this was possible and maybe not that far away.

08:39

Speaker A

double the size of a computer, maybe over time with crazy amounts of capital, you can 10x the size of the computer. Once in a while, these 1,000x gains come along algorithmically. The transformer is a good recent example of that. That's rare,

08:55

Speaker A

And it has gone well, but we hoped it was going to go well. Like we believed in deep learning as this unbelievable new discovery of humanity. And we thought it could go here and we had a duty to get it here and to

09:10

Speaker A

with Microsoft, and you rely on them right now. There's a race on all of these things. The compute one is the most fun, the most theatrical, the biggest numbers. It gets the most attention. It is really important. I don't want

09:24

Speaker A

make it go well and to broadly share the benefits. Yeah, we did think we could get here, and we still believe we can get here. It's not for sure.

09:34

Speaker A

So I think it is on all three fronts. you do have this relationship with Microsoft. It has been described as, at times it's been described as a tech bromance in the best way possible. And then I was just reading Alex Heath who wrote,

09:48

Speaker A

There's a ton of hard work, a ton of research and engineering still to do.

10:04

Speaker A

excited to do like much, much more together. But long term, do you think you need to have your own processing power that's yours as opposed to relying on somebody else? No. And in fact, I mean, I think we need to ensure that we get enough compute of

10:26

Speaker A

But I think it's possible. And I think it's possible not super far in the future. I expect that in 2025, we will have systems that people look at, even people who are skeptical of current progress, and say, wow, I did not expect that.

10:40

Speaker A

have like open AI get really good at building computer, like massive scale data centers. In fact, one of the things, and maybe this is a consequence of kind of just like how I grew up, but I like grew up as

10:54

Speaker A

That does change what? Like what? Agents are the thing everyone is talking about, I think, for good reason. This idea that you can give an AI system a pretty complicated task, like a kind of task you'd give to a very smart human that takes a while to go off and do and

11:06

Speaker A

then all of a sudden AWS changed the scene. And so I've always thought that way. I'm open to us saying, okay, we are going to have to build stuff ourselves or maybe vertical integration turns out to be more important over time. But it's really nice to get to focus on

11:23

Speaker A

use a bunch of tools and create something of value, that's the kind of thing I'd expect next year. And that's a huge deal. We talk about that like, oh, this thing is going to happen. But if that works as well as we hope

11:38

Speaker A

out a couple of things just yesterday. How to do. Great. Happy to hear it.

11:42

Speaker A

it does, that can really transform things. OK, so what are we supposed to think?

11:52

Speaker A

in a long time. I use it so much and I'm so happy with it.

11:57

Speaker A

There's been a whole bunch of headlines in the past couple of weeks where people have talked actually about maybe that the scaling laws of AI actually are slowing down.

12:14

Speaker A

have your own version of a sort of native product that you sell commercially yourself.

12:20

Speaker A

And you put out this, I don't know if it was cryptic or it was very direct, you put out a tweet where you wrote, there is no wall. I don't see how it could be any less cryptic than that. Like, that was an

12:34

Speaker A

things and services that folks at open AI are supposed to use that are Microsoft products and maybe they don't want to use. Just trying to understand all that. There's definitely at various times like real compute conscious. Again, our product has scaled like

12:48

Speaker A

attempt not to be cryptic at all and say, hey, this is going to keep going. In fact, hopefully this will put it to rest at least for a while.

13:03

Speaker A

US developers, many more in the world. So we need lots of compute more than we projected. And that's just been like an unusual thing in the history of business to scale that quickly. And there's been tension on that. I have not heard people

13:16

Speaker A

I've always been struck by how much people love to speculate on, is there a wall? Is scaling going to keep going? And rather than just look at the curve of progress and say, maybe I shouldn't bet against an exponential like that. In any

13:32

Speaker A

Again, there's not no tension, but on the whole, I think our incentives are pretty aligned. It sounds like there's a little bit of tension. For sure. On the artificial general intelligence piece, though, because you always said part of your deal with them is

13:47

Speaker A

case, we have a bunch of new great stuff. So we're doing this kind of fun thing for the holidays. We're doing 12 days of OpenAI starting tomorrow. We're going to launch. We'll either launch something or do a demo every day for the next

13:53

Speaker A

It sounds like you may be getting close. We've also said that our intention is to treat AGI as a mile marker along the way. We have left ourselves some flexibility because we don't know what will happen. But my guess is we

14:09

Speaker A

12 weekdays. And without saying too much about the thing for tomorrow, it is continued progress. And give us a little bit more of a hint then if it's going to start tomorrow. Start today right now. I don't want to spoil your surprise. It's

14:22

Speaker A

on mostly the same way. The economy moves faster, things grow faster. But then there is a long continuation from sort of what we call AGI to what we call super intelligence. And that's when we should get worried. I mean, I remember when you've,

14:34

Speaker A

not that long to wait. I'm not good with that. I want to know. One of the big questions about AI right now, though, is, and this goes to the scaling question, is how much data and what it takes to actually continue to scale. How much of this is about just

14:48

Speaker A

disruption to take a little longer than people think, because there's a lot of inertia in society, but then to be more intense than people think. So the first couple of years, maybe not that much changes. And then maybe a lot changes in the

15:02

Speaker A

pure processing power and therefore capital, right? Versus data, where you get that data, this idea of synthetic data, digital data that we're going to recreate data on top of data. What does it actually take to scale at this point? When people even talk about some of the limiting factors, I think

15:13

Speaker A

But I would bet we will have never seen it go this fast. So I think there's things like that to worry about in the relatively near term. But not these super dangerous things. That stuff I think is further out than a system that

15:25

Speaker A

that there's some question embedded in that about which piece is going to get there.

15:40

Speaker A

that a little bit. I think there's a set of technical problems that the smartest people in the world are going to work on. And I'm a little bit too optimistic by nature, but I assume that they're going to figure that out. And we're

15:55

Speaker A

So the three key inputs and there are others too, but the three key ones are compute, data and algorithms. And you can trade them off sometimes.

16:08

Speaker A

very hard problems. I assume we'll get that right. The societal issues around not just AGI, not the thing that we think will come in a few years that can do a bunch of jobs and create a lot of economic value, but

16:22

Speaker A

Like if you have much better data, you could use less compute. Or if you have a lot more compute, you could use that to create synthetic data and make more data. For a while, there was incredible easy gains in front of

16:35

Speaker A

have to have some faith in our governments. There are going to have to be some policy issues around that there is going to have to be global coordination to a degree that I assume will rise to the occasion, but seems challenging. Okay, so

16:47

Speaker A

us with compute. More recently, we've had a lot of algorithmic gains. But kind of You want to push on all of those inputs at the same time. And at different times, there may be differential returns to one or the other, but I kind

17:00

Speaker A

are not focused on safety enough, right? You have to trust questions. Just speak to it so we understand. When people say, that there's not enough focus on safety. You think what? What is that? What is not happening that is supposed to

17:17

Speaker A

of think of all three. But for you, compute, I assume, is the biggie? And if you don't have the compute, all the others don't matter. I mean, in some sense, algorithmic progress is the biggie, the biggest one. Maybe you can

17:31

Speaker A

did not know how we were going to align very well. And it is now generally considered by most of society to be acceptably safe and acceptably robust.

17:42

Speaker A

double the si

17:55

Speaker A

and they've gone public, they take to Twitter and they say, these folks are not focused on safety. Is that about resources on safety? Is that about processing power? Is that about your attention? There are definitely people who think that chatGPT is not

18:09

Speaker A

sufficiently safe, that it allows things that it shouldn't or doesn't do things that it should. There are people who will push on parts of that. There are people who will say, fine, chatGPT, maybe that's a little bit safer than we thought it was

18:22

Speaker A

going to be, but what's the plan for the next system? What are we going to do about that? And also, there are people who would say, putting out a system like this at all is unsafe because OpenAI accelerated a race in the world,

18:35

Speaker A

and that gives us less time to work on safety. Like we believe, and this is an opinionated stance, that this idea of iterative deployment is really important.

18:45

Speaker A

We've got to put these systems out into the world. Society and the technology have to co-evolve. You have to start while the stakes are lower. You have to understand how people are going to use this and what it doesn't work for, what it

18:56

Speaker A

does. There are other people who say, sure, there's some benefits there, but it's not worth the costs. Let me ask you a different question. And maybe it goes back to the issue of processing power. And I was going to mention, Elon Musk is

19:12

Speaker A

building his own processing, you know, these huge processing power labs effectively to power XAI. And one of the reasons I was asking whether you needed your own is because it seems like everybody is getting their own. We were

19:29

Speaker A

just talking before to Ken about Elon Musk. Elon Musk has a sort of unusual relationship in your life over the years, both as a founder and somebody who's suing the company now. How much do you see XAI as a competitor? We talk about Google, obviously, all the time. And we talk about

19:49

Speaker A

Anthropic and to some degree Microsoft. And I don't know where you think Amazon is.

19:54

Speaker A

We'll talk to Jeff Bezos this afternoon. But how do you see that? They're a competitor. Do you think of them as one of your biggest competitors? It appears that they are coming on super strong. Yeah, I assume they'll be a really serious competitor.

20:07

Speaker A

Did you expect that? Yes. You did? Yes. And what are they doing? And what are they doing? And how have they been able to literally spin up a company that feels, I'm not claiming it's comparable to what you're doing, but getting super close,

20:21

Speaker A

super fast? Meaning, what is that? Well, a lot of the models at the Frontier are all pretty close now. But certainly tremendous respect for how quickly they built that data center. Is that, by the way, do you fear that all this becomes commoditized

20:36

Speaker A

as a result? I mean, if it seems like, I'm not saying anybody can do it, but it just seems like, what is your advantage? And by the way, what is your disadvantage? I think the technology itself, to the degree

20:49

Speaker A

you believe deep learning is just like, sort of like a law of physics, and that we discovered an important new piece of science, then yes, that part will be done by lots of people. Everybody has their analogy for what

21:07

Speaker A

AI is like. The Sassundar is going to be here. He talks about it like electricity, a whole bunch of others. People talk about the Industrial Revolution. Some people talk about the Renaissance. The one I like is the transistor. There was a thing,

21:22

Speaker A

a scientific discovery, that a few companies discovered first. that transformed our society that scaled unbelievably well. Like, you know, when people talk about scaling laws, the best analogy for that, I think, is Moore's law. And that came to be used by a lot of companies in all of the world. Like,

21:44

Speaker A

look at all the things in this room with transistors. But we don't think about that as a transistor device, and we don't think about Google as a transistor company, even though they wouldn't be here without one. And I kind of think that's what's

21:54

Speaker A

going to happen with AI. There will be shockingly capable models, widely available, used for everything. And it will be inconceivable to people in the future that the devices, the products and services they use are not really smart.

22:12

Speaker A

And they won't all call themselves AI companies or AI products. And in that sense, in some sense, the AI itself, the reasoning engine nature of it will become commoditized. And that's fine. That's good. Like science should be just diffused throughout society. And that's why we're focused on building things like

22:34

Speaker A

CHI-GPT. One of the other questions, and it is Elon related, is you are now moving towards having a for-profit component part of your business. Right now it's a not-for-profit. And he, as everybody knows, if you read the papers, is

22:51

Speaker A

suing you over this and many other things. How do you feel? I actually just want to actually ask you on a very personal level, forgetting about even the merits of the case, as a guy who has spent a lot of time with him

23:04

Speaker A

and you guys founded this thing together, how do you feel personally today about all of this? This is tremendously sad. I grew up with Elon as like a mega hero. I thought what Elon was doing was absolutely incredible for the world.

23:22

Speaker A

And I'm still, of course, I mean, I have different feelings about him now, but I'm still glad he exists. And not just because, no, I mean that genuinely, not just because I think his companies are awesome, which I do think, but

23:35

Speaker A

because I think he, at a time when most of the world was not thinking very ambitiously, he pushed a lot of people, me included, to think much more ambitiously. And...

23:55

Speaker A

Grateful is like the wrong kind of word, but I'm like thankful. I'm positive about that. You know, we started OpenAI together and then at some point he like totally lost faith in OpenAI and decided to go his own way. And that's fine too.

24:11

Speaker A

But I think of Elon as a builder and someone who like, you know, known thing about Elon, he really cares about being the guy. But I think of him as someone that if he's not that just competes in the market and in

24:27

Speaker A

technology and whatever else and doesn't resort to lawfare. And, you know, whatever the stated complaint is, what I believe is he's just like, he's a competitor and we're doing well. And that's sad to see. I got to ask you this.

24:42

Speaker A

There was an article in The Wall Street Journal. You were in it. Jeff Bezos was in it. Some of the other people who are his main competitors were in it. And there was speculation in the article that folks like yourself were

24:55

Speaker A

worried about his influence, not just his influence in the technology area, but given his close relationship now with the president-elect? I'm actually not.

25:08

Speaker A

I believe that pretty strongly, I mean, it may turn out to be wrong, but I believe pretty strongly that Elon will do the right thing and that Americans, it would be profoundly un-American to use political power to the degree that

25:25

Speaker A

Elon has it, to hurt your competitors and advantage your own businesses. And I don't think people would tolerate that. I don't think Elon would do it. It would go, again, lots of things not to like about him, but it would go so

25:41

Speaker A

deeply against the values I believe he holds very dear to himself that I'm not that worried about it. Okay, one last related question on that, and then I actually want to talk a different tech question about the company, which is one of the

25:52

Speaker A

things that he alleged is that he thinks that you guys are now so big that there's not competition and that you're trying to prevent competition from happening by preventing potential funders of, for example, XAI or arguably others from both funding you

26:07

Speaker A

and funding them at the same time. Incorrect. What we said, which is very standard and what we say is if you invest in us and want to invest in any of our competitors, that's totally fine. We stop your information rights. You can still

26:19

Speaker A

do it. But like is a very standard term for other companies of our scale, you know, where it's going to stop like telling you our research roadmap. And everybody is like, that seems reasonable. But again, it's like, you want to go invest in

26:31

Speaker A

them? Go invest. Let me ask you a different question just about the company. You did start it as a not-for-profit. It was a research outfit originally. Now, I think there's a view that it has to shift to be some kind of profit-oriented company.

26:45

Speaker A

Does it have to? First of all, I like to talk about the reason we started as a nonprofit because I think it sort of speaks to the answer too.

26:54

Speaker A

When we started, we did not have any idea that we were going to be a product company. We also did not know that the amount of capital we needed would turn out to be so huge. If we did know those things, we would

27:07

Speaker A

have picked a different structure. It's hard to overstate, because it wasn't that long ago on the calendar, but it's hard to overstate how different 2016 was. This was years before we had the research that led to language models. This was four and a half years before we launched our first product.

27:29

Speaker A

This was like six and a half years before we launched ChatGPT. All we knew that we wanted to do was do some AI research and that we thought AGI and superintelligence eventually would be this important thing to the world. And we wanted to

27:44

Speaker A

like somehow do something that would be good. At the time we were working on writing papers, new RL algorithms, new theories, a way to play video games, a robotic hand.

28:03

Speaker A

And it was not clear that there would ever be a product or revenue stream at all. And it wasn't clear that we were going to need one because it wasn't clear we needed so much money. It became clear after GPT-1 and some other

28:15

Speaker A

work that we were going to need to scale. and we started, and also Elon decided to stop funding us as a nonprofit, and we couldn't get somebody else to do it, that we needed to find a way to make a capped profit. Now,

28:29

Speaker A

we wanted to keep going with a lot of the things that we think are good about a nonprofit, and so we had this subsidiary capped profit that worked for a while, and in some senses still does kind of work, and in some other

28:42

Speaker A

senses is like straining the theory of what a nonprofit controlled org can be and the amount of capital we need at this next stage. So we are and have been for a while looking at some changes. Nothing is decided.

28:56

Speaker A

It is, as you can imagine, like very complicated to figure this out. And the board is like hard at work on it. I don't, in any configuration, like the nonprofit doesn't go away. Like one thing that the board has looked

29:13

Speaker A

at, for example, is a PBC that a nonprofit owns a huge chunk of and then figures out how to use that amount of wealth for the purpose of the nonprofit. There's other ideas, too. Yeah. One of the things I've

29:26

Speaker A

always been fascinated by is you never took equity in the company. I think you think about that more than I do. I'm surprised. You get paid $76,000, I looked.

29:35

Speaker A

I believe you. And that's it. If the company does have one of these moments, there's an expectation you will get some equity. There was a bunch of press about that. And there's been like some investor pressure. It is look,

29:53

Speaker A

it is weird that I didn't get equity. Did you want it? You didn't want it. No, I didn't want it. If I could go back in time, I would have taken it just some little bit just to never have to answer this question.

30:06

Speaker A

And No matter how many times I try to explain to people, I have the most interesting, coolest job in the world. This is my retirement dream way to spend my time after what was a pretty good career. And people

30:27

Speaker A

can work on art projects and not get paid for that, and no one thinks it's weird or whatever. It just does not come across. So I wish I had taken some. Don't imagine I would work any harder or less hard.

30:41

Speaker A

There would be, I think, something clearer about the alignment I would have had with investors or whatever else, and it definitely would have been easier to raise money. There are plenty of investors who have not invested because I didn't take equity. Really? That's

30:54

Speaker A

interesting. They will not invest because you don't have equity. It's come up a few times, yeah. Now the company's $157 billion. What do you think is a good number for yourself if it happens? Again, I think you think about it more.

31:07

Speaker A

We're going to run out of time, so I have to ask a couple other quick questions. One is, and at full disclosure, we should say, it just so happens...

31:14

Speaker A

Can I say one more thing on that point before you go? I know we're at. I'll be quick. This is my childhood dream job.

31:23

Speaker A

Not every day, not day-to-day. I would rather not be beating my head against the wall all the time. But getting to work on AGI and getting to sit in the room with the smartest researchers in the world and go on this crazy adventure...

31:37

Speaker A

That is what I always wanted to do. That was my literal childhood dream. And that is, all of the weirdness aside, I think it should at least be understandable that that is worth more to me than any additional money. Fair enough. Thank you.

31:56

Speaker A

Let me ask you this, and I would be remiss if I didn't mention it.

31:58

Speaker A

It just so happens that the New York Times company has a lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft over training on content. And there's a lot of content creators and other folks in this room who make their living off of content. And I'm just so curious, and I know

32:21

Speaker A

you can't speak to the lawsuit itself. But for those folks who are in this room who've written books or written articles or made movies or what have you, that have had their information trained on, whether it was on the open web or the

32:34

Speaker A

closed web or on YouTube or what have you, how we should feel. I think we do need a new...

32:52

Speaker A

deal, standard, protocol, whatever you want to call it, for how creators are going to get rewarded. I very much believe in the right to learn or whatever you want to call it. And if an AI reads something, a physics textbook can learn physics,

33:06

Speaker A

it can use that for other things like a human can. I think those parts of copyright law and fair use really need to keep applying. But I think there's additional things that we're starting to explore and others are where, you know, a particular

33:19

Speaker A

passion of mine has always been can we figure out how to do micropayments where if you generate a story in the style of Andrew Ross Sorkin, you can opt into that for your name and likeness and style to be used and get paid

33:30

Speaker A

for it. There's many other ideas too. I think the discussion on fair use or not is at the wrong level. And like, of course, we very much believe in you need one of these right to learn approaches. But the part

33:45

Speaker A

I really agree with is we need to find new economic models where creators can have new revenue streams. On The New York Times, look, I don't believe in showing up in someone else's house as a guest and being rude. But I will say,

33:57

Speaker A

I think The New York Times is on the wrong side of history in many ways. We can discuss and debate that. And we'll do that, I think, in court. Look forward to seeing you. My final question for you actually has almost nothing to do with technology, but maybe it

34:15

Speaker A

does, which is you have a very exciting thing that's happening in your life. personally in the next year, which you have your child. Yeah. And for all parents out there and would be parents who are thinking about AI and what this is going

34:30

Speaker A

to do to our life and what our even, even what our own meaning is as people, if the machine actually can do things that we really can't, what we're supposed to do, how we're supposed to think about it, what it does

34:45

Speaker A

to our own dignity, What do you think, when you have your child and you're thinking and talking to that child, what do you think you're going to be telling them about this new world we're about to enter? There's nothing

35:00

Speaker A

like, I mean, I'm sure having a kid will be even stronger, but just even like really like getting ready to have a kid, there's nothing like, at least for me, there's been nothing that has made AGI seem so irrelevant. And like the

35:14

Speaker A

level of excitement I have about I thought it was pretty high, but it's so much higher about having a kid. It really puts into perspective what actually matters. And I think that is a... I think that's like a specific lens on the general

35:29

Speaker A

phenomenon, which is we have been developing incredible new technology for a long time. And each time it's happened, people have had these conversations. What does this mean? The Industrial Revolution comes along. Some machines take all of our jobs.

35:43

Speaker A

What does this mean? computer revolution comes along, computers take a bunch of current jobs, what does it mean? And the answer, at least in terms of what it means to be human, is not very much. The economy will grow. The kinds of

35:58

Speaker A

jobs people will do will change. And people will care way more and love their kids way more than they care about AGI and anything else that any technology can deliver. Deep human drives are so powerful and have been here for so long. Evolutionary drift is pretty slow

36:22

Speaker A

that, you know, I think in some sense, my kids will grow up in a super different world. And in some other sense, it'll be exactly the same. Sam Altman, everybody. Thank you so, so much for the conversation. Thank you. Thank you.

Topics: Sam Altman OpenAI ChatGPT Artificial Intelligence AGI AI Ethics AI Future Microsoft AI Scaling Technology Impact


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