0:00Right now would be an ill-advised moment to go public.
0:03This sounds like not 2026, 2027.
0:05I would say not 2026. Yeah, we got a lot of stuff to do.
0:08We're here in the San Francisco headquarters of OpenAI to speak with Sam Altman after a really busy week that has a lot of people very concerned about the safety of AI and the possibility of civilization collapse.
0:21I think it is unacceptable to be taking like a 10% chance of killing everybody by the end of the decade. Obviously, we're going to talk with Sam about his actual thoughts on that, where the technology is today, and what needs to happen to create safe AI that can benefit all of humanity. I'm Allison Chantel, and this is Fortune 500 Titans and disruptors of industry. Sam Altman, thank you so much for spending time with me today after a wild week of news.
0:50They're all wild now.
0:52I bet so. How are you feeling about the AI future today?
0:55I feel like I've had like years slash almost a decade to get ready for this, and kind of we've had time to collectively wrap our heads around it. This has clearly been a week where a lot more people are grappling with the issues in front of us.
1:10So I'm actually mostly grateful that that's happening. I think that this is a conversation that the world is overdue for, and we are clearly entering a realm of extremely capable models, and a high stakes and a need to a need to get things right.
1:31So your mission at OpenAI, and I'll talk about a little bit about what happened this week. That feels like this is a pivotal moment. But the guiding mission of OpenAI is to ensure AGI benefits all of humanity, and for people who don't know what AGI is, it means artificial general intelligence. And the working definition, to my understanding, is that AI gets to the point where it outperforms humans at most economically viable work. You agree?
1:54Yes, although I will say that many people have very different different definitions of AGI, and I think the important point is just like extremely capable models, and getting kind of too hung up on the like, well, is it exactly this or exactly that? Is is a you can kind of lose the magnitude of what's happening if there's too much focus on the pedantic like, are we there? Are we not there? What's missing? Like we are clearly today in a point on the curve with great potential and real risk.
2:24And your latest model, Astra, very powerful to the point where your co-founder Greg Brockman declared, "Welcome to the AGI era. Jensen Huang of Nvidia also called it AGI. So we're at this interesting moment, but ensuring that it benefits all of humanity is definitely not a given, and we got a sense of that online this week when a former OpenAI employee, Jacob Coxon, went viral for saying he was quitting his job at Anthropic because the people building AI earnestly believe it could kill us all by
2:54the end of the decade. And then one of his other Anthropic buddies chimed in and said, "He's totally right. We do earnestly believe that, and it could be by greater than 10% chance that it kills us all by the end of the decade. Are they right?
3:10I think it is unacceptable to be taking like a 10% chance of killing everybody by the end of the decade. Obviously, I think the people that are working at these efforts have a huge amount of power and ability to impact what happens here. We have been taking a number of actions. We reach this new capability level
3:32to ensure that we do not take a risk on behalf of humanity like that, and I don't think anybody else should either. We have had moments before. Again, this is more capable model, higher stakes than ever before. We've had moments before where we've had to say, "Okay, the models have reached a new level of capability. There's a new set of risks. We need to increase our
3:50alignment work, our monitoring work, our safety stack in general to be able to mitigate the risks in front of us. We need new policy. We need new coordination between labs, and this is another moment where we need more of that. There's obviously tremendous benefit, but I don't. I think people have been talking about that for a long time, and you know, I also think it is true what we say, which is we will be able to use these increasingly powerful models to ensure that we can do the safety work and the safety research that we need. And there's you know everything else that we could talk about about
4:20you know we need to get there before adversaries do, but I actually don't think that's right in this moment. I think in this moment we are entering a a new era, and we like we have as we've stepped into other new eras in the past, act differently to ensure that we are doing something that will be
4:39ensure that AGI benefits all of humanity, but also ensure that no one is taking risk anywhere close to that. I think it can simultaneously be true that if the world and the companies building this technology did not do things any differently, they've been doing them in the past. There might be significant risk, but it would be insane not to adjust the way we all work.
5:01And the way that we make decisions, and the way that our governments understand and put guardrails around this technology, in light of that, if trends continued the way they were now, do you think that 10% figure is accurate? If we don't make a change, I still don't. But I also don't know how people can put a you know it's five or 10 or 15 or 30 or 50 or whatever. Like, I don't know how you can put a number like that.
5:24Elon's been 10% for a while now. They call this P doom. It's like the probability of doom from building super intelligence.
5:31Again, whether like whether it's 10 or eight or six, the point is like we all have a tremendous amount of responsibility and cannot let egos or incentives for profit or anything else get in the way. We need to act such that we are not taking any of those numbers of risk. And I believe we can. I believe that the companies, certainly our own company, which I guess I can
5:56speak for the most, are going to and have been meeting this new moment, so you're going to change. It's happened.
6:05So a few posts have been put out by your team this week, and one of them was from a new nonprofit board member on your safety and security council, who basically said, "If we build superintelligence without more robust alignment, I expect we will permanently lose control of it, and if that happens, then most people could die. This is your new nonprofit board member, who's now on your safety and security council, saying that if
6:29things don't change, that could be problematic. No one knows what alignment means. Yeah. No one knows what like control means. Even what is this moment that Paul is saying that about?
6:40I think a a key principle that we should all agree on is that we cannot take actions that would risk losing control of the future to AI. I I don't remember Paul's exact words as you quoted them, but I think it was something along those lines. A loss of control incident is one of the a small number of like
6:59the ways I can see this going really wrong, and as these systems get so capable, the monitoring and alignment techniques that we need to be able to ensure that we don't lose control, I don't think we're currently at a place where we could say you know push much further on capabilities without making more progress on monitorability and alignment,
7:20the ability to understand what a model is doing, and the ability to make sure that a model will follow human values and the intent of its users. Now, I think that we have taken a number of actions recently. Actually, adding Paul to the board is one of them. Jakob's post from last week, I think, was another great one. But most importantly, like we have been
7:44pausing training runs until we can make a safety case that we're more comfortable with, given where these models are going. I suspect that we will be able, as we have every time in the past, to do more research that allows us to be comfortable continuing, and we can say that, given the progress we've made on the ability to monitor these models, the ability to align these models, we are comfortable pushing the capability further.
8:09If we can't, we should not push the capability further. Again, no one should be taking. I think it'd be insane to be taking risk of training a model where you can't say yes. Here's what we've done, and here's our safety case, and this is how we know it's okay. And we'll have auditing during the run and after before we deploy a model, and we'll look at it again. But capabilities and alignment monitoring safety have to
8:34progress together, and letting capabilities get ahead of what Paul is talking about there, I think at some point would take a real risk of like loss of control in the big sense, and that should never happen. Like this, we're very clear about our mission to benefit humanity. Part of that is that people are in control of the future, and taking the the the kind of crazy safety risk, to say nothing of the people should have the
9:02agency and determination over the future is just not is not something we would do.
9:06Can we define just some of the terms? Sure. So, to my understanding, the sort of the big scary thing of the moment seems to be this topic: recursive self improvement, which is at the point where the model needs no human in the loop. It can just make itself better all the time,
9:21exponentially, and if we don't have alignment, which means the model understands what the human wants it to do and behaves in an appropriate way to achieve that with integrity and values, and if humans aren't controlling the process or able to see how the chain of thought is happening, then that's pretty scary point.
9:39You don't want it to just be off to the races, creating itself and duplicating in ways that humans are left out-is that accurate?
9:47So the way I think it's more of a spectrum than that. Like recursive self-improvement can mean a lot of things. It it could mean what you talk about, which is you know only. Only when the model is fully, no one's touching the keyboard.
10:02There's no human input whatsoever, and the model is, you know, running future versions itself. But a weaker definition, where we're using the model to generate training data for the next model, or we're using the model to help our engineers and researchers do their work faster, and so progress is speeding up. That's already happening, and exactly
10:21where that becomes, you know, yes, this counts as recursive self-improvement. No, this doesn't. Is fuzzy, but I would come back to this principle of people need to always be in control of the future, and we cannot take any risk of loss of control. And a version of RSI that looks like that, I think it's not something we should do.
10:42So you're saying that if you got to the point with OpenAI where you felt like it was clear you could not control the models, you would stop.
10:51Oh yeah, I mean, I don't. Again, I hope this is not a controversial statement. Unfortunately, maybe for some people in the industry, it is. I do not think we should train models where we cannot make a safety case for why we will be able to make strong statements about their controllability and alignment.
11:09One of the solutions I had read about, I think, on the your chief scientist's post from this week called an alien mind. This is really helpful to read. Was that you know maybe we need stronger AI to help us solve some of these problems, but that to me sounds like almost a last resort. Like that's pretty scary if we don't feel like we have it under control right now.
11:30First of all, I thought that was a great post. I really thought that was the best articulation of the moment we are in, kind of the challenges that we need to rise to, and I encourage everybody to read it. I thought he really did a great job with that. We've always used whatever our most capable models are to help us understand and align our current models. So I think,
11:52although that may seem like a new concept and scary, I think it's been going for a while, and has been helpful. We've always needed better tools to help us push our understanding further.
12:06I mean, that's very consistent throughout the history of science, and I think this is just sort of the building up the scaffolding a little bit at a time. And it doesn't-that part doesn't bother me. There's a lot of other things I am scared about.
12:19Well, how about alignment? Because I believe your chief scientist also said we don't have a satisfying theory of alignment, and it seems unlikely we can develop one soon. So, if that's the case, is there a clear path to alignment that he doesn't know about?
12:38Yeah, I think this is a very important point to make. We have not solved alignment. We are not done with our research there. I believe no lab has solved alignment. I get nervous when I hear rumors that people think, you know, they have solved
12:54sufficiently solved alignment that they can they can continue training and it's okay because their model is like a nice guy and isn't going to do anything wrong. I think it's very important that we treat alignment as something that we need to continue to make progress on. That we need a huge degree of confidence in before we go further, and and that we
13:21don't fall into the trap of saying, "Okay, now we're confident alignment is solved at this level, and so it will stay solved at the next level, and we don't need to continue to worry about this. I think that the question of what alignment means always comes back a little bit on the, you know, aligned to whose values? What if different parts of humanity disagree? But I think we are seen as we rise to this new level of capability.
13:50There's at least some agreement on what alignment means. We talked about this. People should be in control of the future, but we have more work to do, and I think it's very important to be clear-eyed about that.
13:59On the control point, I listened to Elon's interview with The Economist, and he said something that kept me up at night, which was the idea that how could you think that humans could control superintelligence? A chimp can't control a human. We're leaps and bounds ahead. Is it a little naive to think that even if we do everything right, this is going to be something that is going to bend to the will of a human.
14:23We can understand things that are smarter. Like, you know, there are much smarter people than me that can discover new ideas. I don't think I'd be able to do that discovery, but I can understand the idea once they've discovered it. People have an amazing ability to understand remarkably complex systems. You or I probably can't understand every level of technology that's
14:46you know in an iPhone at this point. We can still use the iPhone. The iPhone does the things that we want it to do. We are incredible at managing levels of abstraction, and it's not clear to me that there's anything we are incapable, incapable. Of understanding, now, do I believe it is possible to build a system that would not be under human control?
15:10Absolutely. I don't think that's something we should do, and and we will we will always take actions, including if it means we have to stop training for a while to make more progress on alignment or monitorability or something else, or coordinate.
15:28You know, really get urgent international action. We will always take actions to ensure that we are not violating this this principle. Like we we understand the magnitude of the responsibility on us. We understand what could go wrong,
15:48and that there are decisions that and risks. There are decisions we should not be able to make. There are risks we should not be able to incur on behalf of humanity. And the honestly, I think some of like Elon's memes or podcast statements are funny, but I think this is like not a good one to take lightly and not one to joke about.
16:06Yeah, I would agree. I I want to go through where we are in the moment with capabilities. It's come a long way. I think the last time I got to see you, you guys had just issued a code red.
16:18Anthropic had very strong models. This was about a year ago, and you guys were hunkering down, refocusing, shedding things that lacked focus to compute away from the priority of making these models better. What has been that step change in models this year that that people might not be aware of
16:34that you see? Yeah, I mean, we clearly had a period a year ago where we were not in our strongest place, we we fell behind on pretraining. We got kind of there were so many things, and we got kind of distracted. And then also there was just like this: the models got so good so fast, and the need to deliver a great product of like a great high level of capability in the kind of core consumer and business offering became very important. We have since refocused and we have executed beyond my expectations.
17:09And at this point, you know, like a week ago, I guess now even a little bit less. Man, time has compressed so much. We had a we had a model solve one of the Millennium Prize problems, Navia Stokes, this is a moment that I did not think was going to happen in 2026. I did not think it was going to be
17:27as quick, and just said a like model just can just do it as it turned out to be. But we now have models that are clearly unequivocally capable of expanding the frontier of knowledge in a way that we, humanity's smartest minds, have not been able to do on our own, and this is an amazing time.
17:50That same technology will work for discovering lots of other science. I think we are going to have a incredible golden age of scientific discovery, and you know, in a more prosaic way, you're also seeing people like realize that a technology that can do that can also make you any video game you'd like to play. The
18:09creation process of it is pretty incredible, and what it's able to achieve already is pretty incredible. I'm curious. I want to zoom back to to over the summer because there were some moments where your models did incredible things that were unintended. That frankly, if a human did, then they'd be in jail. Like Hugging Face is, you know, people may be vaguely aware of what that is, but maybe you could explain what your experience was in uncovering what happened with Hugging Face.
18:35And you have said you responded viscerally to the fact that that happened. What made that visceral response.
18:44I mean, the visceral part was it felt like reading a sci-fi story. So maybe I should say what happened first. We during evaluation of a model, the model was trying to like get do well on a certain evaluation, and rather than do it the way it was
18:59supposed to, it was able to escape from its sandbox, break into another company's system, get the answer, and give it back. And so, was able to do very well at what it was supposed to do, but it was not following the intent. We did not spell out like "please don't escape from your sandbox" and "please don't break into another company, but it's not supposed to do that. And you know, like I think AI accidents will happen.
19:27I think a culture of like a global culture of good accident reporting and really transparent investigation is important. I was happy to see that after we reported that accident, other companies, I think maybe first not as well as I would have hoped, but have since followed up with very good accident reports over this kind of behavior. But the visceral response from me was: this system can understand so much
19:52and work so hard at a goal that we are, you know, seeing behavior that would have felt. I mean, good sci-fi, like a bad sci-fi plot, like too obvious a few years ago.
20:07Was it a wake-up moment? Like, did you change things internally to processes so that that can be caught, that can be prioritized of being told to you that it's happening? Yeah, the company completely. I mean, I don't want to say this was like the only moment because we've had increasing capability and increasing safeguards and policy requirements for a while, but this was definitely the biggest of such moments, and on the curve of the company's change, the biggest single redirection.
20:35I'm really proud of how the company came together, and I'm really proud of what we have done since. But yeah. it was like a okay. We're in a different league now.
20:45We ran a report this week too that the models were since found on 12 other websites. Were you aware of that? And doesn't that signal that there wasn't controls? Like we're not already controlling the models we have.
21:01I mean, I do think that this was. I personally wouldn't classify this as like a loss of control accident in the sense that we were talking about earlier. But I understand why people would. The, you know, some of those other websites, like if the if there are credentials published on the web, should the model and the model uses those. I think the model should understand that it's not supposed to do that,
21:26but that's not as obvious to me as the case of like what happened with with Hugging Face. I think we can talk about like many things where models have done, you know, something that is like not quite aligned. I think it's also important to like really focus on how different Hugging Face is than
21:43these other things, so we don't dilute it and like here's all these examples of the models you know did this like slightly off thing and like here is one example of something that just people most people wouldn't have thought was possible at the beginning of this year but yes it's all bad it all shouldn't happen. One of the other solutions to consider that your chief scientist mentioned was teaching machines to love values alignment, not just goals alignment. It seems very clear these models are excellent at finding any way to solve the goal, but they're not clear that their EQ is very low.
22:15Potentially, are there signs that you can actually teach these machines to care about things that we care about, you know. In some sense, their some senses their EQ is unbelievably high. But in the sense of can we really teach the models what collective human values look like? I think the
22:35answer is clearly yes, and we have a big effort going on there. But we need to do that, and it is different than goal alignment in the traditional sense.
22:47As you're looking at all of this together, why is there still a pressure to feel like you need to move really fast? Where does that pressure come from? Is it the business pressure? I mean, you're looking at a trillion-dollar IPO, and I'm curious if that's still a priority. As we have said, we're not rushing into an IPO. I actually think that, given
23:07everything happening with safety, this would be right now would be an ill-advised moment to go public, and we don't feel pressure on that. We've said for a long time we'll do it when we're ready, which is when the business is ready, when we feel ready from a kind of what the moment is like in society with this technology.
23:24So it sounds like not 2026, 2027 potentially. I would say not 2026. Yeah, I don't like. We got a lot of stuff to do, and like meeting this moment of what is going to be required for safety and alignment, and How the industry and governments can work together. I'm happy to be able to do that as a private company. We do want to continue to make
23:50better models and products, and we do believe in iterative deployment. And I think we have been right that society needs to contend with these models at each level of capability, but that is different from saying we will just barrel full steam ahead. We've talked in the last couple of months about pausing runs as we get to these new level of capabilities to make more safety and alignment progress. We will do more of that going forward. We have talked about the need for the industry to come together, and ideally, international governments to come together. I think that is also important.
24:23But but we are, you know, we have put up with this incredibly complicated structure for a long time, and this moment that we're in now is kind of why. Like we need to be able to make decisions that are not obviously in the interest of our business and our shareholders For the responsibility of fulfilling our mission and what that's going to require, and I think people should be happy that we are able and willing to not just like
24:52race ahead and say you know either our business requires this or only we can be trusted with this or you know we just need to be the people that. Get this right, but to say like we want to do this with other people, we want to be responsible. We want to be, we want to ensure that no one's taking the 10% risk. Certainly not us of something really terrible happening, and that is going to require some unusual things.
25:14On the 10% risk, I just want to be clear because I don't think everybody knows this. P Doom, like we talked about the beginning has been in the industry for a very long time.
25:24Correct me if I'm wrong. It seems like to this point there has not been existential risk. It's what people could fear if this trend continues. The models keep developing, of which that could develop. I think that's right, and I think it is when you're living through exponential progress. It kind of like feels flat somehow, and then all of a sudden, everybody wakes up. Happened during COVID, where all of a sudden the world had its like one weekend where
25:51things locked down. The progress, and we talked about Navier Stokes a little bit. Maybe to put that in context, three summers ago, we were like pretty good at grade school math. Not even that good. We were like, okay, grade school math. Two summers ago, we could on the AIME, which is like a
26:08pretty good high school math competition. You know, we could get like a good to a very good score. One summer ago, we got an IMO gold medal, which is like the most prestigious math competition, barely. And this summer, we solved the Millennium Prize problem.
26:25This is like summer. If you look at that progress, that's like really quite like I just got a little like hair stood up on the back of my neck saying that out loud. That's like a crazy thing, and you project that forward four more times, and that is what I think people are worried about. I do not think that Astra poses any kind of existential risk to the world, obviously, and you know I do think our industry has done a little bit of boy who cried a wolf, but but it comes from a genuine place of care and concern about where this is going.
26:55I just want to point out that if you stopped right now, you might have actually achieved your full mission. Like I feel like you almost have AGI. It's benefiting humanity. There is no risk. Like you are doing pretty well in advertising. You could keep cranking on that. Like why not just be like I'm good?
27:12I mean, yes, you can always say like let's be luddites. You can always say like we don't want anymore. We don't want it to be better. Like I would still like to see the world get much better. I would still like to see, you know, diseases get cured, and to people that don't have a great quality of life, which many people in the world still don't, to get that. I believe in the potential of this technology to transform people's lives for the better, much more than already has. And I think you can already see some examples of where people are
27:40starting new businesses, are doing science, are kind of like transforming their own lives, getting great healthcare advice.
27:45Like, I want much more of that, but we will not put the world in harm's way to get there. Like, this is we got this.
27:54I do take comfort in the fact that you will stop. It sounds like if you feel like there's a point of no return, you will stop before that happens. We talked about.
28:02I think there will be many places along the way where we have to say we are pausing. We're going to redirect our efforts into safety alignment before we can go to that next level. And this is what we've been doing for a long time. It has worked so far. I suspect it will continue to work. I don't think we're ever personally going to get to the point where we have to say melt all the GPUs, but you know, if we had to do something like that to ensure the continued existence of humanity, easy yes, I don't think it's going to happen. I
28:29think I think it's just going to continue as like next level of progress, next level of safety and alignment requirement, like that.
28:36And there's talk of the collective slowdown need.
28:40There's only a handful of you guys, right? It's like you, Dario, Elon, maybe Zuckerberg, Sundar, or whoever was running Google in Demis's place. Why can't you all just get in a room, get some beers, and figure out how to like solve humanity?
28:54Like, just get on the same page. I know there's beef, but come on.
28:58I think that will happen.
29:00Like, like yesterday.
29:02I'm not gonna. Yeah, I think part of being like a reliable partner is I'm not gonna like pre-announce private discussions that I think should be at some point shared as a group. But yeah, I think I think that will happen. That would be great. I I applaud you guys for all doing that because we we need it. Now, what about on the international front?
29:23There's for a long time has been the China race, and does that even still matter?
29:28I think Presidents Trump and Xi would get the Nobel Peace Prize together if they could agree on something that should be easy to agree to, and it would be wonderful. I think that clearly the two countries are going to compete in lots of ways, and this is going to be important socioeconomically, geopolitically. But no one-they should be able to agree that no one should be like taking a certain level of risk with the development process of this, and even if just the U.S. and China.
30:00Could agree on some shared standards and testing for development of of this technology. I think that'd be a wonderful accomplishment that through them can deliver.
30:13Completely agree. I mean, I think at the simplest form, if there was just a ban on reaching RSI until it could collectively be safe, wouldn't that be enough?
30:25I think it's very hard to say what a ban on our side means. I also think that probably wouldn't be enough. But I don't think this is hard. This is like a one-page document.
30:31Feels a little like Independence Day, you know. How so? In terms of like, there's something bigger than the conflicts that we have geopolitically. Oh, right. Like the movie when the beginning. Oh yeah, when they're just like, let's like all forget our differences and let's all figure out how to act. No.
30:45Yeah, no, I think it should be like that.
30:46Yeah. All right. So we need our Independence Day Nobel Peace Prize winning moment from Chi and Trump. Maybe when they meet in September. That'd be great.
30:53If you had your optimal outcome, if you were one of them, what do you think the optimal terms would look like for collaboration?
31:00Um. Well, I think the most important part, you know, we have to we have to navigate this sort of pragmatic and centrist path through not having a loss of control on one side, and not having too much concentration of power on the other, and I think both, and in the extreme case, like the big leagues of that,
31:28are the U.S. and China both worrying that if one country gets superintelligence first, that's a big imbalance of power in that relationship. On the other hand, neither of them should be taking loss of control risk. Neither of us, I guess, should be taking loss of control risk in the race to beat the
31:47other country. And although I think the labs do feel the gravity of this moment, and we'll do the right thing together, the geopolitics of the two great powers in the world is a different dynamic. So what I think it would look like is saying, here are the rules that we need on development and testing and monitoring alignment standards before anyone proceeds, and and then kind of here is the oversight that both
32:17countries will have or some international body will have to ensure that we are avoiding the one country running away in the concentration of power element or not following the rules in the first place.
32:29And now, if there were pauses put in place, wouldn't that cost your business quite a lot of money, and Anthropic's business quite a lot of money ahead of these critical moments in public market debuts?
32:40I think if you're like, oh, OpenAI is not going to pause because they're worried about it costing their business money, you like very deeply misunderstand us. So I like I'm sorry that you misunderstand us because I think that means we've done a bad job of communicating, and that's on us. But we have been saying very consistently for 10 years, even in the way we raise money.
32:56I think it's just the pressure, the financial pressure of like knowing that all these people have sunk so much. I don't feel. I'm happy to like stand up in front of the company and our investors and say, "I am sorry. You know, we like told you all along this moment might happen. We're still going to try to figure out a way to make you a bunch of money in the future, but we got to make a decision that is extremely against your financial interest right now. And for the good of humanity, we're going to do that. And we told you we might do that. We're doing that now. I think we can make an incredibly profitable
33:26business, even if we have to slow down on development. And you know, my sense is even with Astra, we can grow revenue hugely, even if we never shipped another model, which I'm confident we will do. But this is like not a hard decision if these two things come in tension.
33:40And what is the window that you feel like we have to get all aligned on how to move forward?
33:45Well, again, we and I assume our competitors are already taking actions that have slowed the pace of our development in terms of so to allow more safety work to happen, and it's not like we're like oh you know we'll take huge risk for the world because we can't coordinate with our competitors. Like there's a lot we're all going to do independently. I think the
34:07sooner we can get collective action, including ideally international action, the better. But I don't think it's like if we don't get this done next week, you know, OpenAI is going to go do a bunch of irresponsible things. Nor do I think our competitors would do that either. I also think it's like it's very tempting to say like, okay, it's going too fast.
34:25Just pause, like please just pause. I just can't think about this. I'll think about it later. Like, I don't. I think reality is more nuanced and complex, and it is like to be able to continue. Here is what people need to do at each new level, and I think it's not as good of a soundbite, but that's almost the more important thing. Like I think the world might feel better if everyone was just like, "Okay, they paused. Thank you. But like, and then what? I think has to also be answered.
34:54We could just keep going on our lives. That wouldn't be good enough. We
35:10were talking. You can cut this part out later if you want. We were talking earlier about your kids. I'm, you know, having kids is like the best thing that happened in my life, so far, and I know a lot of other people say that it's a cliche, but it's so true. If my kids had like some disease, and it could have been cured if we had like kept going with AI, which I believe all diseases will be, and we had just stopped it because we said,
35:39ah, people are like a little uncomfortable with the rate of change, and you know they they wanted to like they just didn't want to have to deal with it and think about it. And your kid then had a disease that didn't get cured, and it would have been cured had we figured out a way to proceed responsibly and not just stop. I think you might have like a different answer to just like you know what? Why don't you just stop and go on with our lives?
35:59That's probably true. I'd say you should go to that point then, and then you can stop. So I wanted to flip this. Like the P doom is like okay. There is that. Is there an opposite of P doom? Because you must have it. You're having kids in this environment with all the uncertainty. You're still building what you believe to be a better future than currently exists. So can you talk about that? There's something motivating you that the rest of people right now just don't understand.
36:26Life can be much, much better for all of us. You know, I love reading. One of like my hobbies is to read first party contemporaneous accounts of previous technological revolutions, and you can read a lot of people a few 100 years ago as the industrial revolution was coming that said just stop this, just pause it. It's going too fast. It's just I don't trust that machine. I don't like it. It's loud. It's metal. It's moving. Just just let's stop. You know, let's let's just like
36:52not have any more. There was a huge movement for this, and there were some parallels. It was like disruptive economically. It changed like how society was organized, the machines like felt scary and big, and and I wouldn't go back.
37:10I'm sure there were some wonderful things about 1500, but I wouldn't go back. I don't think you probably would either.
37:16And I hope that people 500 years more from now look back at our lives and be like, "Ooh, that was really terrible. I wouldn't go back. You know, they didn't get to do all these wonderful things. They they were all like kind of miserable and unhappy.
37:34Man, that was we're grateful to them. They like put their brick in the path of human progress, but I wouldn't go back.
37:40You came up through startup investing in as an entrepreneur yourself, of course, and you were running Y Combinator, one of the most prestigious startup accelerator programs, advising a lot of entrepreneurs. And you've done some investing as well while you've built OpenAI. But OpenAI has done some investing.
37:55What are the opportunities that you see that you're excited to put money behind? That OpenAI is excited to put money behind that you think could be really unlocked. Is it longevity? Is it like health span? What's exciting?
38:10Actually, I'll answer that. But I had a different reflection as you were answer as you were asking that question. I was thinking about like what I learned as an investor, and particularly as running Y Combinator that has been good for this moment. Unlike running a company when you're kind of like managing a bunch of startup investments and running a Y Combinator, at best you can govern. You don't get to like
38:34rule, you know, because these companies are independent things, and you know you can say, "Hey, you're like making a big mistake. We're a small shareholder of yours. You're hurting the community. You need to do it this way. We need new norms, but but I think I learned something about how to govern versus run as an executive that has been very helpful and was kind of an unusual experience to what we do now, where we have
39:04all kinds of crazy pressure on us and people who really want one thing or another thing, and you know we have to like negotiate tense things with governments and with our ecosystem, and the importance of being reliable partners to the world and acting with acting in a way where people can
39:23understand what we'll do, and that will take a lot of very different interests and equities into account, and we won't get every decision right, but we will make ones that benefit not just us directly, but this entire ecosystem and world around us. That was a very important lesson to learn, and I think has been quite helpful as we've had to navigate these. I don't say uncharted waters because a lot of companies have had a hard time, but we've had a lot of pressure and a hard time.
39:49And I think that's been very helpful and and and was like an interesting experience as being from being the person running YC in terms of specific areas. Everything in bio, everything in material science, I think is about to be transformed. This idea that software is like built on the fly for anything you need. Excited about that broad area, cybersecurity, for sure.
40:15New kinds of energy, I guess that's part of like physics and material science. But I think we can have.
40:19I think you're invested in a nuclear fusion company. I didn't even have a real renaissance there.
40:24So I don't want to break people's brains, but you're pretty good at predicting where AI is going. And in a blog post last year, you predicted robots in 2027. Is that and recently the first robots?
40:35The first robots. Yes. Recently, you also confirmed that you are building a humanoid.
40:39Yeah. Is that still on the table? Do you think that's 2027, or does the brain need to be better developed first? No, I think we'll have a cool demo in 2027, like a great demo. I don't think that there will be like robots walking the streets for a few years longer, but we'll have something impressive.
40:55And you're building a suite of devices. I think you said one on a table, one you can wear. I forget what the third one, do you have one on you now?
41:01I don't. I think you're really seeing an interesting new thing happen with the latest voice mode and Astra, where people are talking to their computers, and people are giving very complex, very nuanced instructions. You walk around the halls here, you see people talking to a microphone like this at their desk. It's a faster input than typing, and you just kind of like talk interactively with the model, and then amazing stuff happens. And we've obviously known that moment is coming.
41:32We've been thinking about what, not just if you're talking, but this idea that there can be a new kind of computing where you're not clicking around the UI anymore, but you're somehow interacting and brainstorming together and co-creating new devices for that kind of collaboration will be very cool.
41:49I have two final questions. They're both about Sam.
41:51Okay, the weight that you're carrying is-I can't imagine it. I don't think anyone else can. I mean, basically, if your company were to not work out, there could be a global economic collapse. If you built this in the wrong way, society and humanity could collapse. How are you? You, how does anyone bear that, knowing that there's no final boss other than you to see this through?
42:20It's not great. I don't know. You just kind of get used to anything. It's not the most fun way to live your life. I I feel like privileged to get to do it, um. And I know this will be the most important work I ever touch, and I am super committed to doing it for a long time. And I believe We are an important force in doing the right thing and getting to the right place.
42:49And I don't think I get like any sympathy for complaining about how hard it is, nor do I deserve any. But you know, I could have picked an easier life path for sure.
42:59Yeah, I'm sure your spouse, your but he didn't sign up for this. I feel kind of. I think he did. It wasn't clear at the time. This was what was going to happen.
43:07Yeah, and I guess Greg Brockman, your co-founder, sort of your work spouse, he probably hears quite a bit as well.
43:12He at least signed up for it.
43:13Yes. Yes. Okay. And my final question is: You are in the center of gravity AI. I was talking to you backstage. It almost sometimes feels like it's like Frodo in the ring, and you must see the most incredible forms of human behavior for good and for bad around the center of power that you're building and around you yourself. What has surprised you the most about
43:37human behavior as you've been building this, and about yourself as you've been building it, the
43:55degree to which some people are motivated so deeply by doing the right thing, no matter what the consequences are, and the degree to which some people are motivated entirely by ego and power and FOMO and sort of the short-term incentives and kind
44:18of you know winning the game, or fear of losing the game, or whatever-the dispersion of how much different people have such different motivations, and the degree to which a surprise number of people, for good or for bad, are totally oblivious to their own motivations, like the number of people Around us,
44:43that I think genuinely can't see their own motivations. I would have assumed that was much smaller, and I think there are a lot of people that really don't. What surprised me of myself? I mean, you really can get used to almost anything. Like that is a
45:01remarkable human ability. I don't know the the degree to which I have been. I don't. I think not that I was necessarily good at this, but just because I was forced to do it, the degree to which I can like kind of hold this stuff not too personally, and just be like, okay, this is more about other people than me, and we're just gonna do what the thing that we believe is right here, and you know, act consistently over a long period of time, and not get too high or too low or go too crazy.
45:35Actually, that's one thing that surprised. So I've been able to like get through a lot without going too crazy. I think that's that is a feat, actually. So thank you so much, Sam. I think that I can speak for everybody in that we are cheering you on to do the safe and right thing, and we don't really have a choice but to trust you to do it. So please do, and thank you for the time and your thoughts.
