Uncapped #13 | Sam Altman from OpenAI

This was a fun one! Sam is my brother and the CEO of a small company in SF called OpenAI. I’m glad he was able to take time out of his busy schedule to give me a hard time and share his thoughts on the future of AI. We covered: AI discovering new science The risk of superintelligence What’s after reasoning Humans needing humans The latest with OpenAI Meta / Scale AI news Plenty of brotherly banter --- Timestamps: (0:00) Intro (0:48) AI discovering new science (5:40) Humanoids are the future (8:27) A world with superintelligence (11:20) Medium-term predictions (15:37) Potential OpenAI apparatus (19:01) Supply chain implications (21:51) Meta / Scale AI news (29:04) Personal reflections --- Linktree: https://linktr.ee/uncappedpod Twitter: https://x.com/jaltma Email: [email protected]

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Jack Altman?

  So far, we've got a consumer business, a B to B business. There's this whole Jony Ive thing, which I'm sure you, you know, we can't really talk about. Johnny. Johnny, oh, we gotta start, I gotta start over. I can't do that.

• 0:12Jack Altman?

  Leave that in, please. No, no, no, we're gonna cut. All right. Today I'm here with Sam. Sam, before we start, do you have anything you need to say? You're my literal podcast bro now. Wow. This is great. How did you become to this? It's so sad. You start a company, then you start being a VC, and now I'm here. Are you disappointed? Why went the other way? What do you mean? Well, I was like a VC, then I did a podcast. Yeah, it's been good for you. It's great. I'm really proud of you. Okay, so. But I think this is great for you. Thank you. Okay. I think you're an incredible podcast host. A very nice sweater, too. Thank you. Thank you. Okay, so I want to start by talking about that. Stop. What are you gonna say? Go ahead. I'll say it later when we're done recording. I wanted to start by talking about the future of AI. And I want to talk about the medium term, because the short term is not as interesting to me.

• 0:56Jack Altman?

  The long term, who knows? But like, five, 10 years out is what I'm most interested in talking about. And I kind of want to try to pull out from you your best guess of a bunch of specific things. One of the places I wanted to start was in software. It seems like the most effective use cases so far, which I'm curious if you agree with, but seem to be coding and then. Chat and code. Yeah, chat and code. I'm curious what's next, like on the next sort of, what's the next set of things right after that that will come? Well, I think there will be incredible, like, other products, like there will be crazy new social experiences. There will be like Google Docs style AI workflows that are just way more productive. You'll start to see like, you'll have these like virtual employees.

• 1:39Jack Altman?

  But the thing that I think will be the most impactful on that five to 10 year timeframe is AI will actually discover new science. And this is a crazy claim to make, but I think it is true. And if it is correct, then over time, I think that will dwarf everything else. Why do you think it'll discover new science? Well, I think we've cracked reasoning in the models. We have a long way to go, but I think we know what to do. And, you know, O3 is already like pretty smart. You hear people say like, wow, this is like a good PhD. What does it mean to crack reasoning? The models can now do the kind of reasoning in a particular domain you'd expect a PhD in that field to be able to do. In some sense, we're like, oh, okay, the AIs are like a top competitive programmer in the world now. Or AIs can get like a top score on the world's hardest math competitions.

• 2:23Jack Altman?

  Or AIs can like, you know, do problems that I'd expect an expert PhD on my PhD in my field to do. And we're like, not that impressed. It's crazy. But it is sort of a crazy thing. Yeah. You know, this reasoning ability of the models over the last year. Are you surprised? Yes. Yeah. You thought that it was just gonna be like the next token type of thing? I thought it was gonna take a little bit longer to get where we are now. The last, the last year of progress has been faster than I thought. Did the way reasoning happen, happen the way you thought it would happen? Like, often has happened in the history of OpenAI. Sometime, pretty often, the dumbest first approach turns out to work. So I don't think I should be surprised by that anymore. And yet it's like a little surprising each time. So reasoning will lead to science going faster or just new stuff or both?

• 3:06Jack Altman?

  Both. I, I mean, you already hear scientists who say they're faster with AI. Like, we don't have AI maybe autonomously doing science. But if a human scientist is three times as productive using O3, that's still a pretty big deal. Yeah. And then as that keeps going and the AI can like autonomously do some science, figure out novel physics. Is it all that happening as a co-pilot right now? Yeah, there's, there's definitely not. Like, you definitely can't go say like, hey, ChatGPT, figure out new physics and expect that to work. So I think it is currently co-pilot like, but I've heard like anecdotal reports from biologists where it's like, wow, it really did figure out an idea. I had to develop it a little bit more, but it made like a fundamental leap. Yeah. Will it be easier to get AI to build you a whole business?

• 3:50Jack Altman?

  Like, build you a whole e-commerce business? Or like, do like a hard piece of science or medium? I wonder about this. If you could like, build AI a hundred billion dollar particle accelerator? Yeah. And say, you'd make the decisions. You look at the data, you tell us like, uh, you know, what experiments to run and we'll go like, find the stuff and do it. So you spend a hundred billion dollars doing that. Or you spend a hundred billion dollars like building an infrastructure to like connect into the economy. Which of those will have an easier time doing something remarkable with? Yeah. And I think the physics is a cleaner problem. You know, I think if you could get like new high energy physics data and then AI, the ability to like run experiments, I think that's like a cleaner problem.

• 4:34Jack Altman?

  Um, I've heard people say that. They expect the first area of science. This is like, I don't know if this is accurate or not, but I've heard people say that they expect the first area of science where AI makes autonomous new discoveries to be astrophysics because there's just mountains of data and we don't have enough PhDs to look at it. And maybe it's not that hard to figure out new stuff, but I don't really know. Okay, so science gets better. The coding in chat will just keep getting better. Does that lead on the business side? Do you also then have the ability to just, can you prompt a whole business? Like, could you just say, build me this type of business? It looks like this. That will happen. Well, that happens. There aren't any people doing that for like, small stuff. You know, you hear these stories

• 5:12Jack Altman?

  of people who like, use AI to do market research and like, figure out new products and then like, email some manufacturer and get some dumb thing made and sell it on Amazon and run ads. Like, there are people that have actually figured out at small scale in the most boring ways possible, how to like, put a dollar into AI and get the AI to like, run a toy business. But it's actually working. Yeah. So, that'll climb the gradient. Yep. What about in the world of like, physical stuff? Because like, I get that, I mean, it seems to me, you know, very clear that like, software is just going this direction. Science, I'd no less, take your word on it. What about like, moving physical things around? Kind, but I think we'll get there. For example, I think we have some new technology

• 5:56Jack Altman?

  that could just do self-driving for standard cars way better than any current approach has worked. And that might not be quite what you meant by like, No, it is. humanoid robots. Yeah. But if our AI techniques can like, really go drive a car, that's still pretty cool. Yeah. Um, humanoid robots are the dream, obviously. I really care about that. I think we will get there eventually. It's been like a hard mechanical engineering challenge. That's more the issue? No, both things are hard. But like, even if we had the perfect brain right now, I don't know if we have the body yet. Um, we, we actually, very early on at OpenAI, we used to work on this robotic hand. And it was hard for all the wrong reasons. Like, the thing just broke all the time. The simulator was like, a little bit off. Wow. But, you know, we'll get there. Yeah.

• 6:41Jack Altman?

  I think in five, 10 years, we'll have great humanoid robots. Yeah. Like, amazing. And they'll just like, walk down the street, be doing stuff. Yeah, I mean, you would think that's where a huge amount of step change unlocks, right? I think that will be one of the moments that not only is unlocks a bunch of stuff in the world. I think that will feel the strangest. We get used to a lot of things. We get used to like chat GPT doing these things that would have sounded like a miracle five years ago. But if you walk down the street and it's like half robots, are you going to get used to that one right away? I don't know. Probably you do, but it feels like a big difference. That's the one that'll feel like there's like a new species taking over us. Yeah, I think that'll feel, I mean, it'll feel like a new species or that it's taking over,

• 7:22Jack Altman?

  but I think it will feel like the future in a way that chat GPT still does not. I think also, if we can figure out great new computing devices to make, that will feel maybe like the future. But as amazing as chat GPT is, or these new coding agents, and they are amazing, it's like still stuck in the form factor of the past. Yeah, it's also stuck in, it's stuck in the computer. Yeah, there's definitely something about that it only can do stuff at the computer, but I don't know, like, how much of the economic value in all of the world do you think is like cognitive labor that can be done behind a computer? Like half? I was gonna say a quarter, but maybe half. I don't know, but some big number. Yeah. Does stuff get much riskier once we have like super embodied intelligence? Because those things are gonna be way stronger than us, too.

• 8:07Jack Altman?

  I don't know about way riskier. I think like the ability to make a bioweapon or like take down a country's whole grid, you can do, you can do quite damaging things without physical stuff. It gets riskier in like sillier ways. Like, I would be afraid to have a humanoid robot walking around my house that might fall on my baby unless I like really, really trusted it. Yeah. What, what like, if you're thinking about, you know, we're back here in 10 years having another conversation, and we're like, did AI do what we thought it would do? What metrics are you expecting? Like, is it that like, the GDP growth curve has a kink in it? Is it that like, life expectancy is up? Is it like, there's less poverty? Is it something completely different?

• 8:50Jack Altman?

  So every year before the last, like, maybe up until last year, I would have said like, hey, I think this is gonna go really far, but it still seems like. There's a lot that we've got to figure out. I feel very confident at this point, the most confident I've ever felt that we kind of like know what to do to get to incredible AI systems that are just super, super capable. If something goes wrong, I would say like somehow it's that we build legitimate superintelligence and it doesn't make the world much better. Doesn't change things as much as it sounds like it should. How would that happen? Seems like a crazy thing to say. Yeah. But like, I don't know, if I told you in 2020, maybe I did tell you, like, we're gonna make something like ChatGPT.

• 9:30Jack Altman?

  And it's gonna be as smart as a PhD student in most areas and we're gonna deploy it and, you know, a significant fraction of the world is gonna use it and kind of use it a lot. Maybe you would have believed that, maybe you wouldn't have, but conditioned on that, I bet you would say, okay, if that happens, the world looks more, way more different than it does right now. Yeah. So it's like, we have this crazy thing. Yeah, I mean, there's this thing where it's like the Turing tests, you know, everybody's thought. It just went by. Yeah, nobody really cared. And yeah, I don't know what explains that. Well, the fact that you can like have this thing do these, this amazing, amazing stuff for you and you kind of live your life the same way you did two years ago. Yeah. Kind of work the same way you did two years ago. Do you think that's possible that we have like crazy superintelligence that's like 400 IQ and we're still, that's still the case?

• 10:15Jack Altman?

  I totally think that's possible. Wow. If it's off discovering new science for us, eventually, society will figure out how to deal with that, but it may be very slow. Well, what's funny is if it looked like a co-pilot, you'd kind of still credit the P I at the lab who was using this, you know, 400 IQ agent behind it. So I think you kind of will, no matter what. Humans are so wired to care about other humans. We need people in the story. You know, we need to talk about like that guy did that thing. Yeah. Or like made this decision or made this mistake or had, you know, this whatever. That's why I was surprised that you don't think if we had like a super accurately embodied robot, that we wouldn't start to imprint some of that on that robot.

• 10:56Jack Altman?

  I think we, we will find out. I may be wrong. I think we will have more of a relationship than we do now as the thing is more embodied. But I think we are so deeply hardwired. Wired to care about other people and that is going to turn out to be pretty deep in biology. And if you know it's a robot, no matter how human like it seems in other ways, you're not going to care that much. That's that's speculation. So reasoning was like one of the components of intelligence that like sort of got figured out. Is there like another thread going around like a topic of like agency or like some concept of like self directedness? Like, is that a thing? The ability to work on a goal over a very long time with a lot of complicated steps along the way.

• 11:41Jack Altman?

  I think is maybe what you're going for. Yeah, same thing. And that is definitely something we're working on. Yeah. What about the future sort of technical path? Would you say is now inevitable? And what parts would you say you're still not sure which way it'll break? I think we will get to extremely smart and capable models. Capable of discovering important new ideas, capable of automating huge amounts of work. But then I feel totally confused about what society looks like if that happens. So I'm like most interested in the capabilities questions. But I feel like maybe at this point, more people should be talking about like, how do we make sure society gets the value out of this? I think those questions have somehow become harder and less clear.

• 12:26Jack Altman?

  This, I mean, this is a crazy statement. Yeah. That like, we're going to solve the super intelligence, but maybe society still sucks. Yeah. Yeah, I can't tell. It doesn't feel right to me, but like. I can't tell if sometimes with some of these statements that people don't react because they only kind of believe it. And maybe that's part of why, but I agree. I mean, that's what, you know, the history of a lot of this stuff has been like Git said. People don't quite believe it and then it happens and then people just kind of adjust. So I don't know what to make of all that either. I feel like, I feel like we've been very right on the technical predictions. And then I somehow thought society would feel more different if we actually delivered on them than it does so far. But I don't even, it's not even obvious that that's a bad thing. Well, one of the more obvious short term impacts will be potentially, or you'd think would be like employment.

• 13:10Jack Altman?

  That seems like something that like, we don't need like, you know, we don't need to believe crazy leaps to see that there ought to be some impact. Like this is going to happen in customer support very obviously right now, for example. Yeah, I mean, my take on this is. A lot of jobs will go away. A lot of jobs will just change dramatically. But we have always been really good at figuring out new things to do and ways to occupy ourselves and status games or ways to be useful to each other. And I'm like, not a believer that that ever runs out. Yeah. I think, now, I do think it gets maybe sillier and sillier looking from our current perspective. Yeah. Like Podcast Bro was not a real job not that long ago and you figured out how to monetize it and you're doing great and we're all happy for you. We're so happy. But would, would like the subsistence farmer look at this and say, this was a job? Or this is you like playing a game to entertain yourself?

• 13:55Jack Altman?

  I think they would subscribe to this podcast. I bet they would. They would like it. But I do think that there is like a big issue here in the short term. I think long term, who knows? I mean, one of the things I'm curious about is in general, so like going from a time when like everybody was a farmer and like nothing that we're currently doing makes any sense to like, now you have all this stuff. Is it different this time if there's enough resources to go around? Like at some point, are there enough resources to go around? And like, that's what creates the difference where now people just like, don't make new jobs. And this, so Vinod was on the podcast last week. He, we're going to release this one first, so this won't be out by the time that this is said. But his point was that people will just consume a lot more leisure.

• 14:37Jack Altman?

  So he kind of took the view of like, I think this time, like, there's just going to be an abundance of resources. Everybody's going to have the stuff that they need. We're going to be able to build, you know, buildings and people can now just like enjoy their lives. Again, I think like the relativistic framing matters here. To us, I bet it will look like those people are just consuming crazy amounts of leisure. I guess this looks like a lot of leisure. But look at you in that beautiful $2,000 low piano sweater and doing like hosting this. This is a regular sweater.

• 15:07Jack Altman?

  So yeah, I think the relativistic point is really important, but like, you know, to us, our jobs feel incredibly important and stressful and satisfying. And if we're all just making better entertainment for each other in the future, maybe that's kind of what at least one of us is doing right now. That's right.

• 15:27Jack Altman?

  All right, let's change gears. I don't like where this is going. Let's talk about OpenAI. A good thing about it, brothers, they can really call you out on your bullshit. It's really helpful. I appreciate it. Let's go to, can we talk about OpenAI? Yes. Thank you. So with OpenAI so far, we have like a consumer business. There's obviously a B2B business. There's something in hardware with Johnny Ive. There's a bunch of other potential stuff that looks like it's kind of hanging around. Can you talk about like, what's the potential complete apparatus? Or what's the apparatus at least in some period of time? Yeah, I think what what consumers want from us eventually is an AI companion, for lack of a better word, that lives in the ether and that is helping them in all these ways, through all these surfaces and all these products, and that gets to know you and your

• 16:11Jack Altman?

  goals and what you want to accomplish and your information. And sometimes you'll like type in it with chat, inside of chat GPT. Sometimes you'll be using a more like entertainment focused version. Sometimes you'll be using other services that will have like integrated with our platform. Sometimes you'll be using our new device. And but what you will have is this thing that will just be helping you get done whatever you want to get done. Like, sometimes it's pushing stuff to you. Sometimes you're like asking questions. Sometimes it's just there like observing and getting better for the future. But that is eventually what I think it'll feel like is this is my.

• 16:49Jack Altman?

  We don't quite have the right word for it. My AI companion is the best I can do right now. Do you think we have like the wrong form factor with all of our stuff right now? Like computing? Yes. Wrong is too strong of a word. I don't think we have like the optimal thing. We, we, there have basically been two revolutions in computer form factors, interfaces, whatever you want to call it, that I think it really mattered. I mean, there was like stuff a long time ago, but neither you nor I were paying attention. But in our lifetime, there's been like this kind of a computer, like a keyboard, a mouse and a monitor, which is pretty awesome and pretty general purpose. And then there's been like touch devices that you carry around. And honestly, those are the big ones.

• 17:33Jack Altman?

  Both of those had the constraints of not having AI. And so there's like things that you had to build or that you could run or not. If you have this incredible new technology, you can maybe get much closer to the kind of computer that exists in sci fi. That'll be the same intelligence, just in a new form factor, which lets you use it differently. Yeah, but the form factor really matters. Because it's with you all the time. That could be one reason it really matters. If it's like with you all the time and full of sensors and kind of just understands what's happening and, you know, is keep track, keeping track of a lot of stuff. And also if you trust that like with a very small command, you can get something complex to happen and happen correctly, like you can just imagine very different kinds of devices. What are the other components that you're thinking about right now?

• 18:17Jack Altman?

  Like, so there's like, you know, there's obviously the way that like chat is getting used by consumers. There's the API that, you know, startups are using all over the place. There's this like device thing, like what are the other like big legs of the stool? I think the most important one that the world hasn't really thought about yet is what it means for this to be a platform that everything integrates into and that integrates everywhere. So then when you're using the other, when you're in your car or when you're using some other website or whatever, it's just perfect continuity. I think that will matter a lot. There are new kinds of things to build, like there are totally new kinds of ways to think about productivity, new kinds of ways to think about social entertainment. But I think the ubiquity will be one of the defining pieces.

• 19:00Jack Altman?

  Given that the intelligence has such strong implications through all of this, there's all these subcomponents to intelligence and like layers above the stack. You know, like you've even talked about like energy, you're obviously super involved in energy. There's like a bunch of things even between there and there's hardware and all this other stuff. Do you feel like it's like important either for like just OpenAI for the country? Like, how important is this whole stack, given all these implications? Critical. I mean, I think the country needs to be thinking about, or like the world, the country, whatever you say, needs to be thinking about it from like. The electron to the chat G P T query. Yeah. And there's a lot of stuff in between. Yeah. And I've started calling that the like A I factory. I think we should call it the meta factory because theoretically this is a factory that can make more copies of itself.

• 19:45Jack Altman?

  But whatever, we got to do that whole supply chain. We, the world, have got to do that whole supply chain. Is it important for OpenAI to do a lot of it? I mean, I think vertical integration can be good in some ways, but no, it is not important for us to do a lot of it. If we could be certain that the whole thing would happen at an upscale. And so there's a lot of places where with partnerships, we can drive like huge. And that it was like no risk that we lost part of it. Yeah. Yeah. On the energy side, are we going to just consume humongous amounts of energy? Is that going to be basically the only end state here? I mean,

• 20:18Jack Altman?

  I sure hope so. Like,

• 20:21Jack Altman?

  I think that the thing that has most correlated with improvements in quality of life over history is increasing abundance of energy. I have no reason to believe that's going to stop. Is there any like climate concern with that? Or are you just like, that's all going to get figured out? And it's like the least of our worst. I think fusion will happen and fishing, new kinds of fishing will happen. How confident are you on fusion? Are you totally confident on it? I never say totally, but pretty confident, like quite confident. And that becomes like a huge percentage of? I think so. Energy? But like next gen fishing stuff is awesome, too. Yeah. Like, I know most of this company called Oklo, but there's other companies, I think, doing great work. And like, that's a huge win. Yep.

• 21:02Jack Altman?

  Solar and storage seems pretty good, but but I hope that eventually humanity is consuming way more energy than we could ever be generating on Earth. Yeah. Even if we switch entirely to fusion, like at some point, if you scaled up Earth's current energy use by a factor of 10 or, you know, 100 or whatever, you're just like heating up the Earth too much from the waste heat. Right. Yeah. But we got a big solar system out there. Doesn't all this stuff that we're talking about mean that like space is both like really important and becomes more likely in general? Yes. Like we're going to space. I hope so. Yeah. Kind of sad if we don't. Yeah. It seems like that it it's funny. Should I make a rocket company? I told you that I thought you should make a rocket company. That's why I asked. Things I think you should. I don't know why not. What is on the list? I have a whole lot of things on the list for you. I would do rocket, I would do social, I would do as many as you could, basically. Why not? I kind of like doing one thing.

• 21:47Jack Altman?

  I like my family, I'm pretty busy already. Yeah.

• 21:51Jack Altman?

  Speaking of social, actually, can we, can I ask you about the whole meta scale? Of course. So what's what's the situation there? Look, I've heard that.

• 22:02Jack Altman?

  Meta thinks of us as their biggest competitor. And, you know, I think it is rational for them to keep trying. Their current AI efforts have not worked as well as they've hoped. And I respect like being aggressive and continuing to try new things. And I, and again, given that I think this is like rational, I expect that if this one doesn't work out, they'll keep trying new ones after that. I remember once hearing Zuck talk about how, you know, Google in the early days of Facebook, it was rational for them to try social, even though it was like clear to people at, at Facebook that that was not going to work. And I feel a little bit similar here, but they started making these like giant offers to, you know, a lot of people on our team, you know, like $100 million signing bonuses, more than that comp per year. This is crazy. And I'm actually, it is crazy.

• 22:47Jack Altman?

  I'm really happy that at least so far, uh, none of our best people have decided to take them up on that. I think that people sort of look at the two paths and say, all right, OpenAI has got a really good shot, a much better shot at actually delivering on superintelligence. And also may eventually be the more valuable company. But I think the strategy of a ton of upfront guaranteed comp, and that being the reason you tell someone to join, like really the degree to which they're focusing on that and not the work and not the mission.

• 23:16Jack Altman?

  I don't think that's going to set up a great culture. And, you know, I hope that we can be the best place in the world to do this kind of research. I think we built a really special culture for it. And I think that we're set up such that if we succeed at that, and a lot of people on our research team believe we will, or we have a good chance at it, then everybody will do great financially. And it's, I think it's incentive aligned with like mission first and then economic awards and everything else flowing from that. So I think that's good. There's many things I respect about Meta as a company. But I don't think they're a company that's like great at innovation. And I think the special thing about OpenAI is we've managed to build a culture that is good at repeatable innovation.

• 23:59Jack Altman?

  And I think we understand a lot of things that they don't about what it takes to succeed at that. But.

• 24:07Jack Altman?

  I don't know, it's been like, in some sense, I think it's been a clarifying thing for our team. Wish them luck. Yeah, I guess some of what it comes down to probably is to what degree do you think AI work to date is that copying AI work to date is enough versus how much of the innovation is in front? I don't think it's enough. I think that there's a lot of people and Meta will be a new one that are saying, we're just gonna try to like copy OpenAI. We're gonna like, I mean, if you look at how much a lot of these other companies, chat apps, look like ChatGPT. Even copying like the UI mistakes, it's crazy how much the research thing is just trying to get to where we are. And this was like a lesson I learned, a lesson I learned at YC.

• 24:48Jack Altman?

  That basically never works. You're always like going to where your competitor was. Yeah. And you don't build up a culture of learning what it's like to innovate. And I think it's like much more deeply challenging than people realize once you're in that state. How do you do both? Cause like to have like an extremely commercial company and an extremely research oriented company at the same time. There's just like not a lot of examples of it. And I get how you did it before you were really, you know, commercialized, but now you're both and it's still working. We're newer at product. We're newer. Like I don't, we, we need to earn that that's working. We're doing okay. We're doing better and better, but we're like,

• 25:30Jack Altman?

  a lot of the history of tech companies is you start a well-run tech company, a product company. And then you later bolt on a badly run research org. We're the opposite. We're the only case I know of that's the opposite. We started as a great research company and bolted on this was initially badly run, getting better and better product company. I think eventually we'll, we'll be a great product company and I'm very proud of the work the team has put in there, but like, two and a half years ago, we were only a research lab. That's crazy that was that short ago. Yeah, we had to build this whole big company. It's, it's amazing, amazing what people have done there. But ChatGPT launched November 30th of 2023. I mean, it's easier, it's easier to get people together who know how to build a company than who know how to do that kind of research, obviously.

• 26:10Jack Altman?

  It's still hard, like, most companies that have had to build out a product at this kind of scale got much more than two and a half years to do it. Yeah. Why would Meta think of you that competitively? Like, I obviously understand that, like, they probably just see that AI is the whole game and, like, maybe that's enough of the explanation.

• 26:26Jack Altman?

  I assume it's just that someone that used to work at Meta said to me that, like, you know, in the rest of the world, people think of ChatGPT as a Google replacement. But in Meta, people think of ChatGPT as a, like, a Facebook replacement. Because people are just spending all their time talking to. Because they talk to it in a way that otherwise, and they like it more. Time is a scarier source and attention. It wasn't a question about time. It was that people, well, of course, there is time competition too, but that people, like, doom scrolling on the internet feels like it's making you worse. It may feel good in the moment, but it's making you feel worse. It's making you feel a worse version of themselves. And I think that we're very proud of when people talk about ChatGPT, they're like, I actually like myself better.

• 27:09Jack Altman?

  It's like helping me. It's like helping me accomplish my goals. I feel like it's like, this was actually one of the best, nicest compliments I ever heard about OpenAI. Just someone said, it's the only tech company that has ever not felt somewhat adversarial to me. You know, you have, like, Google trying to, like, show me worse than research results and show me ads. I love Google. I love all these companies. I don't think this is, like, totally fair. You have, like, Meta trying to, like, hack my brain and get me to keep scrolling. You have Apple that made this phone that I love, but it's like, you know, bombarding me with notifications and, like, distracting me from everything else, and I can't quit. And, and then you have, like, ChatGPT, and I feel like it's, like, kind of just trying to help me with whatever I ask, and that's kind of a nice thing.

• 27:48Jack Altman?

  Is there a way to do social that has, like, the interpersonal component and this energy? A version that I'm curious about, although this is, I don't know what this would mean, is like. Could you have a feed that didn't have any default, but you could like kind of prompt it and say like, hey, I'm trying to like, get fit. Can you like, show me stuff that is like helpful to that? Or I'm trying to like, learn more about current events. Can you like, show me stuff from a neutral perspective that is not going to make me angry, but it's just like actually going to do it? And that would clearly get less minutes spent than the algorithmic feed that's like outrage baiting. But I think that'd be like a very cool version of an aligned AI helping you with the social experience

• 28:33Jack Altman?

  that that you actually want long term. I don't know, I feel like every morning like I wake up as this like recharged person that knows what I really want in life. And that I have like such great intentions and I can like, commit to stuff for the day and then like the day comes at me nonstop. And by like 10pm, I'm like, oh, I wasn't going to drink tonight, but I'm just going to have one glass of whiskey. And I wasn't going to look at like TikTok, but I'm just going to scroll for two minutes. You shouldn't work so hard. I agree with that. But like, if I could be my like, first thing in the morning self all the time. And if I could get technology to like, do the things I wanted then, I think that'd be great. Yeah, I lived with you like, what? 10 years ago. Yeah. And even then, I would say you were, and you were like running YC at the time.

• 29:13Jack Altman?

  And at the time you were like, I would say very high agency and you just like did what you wanted and there were no rules. But I think that since then, and especially recently, it's like, there's really like, seems like there's like no rules. Like, you know, the Stargate thing, there's like, you know, bringing Fiji into the company. There's like Johnny, there's like a lot of things, honestly. And I'm curious if there's any mental update or sort of, if there's anything that you're able to put your finger on or share that is, you know, making you function that way. I think our grandma used to say. Oh, God. No, it's, it's just like, one of the great things about getting old is you stop caring what other people think. And I felt that. I'm just like, you know what?

• 29:57Jack Altman?

  And I've also just like, you know, been in the fire line enough. But I do think there's something freeing about.

• 30:05Jack Altman?

  Getting older and caring less about what people think. Do you still have a set of things that you're like hesitant on? Like, is there another level of agency that you could be acting with? Like, do you have ideas that you're like, I would do that, but something's holding me back? That's a lot of like practice. That, so that was the second thing I was gonna say is like, as OpenAI gets into a place of like more resources and more potential, we can just do more things. So there's still like a lot of things, like I would love to go build the Dyson Sphere on the solar system and like, you know, make the world's gigantic data center with the entire energy output of the sun. But obviously, we can't do that right now, so that one has to like wait a couple of decades. But I think we're able to do more, like we're credibly able to do more things now. How do you pick when you have?

• 30:47Jack Altman?

  Because that's the other problem is like, you've got the like, the curse of choice. And so it's like, you could, you could start some rockets, you could do a social network, you could go nuts on whatever you wanted to. You could go crazy into robotics. How do you like pick when you've got over choice like that? The degree to which I have no extra bandwidth to do anything else right now is like hard to overstate. So like, and also, I never wanted to run even one company, like let alone a lot of them. Yeah. I, I thought I was just gonna be an investor. Yeah, I thought you were gonna be an investor too. It's a nice life. It's a great life, yeah. You seem like. Don't I seem happy? I was gonna say, you just seem like you have a lot of time for hobbies. I'm glowing. Wonderful. You are glowing. Yeah, you know why? I got gua sha this, this morning. What's gua sha?

• 31:31Jack Altman?

  Gua sha is like when, you know, it's your lymphatic system. My wife did it. She just like massages your face? She's like, you need this podcast, you know, might get a lot of views. I want your face to, you know. And she just sits there like rubbing stuff on your cheeks? One minute, yeah. Wow. Yeah. Well, you look great. Thanks. Tell her, good job. But I have time to do that. I'm gonna text her about my thoughts about that right after this. I don't know, I would like to just do this one thing really well, and I sort of trust that other people will make great rocket companies. Would you say on Blend, you're, um, do you overall really like it? Cause it's like more than you bargained for. I mean, I feel very grateful and very like lucky for sure. And I have no doubt that like someday in the future, when I'm like retired, I will miss it and like be like, oh, man. I, you know, kind of bored now and that was so cool. It's like very important.

• 32:15Jack Altman?

  It feels very important. It feels very satisfying. I feel like crazy grateful to get to do it. And I do like it almost most of the time, but man, has it been like all out and overwhelming and like. Yeah. Real, like I think I've been way more in the, in the kind of like line of fire than. I ever imagined. Well, it's not really what you set out to do. I mean, like, you know, most of the time, somebody starts to like a software company, they expect it to be a software company. I don't think you expected all this. It was supposed to be my retirement job. I was supposed to like run a little research lab. Yeah. And I mean, there was a world where this didn't. I mean, there was obviously a lot of worlds where this didn't happen. Yeah.

• 32:51Jack Altman?

  Aside from the liking it and aside from, you know, the number of hours, do you experience it as like heavy and important or like a playful, interesting puzzle? Uh, very much both of those at the same time. Like, I feel like it is clearly from like a societal impact perspective, or at least the potential. It is the most important work, the most impactful work I'll ever touch. I don't know. I don't want to get like too much like drinking our own Kool-Aid, but like, you know, maybe this will be like somewhat historic work and I feel that when I have time to like step back and think about it. But in the day to day, it's kind of like, you know, the smaller stuff and I do find a lot of joy in the smaller stuff.

• 33:33Jack Altman?

  Like, I love the people I work with. It's like very fun to get to like do a lot of the pieces. Some parts are like very stressful and painful. But it's the like, it is more like, uh, it feels more like an interesting puzzle than important work. You also get to like talk to whoever you want. That's cool. You get to like think about whatever you want. I don't get to think about whatever I want. I get like problems. I feel like I'm like a pre-trained model that just like wakes up in the morning. I have like an hour to myself and then I'm just like streamed stuff and I have to react. Okay, fair enough. I guess you could, um, you can put into the model, everything's on the table, even if you can't control how much time you get to give to it, I guess. It doesn't feel that way. That's interesting. It feels like there's some small amount of time before the day really gets going, where I've got some agency and can decide some things.

• 34:17Jack Altman?

  And then I'm, it feels like fairly reactive. Interesting. Yeah. I guess there's kind of no way around that, given the pace of scale. I'm trying to find it. That's tough. Yeah. I guess, you know, you'll get, you keep hearing exactly it gets to a certain place at some point. Hopefully. What about for like your own experience? Cause like what's been interesting to me is, you know, obviously I don't think any differently about, you know, you on some level other than I think this is very cool. But like, you've obviously gone from like tech echo chamber famous to just like a regular New York Times famous. Is there any upside or is it all just suck? I think there is a lot of upside to being tech famous. I think that's like the perfect level of it. Like if you're like tech famous, you can sort of get a lot of interesting stuff down. You can meet kind of anyone you want. Like it's, it's just like that felt. You can kind of like encourage people to do stuff.

• 35:02Jack Altman?

  There's like a lot of good opportunities that felt good. I mean, I think I'm not like celebrity famous. That would be really miserable, but I'm it's enough that I can't like quite have a normal life. Well, it has a different energy to it. Like you're never going to be as cool as Tom Cruise or something. For sure, for sure. But I like, you know, I can still like walk on the streets. I didn't mention this to you, but when we were in the exploratorium last weekend in the gift shop, somebody was like, the CEO of ChatGPT is in the building. So that's good. My son still calls ChatGPT Siri, which I think is very funny. We're gonna talk about that. Yeah, I talked to Siri this morning. It was very funny when you guys called this weekend and he was like, are you really? Are you really? He didn't know that. Did you really make? I just told him. Yeah. Yeah, the inventor of Siri right here. Speaking of kids, given the current trajectory, you think things are on?

• 35:46Jack Altman?

  Does it make you change what you think kids should be learning or what you'll teach your own kids? My kid did learn to roll over yesterday. That's pretty good. Yeah. I was very impressed. The headstrings. Incredible. Yeah. Top, top tier baby. Incredible. Strong, yeah. Yeah. I don't think so. Like I, I mean, the stuff's, it's not going to ever seem weird to him. Right? Like, he's just going to grow up in a world where of course, computers are smarter than he is. Yep. And he'll figure out how to use them incredibly fluently and do amazing stuff. And that will just seem like. Yeah. Yeah. That's good. Hopefully that's how it plays. When you go back to like Y C after this experience, are you back and are you like, oh, this is like, you know, because obviously you ran Y C and so you had that whole chapter of your life. When you go back now, are you like, how do you experience it?

• 36:31Jack Altman?

  Is it like, oh, this is like a quaint thing, you know? No, I love Y C. I, I think like. I don't mean that in a negative way. I mean, in just sort of like a simple, a simpler times kind of way. There's some nostalgia for that. Yeah. Yeah. And it's really like fun to always go back and talk to the batch. But yeah, it hits the nostalgia hard. I just feel like it's like the most pure component of Silicon Valley is Y C. Totally strong. You know what I mean? A hundred percent. It's just so happy. It is earnest and positive and energetic and happy. And like clearly it works super well. Yeah. All right, well, this was a blast. Mom, hope you were watching this. This was very fun. Thanks, Sam. Thank you, Jack.