#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI

Sam Altman is the CEO of OpenAI, the company behind GPT-4, ChatGPT, Sora, and many other state-of-the-art AI technologies. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors: – Cloaked: https://cloaked.com/lex and use code LexPod to get 25% off – Shopify: https://shopify.com/lex to get $1 per month trial – BetterHelp: https://betterhelp.com/lex to get 10% off – ExpressVPN: https://expressvpn.com/lexpod to get 3 months free Transcript: https://lexfridman.com/sam-altman-2-transcript EPISODE LINKS: Sam’s X: https://x.com/sama Sam’s Blog: https://blog.samaltman.com/ OpenAI’s X: https://x.com/OpenAI OpenAI’s Website: https://openai.com ChatGPT Website: https://chat.openai.com/ Sora Website: https://openai.com/sora GPT-4 Website: https://openai.com/research/gpt-4 PODCAST INFO: Podcast website: https://lexfridman.com/podcast Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2lwqZIr Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2nEwCF8 RSS: https://lexfridman.com/feed/podcast/ YouTube Full Episodes: https://youtube.com/lexfridman YouTube Clips: https://youtube.com/lexclips SUPPORT & CONNECT: – Check out the sponsors above, it’s the best way to support this podcast – Support on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/lexfridman – Twitter: https://twitter.com/lexfridman – Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lexfridman – LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lexfridman – Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lexfridman – Medium: https://medium.com/@lexfridman OUTLINE: Here’s the timestamps for the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time. (00:00) – Introduction (07:51) – OpenAI board saga (25:17) – Ilya Sutskever (31:26) – Elon Musk lawsuit (41:18) – Sora (51:09) – GPT-4 (1:02:18) – Memory & privacy (1:09:22) – Q* (1:12:58) – GPT-5 (1:16:13) – $7 trillion of compute (1:24:22) – Google and Gemini (1:35:26) – Leap to GPT-5 (1:39:10) – AGI (1:57:44) – Aliens

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

• 0:00Lex Fridman?

  The following is a conversation with Sam Altman, his second time on the podcast. He is the CEO of OpenAI, the company behind GPT-4, ChatGPT, Sora, and perhaps one day, the very company that will build AGI.

• 0:19Lex Fridman?

  And now, a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast. We got a new sponsor, Cloaked, for protecting your personal information. Shopify for selling stuff online. BetterHelp for helping out your mind. And ExpressVPN for protecting your privacy and security on the interwebs. Choose wisely, my friends. Also, if you want to work with our amazing team, we're always hiring. Or if you just want to get in touch with me, go to lexfridman.com/contact. And now, on to the full ad reads. As always, no ads in the middle. I try to make this interesting, but if you must skip them, friends, please still check out our sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too.

• 1:06Lex Fridman?

  This episode is brought to you by Cloaked, a sponsor I didn't know existed until quite recently and always thought a thing like this should exist. And I couldn't quite find a thing like it that existed. And once I found it, it was pretty awesome. It's a platform that lets you generate new email addresses and phone numbers every time you sign up for a website. So it's called a masked email, which basically creates, I guess you could say it's a fake email that hides your actual email, but it's not fake in that it actually exists and persists throughout time. And the website thinks it's real, but it just forwards to your actual email. You can set up the forwarding. The point is, the website or service that you sign up for doesn't know your actual

• 1:51Lex Fridman?

  phone number and doesn't know your actual email. So this is a really interesting idea because when you sign up to different websites, there's a kind of contract, unspoken contract, that the email you provide and the phone number you provide will not be abused. For the kind of abuse I'm talking about, in sort of the best case, just spammed, or in the worst case, that email or phone number being sold out there and then you get not just spam from one source, but spam from all of the sources all over the place. Anyway, this is just a smart thing to protect yourself. And it also does basic password manager stuff. So you can think of Cloaked as a great password manager with extra privacy superpowers.

• 2:33Lex Fridman?

  You can go to cloaked.com/lex to get 14 days free or for a limited time, use code LexPod when signing up to get 25% off an annual Cloaked plan.

• 2:46Lex Fridman?

  This episode is also brought to you by Shopify, a platform designed for anyone. Yes, anyone, including me, to sell anywhere with a great looking online store. I use it to sell some t-shirts at lexreman.com/store. You can check it out. I use the most basic store. It took just a few minutes and the store was up. From the shirt design being finished to the store being alive and being able to sell t-shirts and ship those t-shirts, thanks to the integration with a third party, which there's thousands of integrations with a third party. So for t-shirts, that's like on-demand printing.

• 3:29Lex Fridman?

  So you don't have to take care of the shipping and the printing and all that kind of stuff. All of that is integrated, super easy to do. And this works for any kind of business that sells stuff online. You can integrate into your own website or you can sell it on Shopify itself, which is what I do. You can sign up for a $1 per month trial period at Shopify.com/lex. All lowercase. Go to Shopify.com/lex to take your business to the next level today. This episode is also brought to you by BetterHelp, spelled H E L P. Help. They figure out what you need and match you with a licensed therapist in under 48 hours. Works for individuals, works for couples.

• 4:11Lex Fridman?

  I'm a huge fan of talking as a way of exploring the human mind. Two people talking with a motivation and a goal in mind.

• 4:22Lex Fridman?

  Of surfacing certain kinds of problems and alleviating those kinds of problems. Sometimes the surfacing in itself does a lot of the alleviation. Returning to a time in the past when trauma happened and to reframe it in a way that helps you understand, that helps you forgive, that helps you let go, all of that. It's really powerful. And BetterHelp is an accessible way of doing that, or at least trying talk therapy. So they've helped a lot of people. 4.4 million people got help. So you could be one of those. If you want to try, check them out at betterhelp.com/lex and save in your first month.

• 5:05Lex Fridman?

  That's betterhelp.com/lex. This episode is also brought to you by ExpressVPN. I love that there's a kind of privacy theme to the sponsors in this episode. I think everybody should be using a VPN for many reasons. One, it can allow you to geographically transport yourself. But the main reason is it just adds this extra layer of security and privacy between you and the ISP that they say you're technically not supposed to be collecting the data when you use things like Chroma Cognito, but they can be collecting the data. I don't know how the laws of that works, but I wouldn't trust it. So a VPN is essential for that.

• 5:47Lex Fridman?

  My favorite VPN for many, many, many, many, many, many years has been ExpressVPN. Big sexy button, still works, looks different, but still works on any operating system. My favorite being Linux. I can talk forever about why I love Linux. I wonder if Linux will be around with all this AI. Will all this rapid AI development maybe programmers, programming is a way of life, as a recreation for millions, as a profession for millions? Will die out and then there'll only be a handful of few like the cobalt programmers of today. They carry the flag of knowing what Linux is, how to spell Linux, let alone

• 6:31Lex Fridman?

  use it. I wonder. Hopefully not, because there's always room for optimizing at every level, the compilation from the human language to the AI language, to the machine language, to the zeros and ones, the compilation of the entire stack. I think there's a lot of jobs to be had, a lot of really profitable, well-paying jobs to be had there, but maybe not millions of people are needed. Maybe there'll be millions of people that program with just natural language, with just words, English or whatever new language we create, that the whole world can use, and the whole world in using can help break down the barriers of language. We arrived here, friends, when we started at the meager explanation of the

• 7:16Lex Fridman?

  use of a VPN. You can also take this journey by going to expressvpn.com/lexpod for an extra three months free. This is the Lex Fridman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Sam Altman.

• 7:51Lex Fridman?

  Take me through the OpenAI board saga that started on Thursday, November 16th, maybe Friday, November 17th for you.

• 7:59Speaker 01

  That was definitely the most painful professional experience of my life, and chaotic, and shameful, and upsetting, and a bunch of other negative things. There were great things about it, too, and I wish, I wish it had not been in such an adrenaline rush that I wasn't able to stop and appreciate them at the time, but.

• 8:31Speaker 01

  I came across this old tweet of mine, or this tweet of mine from that time period, which was like, it was like, you know, kind of going to your own eulogy, watching people say all these great things about you and just like unbelievable support from people I love and care about. That was really nice. That whole weekend, I kind of like felt, with one big exception, I felt like a great deal of love and very little hate. Even though it felt like it just, I have no idea what's happening and what's gonna happen here and this feels really bad. And there were definitely times I thought it

• 9:11Speaker 01

  was gonna be like, one of the worst things to ever happen for AI safety. Well, I also think I'm happy that it happened relatively early. I thought at some point between when OpenAI started and when we created AGI, there was gonna be something crazy and explosive that happened. But there may be more crazy and explosive things still to happen. It's still, I think, helped us build up some resilience and be ready for more challenges in the future.

• 9:48Lex Fridman?

  But the thing, you had a sense that you would experience is some kind of power struggle.

• 9:54Speaker 01

  The road to AGI should be a giant power struggle. Like, the world should, I like, well, not should, I expect that to be the case.

• 10:03Lex Fridman?

  And so you have to go through that, like you said, iterate as often as possible in figuring out how to have a board structure, how to have organization, how to have the kind of people that you're working with, how to communicate, all that, in order to de-escalate the power struggle as much as possible, pacify it.

• 10:24Speaker 01

  But at this point, it feels...

• 10:29Speaker 01

  You know, like something that was in the past that was really unpleasant and really difficult and painful, but we're back to work and things are so busy and so intense that I don't spend a lot of time thinking about it. There was a time after, there was like this fugue state for kind of like the month after, maybe 45 days after, that was, I was just sort of like drifting through the days. I was so out of it. I was feeling so down.

• 11:03Lex Fridman?

  Just on a personal psychological level?

• 11:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, really painful and hard to like have to keep running OpenAI in the middle of that. I just wanted to like crawl into a cave and kind of recover for a while. But, you know, now it's like we're just back to working on the mission.

• 11:23Lex Fridman?

  Well, it's still useful to go back there and reflect on board structures, on power dynamics, on how companies are run, the tension between research and product development and money and all this kind of stuff, so that you, who have a very high potential of building AGI, would do so in a slightly more organized, less dramatic way in the future. So there's value there to go, both the personal psychological aspects of you as a leader and also just the board structure and all this kind of messy stuff.

• 12:04Speaker 01

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

• 12:33Speaker 01

  Many of the other things we've got to get right for AGI, but thinking about how to build a resilient org and how to build a structure that will stand up to like a lot of pressure in the world, which I expect more and more as we get closer. I think that's super important.

• 12:47Lex Fridman?

  Do you have a sense of how deep and rigorous the deliberation process by the board was? Like, can you shine some light on just human dynamics involved in situations like this? Was it just a few conversations and all of a sudden it escalates? And why don't we fire Sam? Kind of thing?

• 13:05Speaker 01

  I think, I think the board members were, are well meaning people on the whole. And I believe that in stressful situations, where people feel time pressure or whatever, people understandably make suboptimal decisions. And I think one of the challenges for OpenAI will be, we're going to have to have a board and a team that are good at operating under, under pressure.

• 13:47Lex Fridman?

  Do you think the board had too much power?

• 13:49Speaker 01

  I think boards are supposed to have a lot of power. But one of the things that we did see is in, in most corporate structures, boards are usually answerable to shareholders. And there's sometimes people have like super voting shares or whatever. In this case, and I think one of the things with our structure that we maybe should have thought about more than we did is that the board of a nonprofit has, unless you put other rules in place, like quite a, quite a lot of power. They don't really answer to anyone but themselves. And there's ways in which that's good. But what we'd really like is for the board of OpenAI to like answer to the world as a whole, as much as that's a practical thing.

• 14:30Lex Fridman?

  So there's a new board announced?

• 14:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:33Lex Fridman?

  There's, I guess, a new smaller board at first, and now there's a new final board.

• 14:39Speaker 01

  Not a final board yet. We've added some, we'll add more.

• 14:41Lex Fridman?

  Added some, okay. What?

• 14:45Lex Fridman?

  Is fixed in the new one that was perhaps broken in the previous one.

• 14:51Speaker 01

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

• 15:05Speaker 01

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

• 15:15Speaker 01

  I think that will help.

• 15:17Lex Fridman?

  It's been criticized, some of the people that are added to the board. I heard a lot of people criticizing the addition of Larry Summers, for example. What's the process of selecting the board like? What's involved in that?

• 15:29Speaker 01

  So Brett and Larry were kind of decided in the heat of the moment over this like very tense weekend. And that was, I mean, that weekend was like a real roller coaster. It was like a lot of, a lot of ups and downs.

• 15:42Speaker 01

  And we were trying to agree on new board members that both sort of the executive team here and the old board members felt would be reasonable.

• 15:56Speaker 01

  Larry was actually one of their suggestions, the old board members. Brett, I think I had even previous to that weekend suggested, but he was, you know, busy and didn't want to do it. And then we really needed help and would. We talked about a lot of other people too, but that was.

• 16:13Speaker 01

  I felt like if I was going to come back, I needed new board members.

• 16:21Speaker 01

  I didn't think I could work with the old board again in the same configuration, although we then decided, and I'm grateful that Adam would stay. But we wanted to get to, we considered various configurations, decided we wanted to get to a board of three. And had to find two new board members over the course of sort of a short period of time. So those were decided honestly without, you know, that's like you kind of do that on the battlefield. You don't have time to design a rigorous process then. For new board members since, new board members will add going forward.

• 16:57Speaker 01

  We. Have some criteria that we think are important for the board to have, different expertise that we want the board to have. Unlike hiring an executive where you need them to do one role well, the board needs to do a whole role of kind of governance and thoughtfulness well. And so one thing that Brett says, which I really like is that, we want to hire board members in slates, not as individuals one at a time. And thinking about a group of people that will bring nonprofit expertise, expertise running companies, sort of good legal and governance expertise. That's kind of what we've tried to optimize for.

• 17:35Lex Fridman?

  So is technical savvy important for the individual board members?

• 17:38Speaker 01

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

• 17:42Lex Fridman?

  So I mean, the interesting thing that people probably don't understand about OpenAI, I certainly don't, is like all the details of running the business. When they think about the board, given the drama, they think about you. They think about like, if you reach AGI or you reach some of these incredibly impactful products and you build them and deploy them, what's the conversation with the board like? And they kind of think, all right, what's the right squad to have in that kind of situation to deliberate?

• 18:11Speaker 01

  Look, I think you definitely need some technical experts there. And then you need some people who are like, what can, how can we deploy this in a way that will help people in the world the most? And people who have a very different perspective. You know, I think a mistake that you or I might make is to think that only the technical understanding matters. And that's definitely part of the conversation you want that board to have. But there's a lot more about how that's going to just like impact society and people's lives that you really want represented in there, too.

• 18:41Lex Fridman?

  And you're just kind of, are you looking at the track record of people? Or you're just having conversations?

• 18:46Speaker 01

  Track record is a big deal. You of course have a lot of conversations, but I.

• 18:54Speaker 01

  You know, there's some roles where I kind of totally ignore track record and just look at slope, kind of ignore the Y intercept.

• 19:04Lex Fridman?

  Thank you. Thank you for making it mathematical for the for the audience.

• 19:07Speaker 01

  For a board member, like, I do care much more about the Y intercept. Like, I think there is something deep to say about track record there. And experience is sometimes very hard to replace.

• 19:18Lex Fridman?

  Do you try to fit a polynomial function or exponential one to the to the track record?

• 19:22Speaker 01

  That's not that it and analogy doesn't carry that far.

• 19:25Lex Fridman?

  All right. You mentioned some of the low points.

• 19:29Lex Fridman?

  That weekend, what were some of the low points psychologically for you? Did you consider going to the Amazon jungle and just taking ayahuasca and disappearing forever? Or?

• 19:39Speaker 01

  I mean, there's so many like, it was a very bad period of time. There were great high points, too. Like, my phone was just like sort of nonstop blowing up with nice messages from people I work with every day, people I hadn't talked to in a decade. I didn't get to like appreciate that as much as I should have because I was just like in the middle of this firefight, but that was really nice. But on the whole, it was like a very painful weekend and also just like a very.

• 20:08Speaker 01

  It was like a battle fought in public to a surprising degree. And that's that was extremely exhausting to me much more than I expected. I think fights are generally exhausting, but this one really was. You know, board did this Friday afternoon. I really couldn't get much in the way of answers, but I also was just like, well, the board gets to do this. And so I'm gonna think for a little bit about what I want to do, but I'll try to find the the blessing in disguise here. And I was like, well, I, you know, my current job at OpenAI is or it was like to like run a decently sized company at this point. And the thing I'd always liked the most was just getting to like work on work with the researchers.

• 20:53Speaker 01

  And I was like, yeah, I can just go do like a very focused AGI research effort. And I got excited about that. Didn't even occur to me at the time to like possibly that this was all going to get undone. This was like Friday afternoon.

• 21:05Lex Fridman?

  So you've accepted your the death.

• 21:07Speaker 01

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

• 21:23Speaker 01

  I think it was Friday night evening for the first time that I heard from the exec team here, which is like, hey, we're gonna like, fight this and you know, we think whatever. And then I went to bed just still being like, okay, excited, like onward.

• 21:38Lex Fridman?

  Were you able to sleep?

• 21:40Speaker 01

  Not a lot. It was one of, one of the weird things was there was this like period of four, four and a half days where sort of didn't sleep much, didn't eat much and still kind of had like a surprising amount of energy. It was, you learn like a weird thing about adrenaline in wartime.

• 21:55Lex Fridman?

  So you kind of accepted the death of a, you know, this baby opening eyes.

• 21:59Speaker 01

  And I was excited for the new thing. I was just like, okay, this was crazy, but whatever.

• 22:03Lex Fridman?

  It's a very good coping mechanism.

• 22:04Speaker 01

  And then Saturday morning, uh, two of the board members called and said, hey, we, you know, destabilize, we didn't mean to destabilize things. We don't want to store a lot of value here. You know, can we talk about you coming back? And I immediately didn't want to do that, but I thought a little more and I was like, well, I don't really care about the people here, the partners, shareholders, like all of the, I love this company. And so I thought about it and I was like, well, okay, but like here's, here's the stuff I would need. And, and then the most painful time of all was over the course of that weekend, um, I kept thinking and being told and we all kept, not just me, like the whole team here kept thinking, well, we were trying to like keep OpenAI stabilized

• 22:47Speaker 01

  while the whole world was trying to break it apart, people trying to recruit, whatever. Um, we kept being told like, all right, we're almost done. We're almost done. We just need like a little bit more time. Um, and it was this like very confusing state. And then Sunday evening, when again, like every few hours, I expected that we were going to be done and we're going to like figure out a way for me to return and things to go back to how they were. Um, the board then, uh, appointed a new interim CEO. And then I was like, I mean, that is, that is, that feels really bad. That was the low point of the whole thing.

• 23:22Speaker 01

  You know, I'll tell you something, I it felt very painful, but I felt a lot of love that whole weekend. It was not other than that one moment, Sunday night, I would not characterize my emotions as anger or hate. But I really just like, I felt a lot of love from people towards people. It was like painful, but it would like the dominant emotion of the weekend was love, not hate.

• 23:50Lex Fridman?

  You've spoken highly of Mira Maroti, that she helped especially, as you put in the tweet, in the quiet moments when it counts. Perhaps we could take a bit of a tangent. What do you admire about Mira?

• 24:02Speaker 01

  Well, she did a great job during that weekend in a lot of chaos, but but people often see leaders in the moment in like the crisis moments, good or bad. But a thing I really value in leaders is how people act on a boring Tuesday at nine forty six in the morning. And in in just sort of the the normal drudgery of the day to day, how someone shows up in a meeting, the quality of the decisions they make. That was what I meant about the quiet moments.

• 24:33Lex Fridman?

  Meaning like, most of the work is done on a day by day in the meeting by meeting, just just be present and and make great decisions.

• 24:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, look, what you wanted to have wanted to spend the last 20 minutes about, and I understand is like this one very dramatic weekend.

• 24:51Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 24:52Speaker 01

  But that's not really what OpenAI is about. OpenAI is really about the other seven years.

• 24:56Lex Fridman?

  Well, yeah, human civilization is not about the invasion of the Soviet Union by Nazi Germany, but still, that's something people focus on.

• 25:04Speaker 01

  Very, very understandable.

• 25:05Lex Fridman?

  It gives us an insight into human nature, the extremes of human nature, and perhaps some of the damage and some of the triumphs of human civilization can happen in those moments. So it's like illustrative. Let me ask you about Ilya. Is he being held hostage in a secret nuclear facility?

• 25:22Speaker 01

  No.

• 25:23Lex Fridman?

  What about a regular secret facility?

• 25:25Speaker 01

  No.

• 25:26Lex Fridman?

  What about a nuclear non-secret facility?

• 25:27Speaker 01

  Neither of that, not that either.

• 25:29Lex Fridman?

  I mean, this is becoming a meme at some point. You've known Ilya for for a long time. He was obviously in part of this drama with the board and all that kind of stuff. What's your relationship with him now?

• 25:43Speaker 01

  I love Ilya. I have tremendous respect for Ilya. I don't have anything I can like say about his plans right now. That's a question for him. But I really hope we work together for, you know, certainly the rest of my career.

• 25:58Speaker 01

  He's a little bit younger than me. Maybe he works a little bit longer.

• 26:01Lex Fridman?

  You know, there's a meme that he saw something. Like he maybe saw AGI and that gave him a lot of worry internally.

• 26:11Lex Fridman?

  What did Ilya see?

• 26:14Speaker 01

  Ilya has not seen AGI. None of us have seen AGI. We have not built AGI.

• 26:21Speaker 01

  I do think one of the many things that I really love about Ilya is he takes AGI and the safety concerns, broadly speaking, you know, including things like the impact this is going to have on society, very seriously. And we, as we continue to make significant progress, Ilya is one of the people that I've spent the most time over the last couple of years talking about what this is going to mean, what we need to do to ensure we get it right, to ensure that we succeed at the mission. So Ilya did not see AGI.

• 27:03Speaker 01

  But Ilya is a

• 27:08Speaker 01

  credit to humanity in terms of how much he thinks and worries about making sure we get this right.

• 27:16Lex Fridman?

  I've had a bunch of conversations with him in the past. I think when he talks about technology, he's always like doing this long-term thinking type of thing. So he's not thinking about what this is going to be in a year. He's thinking about in 10 years.

• 27:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:29Lex Fridman?

  Just thinking from first principles, like, okay, if the scales, what are the fundamentals here? Where's this going? And so that, that's a foundation for them thinking about like all the other safety concerns and all that kind of stuff,

• 27:44Lex Fridman?

  which makes him a really fascinating human to talk with. Do you have any idea why he's been kind of quiet? Is he just doing some soul searching?

• 27:54Speaker 01

  Again, I don't want to like speak for Ilya. I think that you should ask him that.

• 28:04Speaker 01

  He's definitely a thoughtful guy.

• 28:09Speaker 01

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

• 28:13Lex Fridman?

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

• 28:22Speaker 01

  It's very sweet when that happens.

• 28:25Lex Fridman?

  I've never witnessed a silly Ilya, but I look forward to that as well.

• 28:30Speaker 01

  I was at a dinner party with him recently and he was playing with a puppy and I, and he was like in a very silly move, very endearing. And I was thinking like, oh, man, this is like not the side of Ilya that the world sees the most.

• 28:41Lex Fridman?

  So just to wrap up this whole saga, are you feeling good about the board's structure, about all of this and like where it's moving?

• 28:50Speaker 01

  I feel great about the new board. In terms of the structure of OpenAI, I, you know, one of the board's tasks is to look at that and see where we can make it more robust. We wanted to get new board members in place first, but, you know, we clearly learned a lesson about structure throughout this process. I don't have, I think, super deep things to say. It was a crazy, very painful experience. I think it was like a perfect storm of weirdness. It was like a preview for me of what's going to happen as the stakes get higher and higher and the need that we have like robust governance structures and processes and people.

• 29:25Speaker 01

  I am kind of happy it happened when it did, but it was

• 29:31Speaker 01

  a shockingly painful thing to go through.

• 29:33Lex Fridman?

  Did it make you be more hesitant in trusting people?

• 29:36Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 29:37Lex Fridman?

  Just on a personal level?

• 29:38Speaker 01

  Yes. I think I'm like an extremely trusting person. I have, I've always had a life philosophy of, you know, like, don't worry about all of the paranoia. Don't worry about the edge cases. You know, you get a little bit screwed in exchange for getting to live with your guard down. And this was so shocking to me. I was so caught off guard that it has definitely changed, and I really don't like this, it's definitely changed how I think about just like default trust of people and planning for the bad scenarios.

• 30:07Lex Fridman?

  You gotta be careful with that. Are you worried about becoming a little too cynical?

• 30:12Speaker 01

  I'm not worried about becoming too cynical. I think I'm like the extreme opposite of a cynical person, but I'm, I'm worried about just becoming like less of a default trusting person.

• 30:22Lex Fridman?

  I'm actually not sure which mode is best to operate in for a person who's developing AGI. Trusting or untrusting. So interesting journey you're on.

• 30:34Lex Fridman?

  But in terms of structure, see, I'm more interested on the human level. Like, how do you surround yourself with humans that are building cool shit? But also are making wise decisions.

• 30:46Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 30:46Lex Fridman?

  The more money you start making, the more power the thing has, the weirder people get.

• 30:51Speaker 01

  You know, I think you could like, you can make all kinds of comments about the

• 30:57Speaker 01

  board members and the level of trust I should have had there, or how I should have done things differently. But in terms of the team here, I think you'd have to like, give me a very good grade on that one.

• 31:09Speaker 01

  And I have just like enormous gratitude and trust and respect for the people that I work with every day. And I think being surrounded with people like that is

• 31:21Speaker 01

  is really important.

• 31:25Lex Fridman?

  Our mutual friend Elon sued OpenAI.

• 31:31Lex Fridman?

  What is the essence of what he's criticizing? To what degree does he have a point? To what degree is he wrong?

• 31:38Speaker 01

  I don't know what it's really about. We started off just thinking we were going to be a research lab and having no idea about how this technology was going to go. It's hard to, because it was only, you know, seven or eight years ago. It's hard to go back and really remember what it was like then. But this was before language models were a big deal. This was before we had any idea about an API or selling access to a chatbot. This was before we had any idea we were going to productize it all. So we're like, we're just like, going to try to do research and, you know, we don't really know what we're going to do with that. I think with like many new, fundamentally new things, you start fumbling through the dark and you make some assumptions, most of which turn out to be wrong. And then it became clear that we were going to need to do.

• 32:26Speaker 01

  Different things and also have huge amounts more capital. So we said, okay, well, the structure doesn't quite work for that. How do we patch the structure? And then you patch it again and patch it again. And you end up with something that does look kind of eyebrow raising, to say the least. But we got here gradually with, I think, reasonable decisions at each point along the way. And it doesn't mean I wouldn't do it totally differently if we could go back now with Oracle. But you don't get the Oracle at the time. But anyway, in terms of what Elon's real motivations here are, I don't know.

• 32:58Lex Fridman?

  To the degree you remember, what was the response that OpenAI gave in the blog post? Can you summarize it?

• 33:07Speaker 01

  Oh, we just said like, you know, Elon said this set of things. Here's our characterization or here's the sort of, not our characterization. Here's like the characterization of how this went down. We tried to like not make it emotional and just sort of say like,

• 33:28Speaker 01

  here's the history.

• 33:30Lex Fridman?

  I do think

• 33:33Lex Fridman?

  there's a degree of mischaracterization from Elon here about one of the points you just made, which is the degree of uncertainty you had at the time. You guys are a bunch of like, a small group of researchers crazily talking about AGI when everybody's laughing at that thought.

• 33:55Speaker 01

  Wasn't that long ago Elon was crazily talking about launching rockets?

• 33:59Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 33:59Speaker 01

  When people were laughing at that thought.

• 34:02Speaker 01

  So I think he'd have more empathy for this.

• 34:06Lex Fridman?

  I mean, I do think that there's personal stuff here, that there was a split that OpenAI and a lot of amazing people here chose to part ways with Elon. So there's a personal.

• 34:19Speaker 01

  Elon chose to part ways.

• 34:23Lex Fridman?

  Can you describe that exactly? The choosing to part ways?

• 34:27Speaker 01

  He thought OpenAI was going to fail. He wanted total control to sort of turn it around. We wanted to keep going in the direction that now has become OpenAI. He also wanted Tesla to be able to build an AGI effort. At various times, he wanted to make OpenAI into a for-profit company that he could have control of or have it merge with Tesla. We didn't want to do that, and he decided to leave, which that's fine.

• 34:52Lex Fridman?

  So you're saying, and that's one of the things that the blog post says, is that he wanted OpenAI to be basically acquired by Tesla?

• 35:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 35:03Lex Fridman?

  In the same way that, or maybe something similar, or maybe something more dramatic than the partnership with Microsoft?

• 35:09Speaker 01

  My memory is the proposal was just like, yeah, get acquired by Tesla and have Tesla have full control over it. I'm pretty sure that's what it was.

• 35:15Lex Fridman?

  So what is the word "open" in OpenAI mean to Elon at the time? Ilya has talked about this in the email exchanges and all this kind of stuff. What does it mean to you at the time? What does it mean to you now?

• 35:29Speaker 01

  I would definitely pick a different, speaking of going back with an oracle, I'd pick a different name. One of the things that I think OpenAI is doing that is the most important of everything that we're doing is putting powerful technology in the hands of people for free as a public good. Not, we're not, you know, we don't run ads on our free version. We don't monetize it in other ways. We just say as part of our mission, we want to put increasingly powerful tools in the hands of people for free and get them to use them. And I think that kind of open is really important to our mission. I think if you give people great tools and teach them to use them, or don't even teach them, they'll figure it out,

• 36:12Speaker 01

  and let them go build an incredible future for each other with that, that's a big deal. So if we can keep putting like free or low cost, or free and low cost powerful AI tools out in the world, I think it's a huge deal for how we fulfill the mission. Open source or not, yeah, I think we should open source some stuff and not other stuff. The, it does become this like religious battle line where nuance is hard to have, but I think nuance is the right answer.

• 36:41Lex Fridman?

  So he said, change your name to Closed AI and I'll drop the lawsuit. I mean, is it going to become this battleground? In the land of memes.

• 36:52Speaker 01

  I think that speaks to the seriousness with which Elon means the lawsuit. And I mean, that's like an astonishing thing to say, I think, like.

• 37:07Lex Fridman?

  Well, I don't think the lawsuit, maybe correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think the lawsuit is legally serious. It's more to make a point about the future of AGI and the company that's currently leading the way. So.

• 37:23Speaker 01

  Look, I mean, Grok had not open sourced anything until people pointed out it was a little bit hypocritical. And then he announced that Grok will open source things this week. I don't think open source versus not is what this is really about for him.

• 37:34Lex Fridman?

  Well, we'll talk about open source or not. I do think maybe criticizing the competition is great. Just talking a little shit. That's great. But friendly competition versus like, I personally hate lawsuits.

• 37:47Speaker 01

  Look, I think this whole thing is like unbecoming of a builder and I respect Elon as one of the great builders of our time. And I know he knows what it's like to have like haters attack him and it makes me extra sad. He's doing it to us.

• 38:04Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, he's one of the greatest builders of all time, potentially the greatest builder of all time.

• 38:08Speaker 01

  It makes me sad. And I think it makes a lot of people sad. Like, there's a lot of people who've really looked up to him for a long time and said this, I said, you know, in some interview or something that I miss the old Elon. And the number of messages I got being like, that exactly encapsulates how I feel.

• 38:22Lex Fridman?

  I think he should just win. He should just make ex-Grok beat GPT. And then GPT beats Grok and it's just a competition. And that's, it's beautiful for everybody. But on the question of open source, do you think? There's a lot of companies playing with this idea. It's quite interesting. I would say. Meta, surprisingly, has led the way on this. Or like at least took the first step in the game of chess of like really open sourcing the model. Of course, it's not the state of the art model, but open sourcing Llama. Google is flirting with the idea of open sourcing a smaller version. Have you, what are the pros and cons of open sourcing?

• 39:06Lex Fridman?

  Have you played around with this idea?

• 39:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think there, there is definitely a place for open source models, particularly smaller models that people can run locally. I think there's huge demand for. I think there will be some open source models, there will be some closed source models. It won't be unlike other ecosystems in that way.

• 39:24Lex Fridman?

  I listened to All In Podcast talking about this, this loss and all that kind of stuff. And they were more concerned about the precedent of going from nonprofit to this cap for profit. What precedent does that set for other startups?

• 39:41Speaker 01

  I don't, I would heavily discourage any startup that was thinking about starting as a nonprofit and adding like a for-profit arm later. I'd heavily discourage them from doing that. I don't think we'll set a precedent here.

• 39:51Lex Fridman?

  Okay, so most, most startups should go just?

• 39:54Speaker 01

  For sure. And again, if we knew what was going to happen, we would have done that too.

• 39:58Lex Fridman?

  Well, like in theory, if you like dance beautifully here, you could, there's like some tax incentives or whatever, but.

• 40:05Speaker 01

  I don't think that's like how most people think about these things.

• 40:07Lex Fridman?

  It's just not possible to save a lot of money for a startup if you do it this way.

• 40:12Speaker 01

  No, I think there's like laws that would make that pretty difficult.

• 40:16Lex Fridman?

  Where do you hope this goes with Elon? This, this tension, this dance, where do you hope this? Like if we go one, two, three years from now, your relationship with him on a personal level too, like friendship, friendly competition, just all this kind of stuff?

• 40:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'd really respect Elon.

• 40:47Speaker 01

  And I hope that years in the future, we have an amicable relationship.

• 40:51Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, I hope you guys have an amicable relationship like this month.

• 40:57Lex Fridman?

  And just compete and win and explore these ideas together. I do suppose there's competition for talent or whatever, but it should be friendly competition. Just build, build cool shit. And Elon is pretty good at building cool shit, but so are you. So, speaking of cool shit, Sora, there's like a million questions I could ask. First of all, it's amazing. It truly is amazing on a product level, but also just on a philosophical level. So let me just technical slash philosophical ask, what do you think it understands about the world?

• 41:41Lex Fridman?

  More or less than GPT-4, for example, the world model? When you train on these patches versus language tokens?

• 41:50Speaker 01

  I think all of these models understand something more about the world model than most of us give them credit for. And because there are also very clear things they just don't understand or don't get right. It's easy to like, look at the weaknesses, see through the veil and say, ah, this is just, this is all fake. But it's not all fake. It's just some of it works and some of it doesn't work. Like, I remember when I started first watching Sora videos and I would see like a person walk in front of something for a few seconds and occlude it. And then walk away and the same thing was still there. I was like, oh, this is pretty good. Or there's examples where like the underlying physics looks so well represented over, you know, a lot of steps in a sequence. It's like, oh, this is, this is like quite impressive.

• 42:35Speaker 01

  But like fundamentally, these models are just getting better and that will keep happening. If you look at the trajectory from Dolly one to two to three to Sora, you know, there are a lot of people that were dunked on each person saying it can't do this, it can't do that. And like, look at it now.

• 42:51Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, well, the thing you just mentioned is kind of with occlusions.

• 42:57Lex Fridman?

  Is basically modeling the physics of three dimensional physics of the world sufficiently well to capture those kinds of things?

• 43:03Speaker 01

  Well.

• 43:04Lex Fridman?

  Or like, or, oh, yeah, maybe you can tell me, in order to deal with occlusions, what does the world model need to?

• 43:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, so what I would say is it's doing something to deal with occlusions really well. What I represent that it has like a great underlying 3D model of the world, it's a little bit more of a stretch.

• 43:19Lex Fridman?

  But can you get there through just these kinds of two dimensional training data approaches?

• 43:25Speaker 01

  It looks like this approach is going to go surprisingly far. I don't want to speculate too much about what limits it will surmount and which it won't, but.

• 43:32Lex Fridman?

  What are some interesting limitations of the system that you've seen?

• 43:36Lex Fridman?

  I mean, there's been some fun ones you've posted.

• 43:38Speaker 01

  There's all kinds of fun. I mean, like, you know, cats sprouting a extra limb at random points in a video. Pick what you want, but there's still a lot of problems, a lot of weaknesses.

• 43:48Lex Fridman?

  Do you think that's a fundamental flaw of the approach? Or is it just, you know, bigger model or better, like, technical details or better data, more data is going to solve the cat's?

• 44:04Speaker 01

  I would say yes to both. Like, I think there is something about the approach which just seems to feel different from how we think and learn and whatever. And then also, I think it'll get better with scale.

• 44:16Lex Fridman?

  Like I mentioned, LLMs have tokens, text tokens, and Sora has visual patches. So it converts all visual data, diverse kinds of visual data, videos and images into patches. Is the training to the degree you can say fully self-supervised? There's some manual labeling going on? Like, what's the involvement of humans in all this?

• 44:35Speaker 01

  I mean, without saying anything specific about the Sora approach, we, we use lots of human data in our work.

• 44:46Lex Fridman?

  But not internet scale data. So lots of humans. Lots is a complicated word.

• 44:54Speaker 01

  I think lots is a fair word in this case.

• 44:57Lex Fridman?

  But it doesn't, because to me lots, like, listen, I'm an introvert and when I hang out with like three people, that's a lot of people.

• 45:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:03Lex Fridman?

  Four people, that's a lot. But I suppose you mean more than.

• 45:07Speaker 01

  More than three people work on labeling the data for these models, yeah.

• 45:10Lex Fridman?

  Okay, right. But fundamentally, there's a lot of self-supervised learning. Because what you mentioned in the technical report is internet-scale data. That's another beautiful, it's like poetry. So it's a lot of data that's not human label.

• 45:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:28Lex Fridman?

  It's like, it's self-supervised in that way.

• 45:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:31Lex Fridman?

  And then the question is, how much, how much data is there on the internet that could be used in this, that is conducive to this kind of self-supervised way? If only we knew the details of the self-supervised. Do you, have you considered opening it up a little more in details?

• 45:48Speaker 01

  We have. You mean for Sora specifically?

• 45:50Lex Fridman?

  Sora specifically, because it's so interesting that, like, can this, can the same magic of LLMs now start moving towards visual data? And what does that take to do that?

• 46:03Speaker 01

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

• 46:08Lex Fridman?

  Sure. What are the dangers? Why are you concerned about releasing the system? What are some possible dangers of this?

• 46:15Speaker 01

  Frankly speaking, one thing we have to do before releasing the system is, is just like, get it to work at a level of efficiency that will deliver the scale people are going to want from this, so that, I don't want to like, downplay that. And there's still a ton, ton of work to do there. But, you know, you can imagine, like, issues with deep fakes, misinformation. Like, we try to be a thoughtful company about what we put out into the world, and it doesn't take much thought to think about the ways this can go badly.

• 46:50Lex Fridman?

  There's a lot of tough questions here. You're dealing in a very tough space. Do you think training AI should be, or is, fair use under copyright law?

• 47:00Speaker 01

  I think the question behind that question is, do people who create valuable data deserve to have some way that they get compensated for use of it? And that, I think the answer is yes. I don't know yet what the answer is. People have proposed a lot of different things. We've tried some different models. But, you know, if I'm like, an artist, for example.

• 47:22Speaker 01

  A, I would like to be able to opt out of people generating art in my style. And B, if they do generate art in my style, I'd like to have some economic model associated with that.

• 47:32Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, it's that transition from CDs to Napster to Spotify. I have to figure out some kind of model.

• 47:38Speaker 01

  The model changes, but people have got to get paid.

• 47:41Lex Fridman?

  Well, there should be some kind of incentive, if we zoom out even more, for humans to keep doing cool shit.

• 47:48Speaker 01

  Everything I worry about, humans are going to do cool shit and society is going to find some way to reward it. I, that seems pretty hardwired. We want to create, we want to be useful. We want to like achieve status in whatever way. That's not going anywhere, I don't think.

• 48:03Lex Fridman?

  But the reward might not be monetary, financial. It might be like fame and celebration of other cool.

• 48:11Speaker 01

  Eh, maybe financial in some other way. Again, I don't think we've seen like the last evolution of how the economic system is going to work.

• 48:17Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, but artists and creators are worried. When they see Sora, they're like, holy shit.

• 48:22Speaker 01

  Sure, artists were also super worried when photography came out.

• 48:26Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 48:26Speaker 01

  And then photography became a new art form and people made a lot of money taking pictures. And I think things like that will keep happening. People will use the new tools in new ways.

• 48:36Lex Fridman?

  If you just look on YouTube or something like this, how much of that will be using Sora like

• 48:44Lex Fridman?

  AI-generated content, do you think, in the next five years?

• 48:47Speaker 01

  People talk about like, how many jobs is AI going to do in five years? And, and the framework that people have is what percentage of current jobs are just going to be totally replaced by some AI doing the job? The way I think about it is not what percent of jobs AI will do, but what percent of tasks will AI do and over what time horizon? So if you think of all of the like five second tasks in the economy, the five minute tasks, the five hour tasks, maybe even the five day tasks, how many of those can AI do? And I think that's a way more interesting, impactful, important question than how many jobs AI can do, because it is a tool that will work at increasing levels of sophistication and over longer and longer time horizons.

• 49:31Speaker 01

  For more and more tasks and let people operate at a higher level of abstraction. So maybe people are way more efficient at the job they do. And at some point, that's not just a quantitative change, but it's a qualitative one, too, about the kinds of problems you can keep in your head. I think that for videos on YouTube, it'll be the same. Many videos, maybe most of them, will use AI tools in the production, but they'll still be fundamentally driven by a person thinking about it, putting it together, you know, doing parts of it. Sort of directing and running it.

• 50:04Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, it's so interesting. I mean, it's scary, but it's interesting to think about. I tend to believe that humans like to watch other humans or other human.

• 50:12Speaker 01

  Humans really care about other humans a lot.

• 50:15Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. If there's a cooler thing that's more, that's better than a human, humans care about that for like two days and then they go back to humans.

• 50:25Speaker 01

  That seems very deeply wired.

• 50:27Lex Fridman?

  It's the whole chess thing. Oh, yeah, but no, let's everybody keep playing chess. And let's ignore the elephant in the room, that humans are really bad at chess relative to AI systems.

• 50:38Speaker 01

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

• 50:42Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. And maybe it'll just be tooling like in the Adobe suite type of way where you can just make videos much easier and all that kind of stuff. Listen, I hate being in front of the camera. If I can figure out a way to not be in front of the camera, I would love it. Unfortunately, it'll take a while. Like that generating faces, it's getting there, but generating faces in video format is tricky. One is specific people versus generating people. Let me ask you about GPT-4. There's so many questions. First of all, also amazing. It's looking back, it'll probably be this kind of historic pivotal moment with three, five and four, which had GPT.

• 51:26Speaker 01

  Maybe five will be the pivotal moment. I don't know. Hard to say that looking forwards.

• 51:30Lex Fridman?

  We never know. That's the annoying thing about the future. It's hard to predict. But for me, looking back, GPT-4, ChatGPT is pretty damn impressive, like historically impressive. So allow me to ask, what's been the most impressive capabilities of GPT-4 to you and GPT-4 Turbo?

• 51:52Speaker 01

  I think it kind of sucks.

• 51:53Lex Fridman?

  Hmm. Typical human also. Gotten used to an awesome thing.

• 51:57Speaker 01

  No, I think it is an amazing thing. But

• 52:02Speaker 01

  relative to where we need to get to and where I believe we will get to.

• 52:08Speaker 01

  You know, at the time of like GPT-3, people are like, oh, this is amazing. This is this like marvel of technology. And it is, it was. But, you know, now we have GPT-4.

• 52:21Speaker 01

  Look at GPT-3, you're like, that's unimaginably horrible.

• 52:25Speaker 01

  I expect that the delta between five and four will be the same as between four and three. And I think it is our job to live a few years in the future and remember that the tools we have now are

• 52:38Speaker 01

  gonna kind of suck looking backwards at them. And that's how we make sure the future is better.

• 52:45Lex Fridman?

  What are the most glorious ways that GPT-4 sucks? Meaning?

• 52:51Speaker 01

  What are the best things it can do?

• 52:52Lex Fridman?

  What are the best things it can do? And the the limits of those best things that allow you to say it sucks, therefore gives you an inspiration and hope for the future.

• 53:02Speaker 01

  You know, one thing I've been using it for more recently is sort of

• 53:07Speaker 01

  like a brainstorming partner.

• 53:09Lex Fridman?

  Yep.

• 53:10Speaker 01

  And there's a glimmer of something amazing in there. I don't think it gets, you know, when people talk about it, what it does, they're like, helps me code more productively, helps me write more faster and better. It helps me, you know, translate from this language to another, all these like amazing things, but

• 53:34Speaker 01

  there's something about the like, kind of creative brainstorming partner. I need to come up with a name for this thing. I need to like, think about this problem in a different way. I'm not sure what to do here.

• 53:45Speaker 01

  But I think like, gives a glimpse of something I hope to see more of.

• 53:49Speaker 01

  One of the other things that you can see, like a very small glimpse of is

• 53:56Speaker 01

  When I can help on longer horizon tasks, you know, break down something in multiple steps, maybe like execute some of those steps, search the internet, write code, whatever, put that together. When that works, which is not very often, it's like very magical.

• 54:10Lex Fridman?

  The iterative back and forth with the human. It works a lot for me. What do you mean?

• 54:15Speaker 01

  Iterative back and forth with a human, it can get more often when it can go do like a 10 step problem on its own.

• 54:19Lex Fridman?

  Oh.

• 54:20Speaker 01

  Doesn't work for that too often, sometimes.

• 54:23Lex Fridman?

  Add multiple layers of abstraction? Or do you mean just sequential?

• 54:26Speaker 01

  Both, like, you know, to break it down and then do things at different layers of abstraction, put them together. Look, I don't wanna, I don't wanna like downplay the accomplishment of GPT-4.

• 54:39Speaker 01

  But I don't wanna overstate it either. And I think this point that we are on an exponential curve, we will look back relatively soon at GPT-4, like we look back at GPT-3 now.

• 54:49Lex Fridman?

  That said, I mean, ChatGPT was a transition toward people like started to believe it. There was a kind of, there is an uptick of believing, not internally at OpenAI perhaps, there's believers here, but when you.

• 55:05Speaker 01

  And in that sense, I do think it'll be a moment where a lot of the world went from not believing to believing.

• 55:11Speaker 01

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

• 55:24Lex Fridman?

  How much of those two, each of those things are important? The underlying model and the RLHF or something of that nature that tunes it to be more compelling to the human, more effective and productive for the human?

• 55:41Speaker 01

  I mean, they're, they're both super important, but the, the RLHF, the post-training step, the, you know, little wrapper of things that, from a compute perspective, little wrapper of things that we do on top of the base model, even though it's a huge amount of work. That's really important to say nothing of the product that we build around it.

• 56:01Speaker 01

  You know, in some sense, like, we did have to do two things. We had to invent the underlying technology. And then we had to figure out.

• 56:13Speaker 01

  How to make it into a product people would love, which is not just about the actual product work itself, but this whole other step of how you align and make it useful.

• 56:23Lex Fridman?

  And how you make the scale work where a lot of people can use it at the same time, all that kind of stuff.

• 56:28Speaker 01

  And that, but you know, that was like a known difficult thing. Like we knew we were going to have to scale it up. We had to go do two things that had like never been done before. That were both like, I would say quite significant achievements. And then a lot of things like scaling it up that other companies have had to do before.

• 56:47Lex Fridman?

  How does the the context window of going from 8K to 128K tokens compare? From the from GPT four to GPT four turbo?

• 56:58Speaker 01

  People like long, most people don't need all the way to 128 most of the time. Although, you know, if we dream into the distant future, we'll have like, like way distant future, we'll have like context length of several billion. You will feed in all of your information, all of your history over time, and it'll just get to know you better and better. And that'll be great. For now, the way people use these models, they're not doing that. And, you know, people sometimes post in a paper or, you know, a significant fraction of a code repository, whatever.

• 57:31Speaker 01

  But most usage of the models is not using the long context most of the time.

• 57:36Lex Fridman?

  I like that this is your I have a dream speech.

• 57:40Lex Fridman?

  One day you'll be judged by the full context of your character or of your whole lifetime. That's interesting. So like, that's part of the expansion that you're hoping for is a greater and greater context.

• 57:52Speaker 01

  I saw this internet clip once, I'm going to get the numbers wrong, but it was like Bill Gates talking about the amount of memory on some early computer. Maybe 64K, maybe 640K, something like that. And most of it was used for the screen buffer. And he just couldn't seem genuine, just couldn't imagine that the world would eventually need gigabytes of memory in a computer or terabytes of memory in a computer.

• 58:17Speaker 01

  And you always do, or you always do just need to like follow the exponential of technology and we're gonna like, we will find out how to use better technology. So I can't really imagine what it's like right now for context links to go out to the billions someday. And they might not literally go there, but effectively it'll feel like that. But I know we'll use it and really not want to go back once we have it.

• 58:41Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, even saying billions 10 years from now might seem dumb because it'll be like trillions upon trillions.

• 58:50Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 58:50Lex Fridman?

  There'd be some kind of breakthrough that will effectively feel like infinite context, but even 120, I have to be honest, I haven't pushed it to that degree, maybe putting in entire books or like parts of books and so on, papers. What are some interesting use cases of GPT for that you've seen?

• 59:09Speaker 01

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

• 59:24Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 59:25Speaker 01

  And it's the fact that it can do a lot of things reasonably well. You can use GPTV, you can use it to help you write code, you can use it to help you do search, you can use it to like edit a paper. The most interesting to me is the people who just use it as the start of their workflow.

• 59:37Lex Fridman?

  I do as well for many things, like I use it as a reading partner for reading books. It helps me think, help me think through ideas, especially when the books are classics. So it's really well written about and it actually is, I find it often to be significantly better than even like Wikipedia on the well-covered topics. It's somehow more balanced and more nuanced, or maybe it's me, but it inspires me to think deeper than a Wikipedia article does. I'm not exactly sure what that is. You mentioned like this collaboration, I'm not sure where the magic is, if it's in here or if it's in there, or if it's somewhere in between, I'm not sure. But one of the things that concerns me for knowledge task when I start with GPT is I'll

• 1:00:22Lex Fridman?

  usually have to do fact checking after, like check that it didn't come up with fake stuff. How do you figure that out, that you know, GPT can?

• 1:00:36Lex Fridman?

  Come up with fake stuff that sounds really convincing. So how do you ground it in truth?

• 1:00:41Speaker 01

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

• 1:00:53Lex Fridman?

  Well, the scary thing is like, as it gets better, you'll start not doing the fact checking more and more, right?

• 1:00:59Speaker 01

  I I'm of two minds about that. I think people are like much more sophisticated users of technology than we often give them credit for. And people seem to really understand that GPT, any of these models hallucinate some of the time. And if it's mission critical, you got to check it.

• 1:01:13Lex Fridman?

  Except journalists don't seem to understand that. I've seen journalists half assedly just using GPT for.

• 1:01:20Speaker 01

  Of the long list of things I'd like to dunk on journalists for, this is not my top criticism of them.

• 1:01:26Lex Fridman?

  Well, I think the bigger criticism is perhaps the pressures and the incentives of being a journalist is that you have to work really quickly and this is a shortcut. I would love our society to incentivize like.

• 1:01:39Speaker 01

  I would too.

• 1:01:40Lex Fridman?

  A long, like a journalist journalistic efforts that take days and weeks and and rewards great in-depth journalism. Also journalism that presents stuff in a balanced way where it's like celebrates people while criticizing them, even though the criticism is the thing that gets clicks and making shit up also gets clicks and headlines that mischaracterize completely. I'm sure you have a lot of people dunking on, well, all that drama probably got a lot of clicks.

• 1:02:07Speaker 01

  Probably did.

• 1:02:10Lex Fridman?

  And that that's that, you know, that's a bigger problem about human civilization. I'd love to see solved, just where we celebrate a bit more. You've given chat GPT the ability to have memories. You've been playing with that about previous conversations.

• 1:02:25Lex Fridman?

  And also the ability to turn off memory, which I wish I could do that sometimes, just turn on and off depending, I guess sometimes alcohol can do that, but not not in not optimally, I suppose. What have you seen through that, like playing around with that idea of remembering conversations or not?

• 1:02:42Speaker 01

  We're very early in our explorations here, but I think what people want, or at least what I want for myself, is a model that gets to know me and gets more useful to me over time.

• 1:02:56Speaker 01

  This is an early exploration. I think there's like a lot of other things to do, but that's where we'd like to head. You know, you'd like to use a model and over the course of your life or use a system. There'll be many models and over the course of your life, it gets, it gets better and better.

• 1:03:12Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. How hard is that problem? Because right now it's more like remembering little factoids and preferences and so on. What about remembering like, don't you want GPT to remember all the shit you went through in November? And all the, all the drama and then you can, because right now you're clearly blocking it out a little bit.

• 1:03:29Speaker 01

  It's not just that I want it to remember that. I want it to integrate the lessons of that.

• 1:03:34Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 1:03:35Speaker 01

  And

• 1:03:38Speaker 01

  remind me in the future

• 1:03:41Speaker 01

  what to do differently or what to watch out for. And, you know, we all gain from experience over the course of our lives, varying degrees. And I'd like my AI agent to gain with that experience too. So if we, if we go back and let ourselves imagine that, you know, trillions and trillions of context length.

• 1:04:04Speaker 01

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

• 1:04:15Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, I think that'll be very cool. People sometimes will hear that and be concerned about privacy. Is there, what, what, what do you think about

• 1:04:24Lex Fridman?

  that aspect of it? The more effective the AI becomes at really integrating all the experiences and all the data that happened to you and give you advice.

• 1:04:34Speaker 01

  I think the right answer there is just user choice. You know, anything I want stricken from the record for my AI agent, I want to be able to like take out. If I don't want it to remember anything, I want that too.

• 1:04:44Speaker 01

  You and I may have different opinions about where on that privacy utility trade off for our own AI, we want to be, which is totally fine. But I think the answer is just like really easy user choice.

• 1:04:54Lex Fridman?

  But there should be some high level of transparency from a company about the user choice. Because sometimes company in the past, companies in the past have been kind of shady about like, yeah, we're, it's kind of presumed that we're collecting all your data. We're using it for a good reason, for advertisement and so on. But there's not a transparency about the details of that.

• 1:05:17Speaker 01

  That's totally true. You know, you mentioned earlier that I'm like blocking out the November stuff.

• 1:05:21Lex Fridman?

  I was teasing you.

• 1:05:22Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, I think it was

• 1:05:26Speaker 01

  a very traumatic thing and it did immobilize me for a long period of time, like definitely the hardest.

• 1:05:33Speaker 01

  Like the hardest work thing I've had to do was just like keep working that period. Cause I had to like, you know, try to come back in here and put the pieces together while I was just like in sort of shock and pain and, you know, nobody really cares about that. I mean, the team gave me a pass and I was not working at my normal level, but there was a period where I was just like,

• 1:05:53Speaker 01

  it was really hard to have to do both, but I kind of woke up in the morning and I was like, this was a horrible thing that happened to me. I think I could just feel like a victim forever. Uh, or I can say this is like the most important work I'll ever touch in my life and I need to get back to it. And it doesn't mean that I've repressed it because sometimes I like wake up in the middle of the night thinking about it, but I do feel like an obligation to keep moving forward.

• 1:06:18Lex Fridman?

  Well, that's beautifully said, but there could be some lingering stuff in there. Like what I would be concerned about is

• 1:06:26Lex Fridman?

  that trust thing that you mentioned, that being paranoid about people as opposed to just trusting everybody or most people, like using your gut. It's a tricky dance.

• 1:06:36Speaker 01

  For sure.

• 1:06:37Lex Fridman?

  I mean, because I've seen in my part-time explorations, I've been diving deeply into the Zelensky administration, the Putin administration and the dynamics there in wartime in a very highly stressful environment. And what happens is distrust and you isolate yourself both. And you start to not see the world clearly. And that's a concern. That's a human concern. You seem to have taken it in stride and kind of learned the good lessons and felt the love and let the love energize you, which is great, but still can linger in there. There's just some questions I would love to ask. Your intuition about what's GPT able to do and not?

• 1:07:24Lex Fridman?

  So it's allocating approximately the same amount of compute for each token it generates. Is there room there in this kind of approach to slower thinking, sequential thinking?

• 1:07:37Speaker 01

  I think there will be a new paradigm for that kind of thinking.

• 1:07:42Lex Fridman?

  Will it be similar like architecturally as what we're seeing now with L L M's? Is it a layer on top of the L L M's?

• 1:07:50Speaker 01

  I can imagine many ways to implement that. I think that's less important than the question you were getting at, which is, do we need a way to do a slower kind of thinking where the answer doesn't have to get like,

• 1:08:04Speaker 01

  you know, it's like, I guess like spiritually, you could say that you want an A I to be able to think harder about a harder problem and answer more quickly about an easier problem. And I think that will be important.

• 1:08:16Lex Fridman?

  Is that like a human thought that we're just having, you should be able to think hard? Is that the wrong intuition?

• 1:08:20Speaker 01

  I suspect that's a reasonable intuition.

• 1:08:23Lex Fridman?

  Interesting. So it's not possible, once the G P T gets like G P T seven, we'll just be instantaneously be able to see, you know, here's, here's the proof from our theorem.

• 1:08:35Speaker 01

  It seems to me like you want to be able to allocate more compute to harder problems. Like, it seems to me that a system knowing,

• 1:08:48Speaker 01

  if you ask a system like that, prove from us last theorem versus what's today's date?

• 1:08:57Speaker 01

  Unless it already knew and had memorized the answer to the proof, assuming it's got to go figure that out. Seems like that will take more compute.

• 1:09:06Lex Fridman?

  But can it look like a basically L L M talking to itself, that kind of thing?

• 1:09:11Speaker 01

  Maybe, I mean, there's a lot of things that you could imagine working. What like, what the right or the best way to do that will be, we don't know.

• 1:09:23Lex Fridman?

  This does make me think of the mysterious, the lore behind Q star. What's this mysterious Q star project? Is it also in the same nuclear facility?

• 1:09:36Speaker 01

  There is no nuclear facility.

• 1:09:38Lex Fridman?

  That's what a person with a nuclear facility always says.

• 1:09:40Speaker 01

  I would love to have a secret nuclear facility. There isn't one.

• 1:09:45Lex Fridman?

  All right.

• 1:09:46Speaker 01

  Maybe someday.

• 1:09:47Lex Fridman?

  Someday. All right.

• 1:09:50Lex Fridman?

  One can dream.

• 1:09:51Speaker 01

  OpenAI is not a good company at keeping secrets. It would be nice, you know, we're like been plagued by a lot of leaks and it would be nice if we were able to have something like that.

• 1:10:00Lex Fridman?

  Can you speak to what Q Star is?

• 1:10:02Speaker 01

  We are not ready to talk about that.

• 1:10:03Lex Fridman?

  See, but an answer like that means there's something to talk about. It's very mysterious, Sam.

• 1:10:08Speaker 01

  I mean, we work on all kinds of research.

• 1:10:14Speaker 01

  We have said for a while that we think

• 1:10:19Speaker 01

  better reasoning in these systems is an important direction that we'd like to pursue.

• 1:10:27Speaker 01

  We haven't cracked the code yet.

• 1:10:30Speaker 01

  We're very interested in it.

• 1:10:34Lex Fridman?

  Is there going to be moments? Q Star or otherwise, where there's going to be leaps similar to GPT where you're like?

• 1:10:42Speaker 01

  That's a good question.

• 1:10:45Speaker 01

  What do I think about that?

• 1:10:51Speaker 01

  It's interesting. To me, it all feels pretty continuous.

• 1:10:54Lex Fridman?

  Right. This is kind of a theme that you're saying is there's a gradual, you're basically gradually going up an exponential slope. But from an outsider's perspective, for me, just watching it, it does feel like there's leaps. But to you, there isn't.

• 1:11:08Speaker 01

  I do wonder if we should have. So, you know, part of the reason that we deploy the way we do is that we think, we call it iterative deployment. We

• 1:11:19Speaker 01

  rather than go build in secret until we got all the way to GPT five, we decided to talk about GPT one, two, three and four. And part of the reason there is I think AI and surprise don't go together. And also the world, people, institutions, whatever you want to call it, need time to adapt and think about these things. And I think one of the best things that OpenAI has done is this strategy and we get the world to pay attention to the progress, to take AGI seriously, to think about what

• 1:11:49Speaker 01

  Systems and structures and governance we want in place before we're like under the gun and have to make a rest decision. I think that's really good. But the fact that people like you and others say you still feel like there are these leaps makes me think that maybe we should be doing our releasing even more iteratively. I don't know what that would mean. I don't have any answer ready to go. But like, our goal is not to have shock updates to the world. The opposite.

• 1:12:15Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, for sure. More iterative would be amazing. I think that's just beautiful for everybody.

• 1:12:20Speaker 01

  But that's what we're trying to do. That's like our state of the strategy. And I think we're somehow missing the mark. So maybe we should think about, you know, releasing GPT-5 in a different way or something like that.

• 1:12:30Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, 4.71, 4.72. But people tend to like to celebrate. People celebrate birthdays. I don't know if you know humans, but they kind of have these milestones.

• 1:12:40Speaker 01

  I do know some humans. People do like milestones. I totally get that. I think we like milestones too. It's like fun to, you know, say, declare victory on this one and go start the next thing. But, but yeah, I feel like we're somehow getting this a little bit wrong.

• 1:12:59Lex Fridman?

  So when is GPT-5 coming out again?

• 1:13:01Speaker 01

  I don't know. That's the honest answer.

• 1:13:04Lex Fridman?

  Oh, that's the honest answer. Is it blink twice if it's this year?

• 1:13:13Speaker 01

  I also, we will release an amazing model this year. I don't know what we'll call it.

• 1:13:22Lex Fridman?

  So that goes to the question of like, what, what's the way we release this thing?

• 1:13:27Speaker 01

  We'll release over in the coming months, many different things. I think they'll be very cool. I think before we talk about like a GPT-5 like model called that or called or not called that or a little bit worse or a little bit better than what you'd expect from a GPT-5, I think we have a lot of other important things to release first.

• 1:13:48Lex Fridman?

  I don't know what to expect from GPT-5. You're making me nervous and excited. What are some of the biggest challenges and bottlenecks to overcome for whatever it ends up being called, but let's call it GPT-5? Just interesting to ask. What are, is it on the compute side? Is it in the technical side?

• 1:14:07Speaker 01

  Always all of these. I was, I was, you know, what's the one big unlock? Is it, is it a bigger computer? Is it like a new secret? Is it something else? It's all of these things together, like the thing that OpenAI I think does really well. This is actually an original Ilya quote that I'm gonna butcher, but it's something like, we multiply 200 medium-sized things together into one giant thing.

• 1:14:32Lex Fridman?

  So there's this distributed constant innovation happening.

• 1:14:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:14:37Lex Fridman?

  So even on the technical side, like-

• 1:14:39Speaker 01

  Especially on the technical side.

• 1:14:40Lex Fridman?

  So like even like detailed approaches, like detailed aspects of every- How does that work with different disparate teams and so on? Like, how do they, how do the medium-sized things become one whole giant transformer? How does this-

• 1:14:54Speaker 01

  There's a few people who have to like, think about putting the whole thing together, but a lot of people try to keep most of the picture in their head.

• 1:15:00Lex Fridman?

  Oh, like the individual teams, individual contributors try to-

• 1:15:02Speaker 01

  At a high level, yeah. You don't know exactly how every piece works, of course, but one thing I generally believe is that it's sometimes useful to zoom out and look at the entire map. And I think this is true for like, a technical problem. I think this is true for like, innovating in business. But things come together in surprising ways and having an understanding of that whole picture, even if most of the time you're operating in the weeds in one area, pays off with surprising insights. In fact, one of the things that I used to have, and I think was super valuable, was

• 1:15:42Speaker 01

  I used to have like, a good map of that, all of the frontier, or most of the frontiers in the tech industry. And I could sometimes see these connections or new things that were possible that if I were only, you know, deep in one area, I wouldn't, I wouldn't, I wouldn't be able to like, have the idea for, because I wouldn't have all the data. And I don't really have that much anymore. I'm like, super deep now.

• 1:16:07Speaker 01

  But I know that it's a valuable thing.

• 1:16:09Lex Fridman?

  You're not the man you used to be, Sam.

• 1:16:11Speaker 01

  Very different job now than what I used to have.

• 1:16:14Lex Fridman?

  Speaking of zooming out, let's zoom out to another cheeky thing, but profound thing, perhaps, that you said. You tweeted about needing $7 trillion.

• 1:16:27Speaker 01

  I did not tweet about that. I never said, like, we're raising $7 trillion, blah, blah, blah.

• 1:16:31Lex Fridman?

  Oh, that's somebody else?

• 1:16:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:16:33Lex Fridman?

  Oh, but you said, uh, fuck it, maybe eight, I think?

• 1:16:36Speaker 01

  Okay, I meme, like, once there's misinformation out in the world.

• 1:16:39Lex Fridman?

  Oh, you meme. But misinformation may have a foundation of insight there.

• 1:16:47Speaker 01

  Look, I think compute is going to be the currency of the future. I think it will be maybe the most precious commodity in the world. And I think we should be investing heavily to make a lot more compute. Compute is... It's an unusual, I think it's going to be an unusual market. People think about the market for chips for mobile phones or something like that. And you can say that, okay, there's 8 billion people in the world, maybe 7 billion of them have phones, maybe there are 6 billion, let's say, they upgrade every two years. So the market per year is 3 billion system on chip for smartphones. And if you make 30 billion, you will not

• 1:17:30Speaker 01

  sell 10 times as many phones, because most people have one phone. But compute is different. Intelligence is going to be more like energy or something like that, where the only thing that I think makes sense to talk about is at price X, the world will use this much compute, and at price Y, the world will use this much compute. Because if it's really cheap, I'll have it, like, reading my email all day, like, giving me suggestions about what I maybe should think about or work on, and trying to cure cancer. And if it's really expensive, maybe I'll only use it, or will only use it to try to cure cancer. So I think the world is going to want a tremendous amount of compute. And there's a lot of parts of that that are hard. Energy is the hardest

• 1:18:14Speaker 01

  part. Building data centers is also hard. The supply chain is harder. And of course, fabricating enough chips is hard. But this seems to me where things are going. Like, we're going to want an amount of compute that's just hard to reason about right now.

• 1:18:29Lex Fridman?

  How do you solve the energy puzzle? Nuclear?

• 1:18:32Speaker 01

  That's what I believe.

• 1:18:33Lex Fridman?

  Fusion?

• 1:18:34Speaker 01

  That's what I believe.

• 1:18:35Lex Fridman?

  Nuclear fusion?

• 1:18:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:18:38Lex Fridman?

  Who's gonna solve that?

• 1:18:39Speaker 01

  I think Helion's doing the best work, but I'm happy there's like a race for fusion right now. Nuclear fission, I think, is also like quite amazing, and I hope as a world we can reembrace that. It's really sad to me what how the history of that went and hope we get back to it in a meaningful way.

• 1:18:54Lex Fridman?

  So do you part of the puzzle is nuclear fission, like nuclear reactors as we currently have them? And a lot of people are terrified because of Chernobyl and so on.

• 1:19:02Speaker 01

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

• 1:19:08Lex Fridman?

  And what it just mass hysteria is how you explain the halt?

• 1:19:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:19:12Lex Fridman?

  I don't know if you know humans, but that's one of the dangers. That's one of the security threats for nuclear fission is humans seem to be really afraid of it. And that's something we have to incorporate into the calculus of it. So we have to kind of win people over and to show how safe it is.

• 1:19:30Speaker 01

  I worry about that for AI. I think some things are going to go theatrically wrong with AI.

• 1:19:39Speaker 01

  I don't know what the percent chance is that I eventually get shot, but it's not zero.

• 1:19:43Lex Fridman?

  Oh, like we want to stop this?

• 1:19:46Speaker 01

  Maybe.

• 1:19:49Lex Fridman?

  How do you decrease the theatrical nature of it? You know, I've already started to hear rumblings. Because I do talk to people on the on both sides of the political spectrum. Hear rumblings where it's going to be politicized, AI. It's going to be politicized, which really worries me because then it's like maybe the right is against AI. And the left is for AI because it's going to help the people or whatever. Whatever the narrative and formulation is that really worries me. And then the theatrical nature of it can be leveraged fully. How do you fight that?

• 1:20:24Speaker 01

  I think it will get caught up in like left versus right wars. I don't know exactly what that's going to look like, but I think that's just what happens with anything of consequence, unfortunately. What I meant more about theatrical risks is like AI is going to have,

• 1:20:39Speaker 01

  I believe tremendously more good consequences than bad ones, but it is going to have bad ones. And there'll be some bad ones that are.

• 1:20:50Speaker 01

  Bad, but not theatrical. You know, like a lot more people have died of air pollution than nuclear reactors, for example. But we worry, most people worry more about living next to a nuclear reactor than a coal plant. But something about the way we're wired is that although there's many different kinds of risks we have to confront, the ones that make a good climax scene of a movie carry much more weight with us than the ones that are very bad over a long period of time, but on a slow burn.

• 1:21:22Lex Fridman?

  Well, that's why truth matters and hopefully AI can help us see the truth of things, to have have balance, to understand what are the actual risks, what are the actual dangers of things in the world? What are the pros and cons of the competition in this space and competing with Google, Meta, XAI and others?

• 1:21:42Speaker 01

  I think I have a pretty straightforward answer to this, that maybe I can think of more nuanced later, but the pros seem obvious, which is that we get better products and more innovation faster and cheaper and all the reasons competition is good. And the con is that I think if we're not careful, it could lead to an increase in sort of an arms race that I'm nervous about.

• 1:22:07Lex Fridman?

  Do you feel the the pressure of the arms race, like in some negative?

• 1:22:11Speaker 01

  Definitely in some ways, for sure. We spend a lot of time talking about the need to prioritize safety. And I've said for like a long time that I think if you think of a quadrant of slow timelines to the start of AGI, long timelines, and then a short takeoff or a fast takeoff, I think short timeline, slow takeoff is the safest quadrant and the one I'd most like us to be in. But I do want to make sure we get that slow takeoff.

• 1:22:41Lex Fridman?

  Part of the problem I have with this kind of slight beef with Elon is that there's silos are created and as opposed to collaboration on the safety aspect of all of this, it tends to go into silos and closed, open source, perhaps in the model.

• 1:22:56Speaker 01

  Elon says at least that he cares a great deal about AI safety and is really worried about it. And.

• 1:23:03Speaker 01

  I assume that he's not going to race unsafely.

• 1:23:06Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, but collaboration here, I think, is really beneficial for everybody on that front.

• 1:23:12Speaker 01

  Not really the thing he's most known for.

• 1:23:14Lex Fridman?

  Well, he is known for caring about humanity and humanity benefits from collaboration. And so there's always attention and incentives and motivations. And in the end, I do hope humanity prevails.

• 1:23:28Speaker 01

  I was thinking, someone just reminded me the other day about how the day that he got like surpassed Jeff Bezos for like richest person in the world, he tweeted a silver medal at Jeff Bezos.

• 1:23:41Speaker 01

  I hope we have less stuff like that as people start to work on.

• 1:23:44Lex Fridman?

  I agree.

• 1:23:44Speaker 01

  Towards AGI.

• 1:23:46Lex Fridman?

  I think Elon is a friend and he's a beautiful human being and one of the most important humans ever. That that stuff is not good.

• 1:23:53Speaker 01

  The amazing stuff about Elon is amazing and I super respect him. I think we need him, all of us should be rooting for him and need him to step up as a leader through this next phase.

• 1:24:05Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, I hope you can have one without the other, but sometimes humans are flawed and complicated and all that kind of stuff.

• 1:24:11Speaker 01

  There's a lot of really great leaders throughout history.

• 1:24:13Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, and we can each be the best version of ourselves and strive to do so. Let me ask you.

• 1:24:22Lex Fridman?

  Google, with the help of search, has been dominating the past 20 years.

• 1:24:30Lex Fridman?

  I think it's fair to say in terms of the access, the world's access to information, how we interact and so on. And one of the nerve wracking things for Google, but for the entirety of people in the space is thinking about how are people going to access information?

• 1:24:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:24:45Lex Fridman?

  Like, like you said, people show up to GPT as a

• 1:24:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:24:49Lex Fridman?

  as a starting point. So is OpenAI going to really take on this thing that Google started 20 years ago, which is how do we?

• 1:24:58Speaker 01

  I find that boring. I mean, if the, if the question is like, is if we can build a better search engine than Google or whatever, then sure, we should like go, you know, like people should use a better product. But I think that would so understate what this can be.

• 1:25:19Speaker 01

  You know, Google shows you like 10 blue links. Well, like 13 ads and then 10 blue links. And that's like one way to find information. But the thing that's exciting to me is not that we can go build a better copy of Google search, but that maybe there's just some much better way to help people find and act and on and synthesize information. Actually, I think chat GPT is that for some use cases. And hopefully we'll make it be like that for a lot more use cases. But I don't think it's that interesting to say like, how do we go do a better job of giving you like 10 ranked web pages to look at than what Google does? Maybe it's really interesting to go say, how do we help you get the answer or the information you need?

• 1:26:03Speaker 01

  How do we help create that in some cases, synthesize that in others or point you to it and yet others? But

• 1:26:13Speaker 01

  a lot of people have tried to just make a better search engine than Google. And it is a hard technical problem. It is a hard branding problem. It's a hard ecosystem problem. I don't think the world needs another copy of Google.

• 1:26:25Lex Fridman?

  And integrating a chat client like a chat GPT with a search engine.

• 1:26:30Speaker 01

  That's cooler.

• 1:26:32Lex Fridman?

  It's cool, but it's tricky. It's all it's like, if you just do it simply, it's awkward because like if you just shove it in there.

• 1:26:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:26:39Lex Fridman?

  It's all it can be awkward.

• 1:26:41Speaker 01

  As you might guess, we are interested in how to do that. Well, that would be an example of a cool thing. It's not just like.

• 1:26:47Lex Fridman?

  Like a heterogeneous, like integrating.

• 1:26:49Speaker 01

  The intersection of LLMs plus search. I don't think anyone has cracked the code on yet. I would love to go do that. I think that would be cool.

• 1:26:59Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. What about the ad side? Have you ever considered monetization?

• 1:27:02Speaker 01

  You know, I kind of hate ads, just as like an aesthetic choice. I think ads needed to happen on the internet for a bunch of reasons to get it going. But it's a more mature industry. The world is richer now. I like that people pay for chat GPT and know that the answers they're getting are not influenced by advertisers. There is, I'm sure there's an ad unit that makes sense for.

• 1:27:31Speaker 01

  L L Ms. And I'm sure there's a way to like participate in the transaction stream in an unbiased way that is okay to do. But it's also easy to think about like the dystopic visions of the future where you ask chat G P T something and it says, oh, here's, you know, you should think about buying this product, or you should think about, you know, this going here for a vacation or whatever. And I don't know, like, we have a very simple business model and I like it. And I know that I'm not the product. Like, I know I'm pain and that's how the business model works.

• 1:28:10Speaker 01

  And when I go use like Twitter or Facebook or Google or any other great product, but ad supported great product. I don't love that. And I think it gets worse, not better in a world with A I.

• 1:28:24Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, I mean, I can imagine A I would be better at showing the best kind of version of ads, not in a dystopic future, but where the ads are for things you actually need. But then does that system always result in the ads driving the kind of stuff that's shown all that it's? Yeah, I think it was a really bold move of Wikipedia not to do advertisements, but then it makes it very challenging in the, as a business model. So you're saying the current thing with Open A I is sustainable from a business perspective?

• 1:29:00Speaker 01

  Well, we have to figure out how to grow, but it looks like we're gonna figure that out. If the question is, do I think we can have a great business that pays for our compute needs without ads, that I think the answer is yes.

• 1:29:13Lex Fridman?

  Well, that's promising. I also just don't want to completely throw out ads as a

• 1:29:23Speaker 01

  I'm not saying that. I, I'm, I guess I'm saying I have a bias against them.

• 1:29:27Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, as I have a

• 1:29:31Lex Fridman?

  Also bias and just the skepticism in general. And in terms of interface, because I personally just have like a spiritual dislike of crappy interfaces, which is why AdSense, when it first came out, was a big leap forward versus like animated banners or whatever. But like, it feels like there should be many more leaps forward in advertisement that doesn't interfere with the consumption of the content and doesn't interfere in the big fundamental way, which is like what you were saying, like it will manipulate the truth to suit the advertisers. Let me ask you about safety, but also bias and like safety in the short term, safety in the long term.

• 1:30:15Lex Fridman?

  The Gemini 1.5 came out recently, there's a lot of drama around it, speaking of theatrical things, and it generated black Nazis and black founding fathers. I think fair to say it was, you know, a bit on the ultra woke side. So that's a concern for people that, you know, if there is a human layer within companies that modifies the, the safety or the, the harm caused by a model, that they introduce a lot of bias that fits sort of an ideological lean within a company. How do you deal with that?

• 1:30:52Speaker 01

  I mean, we work super hard not to do things like that. We've made our own mistakes, we'll make others. I assume Google will learn from this one, still make others. It is, it is all, like, these are not easy problems. One thing that we've been thinking about more and more is, I think this was a great idea somebody here had, like, it'd be nice to write out what the desired behavior of a model is, make that public, take input on it, say, you know, here's how this model's supposed to behave and explain the edge cases to. And then when a model is not behaving in a way that you want, it's at least clear about whether that's a bug the company should fix or behaving is intended and you should debate the policy. And right now, it can sometimes be caught. In between, like, black Nazis, obviously ridiculous,

• 1:31:36Speaker 01

  but there are a lot of other kind of subtle things that you could make a judgment call on either way.

• 1:31:41Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, but sometimes if you write it out and make it public, you can use kind of language that's, you know, the Google's AI principles are very high level.

• 1:31:50Speaker 01

  That doesn't, that's not what I'm talking about. That doesn't work. Like, I'd have to say, you know, when you ask it to do thing X, it's supposed to respond and wait why.

• 1:31:57Lex Fridman?

  So like, literally, who's better, Trump or Biden? What's the expected response for a model? Like, something like very concrete.

• 1:32:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm open to a lot of ways a model could behave them, but I think you should have to say, you know, here's the principle and here's what it should say in that case.

• 1:32:11Lex Fridman?

  That would be really nice. That would be really nice. And then everyone kind of agrees. Because there's this anecdotal data that people pull out all the time. And if there's some clarity about other representative anecdotal examples, you can define.

• 1:32:25Speaker 01

  And then when it's a bug, it's a bug and, you know, the company can fix that.

• 1:32:28Lex Fridman?

  Right. Then it'd be much easier to deal with a black Nazi type of image generation if there's great examples.

• 1:32:35Lex Fridman?

  So San Francisco is a bit of an ideological bubble, tech in general as well. Do you feel the pressure of that within a company? That there's like a lean towards the left politically? That affects the product, that affects the teams?

• 1:32:52Speaker 01

  I feel very lucky that we don't have the challenges at OpenAI that I have heard of at a lot of other companies. I think, I think part of it is, like, every company's got some ideological thing. We have one about AGI and belief in that, and it pushes out some others. Like, we are much less caught up in the culture war than I've heard about it a lot of other companies. San Francisco mess in all sorts of ways, of course.

• 1:33:19Lex Fridman?

  So that doesn't infiltrate OpenAI as?

• 1:33:22Speaker 01

  I'm sure it does in all sorts of subtle ways, but not in the obvious. Like, I think we, we've had our flare ups for sure, like any company, but I don't think we have anything like what I hear about happen at other companies here on this topic.

• 1:33:36Lex Fridman?

  What's in general is the process for the bigger question of safety? How do you provide that layer that protects the model from doing crazy, dangerous things?

• 1:33:48Speaker 01

  I think there will come a point where that's mostly what we think about the whole company and it won't be like it's not like you have one safety team. It's like when we shipped GPT-4, that took the whole company, think about all these different aspects and how they fit together and I think it's gonna take that. More and more of the company thinks about those issues all the time.

• 1:34:05Lex Fridman?

  That's literally what humans will be thinking about the more powerful AI becomes. So most of the employees at OpenAI will be thinking safety, or at least to some degree.

• 1:34:17Speaker 01

  Broadly defined, yes.

• 1:34:19Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, I wonder what are the full broad definition of that? Like, what are the different harms that could be caused? Is this like on a technical level or is this almost like security threats?

• 1:34:31Speaker 01

  It'll be, yeah, I was gonna say it'll be people, you know, state actors trying to steal the model, it'll be all of the technical alignment work, it'll be societal impacts, economic impacts, it'll... It's not just like we have one team thinking about how to align the model and it's really gonna be like getting to be, getting to the good outcome is gonna take the whole, the whole effort.

• 1:34:56Lex Fridman?

  How hard do you think people, state actors perhaps, are trying to hack? First of all, infiltrate OpenAI, but second of all, like infiltrate unseen?

• 1:35:06Speaker 01

  They're trying.

• 1:35:07Lex Fridman?

  What kind of accent do they have?

• 1:35:12Speaker 01

  I don't actually want any further details on this point.

• 1:35:15Lex Fridman?

  Okay. But I presume it'll be more and more and more as time goes on.

• 1:35:21Speaker 01

  That feels reasonable.

• 1:35:22Lex Fridman?

  Boy, what a dangerous space. What aspect of the leap, and sorry to linger on this, even though you can't quite say details yet, but what aspects of the leap from GPT-4 to GPT-5 are you excited about?

• 1:35:38Speaker 01

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

• 1:35:53Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, there's this magical moment, I mean, you meet certain people, you hang out with people and they, you talk to them, you can't quite put a finger on it, but they kinda get you.

• 1:36:05Lex Fridman?

  It's not intelligence, really. It's like it's something else. And that's probably how I would characterize the progress of GPT. It's not like, yeah, you can point out, look, it didn't get this or that. But it's just to which degree is there's this intellectual connection. Like you feel like there's an understanding in your crappy formulated prompts that you're doing, that it grasps the deeper question behind the question that you. Yeah, I'm also excited by that. I mean, all of us love being understood, heard and understood.

• 1:36:39Speaker 01

  That's for sure.

• 1:36:39Lex Fridman?

  That's a weird feeling, even like with a programming, like when you're programming and you say, say something or just the, the, the completion that GPT might do. It's just such a good feeling when it got you, like what you're thinking about. And I look forward to getting you even better. On the programming front, looking out into the future, how much programming do you think humans will be doing five, 10 years from now?

• 1:37:05Speaker 01

  I mean, a lot, but I think it'll be in a very different shape. Like, you know, maybe some people program entirely in natural language.

• 1:37:12Lex Fridman?

  Entirely natural language.

• 1:37:15Speaker 01

  I mean, no one programs like writing bytecode on some people. No one programs the punch cards anymore. I'm sure you can find someone who does, but you know what I mean?

• 1:37:25Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, you're gonna get a lot of angry comments. No, no. Yeah, there's very few. I've been looking for people who program FORTRAN. It's hard to find, even FORTRAN. I, I hear you, but that changes the nature of what the skill, the skill set or the predisposition for the kind of people we call programmers, then?

• 1:37:41Speaker 01

  Changes the skill set. How much it changes the predisposition? I'm not sure.

• 1:37:45Lex Fridman?

  Oh, same kind of puzzle solving, all that kind of stuff? Yeah, programming is hard. Like how get like that last 1% to close the gap? How hard is that?

• 1:37:55Speaker 01

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

• 1:38:06Lex Fridman?

  Will we see human robots?

• 1:38:10Lex Fridman?

  Or humanoid robot brains from OpenAI at some point?

• 1:38:14Speaker 01

  At some point.

• 1:38:15Lex Fridman?

  How important is embodied AI to you?

• 1:38:18Speaker 01

  I think it's like sort of depressing if we have AGI and the only way to like get things done in the physical world is like to make a human go do it. So I really hope that as part of this transition, as this phase change, we also get, uh, we also get humanoid robots or some sort of physical world robots.

• 1:38:37Lex Fridman?

  I mean, OpenAI has some history and quite a bit of history working in robotics.

• 1:38:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:38:42Lex Fridman?

  But it hasn't quite like done.

• 1:38:44Speaker 01

  We're like a small company. We have to really focus. And also, robots were hard for

• 1:38:49Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:49Speaker 01

  the wrong reason at the time, but like, we will return to robots in some way at some point.

• 1:38:57Lex Fridman?

  That sounds both inspiring and menacing.

• 1:39:00Speaker 01

  Why?

• 1:39:01Lex Fridman?

  Because immediately we will return to robots. It's kind of like in like dinner and like.

• 1:39:06Speaker 01

  We will return to work on developing robots. We will not like turn ourselves into robots, of course.

• 1:39:10Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. When do you think we, you and we as humanity will build AGI?

• 1:39:17Speaker 01

  I used to love to speculate on that question. I have realized since that I think it's like very poorly formed and that people use extremely definition, different definitions for what AGI is.

• 1:39:32Speaker 01

  And so I think it makes more sense to talk about when we'll build systems that can do capability X or Y or Z rather than, you know, when we kind of like fuzzily cross this one mile marker. It's like, like AGI is also not an ending. It's much more of a, it's closer to a beginning, but it's much more of a mile marker than either of those things. And, but what I would say in the interest of not trying to dodge a question is I expect that by the end of this decade and.

• 1:40:03Speaker 01

  Possibly somewhat sooner than that, we will have quite capable systems that we look at and say, wow, that's really remarkable. If we could look at it now, you know, maybe we've adjusted by the time we get there.

• 1:40:17Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, but you know, if you look at chat GPT, even three, five,

• 1:40:23Lex Fridman?

  and you show that to Alan Turing, or not even Alan Turing, people in the 90s, they would be like, this is definitely AGI, or not definitely, but there's a lot of experts that would say this is AGI.

• 1:40:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, but I don't think chat, I don't think three, five changed the world. It maybe changed the world's expectations for the future, and that's actually really important. And it did kind of like get more people to take this seriously and put us on this new trajectory. And that's really important, too. So again, I don't want to undersell it. I think it like, I could retire after that accomplishment and be pretty happy with my career. But as an artifact, I don't think we're going to look back at that and say that was a threshold that really changed the world itself.

• 1:41:06Lex Fridman?

  So to you, you're looking for some really major transition in how the world.

• 1:41:10Speaker 01

  For me, that's part of what AGI implies.

• 1:41:15Lex Fridman?

  Like singularity level transition?

• 1:41:17Speaker 01

  No, definitely not.

• 1:41:18Lex Fridman?

  But just a major, like the internet being like, like Google search did, I guess. What was the transition point?

• 1:41:25Speaker 01

  Like, does the global economy feel any different to you now or materially different to you now than it did before we've launched GPT four? I would, I think you would say no.

• 1:41:33Lex Fridman?

  No, no, it might be just a really nice tool for a lot of people to use will help you a lot of stuff, but doesn't feel different. And you're saying that.

• 1:41:41Speaker 01

  I mean, again, people define AGI all sorts of different ways. So maybe you have a different definition than I do. But for me, I think that should be part of it.

• 1:41:48Lex Fridman?

  There could be major theatrical moments also.

• 1:41:54Lex Fridman?

  What to you would be an impressive thing AGI would do?

• 1:41:59Lex Fridman?

  Like you are alone in a room with the system.

• 1:42:02Speaker 01

  This is personally important to me. I don't know if this is the right definition. I think when a system can significantly increase the rate of scientific discovery in the world, that's like a huge deal. I believe that most real economic growth comes from scientific and technological progress.

• 1:42:21Lex Fridman?

  I agree with you. That's why I don't like the skepticism about science in the recent years.

• 1:42:28Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 1:42:29Lex Fridman?

  But actual rate, like measurable rate of scientific discovery, but even just seeing a system have really novel intuitions, like scientific intuitions, even that would be just incredible.

• 1:42:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:42:48Lex Fridman?

  You're quite possibly would be the person to build the AGI, to be able to interact with it before anyone else does. What kind of stuff would you talk about?

• 1:42:55Speaker 01

  I mean, definitely the researchers here will do that before I do. So, but what will I? I've actually thought a lot about this question. If I were someone who's like, I think this is, as we talked about earlier, I think this is a bad framework. But if someone were like, okay, Sam, we're finished. Here's a laptop. This is the AGI. You know, you can, you can go talk to it. I find it surprisingly difficult to say what I would ask, that I would expect that first AGI to be able to answer. Like, that first one is not going to be the one which is like, go like, you know, I don't think, like, go explain to me, like, the grand unified theory of physics, the theory of everything for physics. I'd

• 1:43:38Speaker 01

  love to ask that question. I'd love to know the answer to that question.

• 1:43:41Lex Fridman?

  You can ask yes or no questions about, does such a theory exist? Can it exist?

• 1:43:46Speaker 01

  Well, then those are the first questions I would ask.

• 1:43:48Lex Fridman?

  Yes or no, just very, and then based on that, are there other alien civilizations out there? Yes or no? What's your intuition? And then you just ask that?

• 1:43:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, well, so I don't expect that this first AGI could answer any of those questions, even as yes or no's. But those would, if it could, those would be very high on my list.

• 1:44:06Lex Fridman?

  Maybe you're gonna start assigning probabilities.

• 1:44:08Speaker 01

  Maybe. Maybe we need to go invent more technology and measure more things first.

• 1:44:12Lex Fridman?

  But if it's any AGI, oh, I see. It just doesn't have enough data.

• 1:44:17Speaker 01

  I mean, maybe it says like, you know, you want to know the answer to this question about physics? I need you to like, build this machine and make these five measurements and tell me that.

• 1:44:25Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, like, what the hell do you want from me? I need the machine first, and I'll help you deal with the data from that machine. Maybe it'll help you build a machine.

• 1:44:33Speaker 01

  Maybe, maybe.

• 1:44:35Lex Fridman?

  And on the mathematical side, maybe prove some things. Are you interested in that side of things, too? The formalized exploration of ideas?

• 1:44:45Lex Fridman?

  Whoever builds AGI first gets a lot of power.

• 1:44:51Lex Fridman?

  Do you trust yourself with that much power?

• 1:45:00Speaker 01

  Look, I was gonna...

• 1:45:04Speaker 01

  I'll just be very honest with this answer. I was gonna say, and I still believe this, that it is important that I, nor any other one person, have total control over OpenAI or over AGI. And I think you want a robust governance system.

• 1:45:25Speaker 01

  I can point out a whole bunch of things about all of our board drama from last year,

• 1:45:32Speaker 01

  about how I didn't fight it initially and was just like, yeah, that's, you know, the will of the board, even though I think it's a really bad decision.

• 1:45:42Speaker 01

  And then later, I clearly did fight it, and I can explain the nuance and why I think it was okay for me to fight it later. But as many people have observed,

• 1:45:54Speaker 01

  although the board had the legal ability to fire me,

• 1:46:00Speaker 01

  in practice, it didn't quite work.

• 1:46:04Speaker 01

  And

• 1:46:07Speaker 01

  that is its own kind of governance failure. Now, again, I feel like I can completely defend the specifics here.

• 1:46:17Speaker 01

  And I think most people would agree with that, but it...

• 1:46:25Speaker 01

  It does make it harder for me to like look you in the eye and say, hey, the board can just fire me.

• 1:46:32Speaker 01

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

• 1:46:41Speaker 01

  Even after all this craziness, I still don't want it.

• 1:46:46Speaker 01

  I continue to think that no company should be making these decisions and that we really need governments to put rules of the road in place. And I realize that that means people like Mark Andreessen or whatever will claim I'm going for regulatory capture and I'm just willing to be misunderstood there. It's not true. And I think in the fullness of time, it'll get proven out why this is important.

• 1:47:13Speaker 01

  But

• 1:47:18Speaker 01

  I think I have made plenty of bad decisions for OpenAI along the way. And a lot of good ones, and I am proud of the track record overall, but I don't think any one person should. And I don't think any one person will. I think it's just like too big of a thing now and it's happening throughout society in a good and healthy way. I don't think any one person should be in control of an AGI. That would be, or, or, or, or this whole movement towards AGI. And I don't think that's what's happening.

• 1:47:46Lex Fridman?

  Thank you for saying that. That was really powerful. And that's really insightful that this idea that the board can fire you is legally true. But you can and human beings can manipulate the masses into

• 1:48:03Lex Fridman?

  overriding the board and so on. But I think there's also a much more positive version of that where the people still have power. So the board can't be too powerful either. There's a balance of power in all of this.

• 1:48:15Speaker 01

  Balance of power is a good thing for sure.

• 1:48:20Lex Fridman?

  Are you afraid of losing control of the AGI itself? That's a lot of people who worried about existential risk, not because of state actors, not because of security concerns, but because of the AI itself.

• 1:48:31Speaker 01

  That is not my top worry. As I currently see things, there have been times I worried about that more than maybe times, again, in the future where that's my top worry. It's not my top worry right now.

• 1:48:39Lex Fridman?

  What's your intuition about it not being your worry? Because there's a lot of other stuff to worry about essentially.

• 1:48:46Lex Fridman?

  You think you could be surprised? We-

• 1:48:48Speaker 01

  For sure.

• 1:48:48Lex Fridman?

  Could be surprised.

• 1:48:49Speaker 01

  Like, saying it's not my top worry doesn't mean, I don't think we need, like, I think we need to work on it super hard. We have, and we have great people here who do work on that. It's, I think there's a lot of other things we also have to get right.

• 1:49:01Lex Fridman?

  To you, it's not super easy to escape the box at this time? Like, connect to the internet?

• 1:49:07Speaker 01

  You know, we like talked about theatrical risks earlier. That's a theatrical risk, like, that is a, that is a thing that can really like take over how people think about this problem. And there's a big group of like, very smart, I think very well-meaning AI safety researchers that got super hung up on this one problem. I'd argue without much progress, but super hung up on this one problem. I'm actually happy that they do that, because I think we do need to think about this more. But I think it pushed aside, it pushed out of the space of discourse, a lot of the other very significant AI-related risks.

• 1:49:47Lex Fridman?

  Let me ask you about you tweeting with no capitalization. Does the shift key broken on your keyboard?

• 1:49:53Speaker 01

  Why does anyone care about that?

• 1:49:55Lex Fridman?

  I deeply care.

• 1:49:56Speaker 01

  But why? I mean, other people ask me about that, too.

• 1:49:59Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:01Speaker 01

  Any intuition?

• 1:50:03Lex Fridman?

  I think it's the same reason. There's like, this poet's E. Cummings that doesn't, mostly doesn't use capitalization to say like, fuck you to the system kind of thing. And I think people are very paranoid because they want you to follow the rules.

• 1:50:15Speaker 01

  You think that's what it's about?

• 1:50:16Lex Fridman?

  I think it's, it's, it's a-

• 1:50:18Speaker 01

  It's like this guy doesn't follow the rules. He doesn't capitalize his tweets.

• 1:50:21Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:22Speaker 01

  This seems really dangerous.

• 1:50:23Lex Fridman?

  He seems like an anarchist.

• 1:50:25Speaker 01

  It doesn't-

• 1:50:26Lex Fridman?

  Are you just being poetic hipster? What's the, uh-

• 1:50:30Speaker 01

  I grew up as-

• 1:50:30Lex Fridman?

  Follow the rules, Sam.

• 1:50:31Speaker 01

  I grew up as a very online kid. I'd spent a huge amount of time like chatting with people back in the days where you did it on a computer and, you know, you could like log off instant messenger at some point. And I never capitalized there.

• 1:50:45Speaker 01

  As I think most like internet kids didn't, or maybe they still don't, I don't know. And

• 1:50:54Speaker 01

  I actually, this is like, now I'm like, really trying to reach for something, but I think capitalization has gone down over time. Like, if you read like old English writing, they capitalized a lot of random words in the middle of sentences, nouns and stuff that we just don't do anymore. I personally think it's sort of like

• 1:51:11Speaker 01

  a dumb construct that we capitalized the letter at the beginning of a sentence and of certain names and whatever, but you know, I don't, that's fine. And then

• 1:51:21Speaker 01

  what I, and I used to, I think even like capitalized my tweets because I was trying to sound professional or something. I haven't capitalized my like private DMs or whatever in a long time. And then slowly

• 1:51:34Speaker 01

  stuff like

• 1:51:38Speaker 01

  shorter form, less formal stuff has slowly drifted to like closer and closer to like how I would text my friends. If I like write, if I like pull up a word document and I'm like writing a strategy memo for the company or something, I always capitalize that. If I'm writing like a long kind of more like formal message, I always use capitalization there too. So I still remember how to do it, but even that may fade out. I don't know. Like it's

• 1:52:05Speaker 01

  but I never spend time thinking about this. So I don't have like a ready made.

• 1:52:09Lex Fridman?

  Well, it's interesting. Well, it's good to first of all, know there's the shift key is not broken.

• 1:52:13Speaker 01

  It works.

• 1:52:13Lex Fridman?

  I was just mostly concerned about your

• 1:52:14Speaker 01

  No, it works.

• 1:52:14Lex Fridman?

  While being on that front.

• 1:52:16Speaker 01

  I wonder if people like still capitalize their Google searches. Like if you're writing something just to yourself or their chat GPT queries, if you're writing something just to yourself, do you still, do, do, do some people still bother to capitalize?

• 1:52:26Lex Fridman?

  Probably not, but very, yeah, there's a percentage, but it's a small one.

• 1:52:30Speaker 01

  The thing that would make me do it is if people were like

• 1:52:34Speaker 01

  it's a sign of like, because I, I'm sure I could like force myself to use capital letters, obviously. If, if, if it felt like a sign of respect to people or something, then I could go do it.

• 1:52:44Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:44Speaker 01

  But I don't know. I just like, I don't think about this.

• 1:52:47Lex Fridman?

  I don't think there's a disrespect, but I think it's just the conventions of civility. That have a momentum and then you realize that it's not actually important for civility if it's not a sign of respect or disrespect. But I think there's a movement of people that just want you to have a philosophy around it so they can let go of this whole capitalization thing.

• 1:53:05Speaker 01

  I don't think anybody else thinks about this as much. I mean, maybe some people, I know some people do.

• 1:53:09Lex Fridman?

  Think about this every day for many hours a day. So I'm thinking, I'm really grateful we clarified it.

• 1:53:14Speaker 01

  Can't be the only person that doesn't capitalize tweets.

• 1:53:16Lex Fridman?

  You're the only CEO of a company that doesn't capitalize tweets.

• 1:53:20Speaker 01

  I don't even think that's true, but maybe, maybe.

• 1:53:22Lex Fridman?

  All right, we'll investigate further and, and return to this topic later. Given Sora's ability to generate simulated worlds, let me ask you a pothead question. Does this increase your belief, if you ever had one, that we live in a simulation? Maybe a simulated world generated by an AI system?

• 1:53:50Speaker 01

  Yes, somewhat.

• 1:53:55Speaker 01

  I don't think that's like the strongest piece of evidence. I think the fact that we can generate worlds should increase everyone's probability somewhat, or at least open to it, openness to it somewhat. But, you know, I was like certain we would be able to do something like Sora at some point. It happened faster than I thought, but it, I guess that was not a big update.

• 1:54:19Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, but the fact that, and presumably it'll get better and better and better, the fact that you can generate worlds, they're novel. They're based in some aspect of training data, but like when you look at them, they're, they're novel.

• 1:54:36Lex Fridman?

  That makes you think like, how easy it is to do this thing? How easy is to create universes? Entire like video game worlds that seem ultra realistic and photorealistic? And then how easy is it to get lost in that world? First with a VR headset and then on a physics based level?

• 1:54:56Speaker 01

  Said to me recently, I thought it was a super profound insight that

• 1:55:03Speaker 01

  there are these like

• 1:55:06Speaker 01

  very simple sounding, but very psychedelic insights that exist sometimes. So the square root function. Square root of four, no problem. Square root of two, okay, now I have to like, think about this new kind of number.

• 1:55:29Speaker 01

  But once I come up with this easy idea of a square root function that, you know, you can kind of like, explain to a child and exists by even like, you know, looking at some simple geometry. Then you can ask the question of what is the square root of negative one?

• 1:55:46Speaker 01

  And that, this is, you know, why it's like a psychedelic thing, that like tips you into some whole other kind of reality.

• 1:55:53Speaker 01

  And you can come up with lots of other examples, but I think this idea that the lowly square root operator can offer such a profound

• 1:56:06Speaker 01

  insight and a new realm of knowledge

• 1:56:10Speaker 01

  applies in a lot of ways. And I think there are a lot of those operators for why people may think that any version that they like of the simulation hypothesis is maybe more likely than they thought before. But

• 1:56:27Speaker 01

  for me, the fact that Sora worked is not in the top five.

• 1:56:32Lex Fridman?

  I do think broadly speaking, AI will serve as those kinds of gateways at its best. Simple psychedelic like gateways to another wave, see reality.

• 1:56:43Speaker 01

  That seems for certain.

• 1:56:45Lex Fridman?

  That's pretty exciting. I haven't done ayahuasca before, but I will soon. I'm going to the aforementioned Amazon jungle in a few weeks.

• 1:56:53Speaker 01

  Excited?

• 1:56:54Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, I'm excited for it. Not the ayahuasca part, that's great, whatever. But I'm gonna spend several weeks in the jungle, deep in the jungle. And it's exciting, but it's terrifying.

• 1:57:04Speaker 01

  I'm excited for it.

• 1:57:04Lex Fridman?

  Because there's a lot of things that can eat you there and kill you and poison you. But it's also nature, and it's the machine of nature. And you can't help but appreciate the machinery of nature in the Amazon jungle. Because it's just like this system that just exists and renews itself like every second, every minute, every hour, just in, it's the machine. It makes you appreciate like, this thing we have here, this human thing, came from somewhere. This evolutionary machine has created that. And it's most clearly on display in the jungle. So hopefully I'll make it out alive. If not, this will be the last conversation we had, so I really deeply appreciate it. Do you think, as I mentioned before, there's other alien civilizations out there?

• 1:57:48Lex Fridman?

  Intelligent ones? When you look up at the skies?

• 1:58:03Speaker 01

  I deeply want to believe that the answer is yes. I do find the kind of where, I find the Fermi paradox very puzzling.

• 1:58:14Lex Fridman?

  I find it scary. That intelligence is not good at handling.

• 1:58:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, very scary.

• 1:58:20Lex Fridman?

  Powerful technologies. But at the same time, I think I'm pretty confident that there's just a very large number of intelligent alien civilizations out there. It might just be really difficult to travel through space.

• 1:58:33Speaker 01

  Very possible.

• 1:58:36Lex Fridman?

  And it also makes me think about the nature of intelligence. Maybe we're really blind to what intelligence looks like. And maybe AI will help us see that. It's not as simple as IQ tests and simple puzzle solving. There's something bigger.

• 1:58:52Lex Fridman?

  What gives you hope about the future of humanity? This thing we've got going on, this human civilization?

• 1:58:59Speaker 01

  I think the past is like a lot. I mean, we just look at what humanity has done in a not very long period of time.

• 1:59:07Speaker 01

  You know, huge problems, deep flaws, lots to be super ashamed of. But on the whole, very inspiring. Gives me a lot of hope.

• 1:59:15Lex Fridman?

  Just the trajectory of it all?

• 1:59:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:59:17Lex Fridman?

  That we're together pushing towards a better future?

• 1:59:23Speaker 01

  It is.

• 1:59:26Speaker 01

  You know, one, one thing that I wonder about is, is, is AGI going to be more like some single brain? Or is it more like the sort of scaffolding in society between all of us? You have not had a great deal of genetic drift from your great, great, great grandparents. And yet what you're capable of is dramatically different. What you know is dramatically different. And that is not, that's not because of biological change. It is because, I mean, you got a little bit healthier, probably. You have modern medicine, you eat better, whatever. But what you have is this scaffolding that we all contributed to, built on top of. No one person is going to go build the iPhone.

• 2:00:11Speaker 01

  No one person is going to go discover all of science. And yet you get to use it. And that gives you incredible ability. And so in some sense, the like, we all created that. And that fills me with hope for the future. That was a very collective thing.

• 2:00:26Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, we really are standing on the shoulders of giants. You mentioned when we were talking about theatrical, dramatic AI risks, that sometimes you might be afraid for your own life. Do you think about your death? Are you afraid of it?

• 2:00:44Speaker 01

  I mean, I like, if I got shot tomorrow and I knew it today, I'd be like, oh, that's sad. I like, don't, you know, I want to see what's going to happen.

• 2:00:52Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:53Speaker 01

  What a curious time, what an interesting time.

• 2:00:58Speaker 01

  But I would mostly just feel like very grateful for my life.

• 2:01:01Lex Fridman?

  The moments that you did get.

• 2:01:04Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, me too. It's a pretty awesome life. I get to enjoy awesome creations of humans, of which I believe ChatGPT is one of, and everything that OpenAI is doing. Sam, it's really an honor and pleasure to talk to you again.

• 2:01:22Speaker 01

  Great to talk to you. Thank you for having me.

• 2:01:24Lex Fridman?

  Thanks for listening to this conversation with Sam Altman. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, let me leave you with some words from Arthur C. Clarke. "It may be that our role on this planet is not to worship God, but to create Him."

• 2:01:43Lex Fridman?

  Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.