Full Interview: Sam Altman on Sora and the Future of OpenAI

A rare live interview with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Sora head Bill Peebles. John and Jordi talk through the first 10 days of the Sora app, how AI will change advertising, and what Sora means for Hollywood. TBPN.com is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.com Figma - https://figma.com Vanta - https://vanta.com Linear - https://linear.app Eight Sleep - https://eightsleep.com/tbpn Wander - https://wander.com/tbpn Public - https://public.com AdQuick - https://adquick.com Bezel - https://getbezel.com Numeral - https://www.numeralhq.com Polymarket - https://polymarket.com Attio - https://attio.com/tbpn Fin - https://fin.ai/tbpn Graphite - https://graphite.dev Restream - https://restream.io Profound - https://tryprofound.com Julius AI - https://julius.ai turbopuffer - https://turbopuffer.com fal - https://fal.ai Privy - https://www.privy.io Cognition - https://cognition.ai Gemini - https://gemini.google.com Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235 https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

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

• 0:00John Coogan?

  And we are joined by Sam Altman and Bill Peebles. Sam, Bill, how are you doing?

• 0:05Jordi Hays?

  What's going on?

• 0:06Speaker 02

  Hey, guys.

• 0:07Sam Altman?

  Hey, guys.

• 0:07John Coogan?

  Great to see you. Congrats on all the progress. I've been enjoying Sora a ton. Personally, I've been enjoying making them. I had a ton of fun making the collab posts yesterday. And I was wondering-

• 0:21Jordi Hays?

  And prompting your cameo feature. John made it so that he always appears as a bodybuilder if anybody's cameoing him. So you guys got to experience-

• 0:31John Coogan?

  And it led to some chaotic results. Do you have favorite Sora posts that you've been coming back to? Or that have stuck out to you as particularly creative uses?

• 0:43Sam Altman?

  I mean, definitely all of the ones of like me stealing GPUs or doing other crazy things to get GPUs have been funny. In the last few days, there are, at least in my feed, there are these like very beautiful, sort of fantastic scenes that are just not things that could have ever existed without something like Sora, or wouldn't have been easy to make. And watching people build those and watching the trends flow through, that has been pretty awesome.

• 1:08John Coogan?

  What about you, Bill? Any favorite uses of Sora so far?

• 1:12Speaker 02

  Oh, man. Mark Cuban came on the platform a few days ago, and there have been some hilarious Shark Tank memes. Those are probably my favorite, pitching some Sora features to Mark.

• 1:22Jordi Hays?

  Also leveraging the prompting function to always include an ad for Costco plus drugs, I thought was especially hilarious, considering he's been one of the most vocal opponents of advertising in AI. He is leveraging the feature to the max.

• 1:38Sam Altman?

  Yeah, I think there are going to be all of these weird new dynamics that we see emerge that just weren't possible in previous kinds of video. And this is like a fun period because it's all going to be so different every few days. Man, I'm watching this Polly Market ticker go by, and it's so tempting to say things to those.

• 1:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. To be clear, don't worry about the ticker. I don't think we're including, I don't think any of those markets are being featured in the ticker. But yeah, again, this is the new world we're in.

• 2:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, you can move the market live on TBPN.

• 2:11Jordi Hays?

  But today, people I'm sure will be happy or disappointed. We're here to talk about Sora.

• 2:16John Coogan?

  Yes, yes.

• 2:17Jordi Hays?

  So none of the other topics.

• 2:20John Coogan?

  But I mean, I also want to know about ads. Why no ads in Sora on day one? I feel like you've laid out a really great, you know, mental model for how you think about ads on Stratechery, on the Andreessen Horowitz podcast. I'm bought in. Is it a technical thing? Do you need scale? Do you need to think about it more? Why no ads on day one?

• 2:44Sam Altman?

  This is like a 10-day-old product, right? Like, it's hard to get anything to work at all. And we like, we don't, we don't assume success. We gotta like, go hard-earned success, and then we can, then we can think about monetization for it. But this is like, it's gone great so far. It's still very early, and there's still a lot of work to build something that a lot of people are gonna love first.

• 3:05John Coogan?

  What about surprising capabilities of the model? You mentioned that you've seen some fantastical scenes. I'm interested to know about specific, like, specific breakthroughs that you've noticed that Sora to the model is particularly good at. I noticed one about reflections being great. Obviously, people love the cameos. But what has surprised you in terms of just like, technically, the model can do something now that it couldn't do before?

• 3:30Speaker 02

  This model is a huge leap forward in terms of physics IQ. So pretty much all past video generation models really struggled with prompts that, you know, involve like backflips, gymnastics routines, etc. And this is really the only model that exists today, which can reliably handle these kinds of really complicated dynamics. One of the big features that people have really loved on the app so far is the steerability of the model. So, you know, if you give it like, a really simple text prompt, that's maybe even only a few words, this model is really good about kind of telling a coherent story with like, a beginning, middle, and end, and doing this like, automatically in a way that doesn't require like, a lot of direct steering from the user. If you want to like, go into, you know, a ton of detail, about exactly how your prompt should be laid out and how the story should unfold, it supports that too. So it can kind of meet you wherever

• 4:13Speaker 02

  you're at in the creative process. But really, this model is just like, so hyper-steerable. And it's like, Just vastly higher physics IQ just makes it able to do things that were like not possible a few months ago.

• 4:23John Coogan?

  Is that all within the model or is there some sort of like reasoning step where you're hydrating or unpacking my prompt and writing a bigger prompt or breaking down the problem in some way? Can you share anything about that?

• 4:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's a good question. So, you know, the intelligence for these text conditional video models kind of lies both in the core model itself like Sora and some amount of it also comes in through the text prompt. So, you know, however the user decides to kickstart a prompt, you can have like a language model under the hood, add some details in. But for example, you know, when it comes to things like, again, like doing these backflips or any kind of physical interactions, how refraction is modeled, you know, when you're pouring water into a glass. All of these details have to be captured by the core video model itself. So that's intelligence, which is really innate to Sora. And certainly you can supplement it with intelligence from a language model as well. But it's not necessarily a prerequisite to get kind of amazing results out of these things.

• 5:15John Coogan?

  Are there any areas on the physics where you think that the model falls down and you want to improve? I mean, we went through the era of like six fingers. It seems like reflections of water are solved, but someone was saying something about doors being hard or I haven't noticed that one personally, but a lot of the stuff's great. But what have you noticed is like the next version is going to be even better at?

• 5:34Sam Altman?

  This is still very early. A thing Bill said that I appreciated is this is like the GPT 3.5 moment per video.

• 5:42John Coogan?

  I agree.

• 5:42Sam Altman?

  And if you went back to use the actual GPT 3.5, you'd be like, okay, signs of great promise can do the occasional impressive thing. But it was really not until GPT 4 where these text models started providing real value for people. And we know how to go make the GPT 4 equivalent of video models and we will do that. And then a lot of these things that are currently annoying like doors or, you know, once in a while, something goes through something else it's not supposed to. In the same way that the world, you know, loved to complain for a brief period of time about where 3.5 fell down and, oh, it's never going to be useful. It's never going to do this. It's never going to do that. And then we were able to just keep making it better and better and better and better. The model

• 6:23Sam Altman?

  physics IQ is certainly the best I've ever seen, but it is nowhere near as good as it will be in the future versions. And I think, I hope, we'll see a similar thing to what happened with the GPT text models, which is people will always demand more and better and they will always find new and better things to use it for. And the world will just make ever more amazing videos.

• 6:47Jordi Hays?

  How quickly?

• 6:48John Coogan?

  Oh, sorry.

• 6:48Jordi Hays?

  How quickly?

• 6:49Speaker 02

  We're so early on the tech curve for video here.

• 6:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 6:51Speaker 02

  Uh, like GPT-1 really was Sora 1, uh, for this modality. And the progress we've made kind of in the last 18 months, getting to this 3.5 moment, right? It's really compressed compared to how long it took to go from GPT-1 to 3.5 in the language domain. So we're really expecting progress to continue to be meteoric here in the near future.

• 7:09Jordi Hays?

  How quickly do you expect the cameo feature to be cloned? That feels like a, a, a equally important part of the, you know, the, the model's made a leap, but the product is in the experience and the, the, the experience of creating, uh, these assets is, uh, wildly innovative. We saw stories get cloned. We saw, saw, uh, you know, algo video short form feeds get cloned. I, I expect many other platforms to be looking at this functionality and realizing that this might be, uh, the future. You guys certainly believe, uh, that, that it could be, uh, important. So how quickly do you think?

• 7:49Sam Altman?

  We're actually totally okay with a world where we do the product innovation and everybody else copies. And I don't think it works for them as well as they think it does. Like the, the, you know, a lot of people have tried copying ChatGPT, uh, in, you can go look at some of our competitors' apps and they even copy the mistakes. They even copy the design decisions we really wish we hadn't made. And maybe it's worked well for them. I guess I kind of hope it has, but it's been fine for us. I, I, I think like the, the, the key to this is not any one innovation, but it's repeatedly putting them out again and again and being first to come up with them and put them into a cohesive offering. And, you know, that's what we want to be good at. And if other people want to clone the stuff that works, we also sometimes clone stuff that works. That's fine.

• 8:32Sam Altman?

  But, but mostly we want to be able to drive the innovation. And I think Bill and his team have done an incredible job of figuring out how people actually want to use these video models, what the models need to do. Really they've approached this as a full stack problem from how do you train the video model? To how do you make this enjoyable for users? But cameos are one out of many ideas they have from here on the journey to like the product that we hope to eventually build. And so if people take some inspiration from us and copy us along the way, I'm sure they will. It's fine.

• 9:05John Coogan?

  How do you think about the like popular claim that we want AI detection? I want AI content flagged. Is that a stated preference that's not a revealed preference? Because personally, I don't want bad AI content, but I don't want bad human-made content either. I want great both, and I'm fine when someone comes up with something genius and they instantiate it with a video model. How do you think about it?

• 9:35Sam Altman?

  I think that is the real thing is you don't want slop, you want great content.

• 9:40John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 9:41Sam Altman?

  Different people, one man's slop is another man's treasure for sure. But what you care about is like good, original, thoughtful, new, helpful, whatever content. And whether that is generated entirely by a human or entirely by AI, or what I expect will mostly happen in the future, which is tool-assisted, human-driven generation. I don't think you care that much if the content is great. There's a lot of like, you know, stuff that is technically written or drawn or filmed by a human, but is completely derivative and much less original than what an AI has generated. And I think that will be what people really care about long-term. You just

• 10:24Sam Altman?

  want great content. Now, I also do want some human connection with it. When I read a great book, first thing I want to do is read about the author that wrote it and what life experience went into that. I don't think that'll go away. But if they're using an AI as a tool to help them make the writing better, sign me up. That sounds great. Similarly, I would rather watch a video about someone I know than some random AI-generated character, which is part of why I think this was cool to offer. One design decision the team made that I thought was really great, and I was actually pushing them in a different direction earlier on, and then I decided they were totally right, and I thanked them and dropped it, was the fact that the feed is AI-only.

• 11:04Sam Altman?

  And not a mix of AI plus some uploaded videos. I think is a subtle but extremely important design decision in how people are relating to this.

• 11:13John Coogan?

  Yeah, it was a very weird experience for me. I was I was thinking about the collab post that I was making announcing this interview. And my initial thing was like, well, I'm gonna have to think of a script or I'm gonna have to think of, you know, what I say, or I should record a piece of this and then I'll use it. And it was like, no, I just type the prompt and then I get the front facing videos remarkable.

• 11:32Jordi Hays?

  What are you, what kind of indicators are are you guys looking at as Sora can transition from what it was the second it launched, which was a creative tool into something that's more of a consum- like a consumption platform, traditional, you know, social media platform, like what, talk about kind of what you guys are pushing forward to. Because obviously you're seeding seeding the the network with with the tool. But it's it's certainly much harder to turn it into something that people are spending hours a day and purely consuming content and not creating content.

• 12:08Speaker 02

  You know, we really wanted to design this from the ground up to be centered around creation. And a lot of the metrics that we've been focused on optimizing here are really aligned with making sure as many people as possible are actually like getting their hands on the source to model itself and, you know, able to create content with their friends and like for the rest of the world. One metric that we're really proud of with this launch so far is that 70% of our users are actually creating content even to this day, you know, a week and a half after launch. And that's like vastly higher than on any other social media platform. And I think it really speaks to just how fun creation can be with the right tool set, right? If you look at any of these kind of legacy platforms, there's just like so much friction from like getting off the feed

• 12:51Speaker 02

  and like into some creative flow state, right? You have to like put the phone down, have to go get like a camcorder, start recording yourself, find your friends, like do a dance, etc. It's just like a lot of work, right? On Sora, like you can just pick up your phone, find a like any video you like in the feed, remix it, you know, cameo any of your friends. And I think one insight that was not obvious to us at first, but we've kind of clearly seen as an emergent behavior of this product. It's just like there's all these people out there who would not necessarily want to be like, you know, influencers or something or have like a big social media presence. But the fact that like all of their friends can just access their cameo, right? Put them in all of these crazy situations actually like kind of gets them into the playing field in a way that felt really high friction before.

• 13:33Speaker 02

  And so, you know, we're closing in on close to like 2 million weekly active users now. We're really excited that such a huge percentage of that user base to this day is like still creating with Sora and we're going to continue pushing on that direction and making sure people have even more powerful tools in the future.

• 13:48John Coogan?

  Yeah, so 70% of Sora users are creating content. The typical benchmark that people kind of quote randomly is like 1% creation, 99% consumption, something like that. And that certainly feels like my experience on Instagram. I post a photo every once in a while, but most of the time I'm just kind of scrolling. And I'm wondering if you think that that 1% will be much higher on Sora in terms of actual time in the app, time prompting versus time scrolling. If you have any data, that'd be super interesting. But then also, does that make it more of like a competitor to video games than traditional social media because it's such a lean forward experience versus just lay back? What do you think?

• 14:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's a great question. We still need to study this more exactly how creation versus consumption habits kind of change over time for folks on the platform. It's still pretty early days. I do agree with your point, though, that I think over time, this is going to feel much more immersive in a way that like video games kind of do. Like you have more agency when you're actually using the platform, you know, not just kind of like mindlessly scrolling a feed like hours a day. And like one interpretation of this product, which I think is kind of interesting, especially from the research perspective, right, is cameos in some ways like the simplest way where you can kind of like inject yourself into the model, right? So it's a very low bandwidth communication channel right now, you know? You're only giving like a few seconds of video footage of like any given individual like into the app.

• 15:15Speaker 02

  But like over time, right, you can imagine like these models know more and more about your life. They really like deeply understand your friends, how you wanna like show up in the world. And like over time, this can almost become like a little mini like alternate reality, right? So like you're not just generating like videos of yourself with your friends. Like you actually just have like digital copies of yourself running in the model on this Sora platform, interacting with other people with agency. And so I think over time, we're really gonna see this platform evolve into, you know, something that feels kind of familiar today into something that really leans into like the full intelligence of Sora 2 in the future and like really leverages all the world simulation capabilities that we're working on internally.

• 15:50Sam Altman?

  Yeah, I would add to that, that if, if you think of this like spectrum of the kind of entertainment you can have in front of a computer, at one end, you have like watch a two and a half hour movie and you hit play and then you lean back and you don't do anything at all. And then at the other end, you have like a very intense video game and you're like, you know, sweating and your heart's racing and it's like super, super active. AI is gonna push things to be more in between there. So you'll have, maybe you're still watching that movie, but now you can like, say something a few times throughout the course of it and it changes what happens as the movie plays out. Or with Sora, you're seeing this amazing new phenomenon where most users are creating in a, in a world where traditionally only 1% of them did.

• 16:35Sam Altman?

  And so you're, yes, you're like watching a video feed, but you're, you're doing a little bit more. And it, at least for me, really changes how fun the whole thing is and how I feel about it. Then maybe you'll do what Bill said and you'll have like, you'll be way more actively participating in a Sora feed and I, I think you're just gonna see that continuum blur a lot more.

• 16:52John Coogan?

  Did you see Bandersnatch by any chance, Sam? Have you seen this Netflix, it's like a Netflix choose your own adventure and it was really cool idea, but ultimately people, it never really took off and became like something that they do again and again and again. And I'm wondering if it was because it was like not customizable enough, or people just want to just sit back and see a director's vision. I don't know. Anyway.

• 17:12Sam Altman?

  I never heard of that, but it sounds cool.

• 17:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 17:14Jordi Hays?

  How do you think, a question for Sam. How do you think about allocating, allocating compute to Sora versus the rest of the business? I imagine Bill is constantly in your ear.

• 17:25Sam Altman?

  Always.

• 17:26Jordi Hays?

  Every, every other hour, but how are you thinking about it?

• 17:30Sam Altman?

  You know, my real answer is I've entirely changed my focus of how I spend my days to just go get more compute, rather than have to make the compute allocation decisions. I still do have to make some short-term compute allocation decisions, but I hope we're heading to a world where. I am instead telling people you got to find a way to use more compute and we're going to be

• 17:50Sam Altman?

  we're going to be very aggressive here.

• 17:51John Coogan?

  It feels like you're doing a great job of like bringing things within your control, within the supply chain. What is outside of your control at this point?

• 18:01Sam Altman?

  I mean, most of it.

• 18:04John Coogan?

  But I feel like you have great, you have great partners all up and down the stack, multiple partners in different parts of the chain. Like when I think about scaling up Sora, I, I, I feel like it's crazy to bet against you. Like you're gonna, you're gonna get the chips. You're not gonna be GPU four.

• 18:17Sam Altman?

  You go try to buy like 10 gigawatts power for delivery next year. It's not so easy.

• 18:23John Coogan?

  It's funny.

• 18:24Jordi Hays?

  How are the conversations going with, with Hollywood?

• 18:27John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 18:28Speaker 02

  Oh, actually.

• 18:29Sam Altman?

  Yeah, you take it.

• 18:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, I was gonna say, we've been chatting actually with a few, you know, very notable folks in Hollywood over the last week. You know, I think people's first reaction to this is like very understandably going to involve a lot of trepidation and like anxiety. When we've gotten to just sit in a room with these folks, though, you know, and really explain what we're building, I've actually been pretty struck by like how excited folks in Hollywood are about this. You know, we were chatting with, with one actor recently who mentioned that, you know, on Twitter, like a year ago, saw like a deep fake of her generated with one of these like open source models, which really had like a lot of nasty content created. And when we really like, we walked her through kind of all of our safety mitigations, right? How we're making sure that

• 19:14Speaker 02

  we have this like very well-defined model spec, which dictates the behavior that, that we allow on this platform, and how we are really leaning into like full control of likeness, right? More so than any other platform. Like you have to come in through the cameo process. You can't just like upload an image of yourself and just like generate a video of it of like any person. You have to come in through cameo. And it became clear to her that, you know, we're really setting The right standard here in terms of making sure people are in full control of their likeness in Hollywood. I think that's where like a lot of this anxiety comes from, right? It's this feeling that, you know, some random person can just kind of take videos or images of you and do whatever they want with them and create all of this like, like, like terrible content that's like outside of your purview. But we've really been like designing Sora

• 19:56Speaker 02

  from the ground up to put users in full control of their likeness end to end. From the moment you sign into the app to, you know, needing cameo permissions to like access any of your friends' generations. So, you know, I think we need to engage more with Hollywood and we're going to continue to do that. But once we really explain the story of Sora, you know, they're very receptive to it.

• 20:14John Coogan?

  Do you think there's a world?

• 20:15Sam Altman?

  To add something to that, I, I, like, you know, I, the team asked me before launch if they could put my cameo in their open access. And I of course thought about it for a second and said, absolutely yes. I had all these Hollywood celebrities then messaging me on the first day being like, you're absolutely crazy. This is insane. This is like the dumbest thing I've ever said. And then by about the third day, they were like, hmm, that was really smart. You got like a lot of, you know, free publicity. Maybe we need to be doing that. And I think you're now seeing actual celebrities say, okay, I'm gonna do this. And I expect a lot more of them will. Similar thing on other kinds of characters and IP. I can totally imagine a world where our problem in a year or six months or maybe even less is not that

• 20:57Sam Altman?

  people don't want their cameos or their characters appearing, but they think we are not fairly having their characters or cameo appearing often enough.

• 21:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 21:08Sam Altman?

  This may turn out to be a really big thing for fan connection. Now, it may be that kind of the previous generation of celebrities don't want to do this and the influencer celebrities all do. I don't know how that's gonna go, but, but I bet this will be like a pretty deep kind of new connection.

• 21:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, it seems like it's been good for DiCaprio in the memes. Like, he's not directly monetizing those when you show the champagne meme or him pointing at the TV, but like, you know, it builds his aura in some way.

• 21:34Jordi Hays?

  A friend of ours posted something yesterday. This, uh, this is Jeremy Gaffon. He said, "The reason we're so upset about slop is because it's obvious we're all going to be, going to love consuming it in two to three years. It's not going to be slop for long." Do you agree, Sam?

• 21:50Speaker 02

  I mean, some of it will be slopped to some people and some of it won't. I I remember like there was a real reaction like this in the early GPT days. Where people were like, I can't believe anyone reads this. It's like total crap. It's full of hallucinations. You know, it's like, it's not useful to anyone. And then it became more useful to some people, but they said, I can't believe anybody like ever thinks this thing writes a beautiful sentence. That's insane. And then with GPT five, you have authors saying like, wow, this is a useful tool. It sometimes like writes a beautiful sentence.

• 22:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 22:19Speaker 02

  Uh, and I kind of think it'll follow a similar trajectory.

• 22:22John Coogan?

  What do you think about the fact that people feel at least, I don't know if they actually can, but it feels like you can still clock GPT five writing, you know, it's not this, it's that, the M dash like will we still see these artifacts in three years in Sora five that people are like, oh, if you know, you know, you can tell, but most people can't.

• 22:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's like, what's the M dash of of video? Because I don't think it's like six fingers.

• 22:46John Coogan?

  No, no, definitely not. That's the typo, which doesn't happen anymore.

• 22:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think right now the M dash is like this like slightly wired speech pattern in Sora where it likes to say a lot of words very quickly. You know, these these generations definitely have like a style to them. Um, I I think analogously to GPT, we really want to give users a lot of control over exactly how their videos show up right on the platform. Like if you really want kind of like a very soothing experience, right? Not a lot of shot changes going on. We want to give users the ability to generate that. Uh, we're going to continue to get more optionality to people. So, you know, there'll be some default kind of behaviors and quirks of uh, of Sora, for sure, but uh, we definitely want all power users to be able to be in full control.

• 23:28John Coogan?

  Random question, where did the name Sora come from?

• 23:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, uh, this is a fun one. Um, so the original Sora came out uh, in February twenty twenty four, the OG blog post.

• 23:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 23:39Speaker 02

  We uh, did not have a name for it. I think like up to two days before we like revealed the model to the world. Uh, we just could not agree uh, on the team what it should be.

• 23:49John Coogan?

  Did you at least have a code word or something?

• 23:51Speaker 02

  We didn't. We just called it like video gen.

• 23:53John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 23:54Speaker 02

  And so, uh, at some ungodly hour, I like just started.

• 24:00Speaker 02

  Pumping a bunch of crazy ideas into ChatGPT. And then like, we basically ran out of like English words, so then we switched to like Japanese words.

• 24:06John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 24:06Speaker 02

  Uh, and then Sora came out, like, wow, that sounds really nice. It means sky, you know, linked with like imagination, like all the possibilities of creation. And so then we just like last minute shipped Sora. So.

• 24:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 24:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was kind of a mad dash.

• 24:18John Coogan?

  Okay, speaking of Japanese stuff, uh, Sam, you said you were looking for an Acura NSX a while back. Uh, it's kind of this throwback car, very, it's not a Waymo. Uh, what do you think the piece of content or format will be that, uh, remains loved? Uh, in an age where everyone's taking the Waymo of video, the Sora of video generation? What do you think is like?

• 24:40Sam Altman?

  Well, first of all, I got that NSX and it lived up to all of the childhood hype. I mean, just incredible. Like, that car is so fantastic.

• 24:49John Coogan?

  That's great.

• 24:51Sam Altman?

  And I, I don't know, I kind of think there's going to be a lot of stuff like that for people that generated or not, where you still, you want the real thing, you want the thing that you have the kind of childhood connection to. Uh, you know, someone like a kid today is not going to want the NSX, but whatever the, a cool car like that is, they will want. And at some point, like, the fact that they can have like a crazy VR experience, they'll still want the real thing and the connection to it and everything they have. So I, I think there will be a huge amount of that. In fact, I think the future looks like much more of that kind of stuff, not much less.

• 25:26Jordi Hays?

  How quickly do you want to create an economy on Sora? It feels like there would be a, a number of ways that you could create incentives for creators to create things, for IP holders, for individuals to just be passively monetizing their likeness.

• 25:45John Coogan?

  Bill, what do you think for timing on that?

• 25:47Speaker 02

  I mean, this is like a top priority for the team, you know? There's clearly such an incredible value proposition for celebrities, for rights holders across the board here. Um, we think Cameo is like a great entry point for this, right? You can imagine, right now, we have Cameos for people, maybe you have Cameos for like. You know, your character or like your brand or something. And so we're actively working on the team right now, coming up with like the right monetization model here to get this rolled out. But it's really important to us, right? That our creators on the platform are rewarded and that there are clear, you know, financial incentives. Feel like the incredible work that they're already doing. So this is like top of mind for us and we'll have updates here over the coming weeks. This is like something we're actively working on.

• 26:28Sam Altman?

  I, I, I will, I, I think it's super important and awesome. I, I will say, I, I would like to know how many hours of sleep Bill has averaged for the last few weeks, but I bet it's not enough. So we got a lot of stuff. The team's got a lot of stuff they have to do in a short period of time and it's going to take a little while.

• 26:41John Coogan?

  Okay, let me put one more thing on your plate, Sam. I mean, earlier, like years ago, you built Looped, location-based product. Have you thought about how AI and location-based content fits together? Like on most of these social apps, you can tag a location. It wouldn't even make sense in the current Sora app, but what does the AI Maps product look like?

• 27:08Sam Altman?

  I haven't thought about AI and location that much, but I've thought about like how AI can really change the social experience for people.

• 27:19Sam Altman?

  We don't have like a for sure answer yet. We have like a lot of interesting threads to pull on. And I have thought back to like my days running that startup there more. My instinct is it is possible to make a very interesting new kind of social experience, connecting you to people, helping you find people that is intermediated by AI in an interesting way.

• 27:44Sam Altman?

  But, you know, we'd have a lot of exploration to do there.

• 27:47John Coogan?

  What advice are you giving to startup founders these days? Uh, I remember in the GPT 3.5, GPT 4 days, it was like, don't build a company that assumes model stagnation. How do you think about in the age of Sora?

• 28:01Jordi Hays?

  That's been really great advice.

• 28:02John Coogan?

  It really has. It planned out, it played out exactly like that. There's a bunch of great companies that aren't built that way and they've done great. But if you, if you were just, oh, I have a special prompt that tunes up GPT 4. Yeah, bad times. But how are you thinking about it now in the context of video and Sora specifically? You obviously do have an API, you have Dev Day, there's people that will build on top of this. Is it a different shape of the problem?

• 28:26Sam Altman?

  Totally. The, the reaction to. The API has been nuts positive, like at least the fastest ramping revenue I've ever seen for one of our new models in the API. I mean, maybe there was something faster than I'm not remembering, but the demand there has been just incredible and people are doing awesome stuff with it. Um, Bill and I have not had a chance for a one on one since launch because it's been so crazy. We're doing one later. We're doing one later today. But one of the things I was going to suggest to him was that we, given how much excitement there is to build on this stuff, that we do something we don't usually do and put out our intended roadmap of the things we're going to prioritize because I can imagine really cool new startups

• 29:07Sam Altman?

  that simply were not possible, that will be possible if each of these new things will ship.

• 29:12Jordi Hays?

  So I, I had a question when you guys released the Sora 2 via API, which was that if Sora has the potential to be a Instagram or YouTube scale business, why release part of your edge for the entire world that they can integrate into other creative tools and then use the model to generate content that doesn't have a watermark, that's not in your feed, that you're not able to get that feedback loop on that you guys do with the Sora app?

• 29:42Sam Altman?

  For ChatGPT, we also put out a great model in the API and people can theoretically compete with us on ChatGPT and some try to, but like, we are willing, we're never going to build every cool use of the technology and we want the world to get all that stuff. We're delighted to also get paid on people using our API, but like, we just want AI to flourish out in the world. We're not going to build every great use of what you can do with video models either. We'll build one and I think it's pretty awesome, but people have a lot of other ideas of businesses and products to go build and we'd like to enable those.

• 30:15John Coogan?

  Okay, last question, back to cars. What's wrong with the Porsche 911?

• 30:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you said earlier, the timeline was in turmoil. You said if you're worth, uh, somebody said, uh,

• 30:26John Coogan?

  If you're five million net worth.

• 30:27Jordi Hays?

  If you buy a 911, you said no, you agreed with PG. What, what did you mean by?

• 30:34Sam Altman?

  I mean, it was, maybe it was like a tasteless joke. It was kind of like late at night. I was, you know, whatever. But I, I have an unfortunate proclivity for expensive cars. And, and the response was like, would you ever spend 250K on a car? And I took that literally.

• 30:50John Coogan?

  That's amazing.

• 30:52Jordi Hays?

  Hit the size gong for taking it literally. No, no time for 250K cars.

• 30:58Sam Altman?

  But I probably, that was not my best tweet.

• 31:01John Coogan?

  Yeah, no, I, I, I enjoy it now.

• 31:04Jordi Hays?

  We all enjoyed it.

• 31:05John Coogan?

  I enjoy it now. I have the context. Congratulations on all the progress to both of you. Thank you so much for taking the time to stop by the show.

• 31:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, really appreciate the update.

• 31:12John Coogan?

  And very excited to see where this goes. Thank you so much.

• 31:15Sam Altman?

  Cheers.

• 31:15John Coogan?

  Thank you. We'll talk to you soon.