FULL INTERVIEW: Sam Altman Responds to Anthropic’s Attack Ads, Live on TBPN

This is our full interview with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, recorded live on TBPN. We discuss Anthropic's Super Bowl ads, Codex 5.3, why managing AI agents is the next interface shift, and how chips, power, and compute bottlenecks will shape the future of AI. TBPN is a live tech talk show hosted by John Coogan and Jordi Hays, streaming weekdays from 11–2 PT on X and YouTube, with full episodes posted to podcast platforms immediately after. Described by The New York Times as “Silicon Valley’s newest obsession,” TBPN has recently featured Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Mark Cuban, and Satya Nadella.

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

• 0:00Jordi Hays?

  Well, we have our first guest to the show.

• 0:02John Coogan?

  Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI. He's in the restream waiting room. Welcome to the show, Sam. How are you doing?

• 0:07Jordi Hays?

  Welcome back.

• 0:08Sam Altman?

  Good. Thank you, guys, for having me back.

• 0:09John Coogan?

  Thanks so much.

• 0:10Jordi Hays?

  Big day.

• 0:10John Coogan?

  Big day. Kick us off with, where should we start? Should we start with the model or Frontier?

• 0:17Sam Altman?

  Can we start with the model just because I'm having so much on it?

• 0:19John Coogan?

  Yeah, absolutely. Break it down. What did you launch?

• 0:21Sam Altman?

  So we launched 5.3 Codex. It is, I think, the best coding model in the world. We took a lot of the feedback that people had about 5.2, 5.2 Codex and got it into one model. It is much smarter at programming, but it's also way faster. You can interact with it mid-turn. I think it's got a much better personality. It's really good at computer use. So it feels like a very big step forward. It was funny as we were deploying it this morning. A couple of very, like, extremely experts using these models noticed and said, man, something's really different with Codex. And they, like, caught it mid-deploy. So I think you can really feel it quickly.

• 0:56John Coogan?

  That's great.

• 0:56Jordi Hays?

  Oh, you're saying people outside of OpenAI, just everyday users?

• 0:59Sam Altman?

  Yeah, I like the hour that we put it out before we, you know.

• 1:02John Coogan?

  Talk about interacting with a mid-turn. How does that work? Why is that important? What does that unlock?

• 1:08Sam Altman?

  So people are starting to use these, these tools for very long pieces of work at one time, you know, multi-hour tasks. And sometimes you don't specify it correctly, right? Sometimes something is not set up right, something, the song will just screws up. The ability, they can do amazing things with no steering, but they can do much more amazing things if you steer them along the way. So this has been, this is one of the things I felt most new about this model.

• 1:30John Coogan?

  So talk about orchestration, how this fits into Frontier, because I imagine that...

• 1:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, one second. It's notable, like, if you see a coworker making a mistake and you don't interrupt them, that's rude, right? Like, it's deeply inefficient.

• 1:44Sam Altman?

  It is incredible what these models can do without any feedback. Like, if you think about a new coworker especially, you know, you train them and you give them a lot of feedback early on. They learn the job and you correct them and they, they kind of get practicing. The models, they will soon do that. But right now, they don't do that. So we just rely on either they get it right one shot or we collect them, correct them along the way.

• 2:05John Coogan?

  Yeah. So, you know, I think there's a lot of people that are running multiple agents and multiple tabs. They're starting to think about orchestration. It feels like Frontier is a piece of that. But if you're interacting with a model that's running mid-turn, like, how does the user experience change for developers with 5.3? And then what will it look like in the Frontier world?

• 2:27Sam Altman?

  I think we will be heading towards a workflow where a lot of people just feel like they're managing a team of agents and they'll keep, as the agents get better, they'll keep operating at a higher and higher level of abstraction, which at least watching what's happening so far is a, is a jump that people are gonna make pretty well. The, the models are so good now, there's such a capability overhang that building better tools to let people do that, which the Codex app that we launched on Monday was a great step forward for, will be very, very important, but you will be managing very complex workflows. The agents will keep getting better, so you'll keep working at the maximum of your management bandwidth or cognitive ability to keep track of all the stuff, and the tools to make that

• 3:12Sam Altman?

  easy to do will matter, I think, more than intelligence for a little while, because there's such an intelligence overhang already.

• 3:19John Coogan?

  What's the role of a forward deployed engineer today at OpenAI towards the end of the year, capability overhang that feels like raw meat for a, for a forward deployed engineer, it's like the, like they solve that problem, right?

• 3:34Sam Altman?

  Yeah, I mean, look, eventually, the models will get so good that they'll help companies deploy themselves and the forward deployed engineers will again get to work at a higher level of abstraction, but for now, you go into a company that is not AI native and say, okay, you've said you want us, you know, they say they want to deploy AI, they really are not sure what to do, how do I hook this up to my systems, do I need to fine tune a model on my codebase, how do I think about orchestrating agents and using things from different companies, most of all, or at least what we hear most frequently is, how do I think about security of my data, and how do I know that these like AI co-working agents are not going to go access a bunch of information and share it in ways they shouldn't, or get, you know, a context exploit or something like that?

• 4:18Sam Altman?

  So the forward deployed engineers take this incredible new technology and a platform like Frontier and say, we will connect your company to an AI platform so that you can use all these agents and workflows and everything else you want.

• 4:31John Coogan?

  How important are these metaphors, or how temporary are they, I was very interested in reading about Gastown and you have these pole cats and it's this whole Mad Max world and that feels like maybe just a temporary aberration where you're setting up agents for specific tasks, but also that could be incredibly valuable in explaining to a large corporation of how they're gonna integrate AI across the whole organization.

• 4:55Sam Altman?

  Yeah, I

• 4:59Sam Altman?

  I suspect like everything else that's happening. When an industry is moving so fast, all of this is somewhat temporary on like a long enough time scale. Um, and

• 5:11Sam Altman?

  you a- a- as these models become more capable, these agents are operating on very long time horizons with the ability to just kind of figure it out. And our trust in their robustness keeps going up. Um, then maybe you don't need a lot of the abstractions we need today. You know, maybe you just like have a, a single AI bot that runs at your company. And you can say, hey, I want to like launch this new product. And it does everything an ambitious person would do. Um, but that's not where we are today. So today we have to

• 5:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 5:40Sam Altman?

  put in a little more work to get the pieces put together.

• 5:42John Coogan?

  Yeah. How are you thinking about the, the, the meter benchmark for long task horizon? Uh, you're at the top of the charts. Uh, at the same time, it feels like we might need a new chart if we're talking about agent swarms, because they'll be able to do things that go for weeks, but they will subdivide the work.

• 5:59Sam Altman?

  Yes.

• 5:59John Coogan?

  There's some subdivision that happens within a reasoning model, but it doesn't truly parallelize, at least that I'm aware of. So what does it look like in a world where you go to a model? But now it's spinning up a whole bunch of different models underneath.

• 6:13Sam Altman?

  I think you're, there's two of, of the key insights of the whole field are in this question. Number one, uh, the implication that no chart in AI lasts more than a few years is right. And like this one kind of, you know, we'll see how much longer it's really useful.

• 6:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 6:27Sam Altman?

  The second is

• 6:30Sam Altman?

  a lot of people thought that, okay, we're going to just need a super long task and a super long task horizon. So we need a super long context. And definitely what people have already seen with coding agents is by agents breaking up work, orchestrating it well, farming it off to sub agents. Even with the current limitations of the technology, we can do something, which should not be surprising because it's similar to how people do things and get amazing amounts of work done. So that's been cool to watch. I think that will keep going. Um.

• 7:01Sam Altman?

  A joke that some people at OpenAI make is that soon the chart that matters is just going to be GDP impact. And then the question is, what's the one that comes after that? But everything else, these, a lot of these proxy metrics, there's now so much economic value in what the models are doing.

• 7:14Jordi Hays?

  What do you think could come after?

• 7:16Sam Altman?

  I have no idea. Do you have an opinion?

• 7:18John Coogan?

  Happiness?

• 7:18Jordi Hays?

  I don't know. When you look, when you look back at some of your, when you look back at some of your blog posts from 10 years ago, your predictions were usually pretty on point.

• 7:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 7:27Jordi Hays?

  Maybe it's harder to predict.

• 7:28Sam Altman?

  Thank you. Thank you. I, uh.

• 7:30Jordi Hays?

  Specifically, specifically the merge.

• 7:32John Coogan?

  Merge, yeah.

• 7:33Jordi Hays?

  Like basically calling, I mean, like right now, we're getting, you know, thousands of messages in the chat about 4.0 and you predicted in 2016 that people could, uh, would, would become, uh, you know, very attached to a chatbot.

• 7:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 7:47Sam Altman?

  I'm working on like a big prediction blog post for the next 10 years seems too far, but the next five. But, uh, cause it's like, I'm sure a lot of it'll be wrong and it, you know, it's, it's still fun to try. The, the, the sort of like relationships with chatbots, clearly that's something that we got to worry about more and is no longer an abstract concept. The, the, even the question of what comes after GDP, like,

• 8:17Sam Altman?

  one reason I think that's interesting is the way we measure GDP now could start going down, even though quality of life goes way up.

• 8:25Jordi Hays?

  Sure.

• 8:25Sam Altman?

  And we don't have a lot of practice with things like that, but the, the massively deflationary.

• 8:30Jordi Hays?

  Isn't that just Europe?

• 8:32Sam Altman?

  Not just Europe. We want quality of life going up too, not just going down, you know?

• 8:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 8:39John Coogan?

  Switching gears, uh, what do you think about the work that, that the NeoLab boom, the research efforts that are happening all over Silicon Valley? It feels like there's, there's an acknowledgement that there's research breakthroughs that need to happen and everyone's taking different, uh, shots at those. Do you think that those companies will just find a breakthrough and join a lab or launch their own products?

• 9:02Sam Altman?

  I think it's fantastic, first of all.

• 9:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 9:04Sam Altman?

  One of the meta things that we wanted to do when we started with OpenAI.

• 9:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 9:08Sam Altman?

  Is when we started OpenAI is like. There had been a period where the technology industry and Silicon Valley in particular was amazing at new research labs or just doing new research in industry in general. And then it kind of fell apart and there hadn't been a good one in a while. And part of what we hope to show, and this was not only us, like a lot of people were excited about new research labs, is that industry could do research again. So seeing that now become fashionable in all of these new labs, I think it's totally awesome. Some will succeed, some will fail, some will go into some other effort, but having industry support research in startup style, I think it's wonderful.

• 9:44Jordi Hays?

  Over the next two years, would you expect to acquire more individual product companies or more research labs?

• 9:54Sam Altman?

  Good question.

• 9:57Sam Altman?

  I don't have a strong opinion there. I would bet, well, I'd say the very best ones will often look like a mixture of both. Like the one that I have in mind right now is something that very much looks like a mixture of both. So maybe that's, maybe the shape of things to come is that really truly extraordinary product work will have more and more of a research component and it'll be kind of a more of a hybrid thing.

• 10:22John Coogan?

  Is data the new oil? Is there value?

• 10:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we were joking a couple of days ago.

• 10:26John Coogan?

  A bunch of data, but they don't understand AI, they don't know how to monetize.

• 10:30Jordi Hays?

  Well, and that phrase was effectively wasted a decade ago.

• 10:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 10:33Jordi Hays?

  And so to say it now sounds really silly.

• 10:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 10:35Jordi Hays?

  But it feels like it could be more true now than ever.

• 10:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 10:40Sam Altman?

  You know, certainly, yeah, man, they really did waste it a decade ago. I was just thinking of the kind of people that used to say that.

• 10:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 10:46Jordi Hays?

  TED Talks.

• 10:47John Coogan?

  You're not supposed to call them out. They're nice people over at TED.

• 10:53Sam Altman?

  You know, definitely like the sort of the magic relationship of this last eight years, whatever you want to call it, has been like, you know, that we can put in more and more resources, compute data.

• 11:10Sam Altman?

  New ideas, whatever, into creating an artifact. And it gets like, the log of it gets better. So you can throw in, you know, that's why we have this huge exponential increase in resources. But we keep getting better and better models. And for all of the concern people have about it's, it's gonna like top out or it's slowing down or whatever. Like, no one's been right about that. I mean, sometimes they, it looked like they were for a couple of months as we digested a new model or came to a new form factor. But it has been incredibly smooth last six or eight years of this. What those resources are, there can be some trade off between. You know, sometimes it's better to spend your money on better data, sometimes on more compute, sometimes something else.

• 11:53Sam Altman?

  On the whole, compute power is the new oil is the statement that feels closest to true to me. But there will be other parts too.

• 12:04John Coogan?

  Makes sense. Is software dead?

• 12:08Sam Altman?

  It's different. It's definitely not dead. But what software, like how you create it, how you're going to use it?

• 12:15Sam Altman?

  How much you're gonna have written for you each time you need it versus how much you'll want sort of a consistent UX? That's all gonna change. You know, there have been a number of these like big sell offs of SaaS stocks over the last few years as these models have rolled out. There, I expect there will continue to be more. I expect there will be big booms in software. I think it's just gonna be volatile for a while as people figure out what this looks like. The statement that someone said to me that has stuck in my mind most these last couple of weeks is that every company is an API company now, whether they want to be or not. Because agents are just going to be able to.

• 12:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we had, we had Dara, we had Dara from Uber on yesterday and he had a pretty refreshing kind of approach. We were asking about integrating agents with Uber and, and he recognized that, yeah, the ad business could potentially be threatened. If you can order an Uber and chat GPT, but he basically said, like, you have to think of the consumer. The consumer wants to order an Uber via their preferred agent, you should let them. Otherwise, you're, you're gonna have other problems.

• 13:23Sam Altman?

  Yeah, that, that is the right take for sure. And I don't, or I think so at least. And. You know, we've been through platform shifts like this before where you, I mean Uber wouldn't have existed without one. It wasn't until iPhone where you could like have it make sense to order an Uber to write where you were as you're out in the world. So I think there will be totally new things that happen, other things you'll use in new ways, but definitely as I've started using Codex, my excitement about having agents go off and do things for me and still use other services, pay other services. I'm sure we'll need to figure out new business models and how revenue gets shared around, but that will happen.

• 14:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, talk more about Codex Desktop.

• 14:01Jordi Hays?

  One more question on SaaS. Have any public market SaaS companies tried to get a soft landing with OpenAI? And do you think there's any, there's, there's any value? Just let's say.

• 14:15Sam Altman?

  No one has, no public SaaS companies that I'm aware of have tried that with OpenAI.

• 14:20Jordi Hays?

  But some of them, some of them, some of them will certainly be durable and are on sale right now and potentially just need new energy and, and need kind of a new, an entirely new approach and maybe OpenAI could provide that.

• 14:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 14:35Sam Altman?

  Yeah, I think some will be incredibly valuable. Some do feel like a thinner layer now.

• 14:41Sam Altman?

  But I don't know, like I was talking recently to a bunch of SaaS companies and they do not, they do not feel unexcited. Like they're like, we're going to go through a big transformation here and you know, yeah, sure. Other people can instantly write software now, but so can we. And we got a great system of record and seems reasonable. Some will make it, of course.

• 15:01John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah. Talk more about the, the Codex Desktop rollout. It feels like

• 15:08John Coogan?

  you know, successful amount of downloads, but, but key, like a shift for, you know, people who are maybe lightly technical, but don't have time to set up an IDE and configure an environment to actually start writing software. I want to know about plans to integrate to the phone. That was a big moment, I think, for a lot of people with the, the Claude bot, Molt bot, open claw thing was like, oh, I can text something and it will go and write code and that's valuable and that unlocks a new agentic experience. Like where do you see the Codex Desktop ecosystem going?

• 15:43Sam Altman?

  I am. So. Codex desktop has been a somewhat of a surprise to me in terms of how much people love it, including how much I love it myself. You know, the, I think it's a great example of 10% of polish of the experience of using these models, especially when there's so much capability overhang, goes an extremely long way to what you can build and how you interact with this stuff. Of course, we should have an ability to kick off new tasks from mobile and we'll do that. I mean, really what you want is like your single AI that's working for you on a unified backend, access to all of your data and your ideas and your stuff and your memory and your, all the context and the ability to work across a lot of surfaces.

• 16:25Sam Altman?

  And often you'll be at your desktop, often you'll be on your phone and you just want to add something in.

• 16:33Sam Altman?

  But it is a pretty profound shift in my own workflow, not just for coding tasks, but more general purpose tasks. It's still kind of hard to use if you're not at least reasonably technical, but obviously we'll find a version of this product that can do other knowledge work tasks and control your computer and things like that, where you don't have to be. And we'll, and it'll bring the magic of building stuff really to a lot of people because even if you never look at code, you'll be able to build something reasonably sophisticated. One of the things that I have built when I was playing around with the new Codex app is this thing I had always wanted, just like this magic auto completing to do list. I really work with to do lists and this idea that I could just put tasks in and it would try to go do them. If it could complete them, it could complete them.

• 17:18Sam Altman?

  If it needed questions, it would ask me questions. If it needed, you know, if I had to do something, I could still do it the old fashioned way. But an interface like that where, you know, all the stuff you want to do, you just sort of explain to a computer or your AI and it tries to go off and do them. And sure, if you're on your phone, you're gonna just add it. A task on your phone, or you know, if you want to easily import something from email, you're going to do that like felt feels really good. So I'm excited about all of the ways that this will just become a general knowledge work agent.

• 17:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 17:49Jordi Hays?

  Were you unsurprised to see a product like OpenClaw come from open source? Because it's certainly that kind of user experience is not, I would imagine this is something that you knew would be a thing. And yet I think part of the the magic of OpenClaw is that it would be very, very difficult for a large tech company.

• 18:11John Coogan?

  Peter didn't make many phone calls to hyperscalers to say, hey, I'm going to be integrating with your API. It just went out.

• 18:18Jordi Hays?

  And you guys, you know, and when I think back on like the Sky acquisition, this this kind of experience was probably very top of mind and that you're working towards internally.

• 18:28Sam Altman?

  I love the spirit of everything about OpenClaw.

• 18:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 18:32Sam Altman?

  And you are totally right that it's much easier to imagine a one person open source project doing something like that than a company who is going to be afraid of lawsuits, data privacy and everything else. Um, you know, they're like, I think this is kind of how innovation works. There's something like that starts, it's clearly amazing. There will be a way to make a mass market version of that product, but letting the builders build the equivalent of the homebrew homebrew computer club spirit go here is so important.

• 18:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, totally. Can we switch to social? I feel like if I Google Sam Altman's social, I get pure AI and Sora and then also demand or predictions about a human only social network. Where do you see social going broadly? How do you want to integrate it with it and power it in the future?

• 19:20Sam Altman?

  I, the Molebook thing was like a very interesting social experiment to watch. And I think points to. Agents interacting in some sort of social space, hopefully on behalf of people, at least in some degrees, could be quite interesting. I don't think we know what to do there yet, but it feels like social is going to change a lot. And I am interested in the space of what a social experience can look like when your agent is talking to my agent and coming up with new stuff. Clearly, putting like a lot of AI bots on the existing social platforms is just making everyone crazy and not that fun. So that's not the right answer.

• 20:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 20:02Sam Altman?

  But I think we can design something new for what this technology is capable of that will feel good and useful.

• 20:10John Coogan?

  Yeah. Is there, is there a solution to the bot problem that's just all the labs sort of integrating with all the other platforms? And, and even if you can't detect it's AI-generated, you can literally say, we just, we just generated those tokens. Like those exact tokens are in our database.

• 20:25Sam Altman?

  You probably can't do that because their open source models are like good enough to write things at this point.

• 20:30John Coogan?

  Sure, sure. Yeah, yeah.

• 20:33Sam Altman?

  I am excited about sort of like assertion of humanity instead of trying to like detection of AI as a, as a thing here. I don't know if the social platforms, it's like in their interest to solve this. It is caused, it's creating like, at least in the short term, it creates like a lot of engagement and increased usage. So I believe they could solve it if they wanted to. I'm not sure it's in their interest. I'm actually not even like, it is, I don't like it, but it is, some people do seem to enjoy it.

• 20:59John Coogan?

  Yeah. Can you talk a little bit more about where Sora as, as a video generation model is going? It feels like tool use is maybe under discussed, you know, adding, adding reasoning. It's not just the diffusion model. It's giving these models the ability to make linear cuts and overlay motion graphics. And when I scroll the Instagram reels that I see, they're like vibe reels with cut, cutouts and it flips negative and it's all color graded and stuff that like, yeah, you could probably diffuse it all, but it's pretty cool just to teach a model to also use After Effects or whatever video, you know, motion graphics suite you want to use. Is that an interesting unlock? What do you see going on?

• 21:44Sam Altman?

  So all of that stuff will happen, and I agree with you, the models will get really great at doing that. People love generating videos.

• 21:51Jordi Hays?

  Sure.

• 21:51Sam Altman?

  I would say people, we have not yet found a way that people really love watching other people's videos. This is true for a lot of other AI, like they love to, you know, people love talking to ChatGPT or whatever. It's not that compelling for most people to like read other people's ChatGPT generation. So I think there is something.

• 22:07Jordi Hays?

  But isn't that for all writing and all video?

• 22:10Sam Altman?

  Yeah, it seems stronger to me in this case than the general case, but maybe you're right. Maybe this is.

• 22:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but if, but if, if somebody says, hey, I generated a 15 minute video, I'm, I'm really excited for you to watch it. And you watch the first 10 seconds and you're not that captured by it. I don't care that it was human made.

• 22:26Sam Altman?

  Yeah, maybe, maybe you're right. And this is, it's not, it's not a special case.

• 22:31John Coogan?

  Do you see that in the data with, with Sora downloads? Because I've noticed that I'll generate stuff on Sora, download it and share it to a group chat. And then it's this little in-joke that me and five other people get. And we see this like family group chats of, oh, it's our dog and our kids. But like, there's not really like, okay, yeah, this is a business. You know, everyone likes this.

• 22:51Sam Altman?

  Absolutely. I would say that the most common use case is something like that.

• 22:55John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 22:55Sam Altman?

  You know, like memes on group chats is a real killer use case.

• 22:59John Coogan?

  How is the Disney rollout going? I was super excited about it. Jordy was extremely bullish on it from a business strategy perspective.

• 23:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, when you look at how image models have grown various LLMs historically, and now you're going to have an image, image and video model that can do something that no other LLM can do, at least legally.

• 23:17John Coogan?

  Yeah. And here's Bob Iger joining OpenAI.

• 23:21Sam Altman?

  Bob Iger, I love it. No.

• 23:24John Coogan?

  Because he's going to be looking for a job in.

• 23:26Jordi Hays?

  Free agent.

• 23:26John Coogan?

  He's a free agent. Pick him up.

• 23:28Sam Altman?

  Hit him up for us, you know, do some recruiting. That'd be, that'd be great. The, I think that generating characters in images and videos is going to be very important to people and they really like that. Like other, like we were saying, otherwise, I don't think many people like want to watch me and some Star Wars character doing something together, but I might think it's cool.

• 23:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 23:51Sam Altman?

  It's, you know, there, there's like a real trend going on right now with ChatGPT, where it's make a caricature of me and my job based off of everything you know about me.

• 23:58John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 23:59Sam Altman?

  And those kinds of things, people actually do like looking at other people's.

• 24:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 24:04Sam Altman?

  Media.

• 24:05John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's almost like a like a face filter or something. There's like enough of it. It's the Studio Ghibli moment. Like, there's enough of the humans still in there that it's not. It's not. You can't. Yours is not the same as mine. So it's still personalized.

• 24:17Sam Altman?

  It's personalized and it says something about you and, you know, the like, a lot of these things. A lot of what's gone viral before with ImageGen, I think it's like if you can make people look a little bit more attractive or cool than they look in than they are in real life.

• 24:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 24:32Sam Altman?

  Without sort of having to ask for that.

• 24:34John Coogan?

  Yeah. How are you thinking about the actual the actual rollout? We were we were debating between like, open the floodgates, you can generate any Disney property versus like, it's Spider-Man week and everyone's posting Spider-Man and then it's it's, you know, Mickey Mouse week. And there's another viral moment.

• 24:50Sam Altman?

  I'm not sure what the team is planning there. I know Disney's had some different opinions about how they what they want to do and try to be a good partner there, but I'd be excited to open the floodgates personally.

• 24:58John Coogan?

  Oh, that'd be fun. Cool. Talk about your first, speaking of videos, your first Super Bowl ad. It felt like not generated, lots of motion graphics, the black dots coming together. Like, what was the what was the goal with that ad? Who were you trying to speak to? It didn't feel like a direct response QR code, download the app.

• 25:18Sam Altman?

  No.

• 25:19John Coogan?

  What was the mission?

• 25:20Sam Altman?

  Um, I love that ad. I think that was such a cool one. It was clearly not meant to be like a mass market or direct response ad.

• 25:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 25:29Sam Altman?

  But, you know, speaking to the like,

• 25:33Sam Altman?

  people who are at the center of this revolution and just trying to like celebrate everything that has come before and everything that will come after.

• 25:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 25:43Sam Altman?

  It, we didn't hear a lot about it from like average users of ChatGPT, but we heard a lot about it from like researchers in the field and a lot of resonance there. It was definitely not generated. It was done the old fashioned way. And, you know, it had like, a lot of people loved it, a lot of people hated it. And then many people in the middle didn't get it and I felt okay about that.

• 26:03John Coogan?

  That's a great.

• 26:04Sam Altman?

  I like our ad for Sunday.

• 26:05John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 26:06Sam Altman?

  It's about Codex, no surprise, but.

• 26:08John Coogan?

  Yeah. Talk about the evolution of the advertising to be more just clear about the actual use case, the value. Like, what are you trying to say with your advertising strategy now as it refers, as it relates to like video?

• 26:23Sam Altman?

  Um.

• 26:27Sam Altman?

  Well, the thing I would most like us to say, and I think this is a new challenge, given where the models are, is to teach people what they can go do with AI.

• 26:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 26:38Sam Altman?

  I mean, AI is now unbelievably capable in most of the world. It's still like asking it basic questions on ChatGPT. Everyone can go build amazing things now. Everyone can go do all kinds of work. Scientists are going to make new discoveries. And I'd like to, you know, to the degree that advertising we do can teach people how to use this, I think that'd be awesome.

• 26:57John Coogan?

  Yes, the KPI is like reduce the capability overhang broadly.

• 27:02Sam Altman?

  I think that's should be a general KPI for us, not just of our ads.

• 27:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 27:07Sam Altman?

  The products that we build, how we teach people to use those products, like the that feels very important.

• 27:13John Coogan?

  Yeah. Anthropic also has a bunch of ads in the Super Bowl. Seems like they run a ton.

• 27:18Jordi Hays?

  Damn, heard.

• 27:18John Coogan?

  What do you think they're getting wrong about about their characterization of how ads will roll out in chat apps?

• 27:30Sam Altman?

  Well, it's just wrong. Like the the main thing that I think is in, we're not stupid. We respect our users. We understand that if we did something like what those ads depict, people would rightfully stop using the product.

• 27:45Sam Altman?

  No one, like our first principle with ads is that we're not going to put stuff into the LLM stream. That would feel crazy dystopic, like bad sci fi movie. So the main thing that's wrong with the ads is like using a deceptive ad to criticize deceptive ads feels, I don't know, something doesn't sit right with me about that.

• 28:06Jordi Hays?

  I asked I asked Claude what if if what the definition of playing dirty? And it said, what did it say? Misleading others about your intentions, hiding information or creating false impressions.

• 28:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 28:23Jordi Hays?

  Thought it was a little dirty. I thought it was well played, but it was.

• 28:26Sam Altman?

  It was it was well played for sure. And it was a funny ad and and they, you know, like the sort of the stuff about the chat GPT personality that most annoys me, which we'll fix very soon. I thought they nailed in the ad. So that part was funny.

• 28:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 28:40Sam Altman?

  Um, but I don't know, you know, like, I also, I think it's great for them not to do ads. We have a different shaped business. I did notice that they said in their thing like, we may later revise this decision and we'll explain why. So.

• 28:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the the blog post, the blog post was a kind of did a good job of disarming the pro ad people gave themselves an out in the future. Uh, do you think they care?

• 29:07Sam Altman?

  I think it doesn't matter. Like, I think it's a sideshow. You know, people are excited for a food fight and uh, between companies, but like the the amazing capabilities of these models, the product, the kind of like, the groundswell of excitement around Codex, that feels way more important.

• 29:26John Coogan?

  How do you stop the pausing that happens in voice mode? Do you need new hardware for that? Or is it a model capability thing?

• 29:33Sam Altman?

  We need new model. Uh, we may need some new hardware too, but mostly we just need a new model. I think we will have a great voice mode

• 29:41Sam Altman?

  by the end of this year.

• 29:42John Coogan?

  What's the bigger bottleneck? Energy or chips?

• 29:45Sam Altman?

  It goes back and forth. Uh, right now, again, it's chips.

• 29:48John Coogan?

  Chips. Is there anything?

• 29:49Sam Altman?

  But it, you know, be different, different times.

• 29:51John Coogan?

  Is there anything we, like, society, America, should be doing more aggressively to increase the supply of fabs?

• 29:58Sam Altman?

  Um, yeah, I think it is.

• 30:04Sam Altman?

  Well, it may get solved on its own. It may like normal capitalism may solve it, but I think somehow deciding as a society that we are going to increase the wafer capacity of the world and we're going to fund that. Uh, and we're going to get, you know, the whole supply chain and the talented people we need to make that happen would be a very good thing to do.

• 30:23John Coogan?

  Do you think there's an upper bound on model IQ? Like, the the race right now is is you're smart, but you're not smart for days. You're smart for hours. Can you go much farther and get much smarter?

• 30:38Sam Altman?

  It seems certain. Upper bound, I don't know. Uh, I don't know how to think about that question yet.

• 30:43John Coogan?

  Yeah, I can't even reason about what 2000 IQ looks like, you know? Like, I don't know what that means.

• 30:50Sam Altman?

  It's funny you say, I mean, I, I, I can't reason about what it means to think about a problem for like 10,000 human years.

• 30:56John Coogan?

  That's another good one.

• 30:57Sam Altman?

  Yeah.

• 30:58John Coogan?

  That's crazy.

• 30:58Sam Altman?

  But maybe IQ is gonna feel even, even weirder. I, I.

• 31:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 31:03Sam Altman?

  I don't know. I feel like, I somehow feel like this isn't going to feel as strange as it sounds. And the, like, for a bunch of reasons, we're so focused on other people, we're so focused on our own lives, we're so focused, we have such a human centric nature that like, okay, this thing is really smart, it's inventing new science for us, it's running companies for us, it's doing all the stuff. And that sounds like it should be impossibly weird, and I think it'll just be very weird.

• 31:31Jordi Hays?

  Do you think space data centers will provide a meaningful amount of compute for OpenAI in the next two to three years?

• 31:39Sam Altman?

  No.

• 31:39Jordi Hays?

  Five years?

• 31:40Sam Altman?

  No.

• 31:41Jordi Hays?

  10 years?

• 31:42Sam Altman?

  Um.

• 31:43John Coogan?

  You just keep going. 10,000 years?

• 31:47Sam Altman?

  I, I wish Elon luck.

• 31:50John Coogan?

  Okay. Uh, the, the, the funny thing about the whole, like, back and forth about ads is that, uh, in, in our world, the criticism is that you didn't launch ads early enough. Is there a world where you wish you launched earlier? How is the actual rollout going? Are advertisers happy? Do you have like a really long roadmap? Or do you think you'll be faster at catching up to sort of what's frontier in ad?

• 32:13Sam Altman?

  We haven't even started the test yet. We start the test soon.

• 32:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 32:17Sam Altman?

  But, you know, we're gonna, it's gonna take us some number of iterations to figure out the right ad unit, the right kind of, the right way this all works. Um, do I wish we had started earlier?

• 32:28Sam Altman?

  We have gone from like not a company, you know, three years and three months ago, or something like that, we were like a research lab. And now we are like a pretty big company with a lot of products. So there's many things I wish we had done faster. I think we were correct on the trade off here of how we balance things that we need to do. I wish, you know, we launched this very cool enterprise platform this morning, which we had done earlier too, but had to like deal with the monstrous growth of chat GPT and Codex and all that other stuff.

• 32:54John Coogan?

  Good problems to have. Last question for me. What happened to that internal writing model that you use to write the essay? That feels like something that was really cool, but we never really saw the light of day.

• 33:09Sam Altman?

  We're going to get a lot of that spirit into a future model. Again, it's like, there's so much stuff happening.

• 33:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 33:17Sam Altman?

  We have to make these hard prioritization decisions.

• 33:19John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 33:19Sam Altman?

  I would love a cool writing model, not as much as I would love a cool coding model. And it's what is possible now for coding for science. That's the thing I'm most excited about. For accelerating all kinds of research, AI and otherwise, for really accelerating the economy. I think that's like the right thing for us to most prioritize in terms of new capabilities. But yeah, well, like you want, you want a model that can write beautifully because it means it, well, you want to write a model that can write beautifully if it can also think very clearly and express that very clearly. That's just useful in normal work.

• 33:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, that makes sense.

• 33:57Jordi Hays?

  Last question for me. How, how have conversations been with the broad OpenAI leadership team? You guys are in a position where any single word or sentence you say in any situation can be spun into a headline immediately. And then you guys have to go on damage control, kind of correcting the narrative. But of course, the original message is often, or at least the original news is often seen more broadly than the, than the correction. It seems like an interesting challenge.

• 34:25Sam Altman?

  It, it is a strange way to live. It, and I don't like, I don't know of any private company that has ever like been so in the news and so under a microscope. And it, you know, at some level, it's frustrating and, you know, we're so squarely in the sights of everybody's anxieties and every competitor trying to take us down. And everybody's like, just what is going to happen with AI to their part of the business or their own lives? That there's like a lot of.

• 34:58Sam Altman?

  Plasma looking for an instability to collapse on. In some other sense, though, the the subjective experience of it is we are so busy on so much exciting stuff that it often feels like there's this crazy hurricane turning around us. And when we sit, it's like fairly calm, you know, the media or Twitter goes insane about something one day, they're talking about a crazy meltdown. We're like, that is insane. Like, OK, and people talk about it all day and then later find out it's wrong. Sort of seems like a lot of wasted energy, but we're just like, we have this great new model coming. People are building incredible stuff. Companies are transforming. We're trying to like, figure out how to get more compute and deal with this compute crunch. And we just kind of like, keep going and we're busy. And then if we like, open Twitter,

• 35:43Sam Altman?

  pop up our heads and look at the news, it's like, wow, that is an insane, crazy thing happening, completely divorced from reality, or 99% divorced from reality. And like, OK, someone will correct it, but then we get back to work and people flip out again. It's, it is much, it is weird to watch when we look outside, but it is a,

• 36:05Sam Altman?

  it is less chaotic internally than I think you would imagine from reading the media reports.

• 36:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, makes sense. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us. Congrats on the launch.

• 36:15Jordi Hays?

  Thank you for having me. I'm excited to see the Codex ad.

• 36:18Sam Altman?

  Please try it. The app and 5.3 have been like, I think, the coolest thing we've done in a while.

• 36:23John Coogan?

  Yes, with one prompt, I rebuilt the tbpn.com homepage to look exactly like Berkshire Hathaway. And it was just immediate. It was very fun.

• 36:31Sam Altman?

  Interesting choice.

• 36:33John Coogan?

  Plain text. It was very easy. Immediately one shot. Did not really push it to its limits, but I'm having fun. So thank you so much for coming on the show. We'll talk to you soon.

• 36:40Sam Altman?

  Thank you.

• 36:40Jordi Hays?

  Great to catch up.

• 36:41John Coogan?

  Goodbye.

• 36:41Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.