How Sam Altman Uses Dots to Take Back His Time

Sam Altman's Dot, OpenAI's new always-on agent, gave him back the most productive part of his day. The OpenAI CEO would lose his early mornings—his window of "maximum creativity"—to whatever fire needed putting out. Now, his Dot triages those issues and flags only what's truly urgent. It's also gotten him building again: In spare moments, he gives his Dot ideas for a feature, and his Dot builds five or six versions for him to review. On the first episode of The Every Podcast (formerly AI & I), Dan Shipper interviews Altman at OpenAI's DevDay. They discuss how Altman uses his Dot to protect his time, why he only prompts on Ultrafast, and his belief that AI will spark a new Renaissance. If you found this episode interesting, please like, subscribe, comment, and share! Go to https://attio.com/every and get 15% off your first year. To hear more from Dan Shipper: • Subscribe to Every: https://every.to/subscribe • Follow him on X: https://twitter.com/danshipper Chapters: 00:00:00 Introduction 00:00:55 Why AI hasn’t replaced developers 00:04:45 OpenAI’s platform bet on the rise of small-team companies 00:05:45 Why the AI era is more “Renaissance” than “Industrial Revolution” 00:07:40 How Sam’s Dot, OpenAI’s always-on AI agent, gave him back his mornings 00:12:00 Sam’s process for building new features with his Dot 00:16:00 Inside OpenAI’s “live documents” that agents and humans can build together 00:20:55 What bring-your-own-subscription changes for app developers 00:24:00 Why “OpenAI just killed X startup” never comes true 00:27:55 Sam’s life on Ultrafast and the push to make speed as cheap as intelligence Links to resources mentioned in the episode: • Sam Altman on X: https://x.com/sama • Codex: https://openai.com/codex • Space: https://help.openai.com/en/articles/20001549-getting-started-with-space-in-chatgpt • Every's Vibe Check on Dots: https://every.to/vibe-check/vibe-check-dots-always-on-agents-in-chatgpt?utm_source=podcast • Every's Vibe Check on OpenAI DevDay 2026: https://every.to/vibe-check/vibe-check-openai-devday-2026?utm_source=podcast

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Do you do all your prompting on UltraPass?

• 0:02Speaker 01

  I do.

• 0:03Speaker 00

  That's

• 0:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 0:04Speaker 00

  That's crazy.

• 0:06Speaker 01

  You know, seven people's dots can working together create something new that kind of existed in all of our heads to some degree, but was like an emergent thing.

• 0:26Speaker 00

  Hey, this is Dan Shipper. You might be wondering what happened to AI and I. This is the same show. We are just rebranding it to the every podcast. I'm really excited for our first episode with Sam Altman. Here it is. Sam, welcome to the show.

• 0:37Speaker 01

  Thanks for having me.

• 0:38Speaker 00

  psyched to have you here. So we're here at Dev Day. I think if you had told me four years ago that the coding models were at this level of

• 0:45Speaker 01

  They're so good now.

• 0:47Speaker 00

  I would have been like, wow, I don't know if there would be a lot of developers at Dev Day, but there's more developers than ever, it seems like, and more work to do than ever. So what has the like riding the increasing capabilities of coding models and seeing the impact on engineering taught you about the future of engineering and more broadly, like the future of work with AI?

• 1:06Speaker 01

  I think people just want so much more stuff. People's expectations are so high. And I think that's a wonderful thing. I think this is why we'll all have this incredible future in front of us to explore. But developers, they've never been able to do more, but there's never been a higher bar either. And I think that's great. I think that's like a nice thing about society.

• 1:23Speaker 00

  Is that something that surprised you? Did you expect that to happen?

• 1:26Speaker 01

  I think I was never like as doomery about the job stuff as other people, but it still has surprised me somewhat on the upside of just how much latent demand existed in the world.

• 1:38Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:38Speaker 01

  And how and also how much like people have remained at the center of everything that is happening with AI.

• 1:44Speaker 00

  Do you think there's a limit to that? Or do you think that translates pretty cleanly to other areas of work?

• 1:50Speaker 01

  I think there will be some areas of work where there's actually not much creativity required and we don't care about the person doing it. And many of those tasks or jobs will be done by AI. But I think there's so much other stuff people want in the world. There's going to be no shortage of new things to go to go do. I think that's been one of the lessons of recent time.

• 2:09Speaker 00

  Why do you think it's so human centered, even though we talk a lot about automation?

• 2:14Speaker 01

  I mean, one observation is we just, we don't care that much about what the machines do. And in some sense, we never have. And we're just like, we're obsessed with other people. We want to know about the person behind the art or the person behind the company or the idea or the product. And I think this is like a wonderful positive surprise that we probably should have all known before.

• 2:35Speaker 00

  I agree. It's, I've been thinking like, if an agent solves a Navier Stokes in a data center, but no one finds out, did it really solve it? You know?

• 2:43Speaker 01

  I think that was like a great example where, you know, 10,000 agents worked super hard for four days and perfect coordination with each other and did this amazing thing. And almost none of the public reaction was about that actually, the problem being solved. A lot of talk about the interpretation, a lot of talk about like the people involved in it in different ways. But, you know, that was like, that was a good thing.

• 3:04Speaker 00

  Yeah. So it's Dev Day. You launched, by my count, 22 new things today, which I've been at all four Dev Days. And I think last year was like nine and the year before that was like four or five. So it's a lot more than usual.

• 3:19Speaker 01

  Just wait for next year.

• 3:20Speaker 00

  Okay. I'm tired. I'm tired.

• 3:24Speaker 01

  We cut a bunch of things that we were going to launch today, just because you have to like fit it in 50 minutes. But, you know, like, we try to practice what we preach. And if we are saying these tools can make people much more productive and build more and that people want more stuff, like, we better build more ourselves.

• 3:41Speaker 00

  What are the new kind of bottlenecks and best practices for doing that? Because I, I can see for myself, and I assume you guys are seeing this too, like now that you can build everything, you're like, what, what should we build? And how do we make it all coherent? How do you think about that?

• 3:59Speaker 01

  Moving to this world of sort of persistent intelligence, active intelligence, whatever people want to call it, this idea that you're going to have these agents that are running in the background 24/7, connected to your systems, doing stuff proactively for you. This is clearly a direction that feels important to explore. I think we're going to see amazing stuff happen there. Another thing we really wanted to do is there's just, there are now so many ideas that are capable of being built.

• 4:27Speaker 01

  And what we are missing is the creative spirit to figure them out and build them. So we wanted to really open up our ecosystem, let people build apps in chat GPT and like the same way that we get to do them, let people bring their subscription wherever they'd like, have the marketplace and really try to let people get connected to all the stuff that people will now be able to build.

• 4:50Speaker 00

  Yeah. I mean, I just looking at all the platform features that you launched and the way that you talk about platforms, it reminds me a lot of the way that Bill Gates used to talk about Windows as a platform, where you create more value than you capture. What have you learned? You know, you said this in your keynote and I've observed it as well. There's at Dev Day, there's always an app store. You've been taking swings at app stores for a while. What have you learned about building a platform? And what do you think makes this one different?

• 5:17Speaker 01

  I mean, we clearly have not yet figured out the app store equivalent, but we have figured out how to build a platform that a lot of people are building incredible value on top of. I think there are really kind of two schools of thought among people building AI model companies. There are people that believe or hope that there's only going to be one company in the world. And then there are people like us that believe we are going to see a renaissance in the number of companies and just an absolute lowering of the bar to people, one person companies, small team companies, creating incredible new products and services. And we want to go as hard as we can with the platform to enable people to do that.

• 5:59Speaker 01

  And although I think we haven't figured out the app store yet, that's totally fair. I think we have figured out how to help like millions of people build and create significant new products and companies.

• 6:09Speaker 00

  If you had to narrow in, you said, you talked at the keynote about an industrial revolution versus a renaissance, which you just mentioned now. If you had to narrow in on the key things that make the difference between those two worlds and maybe OpenAI's part in it, but maybe even the broader ecosystem, what do you think those things are?

• 6:29Speaker 01

  One take on this would be that the renaissance was fundamentally centered around people and the industrial revolution was fundamentally centered around machines. There were a lot of good things about the industrial revolution. It had a hugely positive impact on the world in many ways. But I think a lot of people did not have a purely positive personal impact from that. And this feeling that people had these like rich lives and did all these things. And yeah, of course they like struggled and wanted more and better stuff. And that's the part of the industrial revolution to deliver in some ways, but they were kind of turned into, in many cases, this like cog in the machine, doing some extremely specialized thing and kind of like disconnected from a lot of the parts that made life good.

• 7:13Speaker 01

  I get sad to hear people talk about like, oh, AI is going to automate everything. There's going to be no role for humans. We're going to be like house cats and the AI will decide how to reward us and tell us what to do. And

• 7:25Speaker 01

  I've heard people say that.

• 7:28Speaker 01

  That's certainly not what we think.

• 7:29Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 7:30Speaker 01

  What I am hopeful for is that this is just a huge new wave of scientific discovery, art, company formation, like everybody that wants to start a new thing. And that people do get the benefits of all the economic growth and the new stuff happening here. But also people get back in control of their lives and ability to kind of do the things they want and spend their time the way they want.

• 7:54Speaker 00

  One of the things that strikes me about the renaissance versus the industrial revolution is in the renaissance, you have a sort of different understanding of what it means to be a person and like an individual.

• 8:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:07Speaker 00

  As opposed to sort of the cog in the machine. Do you feel like you're starting to see any difference in how we think of ourselves as human that's comparable to the way that we changed how we think of ourselves during the renaissance?

• 8:20Speaker 01

  I mean, so much happened during the renaissance. It's hard to say there's like this one thing, but, but definitely a big part of it was about people like sort of reconnecting to a lot of things that had in the distant past. And you do hear, and then, and then also like this kind of combination of that with this crazy futurism and discovery of science and engineering and just sort of this, this feeling that the human potential had massively expanded. And you do hear people talk about both of those things simultaneously with AI, which is kind of how I got interested in this as an analogy in the first place. I mean, this is like a very trivial example relative to what is going to be possible or already is possible.

• 8:58Speaker 01

  But the dots, the new thing we launched today is the first thing that has given me back control of my mornings and like my mental space in the mornings. I used to love the early mornings. It's my favorite time of the day to work. It's like maximum creativity. That's when I would like do the really deep, complicated project of the day. And then now I like run this like big company and something is going wrong all the time. And overnight, a lot of stuff happens. And if I don't check my phone right away, then, you know, sometimes it was fine. And sometimes there was like a real disaster that if I ignored for an hour, it just got much worse. The problem had been that as I checked my phone, I polluted my brain with all these other things and I lost the deep work period. But now I trust my dot to go.

• 9:41Speaker 01

  Have good judgment about what I need to think about and not think about if there's something very urgent, otherwise handle things for me. And I get this space for kind of like creativity or to just hang out with my kids back. And that has been like, you know, it sounds small, but like a significant improvement to my life.

• 9:56Speaker 00

  That's what I was gonna ask is so it look, it seems like it's deflecting a lot of things that you might have had to deal with immediately that you can just like leave for later. Cause you're confident you get the thing you need when, when you check it.

• 10:08Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, two, two things that happened today about that. During the keynote, we had like a big seven production. This is the risk of live demos and trying to deploy many new features at once.

• 10:20Speaker 00

  I was recurling, I was.

• 10:23Speaker 01

  So, so that happened. Tebow got a message from his dot five minutes before the demo saying, just to let you know. There's, I see that you're in the dev day keynote. I know you were working on it. I know what the demo is because I was able to like, look at the presentation. Um, in space or whatever, and there, you know, this sub is probably going to make the demo not work. Would you like me to try to fix it? There's like a few minutes to go. And now it couldn't fix it yet, but like maybe the next version, we'll be able to go fix that in prod. And like, think about that whole, like all the stuff that had to come together to make that work. Just right now, before I came here, I've been in like back to back stuff all day. Very, very behind on all of my normal stuff.

• 11:07Speaker 01

  My dot, just before I had walked into the last thing said, you have one little break between now and this thing you're going to go to with Dan. You have to pay attention to this one thing. I never would have found that otherwise. And like, it would have been a big mess. And just the fact that I like, don't have to worry about that feels, feels super different.

• 11:24Speaker 00

  What's your dot's name?

• 11:25Speaker 01

  Dottie. I tried, I had Alfred earlier and then like many people are calling it Dottie for now, but I'm trying to like, think of a great name.

• 11:33Speaker 00

  Mine's name is Boo.

• 11:34Speaker 01

  That's a good one. What do you think so far? I know it's like super early and still.

• 11:38Speaker 00

  I, I like it. It has become the default way that I use chat, which I think is a very promising thing.

• 11:45Speaker 01

  Me too.

• 11:45Speaker 00

  And I, I shared with you, like, I think, you know, I'm, I'm in the beta. So I was in the, the early period. So I, I think it's, it, you know, it has limits. It's like, has been a little bit buggy for me. So there's a lot of different surfaces that it can be used on like mobile and it has its own cloud computer and like all that kind of stuff. And I think those kinds of things, getting that cleaned up is a big deal, but yeah.

• 12:05Speaker 01

  That, that, I, I think this is the kind of thing where it's going to get like better rapidly each week from here, but it's going to definitely take some time to smooth it all out.

• 12:13Speaker 00

  I had a similar example where I was trying to reschedule a flight and it was like, hey, you have a meeting during this flight that you're rescheduling, but it wasn't on my calendar. It had just like read it in Slack.

• 12:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:23Speaker 00

  And then it was like, yeah.

• 12:24Speaker 01

  That, that thing about the ability to bring context together from across your entire life and like really do things in ways that would be hard even for an attentive person to get right. Has been super impressive. That, that's been one of the things I found most useful about it.

• 12:38Speaker 00

  What had to happen from a research perspective to make this possible?

• 12:42Speaker 01

  This is like a very complicated system with a lot of stuff, but may, maybe most important was Astra. We needed like a, you needed a smart enough model. And then there were a lot of other things you had to build too, but, but getting the model over the intelligence bar was, was a key part.

• 12:56Speaker 00

  You've told me that there's like, there have been a couple of times, not just for like scheduling or, or, or things that are urgent, like filtering, but there have been a couple of times where it's. Helped you see something or make a decision with an AI that you could not have, you said you couldn't have hired someone to do that. Like it, it'd just be too complicated. Do you have any specific examples you can share?

• 13:16Speaker 01

  There, there was one like new feature that I was kind of excited about, and it would have been very hard to explain it to people in enough detail to get it built. Um, and even then there were like a lot of ways to do it and I wouldn't have been confident in which one. And I just like, I, I would just like constantly jot notes as I thought of something, or as I was like on a walk or whatever to my dot. And then the dot went off and built like five or six versions. I was able to give feedback. I was able to iterate. And it was just like, whenever I had a spare moment or had an idea and the kind of like, the ability to just like dump that in raw form, the ability to like get. And give pretty continuous feedback on it. What was very cool. And then, so there's like many categories like that where like, uh.

• 13:59Speaker 01

  An idea that would be, you'd be so unsure about, or it would be too much effort for you or for someone else to build. You can actually just kind of like continually iterate on and, and, and it's, it's like, it's pretty cool to go to sleep and like. Just leave a long voice note as you're kind of drifting off with a bunch of thoughts. And like wake up in the morning and not only is the thing built, but it like went off and did like the next seven steps. And it's like, all right, this is like a very cool way to express stuff. And then, and then also like there, there's a set of tasks that I would normally give up on, or that I would have given up on before. There was a thing that I was sure I had seen in Slack and Slack search is obviously terrible. So I mostly use Codex to search it. And I had been searching for this thing because I wanted to find it again. I wanted to reference it.

• 14:43Speaker 01

  And I spent like a good 10 or 20 minutes trying to search with Codex and find this. And I kept trying different things and didn't find it. And I was like, man, like maybe. I dreamed it and this didn't really happen because Codex doesn't usually fail. And I kind of gave up on it. And then the next day, um, my dot was like, hey, I noticed you were trying to do this thing. And you didn't find it, but I like kept thinking about overnight and I found it for you. And I was like, what? And it was a screenshot. I had forgotten in my head, it was a screenshot, not text in Slack. And it just like sat there very patiently looking for something to do to be helpful to me and like looked at, like image rec, every screenshot and found the thing. And I was like, that's really, that's really, I would have given up on that.

• 15:27Speaker 00

  I think there's a, you're, we're constantly feeling like there's way too much to read in Slack on email and all that kind of stuff. And it's, it's perfect for that amount of context to just like get you the right thing at the right time.

• 15:40Speaker 01

  People have talked about the need to have an agent deal with the just onslaught of the internet and all of the various things trying to like hack our attention and distract us and whatever. I have definitely learned in the few weeks that I've been using dots that. Although technology is very wonderful in many ways, the kind of like crazy attention hacking of social media and phones and notifications. Had gotten way worse than I realized for me personally.

• 16:08Speaker 00

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• 16:49Speaker 00

  And grow accounts around the clock. Try Adio for free at attio.com/evry. That's Adio, A T T I O dot com slash every. And now back to the episode. Tell me about space. It's, it's a big bet to do three like office suite type tools in one launch.

• 17:08Speaker 01

  We didn't set out wanting to do this. And then we realized, and I'm sure you've realized your own version of this too. That software was really not designed on the whole for collaborating with AI. And you can use it yourself or you can have AI use it on your behalf. But to really collaborate closely, especially when it's multiple people and multiple people's AIs all working together. Like a lot of the current abstractions we have breakdown. So this is definitely an ambitious bet, but, uh, but I think that the space of human AI collaboration is really important to explore.

• 17:44Speaker 00

  How are you working with it? Like, are you reviewing docs in space? Or are you making docs? And do you have expectations for how much of it you're typing versus how much of it your dot is doing for you? And also with the, with the docs that you get, like, are you, are you reviewing it from that perspective too?

• 18:04Speaker 01

  If there's like a new idea, um, I like writing the old fashioned way because it helps me like, think about it. So I still do that. And then maybe have my daughter, other people's dot, like do the follow-ups. But one of the things that I have found most amazing about it, and I don't think we have a word for this yet, but for lack of a better word, these like live documents. Creating a doc that is going to automatically update as people interact or as other things change in the world. And something that like many of our dots can work with together, not only to like share information, but, but actually like, you know, seven people's dots can working together. Create something new that kind of existed in all of our heads to some degree, but was like an emergent thing. That's been very fun as we think about like new features to explore.

• 18:49Speaker 00

  Is there a specific live doc that has been most useful for you?

• 18:53Speaker 01

  I have switched, like the dashboard, I think everybody's probably got like a dashboard that they look at every day for how the company's doing and the way they care about. And, you know, I used to share one with everybody else or many other people. And I now have one that is kind of like a changing summary of the business. Just for me, based off of like the evolving things that I'm caring about or not caring about. Like looks at all my Slack messages, makes me a new thing, like constantly updates it. And it's like, oh, this just feels like a living document.

• 19:22Speaker 00

  That's sick. What, what do you care about now?

• 19:25Speaker 01

  A lot on my mind recently is just how we're thinking about the safety alignment and security challenge in front of us.

• 19:32Speaker 01

  But you know, six months ago, I probably cared more about revenue and growth and metrics of this sort of traditional part of the business. So watching that evolve, I, I've actually been thinking about how I can like, because I'd be very curious to see what my dot thinks I care about each day the most over time. And we don't currently have a good way to visualize that.

• 19:50Speaker 00

  That is really.

• 19:50Speaker 01

  I have not been able to get my dot to figure out a cool way to do that. And I, I would love to see that over the course of years.

• 19:56Speaker 00

  I think that's really cool. I've been wanting one that just like, it's a live dashboard of my mood. Because I, I have my dot, like when I get a Slack message and I'm like, I don't know if I want to look at this Slack message. I have my doc go look at it and then I'm like, should I look at this now or later? And it's like, you should look later. And I kind of want like a live thing of my mood. So it knows.

• 20:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, I, I want that too.

• 20:20Speaker 00

  Very cool. Tell me about decisions API. I feel like the decisions API is one of the sneaky, most important things today. Because Jeff is this new hot thing that has honestly changed how we think about building things internally. Is decisions API, did you start that from Jeff or has it been in the works for a while? How do you think about it?

• 20:39Speaker 01

  Diogo, uh, used to work at OpenAI and, um, Diogo's awesome. And he was talking about this class of ideas for a long time.

• 20:48Speaker 01

  And we had been working on.

• 20:52Speaker 01

  Trying to figure out how to make it work. We like the number one request of Luna. And this is like an example of how people always want like more cheaper, faster, better. But the number one request with Luna, even though people love that model, was I want it to be even cheaper and even faster. And so we have been thinking about how we could push it further in that direction. Definitely seeing the response to Jev made us more excited to prioritize things in that direction. But and like Diogo has inspired me for a long time on thinking about this. But I think you will see us try to push, you know, in different ways in the spirit of make the technology super fast and super low cost for common use cases.

• 21:36Speaker 00

  How do you think about, you know, if something like Jev comes out, it's a kind of new type of model? And then OpenAI can can add like a decisions API. How do you think about how that changes the race between Neo Labs and Labs? And what what OpenAI can cover and what a new lab can focus on?

• 21:54Speaker 01

  As I understand the approach of Jev, it's pretty different. And I don't think we can go, well, maybe we could go do something from scratch like that. But I think we have other things to go do, you know, like we want to make the best, cheapest, fastest, most capable model at every point on the Pareto curve of cost and speed and modality. But I think there will be new approaches, new architectures, new technologies that are things we just can't cover all of. But for the the kind of mainline workhorse, like we will try to deliver that.

• 22:24Speaker 00

  So I've been like in your ear a lot about Codex Native apps for a little while now.

• 22:29Speaker 01

  Finally did it.

• 22:29Speaker 00

  And you finally did it. I'm psyched. So plugin extensions. Yeah, and also being able to bring your tokens from your chat GPT subscription to an app developer. Like it changes the equation for someone like me where normally you're you're thinking about, okay, how much AI can I let my users use? So that doesn't bankrupt me. And then you're like, can I use, should I use lower priced models and then the experience is worse? But if someone can bring their subscription, I'm like, great, you can use whatever model you want under your subscription. What are you most excited about for the kinds of applications and products that can be built at the application layer in this new world?

• 23:03Speaker 01

  I mean, I'm most excited for the ones that we haven't thought of. Like there's many reasons that we wanted to do this. But one of the biggest is, and why we do this big Dev Day thing, is just that this very deep belief that there are way more good ideas outside of our building than inside. And I don't know what I'm going to love the most as like a chat GPT native app, a plugin extension. But I am very confident that there will be things that I really do love that I cannot imagine today. And that no one at OpenAI really could imagine with conviction today. And that's why, I mean, that's one of the reasons why this is so important to do. Like, we want to find a way to get that creative spirit into people's hands.

• 23:45Speaker 01

  And we want to find a way to help builders connect with people who are gonna find the technology useful. In terms of bringing your chat GPT subscription with you everywhere, like, we just want that ourselves. There's all this great stuff that people are building. There's all these new apps. We want to try them. And I like, I hate having to sign up for a hundred subscriptions. And also, like, when I try something, I'm like, hey, I, you know, like, I'd like to be able to use this with like full juice AI. So we want to make it just super easy for people to take it with them. And it's your subscription, like it's, you should get to use wherever you want.

• 24:18Speaker 00

  Do you think anyone at the app layer is doing this well today?

• 24:21Speaker 01

  Like building interesting apps? Well, not with the new stuff, just because it's brand new. But but yes, I mean, I think there's an unbelievable. For all of the fear people had a couple of years ago about, man, AI model companies are just going to eat everything. There is an unbelievable amount of significant new companies, great new products, building this stuff all of the time. I've never seen startups get as successful as quickly.

• 24:43Speaker 00

  Does that change, you know, you were part of Y Combinator before OpenAI. Does that change how you think about when people ask you about, how do I start a startup? Or how do I think about how to grow, like all that kind of stuff?

• 24:54Speaker 01

  I would love to be a startup investor again. I mean, because like, oh, man, what a fun time. Like the watching what people are doing right now, getting to spend time with some of these founders, which I don't get nearly as much as I like. It is, it is just a golden age.

• 25:08Speaker 00

  What are you looking for? I mean, obviously, besides the founder themselves, like, what are you looking for in the shape of things that you'd be like, oh, man, I want to invest in that?

• 25:15Speaker 01

  Hmm. I was always a very founder driven investor, like I have my pet project like anybody else. But my my whole MO as an investor was like, find the absolute best founders I can that are working on the ambitious projects and be willing to take a lot of risk with them.

• 25:30Speaker 00

  Yeah, I feel like there's always that narrative of the net labs are going to eat everything. And Dev Day is like, the tweet that always works is like, OpenAI just killed X startup or whatever.

• 25:41Speaker 01

  The tweet works because people like doomerism, but it never actually happens.

• 25:45Speaker 00

  Yeah, why is that?

• 25:46Speaker 01

  Why does it never happen?

• 25:47Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 25:47Speaker 01

  Well, A, I think we have a lot of conviction that empowering builders and not just trying to be like the one giant evil mega corp is important. So I think we took a lot of steps today that no other AI lab would do about saying, we're going to give you all of the same tools we use. We've always pushed the frontier on on model access. And so I think we're like uniquely committed in the industry to doing this. And we really do love developers. And I think that's partly, I just also love startups and that's where I came from. But I also think, speaking of like a new Renaissance, it's just, there is so much to explore. People are going to do such incredible stuff. We are going to have such a tiny fraction of that vision ourselves that, you know, like the world has a fundamentally new enabler.

• 26:31Speaker 01

  This is like, I mean, I don't even know what this is like fire or something. This is like a real change to what's possible. You know, maybe we like brought it down from the mountain, but we want to give it to everybody and we want people to like do stuff with it.

• 26:43Speaker 00

  There's a lot of basic startup lore, like you should always have a co-founder. Or, you know, even the structure of how Y Combinator does investments that is based on a previous, for example, cost structure.

• 26:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:56Speaker 00

  If you were going to start those things from scratch or think about them from scratch, like, what do you think changes?

• 27:01Speaker 01

  There are a few things that are probably just like in variance. You know, you've got to like make something people want. That device was good.

• 27:07Speaker 00

  Or agents want.

• 27:08Speaker 01

  One years ago.

• 27:09Speaker 00

  Yeah, okay.

• 27:10Speaker 01

  Well, yes, but at least by our understanding of the world today, like at some level, people.

• 27:16Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 27:17Speaker 01

  You got it. So there's some stuff that just hasn't changed. And then there's a lot of other things like how much work you can get done with one person or two people or whatever. It feels totally different. And I don't think there has been enough reexamination of that in this sort of startup conveyor belt of Silicon Valley yet.

• 27:37Speaker 00

  As a person who's running a gigantic company and generally probably wouldn't have time for building stuff, and now it seems like you are. How does that change how you are able to lead or what you're able to do that you can like make stuff on the side?

• 27:52Speaker 01

  I mean, we are not a gigantic company, first of all. Like, there's probably, I don't know, like, maybe the big tech companies have like a hundred times more people than we do, something like that. But I am way, I really believe in if you lower friction a little bit, people build way more. And I have really felt that now with Dots. And these like, you know, little chunks of time I have, or even like a long chunk of time where I can like have this interactive thing, get a lot done. I I feel like I will do something that is not just like a little side project for myself like I used to do with Codex. But like, I hope I launch something to the world. Like, I hope I actually make a cool new thing and like get it over the threshold.

• 28:34Speaker 00

  And like, does that go out on like samautman.com or are you talking about like a real like OpenAI product?

• 28:39Speaker 01

  Uh, I meant like I would try to like build a plugin extension or something and put it out.

• 28:44Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's.

• 28:45Speaker 01

  Maybe I'll maybe I'll ship a real OpenAI product.

• 28:48Speaker 01

  It feels like all bets are off now.

• 28:50Speaker 00

  And so, you know, you have to make that decision, do I?

• 28:52Speaker 01

  You know what? I will do that. I'm inspired now.

• 28:54Speaker 00

  What's do you have?

• 28:55Speaker 01

  I know, I don't know. I don't know. I think about it. Now I want to do something.

• 28:57Speaker 00

  I love it. I love it. But you do have to make a decision of like, you could just put a team on that. So what do you get to? What does that add that instead of having to put a team on it, you can now be like, oh, I'm going to make a plugin?

• 29:08Speaker 01

  Uh, well, I think today was an example of this. Like, you talked about how the amount of stuff every Dev Day has gone up. Like, we could not have done all this stuff without having AI to help us. And if this works, like, next year, we will put the teams on it. And I will do something and more people will do something and we'll have like a crazy amount of amazing stuff. Or just one really great thing, that'd be fine too. But like, hopefully, the total amount of like utility we put out into the world goes up.

• 29:36Speaker 00

  Do you do all your prompting on ultra fast?

• 29:39Speaker 01

  I do.

• 29:40Speaker 00

  That's.

• 29:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:41Speaker 00

  That's crazy.

• 29:42Speaker 01

  No, I've been I've been thinking about this. I I worry that in some ways, we kind of get out of touch with people building on our tools. And we try, we've tried to like put all of these constraints on ourselves. You know, I'm like very aware that not everybody is going to be able to use ultra fast all the time for everything. But I have such a hard time dragging it back over.

• 30:03Speaker 00

  Given that you're like living in that future, that I think, you know, all of us can experience a little taste of it. What is what is different about the ultra fast world in terms of how you can use these tools?

• 30:15Speaker 01

  There was an amazing talk, like, I don't know, fifteen, twenty years ago, from Brett Victor about kind of the principles that he thought people like, how he did his work. And one of the things, I'm going to get this a little bit wrong, but it was something like creators should have an immediate connection to what they're creating and how speed and the feedback loop was so important. And I did not realize what a difference that makes to my kind of iterative thinking loop to have responses come in so quickly. But but in terms of trying to build something, trying to think through a problem, it's like a wild difference.

• 30:52Speaker 00

  I know you've been thinking for a long time about AI as a democratizing force to allow anyone to build stuff. And in the sort of ultra fast world or in the Astros and more expensive model world, I know you're also thinking about that means something, that people pay more for better intelligence. So like, like, what are you thinking there?

• 31:12Speaker 01

  So historically, what we have mostly focused on and I think done a great job of is bringing down the like price of IQ. And we have made hugely more capable models that get dramatically, dramatically cheaper every few months or every year. Now, there's this new vector that is clearly going to be very important of speed. And we are putting the investments in place, like our own chip is going to be an incredible contributor to letting us get very fast inference in the hands of everybody, to say nothing of what the models will do to improve research and our inference stack and everything else. And I think we now realize that we've got to go invest in the democratization of this like we have for model intelligence.

• 31:54Speaker 00

  So when can I expect to use ultra fast for all my prompts?

• 32:00Speaker 01

  You can pay us for it and do it now.

• 32:01Speaker 00

  Like, I don't think I can afford it.

• 32:04Speaker 01

  I think we can deliver eight X at a great price in the not distant future. But then we'll have a hundred X faster. And like, you know, and they'll also be like, you know, GPT seven, Galaxy or whatever. And so I I think I think the right way to think about this is as far as I can see, there will always be a real frontier in terms of intelligence or speed or whatever else at a higher price. But I think you can also bet that we will keep doing what we've done of just a ridiculous, like put Moore's Law of Shame relentless focus on driving value per dollar up and up and up, kind of in this big compound anyway.

• 32:48Speaker 00

  Amazing. Sam, thank you so much.

• 32:50Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 32:56Speaker 01

  Thank you all for coming. I didn't realize there was going to be like a live audience, but that was fun. See you.