The Possibilities of AI [Entire Talk] - Sam Altman (OpenAI)

[Music] welcome to the entrepreneurial thought leader seminar at Stanford University this is the Stanford seminar for aspiring entrepreneurs ETL is brought to you by stvp the Stanford entrepreneurship engineering center and basis The Business Association of Stanford entrepreneurial students I'm rvie balani a lecturer in the management science and engineering department and the director of Alchemist and accelerator for Enterprise startups and today I have the pleasure of welcoming Sam Altman to ETL um Sam is the co-founder and CEO of open AI open is not a word I would use to describe the seats in this class and

so I think by virtue of that that everybody already play knows open AI but for those who don't openai is the research and deployment company behind chat gbt Dolly and Sora um Sam's life is a pattern of breaking boundaries and transcending what's possible both for himself and for the world he grew up in the midwest in St Louis came to Stanford took ETL as an undergrad um for any and we we held on to Stanford or Sam for two years he studied computer science and then after his sophomore year he joined the inaugural class of

Y combinator with a Social Mobile app company called looped um that then went on to go raise money from Sequoia and others he then dropped out of Stanford spent seven years on looped which got Acquired and then he rejoined Y combinator in an operational role he became the president of Y combinator from 2014 to 2019 and then in 2015 he co-founded open aai as a nonprofit research lab with the mission to build general purpose artificial intelligence that benefits all Humanity open aai has set the record for the fastest growing app in history with the launch

of chat gbt which grew to 100 million active users just two months after launch Sam was named one of times's 100 most influential people in the world he was also named times CEO of the year in 2023 and he was also most recently added to Forbes list of the world's billionaires um Sam lives with his husband in San Francisco and splits his time between San Francisco and Napa and he's also a vegetarian and so with that please join me in welcoming Sam Altman to the stage and in full disclosure that was a longer introduction than

Sam probably would have liked um brevity is the soul of wit um and so we'll try to make the questions more concise but this is this is this is also Sam's birth week it's it was his birthday on Monday and I mentioned that just because I think this is an auspicious moment both in terms of time you're 39 now and also place you're at Stanford in ETL that I would be remiss if this wasn't sort of a moment of just some reflection and I'm curious if you reflect back on when you were half a lifee

younger when you were 19 in ETL um if there were three words to describe what your felt sense was like as a Stanford undergrad what would those three words be it's always hard questions um I was like ex uh you want three words only okay uh you can you can go more Sam you're you're the king of brevity uh excited optimistic and curious okay and what would be your three words now I guess the same which is terrific so there's been a constant thread even though the world has changed and you know a lot has

changed in the last 19 years but that's going to pale in comparison what's going to happen in the next 19 yeah and so I need to ask you for your advice if you were a Stanford undergrad today so if you had a Freaky Friday moment tomorrow you wake up and suddenly you're 19 in inside of Stanford undergrad knowing everything you know what would you do would you drop be very happy um I would feel like I was like coming of age at the luckiest time um like in several centuries probably I think the degree to

which the world is is going to change and the the opportunity to impact that um starting a company doing AI research any number of things is is like quite remarkable I think this is probably the best time to start I yeah I think I would say this I think this is probably the best time to start a companies since uh the internet at least and maybe kind of like in the history of technology I think with what you can do with AI is like going to just get more remarkable every year and the greatest companies

get created at times like this the most impactful new products get built at times like this so um I would feel incredibly lucky uh and I would be determined to make the most of it and I would go figure out like where I wanted to contribute and do it and do you have a bias on where would you contribute would you want to stay as a student um would and if so would you major in a certain major giving the pace of of change probably I would not stay as a student but only cuz like

I didn't and I think it's like reasonable to assume people kind of are going to make the same decisions they would make again um I think staying as a student is a perfectly good thing to do I just I it would probably not be what I would have picked no this is you this is you so you have the Freaky Friday moment it's you you're reborn and as a 19-year-old and would you yeah what I think I would again like I think this is not a surprise cuz people kind of are going to do what

they're going to do I think I would go work on research and and and where might you do that Sam I think I mean obviously I have a bias towards open eye but I think anywhere I could like do meaningful AI research I would be like very thrilled about but you'd be agnostic if that's Academia or Private Industry um I say this with sadness I think I would pick industry realistically um I think it's I think to you kind of need to be the place with so much compute M MH okay and um if you

did join um on the research side would you join so we had kazer here last week who was a big advocate of not being a Founder but actually joining an existing companies sort of learn learn the chops for the for the students that are wrestling with should I start a company now at 19 or 20 or should I go join another entrepreneurial either research lab or Venture what advice would you give them well since he gave the case to join a company I'll give the other one um which is I think you learn a lot

just starting a company and if that's something you want to do at some point there's this thing Paul Graham says but I think it's like very deeply true there's no pre-startup like there is Premed you kind of just learn how to run a startup by running a startup and if if that's what you're pretty sure you want to do you may as well jump in and do it and so let's say so if somebody wants to start a company they want to be in AI um what do you think are the biggest near-term challenges that

you're seeing in AI that are the ripest for a startup and just to scope that what I mean by that are what are the holes that you think are the top priority needs for open AI that open AI will not solve in the next three years um yeah so I think this is like a very reasonable question to ask in some sense but I think it's I'm not going to answer it because I think you should never take this kind of advice about what startup to start ever from anyone um I think by the time

there's something that is like the kind of thing that's obvious enough that me or somebody else will sit up here and say it it's probably like not that great of a startup idea and I totally understand the impulse and I remember when I was just like asking people like what startup should I start um but I I think like one of the most important things I believe about having an impactful career is you have to chart your own course if if the thing that you're thinking about is something that someone else is going to do

anyway or more likely something that a lot of people are going to do anyway um you should be like somewhat skeptical of that and I think a really good muscle to build is coming up with the ideas that are not the obvious ones to say so I don't know what the really important idea is that I'm not thinking of right now but I'm very sure someone in this room does it knows what that answer is um and I think learning to trust yourself and come up with your own ideas and do the very like non-consensus

things like when we started open AI that was an extremely non-consensus thing to do and now it's like the very obvious thing to do um now I only have the obvious ideas CU I'm just like stuck in this one frame but I'm sure you all have the other ones but are there so can I ask it another way and I don't know if this is fair or not but are what questions then are you wrestling with that no one else is talking about how to build really big computers I mean I think other people are

talking about that but we're probably like looking at it through a lens that no one else is quite imagining yet um I mean we're we're definitely wrestling with how we when we make not just like grade school or middle schooler level intelligence but like PhD level intelligence and Beyond the best way to put that into a product the best way to have a positive impact with that on society and people's lives we don't know the answer to that yet so I think that's like a pretty important thing to figure out okay and can we continue

on that thread then of how to build really big computers if that's really what's on your mind can you share I know there's been a lot of speculation and probably a lot of here say too about um the semiconductor Foundry Endeavor that you are reportedly embarking on um can you share what would make what what's the vision what would make this different than it's not just foundies although that that's part of it it's like if if you believe which we increasingly do at this point that AI infrastructure is going to be one of the most

important inputs to the Future this commodity that everybody's going to want and that is energy data centers chips chip design new kinds of networks it's it's how we look at that entire ecosystem um and how we make a lot more of that and I don't think it'll work to just look at one piece or another but we we got to do the whole thing okay so there's multiple big problems yeah um I think like just this is the Arc of human technological history as we build bigger and more complex systems and does it gross so

you know in terms of just like the compute cost uh correct me if I'm wrong but chat gbt 3 was I've heard it was $100 million to do the model um and it was 100 175 billion parameters gbt 4 was cost $400 million with 10x the parameters it was almost 4X the cost but 10x the parameters correct me adjust me you know it I I do know it but I won oh you can you're invited to this is Stanford Sam okay um uh but the the even if you don't want to correct the actual numbers

if that's directionally correct um does the cost do you think keep growing with each subsequent yes and does it keep growing multiplicatively uh probably I mean and so the question then becomes how do we how do you capitalize that well look I I kind of think that giving people really capable tools and letting them figure out how they're going to use this to build the future is a super good thing to do and is super valuable and I am super willing to bet on the Ingenuity of you all and everybody else in the world to

figure out what to do about this so there is probably some more business-minded person than me at open AI somewhere that is worried about how much we're spending um but I kind of don't okay so that doesn't cross it so you know open ey is phenomenal chat gbt is phenomenal um everything else all the other models are phenomenal it burned you've earned $520 million of cash last year that doesn't concern you in terms of thinking about the economic model of how do you actually where's going to be the monetization source well first of all that's

nice of you to say but Chachi PT is not phenomenal like Chachi PT is like mildly embarrassing at best um gp4 is the dumbest model any of you will ever ever have to use again by a lot um but you know it's like important to ship early and often and we believe in iterative deployment like if we go build AGI in a basement and then you know the world is like kind of blissfully walking blindfolded along um I don't think that's like I don't think that makes us like very good neighbors um so I think

it's important given what we believe is going to happen to express our view about what we believe is going to happen um but more than that the way to do it is to put the product in people's hands um and let Society co-evolve with the technology let Society tell us what it collectively and people individually want from the technology how to productize this in a way that's going to be useful um where the model works really well where it doesn't work really well um give our leaders and institutions time to react um give people time

to figure out how to integrate this into their lives to learn how to use the tool um sure some of you all like cheat on your homework with it but some of you all probably do like very amazing amazing wonderful things with it too um and as each generation goes on uh I think that will expand and and that means that we ship imperfect products um but we we have a very tight feedback loop and we learn and we get better um and it does kind of suck to ship a product that you're embarrassed about

but it's much better than the alternative um and in this case in particular where I think we really owe it to society to deploy tively um one thing we've learned is that Ai and surprise don't go well together people don't want to be surprised people want a gradual roll out and the ability to influence these systems um that's how we're going to do it and there may be there could totally be things in the future that would change where we' think iterative deployment isn't such a good strategy um but it does feel like the current

best approach that we have and I think we've gained a lot um from from doing this and you know hopefully s the larger world has gained something too whether we burn 500 million a year or 5 billion or 50 billion a year I don't care I genuinely don't as long as we can I think stay on a trajectory where eventually we create way more value for society than that and as long as we can figure out a way to pay the bills like we're making AGI it's going to be expensive it's totally worth it and

so and so do you have a I hear you do you have a vision in 2030 of what if I say you crushed it Sam it's 2030 you crushed it what does the world look like to you um you know maybe in some very important ways not that different uh like we will be back here there will be like a new set of students we'll be talking about how startups are really important and technology is really cool we'll have this new great tool in the world it'll feel it would feel amazing if we got to

teleport forward six years today and have this thing that was like smarter than humans in many subjects and could do these complicated tasks for us and um you know like we could have these like complicated program written or This research done or this business started uh and yet like the Sun keeps Rising the like people keep having their human dramas life goes on so sort of like super different in some sense that we now have like abundant intelligence at our fingertips and then in some other sense like not different at all okay and you mentioned

artificial general intellig AGI artificial general intelligence and in in a previous interview you you define that as software that could mimic the median competence of a or the competence of a median human for tasks yeah um can you give me is there time if you had to do a best guess of when you think or arrange you feel like that's going to happen I think we need a more precise definition of AGI for the timing question um because at at this point even with like the definition you just gave which is a reasonable one there's

that's your I'm I'm I'm paring back what you um said in an interview well that's good cuz I'm going to criticize myself okay um it's it's it's it's too loose of a definition there's too much room for misinterpretation in there um to I think be really useful or get at what people really want like I kind of think what people want to know when they say like what's the timeline to AGI is like when is the world going to be super different when is the rate of change going to get super high when is the

way the economy Works going to be really different like when does my life change and that for a bunch of reasons may be very different than we think like I can totally imagine a world where we build PhD level intelligence in any area and you know we can make researchers way more productive maybe we can even do some autonomous research and in some sense like that sounds like it should change the world a lot and I can imagine that we do that and then we can detect no change in global GDP growth for like years

afterwards something like that um which is very strange to think about and it was not my original intuition of how this was all going to go so I don't know how to give a precise timeline of when we get to the Milestone people care about but when we get to systems that are way more capable than we have right now one year and every year after and that I think is the important point so I've given up on trying to give the AGI timeline but I think every year for the next many we have dramatically

more capable systems every year um I want to ask about the dangers of of AGI um and gang I know there's tons of questions for Sam in a few moments I'll be turning it up so start start thinking about your questions um a big focus on Stanford right now is ethics and um can we talk about you know how you perceive the dangers of AGI and specifically do you think the biggest Danger from AGI is going to come from a cataclysmic event which you know makes all the papers or is it going to be more

subtle and pernicious sort of like you know like how everybody has ADD right now from you know using Tik Tok um is it are you more concerned about the subtle dangers or the cataclysmic dangers um or neither I'm more concerned about the subtle dangers because I think we're more likely to overlook those the cataclysmic dangers uh a lot of people talk about and a lot of people think about and I don't want to minimize those I think they're really serious and a real thing um but I think we at least know to look out for

that and spend a lot of effort um the example you gave of everybody getting add from Tik Tok or whatever I don't think we knew to look out for and that that's a really hard the the unknown unknowns are really hard and so I'd worry more about those although I worry about both and are they unknown unknowns are there any that you can name that you're particularly worried about well then I would kind of they'd be unknown unknown um you can I I am am worried just about so so even though I think in the

short term things change less than we think as with other major Technologies in the long term I think they change more than we think and I am worried about what rate Society can adapt to something so new and how long it'll take us to figure out the new social contract versus how long we get to do it um I'm worried about that okay um I'm going to I'm going to open up so I want to ask you a question about one of the key things that we're now trying to in into the curriculum as things

change so rapidly is resilience that's really good and and you know and the Cornerstone of resilience uh is is self-awareness and so and I'm wondering um if you feel that you're pretty self-aware of your driving motivations as you are embarking on this journey so first of all I think um I believe resilience can be taught uh I believe it has long been one of the most important life skills um and in the future I think in the over the next couple of decades I think resilience and adaptability will be more important theyve been in a

very long time so uh I think that's really great um on the self-awareness question I think I'm self aware but I think like everybody thinks they're self-aware and whether I am or not is sort of like hard to say from the inside and can I ask you sort of the questions that we ask in our intro classes on self awareness sure it's like the Peter duer framework so what do you think your greatest strengths are Sam uh I think I'm not great at many things but I'm good at a lot of things and I think

breath has become an underrated thing in the world everyone gets like hypers specialized so if you're good at a lot of things you can seek connections across them um I think you can then kind of come up with the ideas that are different than everybody else has or that sort of experts in one area have and what are your most dangerous weaknesses um most dangerous that's an interesting framework for it uh I think I have like a general bias to be too Pro technology just cuz I'm curious and I want to see where it goes

and I believe that technology is on the whole a net good thing but I think that is a worldview that has overall served me and others well and thus got like a lot of positive reinforcement and is not always true and when it's not been true has been like pretty bad for a lot of people and then Harvard psychologist David mcland has this framework that all leaders are driven by one of three Primal needs a need for affiliation which is a need to be liked a need for achievement and a need for power if you

had to rank list those what would be yours I think at various times in my career all of those I think there these like levels that people go through um at this point I feel driven by like wanting to do something useful and interesting okay and I definitely had like the money and the power and the status phases okay and then where were you when you most last felt most like yourself I I always and then one last question and what are you most excited about with chat gbt five that's coming out that uh people

don't what are you what are you most excited about with the of chat gbt that we're all going to see uh I don't know yet um I I mean I this this sounds like a cop out answer but I think the most important thing about gp5 or whatever we call that is just that it's going to be smarter and this sounds like a Dodge but I think that's like among the most remarkable facts in human history that we can just do something and we can say right now with a high degree of scientific certainty GPT

5 is going to be smarter than a lot smarter than GPT 4 GPT 6 going to be a lot smarter than gbt 5 and we are not near the top of this curve and we kind of know what know what to do and this is not like it's going to get better in one area this is not like we're going to you know it's not that it's always going to get better at this eval or this subject or this modality it's just going to be smarter in the general sense and I think the gravity of

that statement is still like underrated okay that's great Sam guys Sam is really here for you he wants to answer your question so we're going to open it up hello um thank you so much for joining joining us uh I'm a junior here at Stanford I sort of wanted to talk to you about responsible deployment of AGI so as as you guys could continually inch closer to that how do you plan to deploy that responsibly AI uh at open AI uh you know to prevent uh you know stifling human Innovation and continue to Spur that

so I'm actually not worried at all about stifling of human Innovation I I really deeply believe that people will just surprise us on the upside with better tools I think all of history suggest that if you give people more leverage they do more amazing things and that's kind of like we all get to benefit from that that's just kind of great I am though increasingly worried about how we're going to do this all responsibly I think as the models get more capable we have a higher and higher bar we do a lot of things like

uh red teaming and external Audits and I think those are all really good but I think as the models get more capable we'll have to deploy even more iteratively have an even tighter feedback loop on looking at how they're used and where they work and where they don't work and this this world that we used to do where we can release a major model update every couple of years we probably have to find ways to like increase the granularity on that and deploy more iteratively than we have in the past and it's not super obvious

to us yet how to do that but I think that'll be key to responsible deployment and also the way we kind of have all of the stakeholders negotiate what the rules of AI need to be uh that's going to get more comp Lex over time too thank you next question where here you mentioned before that there's a growing need for larger and larger computers and faster computers however many parts of the world don't have the infrastructure to build those data centers or those large computers how do you see um Global Innovation being impacted by that

so two parts to that one um no matter where the computers are built I think Global and Equitable access to use the computers for training as well inference is super important um one of the things that's like very C to our mission is that we make chat GPT available for free to as many people as want to use it with the exception of certain countries where we either can't or don't for a good reason want to operate um how we think about making training compute more available to the world is is uh going to become

increasingly important I I do think we get to a world where we sort of think about it as a human right to get access to a certain amount of compute and we got to figure out how to like distribute that to people all around the world um there's a second thing though which is I think countries are going to increasingly realize the importance of having their own AI infrastructure and we want to figure out a way and we're now spending a lot of time traveling around the world to build them in uh the many countries

that'll want to build these and I hope we can play some small role there in helping that happen trfic thank you U my question was what role do you envision for AI in the future of like space exploration or like colonization um I think space is like not that hospitable for biological life obviously and so if we can send the robots that seems easier hey Sam so my question is for a lot of the founders in the room and I'm going to give you the question and then I'm going to explain why I think it's

complicated um so my question is about how you know an idea is non-consensus and the reason I think it's complicated is cu it's easy to overthink um I think today even yourself says AI is the place to start a company I think that's pretty consensus maybe rightfully so it's an inflection point I think it's hard to know if idea is non-consensus depending on the group that you're talking about the general public has a different view of tech from The Tech Community and even Tech Elites have a different point of view from the tech community so

I was wondering how you verify that your idea is non-consensus enough to pursue um I mean first of all what you really want is to be right being contrarian and wrong still is wrong and if you predicted like 17 out of the last two recessions you probably were contrarian for the two you got right probably not even necessarily um but you were wrong 15 other times and and and so I think it's easy to get too excited about being contrarian and and again like the most important thing to be right and the group is usually

right but where the most value is um is when you are contrarian and right and and that doesn't always happen in like sort of a zero one kind of way like everybody in the room can agree that AI is the right place to start the company and if one person in the room figures out the right company to start and then successfully executes on that and everybody else thinks ah that wasn't the best thing you could do that's what matters so it's okay to kind of like go with conventional wisdom when it's right and then

find the area where you have some unique Insight in terms of how to do that um I do think surrounding yourself with the right peer group is really important and finding original thinkers uh is important but there is part of this where you kind of have to do it Solo or at least part of it Solo or with a few other people who are like you know going to be your co-founders or whatever um and I think by the time you're too far in the like how can I find the right peer group you're somehow

in the wrong framework already um so like learning to trust yourself and your own intuition and your own thought process which gets much easier over time no one no matter what they said they say I think is like truly great at this this when they're just starting out you because like you kind of just haven't built the muscle and like all of your Social pressure and all of like the evolutionary pressure that produced you was against that so it's it's something that like you get better at over time and and and don't hold yourself to

too high of a standard too early on it Hi Sam um I'm curious to know what your predictions are for how energy demand will change in the coming decades and how we achieve a future where renewable energy sources are 1 set per kilowatt hour um I mean it will go up for sure well not for sure you can come up with all these weird ways in which like we all depressing future is where it doesn't go up I would like it to go up a lot I hope that we hold ourselves to a high enough

standard where it does go up I I I forget exactly what the kind of world's electrical gener generating capacity is right now but let's say it's like 3,000 4,000 gwatt something like that even if we add another 100 gwatt for AI it doesn't materially change it that much but it changes it some and if we start at a th gwatt for AI someday it does that's a material change but there are a lot of other things that we want to do and energy does seem to correlate quite a lot with quality of life we can

deliver for people um my guess is that Fusion eventually dominates electrical generation on Earth um I think it should be the cheapest most abundant most reliable densest source I could could be wrong with that and it could be solar Plus Storage um and you know my guess most likely is it's going to be 820 one way or the other and there'll be some cases where one of those is better than the other but uh those kind of seem like the the two bets for like really global scale one cent per kilowatt hour energy Hi Sam

I have a question it's about op guide drop what happened last year so what's the less you learn cuz you talk about resilience so what's the lesson you learn from left that company and now coming back and what what made you com in back because Microsoft also gave you offer like can you share more um I mean the best lesson I learned was that uh we had an incredible team that totally could have run the company without me and did did for a couple of days um and you never and also that the team was

super resilient like we knew that a CRA some crazy things and probably more crazy things will happen to us between here and AGI um as different parts of the world have stronger and stronger emotional reactions and the stakes keep ratcheting up and you know I thought that the team would do well under a lot of pressure but you never really know until you get to run the experiment and we got to run the experiment and I learned that the team was super resilient and like ready to kind of run the company um in terms of

why I came back you know I originally when the so it was like the next morning the board called me and like what do you think about coming back and I was like no um I'm mad um and and then I thought about it and I realized just like how much I loved open AI um how much I loved the people the C the culture we had built uh the mission and I kind of like wanted to finish it Al together you you you emotionally I just want to this is obviously a really sensitive and

one of one of oh it's it's not but was I imagine that was okay well then can we talk about the structure about it because this Russian doll structure of the open AI where you have the nonprofit owning the for-profit um you know when we're we're trying to teach principal ger entrepreneur we got here we got to the structure gradually um it's not what I would go back and pick if we could do it all over again but we didn't think we were going to have a product when we started we were just going to

be like a AI research lab wasn't even clear we had no idea about a language model or an API or chat GPT so if if you're going to start a company you got to have like some theory that you're going to sell a product someday and we didn't think we were going to we didn't realize we're were going to need so much money for compute we didn't realize we were going to like have this nice business um so what was your intention when you started it we just wanted to like push AI research forward we

thought that and I know this gets back to motivations but that's the pure motivation there's no motivation around making money or or power I cannot overstate how foreign of a concept like I mean for you personally not for open AI but you you weren't starting well I had already made a lot of money so it was not like a big I mean I I like I don't want to like claim some like moral Purity here it was just like that was the of my life a dver driver okay because there's this so and the reason

why I'm asking is just you know when we're teaching about principle driven entrepreneurship here you can you can understand principles inferred from organizational structures when the United States was set up the architecture of governance is the Constitution it's got three branches of government all these checks and balances and you can infer certain principles that you know there's a skepticism on centralizing power that you know things will move slowly it's hard to get things to change but it'll be very very stable if you you know not to parot Billy eish but if you look at the

open AI structure and you think what was that made for um it's a you have a like your near hundred billion dollar valuation and you've got a very very limited board that's a nonprofit board which is supposed to look after it's it's its fiduciary duties to the again it's not what we would have done if we knew then what we know now but you don't get to like play Life In Reverse and you have to just like adapt there's a mission we really cared about we thought we thought AI was going to be really important

we thought we had an algorithm that learned we knew it got better with scale we didn't know how predictably it got better with scale and we wanted to push on this we thought this was like going to be a very important thing in human history and we didn't get everything right but we were right on the big stuff and our mission hasn't changed and we've adapted the structure as we go and will adapt it more in the future um but you know like you don't like life is not a problem set um you don't get

to like solve everything really nicely all at once it doesn't work quite like it works in the classroom as you're doing it and my advice is just like trust yourself to adapt as you go it'll be a little bit messy but you can do it and I just asked this because of the significance of open AI um you have a you have a board which is all supposed to be independent financially so that they're making these decisions as a nonprofit thinking about the stakeholder their stakeholder that they are fiduciary of isn't the shareholders it's Humanity

um everybody's independent there's no Financial incentive that anybody has that's on the board including yourself with hope and AI um well Greg was I okay first of all I think making money is a good thing I think capitalism is a good thing um my co-founders on the board have had uh financial interest and I've never once seen them not take the gravity of the mission seriously um but you know we've put a structure in place that we think is a way to get um incentives aligned and I do believe incentives are superpowers but I'm sure

we'll evolve it more over time and I think that's good not bad and with open AI the new fund you're not you don't get any carry in that and you're not following on investments onto those okay okay okay thank you we can keep talking about this I I I know you want to go back to students I do too so we'll go we'll keep we'll keep going to the students how do you expect that AGI will change geopolitics and the balance of power in the world um like maybe more than any other technology um I

don't I I think about that so much and I have such a hard time saying what it's actually going to do um I or or maybe more accurately I have such a hard time saying what it won't do and we were talking earlier about how it's like not going to CH maybe it won't change day-to-day life that much but the balance of power in the world it feels like it does change a lot but I don't have a deep answer of exactly how thanks so much um I was wondering sorry I was wondering in the

deployment of like general intelligence and also responsible AI how much do you think is it necessary that AI systems are somehow capable of recognizing their own insecurities or like uncertainties and actually communicating them to the outside world I I always get nervous anthropomorphizing AI too much because I think it like can lead to a bunch of weird oversights but if we say like how much can AI recognize its own flaws uh I think that's very important to build and right now and the ability to like recognize an error in reasoning um and have some sort

of like introspection ability like that that that seems to me like really important to pursue hey s thank you for giving us some of your time today and coming to speak from the outside looking in we we all hear about the culture and together togetherness of open AI in addition to the intensity and speed of what you guys work out clearly seen from CH gbt and all your breakthroughs and also in when you were temporarily removed from the company by the board and how all the all of your employees tweeted open air is nothing without

its people what would you say is the reason behind this is it the binding mission to achieve AGI or something even deeper what is pushing the culture every day I think it is the shared Mission um I mean I think people like like each other and we feel like we've you know we're in the trenches together doing this really hard thing um but I think it really is like deep sense of purpose and loyalty to the mission and when you can create that I think it is like the strongest force for Success at any start

at least that I've seen among startups um and you know we try to like select for that and people we hire but even people who come in not really believing that AGI is going to be such a big deal and that getting it right is so important tend to believe it after the first three months or whatever and so that's like that's a very powerful cultural force that we have thanks um currently there are a lot of concerns about the misuse of AI in the immediate term with issues like Global conflicts and the election coming

up what do you think can be done by the industry governments and honestly People Like Us in the immediate term especially with very strong open- Source models one thing that I think is important is not to pretend like this technology or any other technology is all good um I believe that AI will be very net good tremendously net good um but I think like with any other tool um it'll be misused like you can do great things with a hammer and you can like kill people with a hammer um I don't think that absolves us

or you all or Society from um trying to mitigate the bad as much as we can and maximize the good but I do think it's important to realize that with any sufficiently powerful Tool uh you do put Power in the hands of tool users or you make some decisions that constrain what people in society can do I think we have a voice in that I think you all have a voice on that I think the governments and our elected representatives in Democratic process processes have the loudest voice in that but we're not going to get

this perfectly right like we Society are not going to get this perfectly right and a tight feedback loop I think is the best way to get it closest to right um and the way that that balance gets negotiated of safety versus freedom and autonomy um I think it's like worth studying that with previous Technologies and we'll do the best we can here we Society will do the best we can here um gang actually I've got to cut it sorry I know um I'm wanty to be very sensitive to time I know the the interest far

exceeds the time and the love for Sam um Sam I know it is your birthday I don't know if you can indulge us because I know there's a lot of love for you so I wonder if we can all just sing Happy Birthday no no no please no we want to make you very uncomfortable one more question I'd much rather do one more question this is less interesting to you thank you we can you can do one more question quickly day dear Sam happy birthday to you 20 seconds of awkwardness is there a burner question

somebody who's got a real burner and we only have 30 seconds so make it short um hi I wanted to ask if the prospect of making something smarter than any human could possibly be scares you it of course does and I think it would be like really weird and uh a bad sign if it didn't scare me um humans have gotten dramatically smarter and more capable over time you are dramatically more capable than your great great grandparents and there's almost no biological drift over that period like sure you eat a little bit better and you

got better healthare um maybe you eat worse I don't know um but that's not the main reason you're more capable um you are more capable because the infrastructure of society is way smarter and way more capable than any human and and through that it made you Society people that came before you um made you uh the internet the iPhone a huge amount of knowledge available at your fingertips and you can do things that your predecessors would find absolutely breathtaking um Society is far smarter than you now um Society is an AGI as far as you

can tell and the the way that that happened was not any individual's brain but the space between all of us that scaffolding that we build up um and contribute to Brick by Brick step by step uh and then we use to go to far greater Heights for the people that come after us um things that are smarter than us will contribute to that same scaffolding um you will have your children will have tools available that you didn't um and that scaffolding will have gotten built up to Greater Heights and that's always a little bit scary

um but I think it's like more way more good than bad and people will do better things and solve more problems and the people of the future will be able to use these new tools and the new scaffolding that these new tools contribute to um if you think about a world that has um AI making a bunch of scientific discovery what happens to that scientific progress is it just gets added to the scaffolding and then your kids can do new things with it or you in 10 years can do new things with it um but

the way it's going to feel to people uh I think is not that there is this like much smarter entity uh because we're much smarter in some sense than the great great great grandparents are more capable at least um but that any individual person can just do more on that we're going to end it so let's give Sam a round of applause [Music]