0:01

I'm Barry Weiss, and this is

0:03

Honestly. Six

0:05

months ago, few people outside of Silicon

0:07

Valley had even heard of OpenAI,

0:10

the company that makes the artificial intelligence

0:12

chatbot known as ChatGPT.

0:15

Now, ChatGPT is being

0:18

used daily by over 100 million

0:20

users, and by some of these people, it's

0:23

being used more often than Google. Just

0:26

months after its release, ChatGPT

0:29

is the fastest growing app in

0:31

history.

0:35

ChatGPT can write essays. It

0:38

can code. It can ace the bar

0:40

exam. It can write poems and song

0:42

lyrics, summarize emails. It

0:44

can give advice, scour the internet for

0:47

information, and it can do all of this in a

0:49

matter of seconds. And

0:51

the most amazing thing of all is

0:54

that all of the responses it generates

0:56

are eerily similar to

0:58

those of a human being.

1:05

For many people, it feels

1:07

like we're on the brink of the biggest thing

1:09

in human history, that the technology

1:12

that powers ChatGPT and

1:14

the emergent AI revolution more broadly

1:17

will be the most critical and

1:19

rapid societal transformation in

1:21

the history of the world. If

1:24

that sounds like hyperbole to you, don't take

1:26

it from me.

1:27

What do you compare AI

1:29

to in the course of human civilization?

1:33

You know, I've always thought of AI as the most

1:35

profound technology humanity is working

1:38

on. More profound than fire

1:40

or electricity or anything that we have

1:42

done in the past.

1:43

Google CEO Sundar Pichai said

1:46

that the impact of AI will be more

1:48

profound than the invention of

1:50

fire.

1:51

As you know, I work in AI

1:53

and AI is changing the world. Computer

1:56

scientist and Coursera co-founder Andrew

1:58

Ng. AI is the new electricity. said

2:00

that AI is the new electricity.

2:04

Some compare it to the printing press.

2:06

Others say it's more like the invention of

2:08

the wheel or the airplane.

2:10

Sacks, you're saying explicitly you think this

2:13

is bigger than the Internet itself. Bigger

2:15

than mobile has a platform shift.

2:18

It's definitely top three and I think it might be the biggest ever.

2:21

Many predict that the AI revolution

2:24

will make the Internet seem small. And

2:26

last month, the Atlantic ran a story

2:29

comparing AI to

2:30

nuclear weapons.

2:35

Now, I'm generally an enthusiastic personality

2:37

and so when someone tells me about

2:39

a new technology, I get excited.

2:42

When I heard about crypto, I bought

2:44

Bitcoin. When a friend told me that

2:46

VR is going to change my life, I

2:49

spent hours trying on his headset

2:51

in the metaverse. So there's something profoundly

2:54

exciting about a technology

2:56

that so many smart people

2:59

believe could be a world changer, literally.

3:02

You know, we are developing technology

3:04

which for sure one day will

3:06

be far more capable than anything

3:09

we've ever seen before.

3:11

But it also scares me.

3:14

Because other smart people,

3:17

sometimes the very same people,

3:19

are saying that there is a flip side to all of this

3:21

optimism. And it's a very dark

3:23

one. The problem is that we do not get 50

3:26

years to try and try again and observe that

3:28

we were wrong and come up with a different theory and realize

3:30

that the entire thing is going to be like way more difficult

3:33

and realized at the start. Because

3:35

the first time you fail at aligning something much

3:37

smarter than you are, you die.

3:41

One of the pioneers of AI, a guy named

3:43

Eliezer Yudofsky, claims that

3:45

if AI continues on its current trajectory,

3:49

it will destroy life on Earth as we know it. Here's

3:51

what

3:52

he just wrote recently. If

3:54

somebody builds a too powerful AI

3:56

under present conditions, I expect that every single

3:59

one of us will be able to do it.

3:59

member of the human species,

4:01

and all biological life on Earth

4:04

dies shortly thereafter. Now

4:08

his concerns are particularly severe.

4:10

It's hard to think of a more dire

4:13

prediction than that one. But he's not the

4:15

only one with serious concerns.

4:17

Thousands of brilliant technologists, people

4:19

like Elon Musk and Steve Wozniak, are

4:22

so concerned that last month they put out a public

4:24

letter calling for an immediate pause

4:26

on training any AI systems more

4:29

powerful than the current version of

4:31

chat GPT.

4:35

So which is it? Is

4:38

AI the end of the world? Or

4:40

the dawn of a new one?

4:46

To answer that question, I

4:48

invited Sam Altman on the show today.

4:51

Sam is the co-founder and CEO

4:53

of OpenAI, the company that makes chat

4:55

GPT, which makes him arguably

4:58

one of the most powerful people in Silicon Valley,

5:00

and

5:01

if you believe the hype about AI,

5:03

the whole world. I

5:05

asked Sam, is the technology

5:07

that powers chat GPT going

5:10

to fundamentally transform life

5:12

on Earth as we know it? And if so,

5:14

how?

5:15

How will AI affect the way we

5:17

do our jobs, our understanding

5:19

of intelligence,

5:21

our relationships with each other, and

5:23

our basic humanity, and are the

5:25

people in charge of this technology, people

5:28

like him,

5:29

ready for the responsibility?

5:36

That and more after a short break. Stay

5:39

with us. This

5:41

episode is brought to you by Cozy Earth. This

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6:39

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dot com slash honestly.

7:30

Sam Altman, welcome to Honestly.

7:32

Thanks for having me on. So Sam, last

7:34

night I was watching 60 Minutes because despite appearances,

7:36

I guess I'm a boomer on the inside and I

7:39

listened as Google CEO compared

7:42

AI to the invention of fire.

7:46

And if that's true, then I guess despite

7:48

the fact that many of us feel like we're living at the pinnacle

7:51

of civilization, we're actually

7:53

in retrospect going to look something like I

7:55

guess Neanderthals or cavemen. And

7:58

I wonder if you... agree with that analogy.

8:01

If you think that this technology

8:03

that you're at the very cutting edge of as the CEO

8:06

of OpenAI, that it's going to create

8:08

as seismic a change

8:11

in human life on earth, as

8:13

did fire or maybe electricity.

8:16

My, my old understanding of the world did

8:18

sort of match that there were all of these different

8:21

technological revolutions and argue about

8:23

which one is bigger or smaller than the other and

8:25

talk about

8:26

when different people reached the

8:28

pinnacle or whatever. And now I understand

8:30

the world in a very different way, which is this one long

8:33

arc, this one single technological

8:35

revolution or the knowledge revolution.

8:38

And it was our incredible

8:41

ability to figure things out, to

8:44

form new explanations

8:47

in the beginning of infinity language, good explanations

8:50

and advance the state

8:53

of knowledge and evolve this sort of infrastructure

8:55

outside of our ourselves, our civilization,

8:58

that really is the way to understand progress

9:01

forward. And it's this one big, gigantic

9:04

exponential curve that we're all writing, the

9:07

knowledge revolution. And that's

9:09

not how I view history and

9:12

certainly how I view the history of technology. And

9:14

so I think it's like always tempting to feel like we're

9:17

at the pinnacle now. And I'm sure people in the past felt

9:19

like they were at the pinnacle and

9:21

that the part of the revolution that

9:23

they happen to be living through was the most important part ever.

9:26

But I think we are at a new pinnacle and

9:28

then there will be many more to follow. And

9:30

it's all part of this one expanding

9:32

thing. Right. But not every period of

9:35

time feels as, as enormous.

9:38

You know, if you look between like the eighth and 10th century,

9:41

probably not that much change. I mean, I'm sure it did

9:43

to the people who were alive then, but this

9:45

feels like a revolution to me

9:47

in a way that so many other things that have

9:49

been hyped as revolutions in the past 10

9:52

years simply don't. The

9:54

curve has squiggles for sure. And

9:57

I think this is bigger than some

9:59

of the things that have been hyped in the last decade

10:02

that haven't quite planned out. But that's okay. That's

10:04

like the way of it. Sometimes it looks more

10:06

obvious, sometimes it doesn't. And again,

10:08

there are periods where less happens.

10:11

But if you like zoom out, you know, this is like

10:14

the third millennium since we've been counting, but

10:16

let's say like, this is maybe, you know,

10:18

year 70,000 of humans or whatever. And

10:21

you can say, wow, between years 60 and 70,000, so

10:23

much happened. I bet

10:25

way more will happen between year 70,000 and 80,000 of human history.

10:29

I think it's just going to keep going. Sam,

10:32

in just a few years, your company

10:35

has gone from being a small nonprofit

10:37

that few outside of Silicon Valley

10:39

paid much attention to, to

10:42

having an arm of the company

10:45

that's a multi-billion dollar company

10:47

with a product so powerful that

10:50

some people I know tell me they already spend more

10:52

time on it than they do Google. Other

10:54

people are, you know, writing op-eds warning

10:56

that the company you're overseeing, that technology

10:59

overseeing has the potential to destroy humanity

11:01

as we know it. You know, for those

11:03

who are just sort of new to this conversation,

11:06

what happened at open AI over

11:08

the past few years that's led to

11:11

what to many of us seems like this

11:13

massive explosion only over the past few

11:16

months? What have you guys been doing for the past

11:18

few years?

11:20

First of all, we are still a nonprofit. We have a

11:22

subsidiary capital profit. We realized that we

11:24

just needed way more capital than we could

11:26

raise as a nonprofit given the compute power

11:28

that these models needed to be trained. But

11:31

the reason that we have that unique structure around

11:33

safety and sharing of benefits, I think it's only

11:35

more important now than it

11:37

used to be. What changed is our

11:40

seven years, whatever it's been of research, finally

11:43

really paid off. It took a long time

11:45

and a lot of work to figure out how we

11:48

were going to develop AI. And we tried a

11:50

lot of things. Many of them came together.

11:52

Some of them turned out to be dead ends.

11:55

And finally we got to a system

11:57

that was over a bar

11:59

of utility. You can argue

12:01

about whether it's intelligent or not, but most

12:03

people who use it would not argue that it doesn't have

12:06

utility. And then after we developed

12:08

that technology, we still had to develop a

12:10

new user interface. Another thing that I

12:12

have learned is that making

12:15

a simple user interface that fits

12:17

the shape of a new technology is important

12:19

and usually neglected. So we

12:22

had the technology for some time, but it took

12:24

us a little while to find out how to make it really

12:26

easy to chat with. And we were very focused on this

12:28

idea of a language interface, so we wanted to get there.

12:31

And

12:31

then we released that. People, it's been very gratifying

12:33

to see, have found a great deal of value

12:36

in using it to learn things, to

12:38

do their jobs better, to be more creative, whatever.

12:42

I know that there are listeners of this show, including

12:44

my mom, who have vaguely heard what AI

12:46

is. They know it's a thing. They know it's

12:49

a thing that a lot of people are going

12:51

on about, either very excited or very

12:54

scared of it. But they've definitely

12:56

never used chat GPT. They've

12:59

probably never heard of a large language model. So

13:02

first, just just to set the stage,

13:04

how do you define what artificial

13:07

intelligence or artificial general

13:09

intelligence AGI is? What

13:12

is that?

13:13

So I don't like either of those terms, but

13:16

I've like fought battles in the past to try to change

13:18

them and given up on that. So I'll just stick

13:20

with them for now. I think AI

13:22

is

13:23

understood to still be a computer program, but one

13:26

that is smarter. So you still use it like you

13:28

use some other computer program, but it seems

13:30

to get what you mean a little bit more. It seems

13:32

to be a little bit closer towards like

13:35

a smart person that can sort of intuit

13:37

things or put things together for you in new ways or just

13:39

be a little bit more natural, a little bit more flexible.

13:42

And so people have this experience the first time

13:44

they talk to chat GPT, which is like, wow,

13:47

the experts, the linguists, they can

13:49

argue about the definition of the word, understanding

13:51

that it feels like this thing understands me, feels

13:53

like this thing is trying to help me and do

13:55

my task or whatever.

13:57

And that's powerful. And then AGI.

15:47

What

16:00

are these systems actually doing? Are we too impressed?

16:02

Is it a parlor trick? But in terms of delivering

16:04

the value to a user, in some cases, it's

16:07

inarguably there. Chat

16:09

GPT is the fastest growing

16:11

app

16:12

ever in the history of the internet. In

16:14

the first five days, it got a million users.

16:17

Then over the course of two months after it

16:19

launched, it amassed a hundred million.

16:22

And this was back in January. And right from the

16:24

beginning, it was doing amazing things, things

16:26

that every single dinner party I was going to, it's all anyone

16:28

could talk about. It could take an AP test.

16:30

It could draft emails. It could write essays.

16:33

I mean, before I went on Bill Maher most recently,

16:35

I knew we were going to talk about this subject. I

16:37

typed in Bill Maher monologue and it turned

16:40

out

16:40

a monologue that sounded a whole lot like Bill

16:43

Maher. He was not thrilled to hear that. And

16:45

yet you have said that you were embarrassed

16:48

when chat GPT 3 and 3.5, the

16:51

first iterations of the product were released. And

16:53

I wondered why.

16:55

Well, I think that Paul Graham once

16:57

said to me, there's always stuck with me is if you don't launch

17:00

version one that you're a little embarrassed about, you waited

17:02

too long to launch.

17:03

Explain to Paul Graham. Paul Graham,

17:05

he ran YC before me and is just sort of

17:07

a legend, rightfully so among

17:10

founders in Silicon Valley. I think he did more

17:12

to help founders as

17:14

a whole, like as a class probably than any other

17:16

person, both in terms of starting YC

17:18

and also just

17:20

the contributions, the advice and the

17:22

support he gave to people like me and thousands of other

17:24

founders he worked with over the years. But

17:27

one thing he always said is, if you

17:29

don't launch a version that you're a little embarrassed about, you waited too long.

17:31

So there's all of these things in chat GPT that

17:33

are still don't work that well. And

17:37

we make it better and better every week and that's okay. Last

17:39

month you released the current version, chat

17:41

GPT 4, which is remarkably

17:44

more effective and accurate than the previous versions.

17:47

I saw a chart of exam results between chat

17:50

GPT 3.5 and 4, and

17:52

it's crazy how much better it is. Like it

17:54

went from failing the bar exam to getting only 50% of

17:57

the answers correct to scoring in the

17:59

nine.

17:59

or scoring one

18:02

out of five on an AP Calc exam, calculus

18:04

exam, to four out of five, which

18:06

is much better than I did. So how

18:08

were you able at OpenAI to

18:10

improve GPT's accuracy

18:13

with such speed? And what does that

18:15

great leap tell us about what

18:17

the next version of this product will look like?

18:20

So we had GPT-4 done for a long

18:22

time, but as you said,

18:25

these technologies are anxiety-producing

18:29

to say the least. And when

18:31

we finished the model, we spent then about

18:33

eight months

18:34

aligning it, making it safer,

18:37

red-teaming it, having external audits done.

18:40

We really wanted to make sure that that

18:42

model was safe to release into the world. And

18:46

so it felt like

18:48

it came pretty quickly after 3.5, but

18:51

it was because we had had

18:53

it for a while and we're just working on safety testing.

18:55

Alignment that word you just used is

18:57

a word that comes up a lot around this subject.

19:00

What do you mean when you say it? The

19:02

model acts in accordance

19:04

with the desire of the person using

19:06

it and that it follows whatever overall

19:09

rules have been set for it. Okay. I

19:11

want to get in a little bit to the safety question

19:13

because that's one of the biggest questions people raise. But

19:16

just briefly, what are you using this

19:18

product for right now?

19:20

Well, right now, this is the

19:22

busiest I've ever been in my life. So right now, I'm mostly using

19:24

it to help process inbound

19:27

information.

19:27

So email, summarizing

19:30

Slack threads

19:31

take a very long email someone writes

19:33

and give me the three bullet point summary.

19:35

That kind of stuff I've really come to rely on. That's

19:38

probably not its coolest use case, but you ask how

19:40

I'm personally using it right now and that's it. What

19:43

is its coolest use case? I'm sure

19:45

you're hearing from tons of people that are using

19:47

it. Give us some examples of the wide

19:49

range of uses it has.

19:50

The one that I find super

19:53

inspiring because I just get these heartwarming

19:56

emails and a lot of them every day are

19:59

people using it. to learn new things and

20:02

how much it's changed their life there. You

20:04

hear this from people in all different

20:07

areas of the world, all different subjects. But

20:09

this idea that with very

20:12

little effort to learn how to use it this way, you can

20:14

have a personal tutor for

20:17

any topic you want and one that really

20:19

helps you learn. That's a super cool thing,

20:21

and people really love that. A lot of programmers

20:23

rely on it for different parts of their workflow. Like,

20:26

that's kind of our world, so we hear about that a lot. And

20:28

then we could go on for a long list of down every vertical

20:31

of what we've seen there. There was

20:33

a Twitter thread recently about someone who

20:35

says they saved their dog's life because they input

20:38

a blood test and symptoms into GPT-4.

20:39

That's an amazing use case.

20:42

I'm curious where you see chat

20:45

GPT going. You use the

20:47

example of summarizing long-winded

20:50

emails or summarizing Slack. This is

20:52

kind of like in the menial

20:54

task category, right? The grocery store

20:57

order, the sending emails, making payments. And

20:59

then on the other side of it, it's the question about

21:02

having it do things that feel more

21:04

existential

21:06

and more foundational to what it is to be a human

21:09

being, things that emulate or replace human

21:11

thinking, right? So someone recently released

21:13

an hour-long episode of the Joe Rogan

21:16

experience, and it wasn't Joe Rogan, it was someone

21:18

who created it. It was an hour-long conversation

21:20

between you and him, and the entire

21:23

thing was generated using AI language models.

21:25

So is it the sort of like chores

21:28

and mindless emails, or is it

21:31

the creation of new

21:33

conversation, new art, new

21:35

information? Because those seem like very

21:38

different goals with very different human

21:40

and moral repercussions.

21:43

I think it'll be up to individuals

21:46

and society as a whole about how

21:48

we wanna use this technology. The technology

21:51

is clearly capable of all of those things,

21:53

and it's clearly providing value to people

21:55

in very different ways.

21:57

We also don't know perfectly yet how

21:59

it's... going to evolve, where we'll hit roadblocks,

22:02

what things will be easier than we think, what things will be much, much

22:04

harder than we think. What I hope

22:06

is that this becomes an

22:09

integral part of our workflow

22:12

in many different things. So

22:14

it will help us create. It will help

22:17

us do science. It will help us

22:19

run companies. It will help us learn when we're in school

22:21

and later on in life. I think

22:24

if we change out the word AI for

22:26

software, which I always like doing, you

22:28

know, we say like, is software going to help us

22:31

create better or is it going to help us do menial tasks

22:34

better or is that going to help us do science better? And the

22:36

answer, of course, is all of those things.

22:38

And if we understand AI is just really advanced software,

22:41

which I think is the right way to do it, then

22:44

the answer is maybe a little less mysterious. Sam,

22:47

in a recent interview, when you were asked about

22:49

the best and worst case scenarios

22:52

for AI, you said this of the best case,

22:54

I think the best is so unbelievably

22:56

good that it's hard for me to imagine. I'd

23:00

love for you to imagine like, what is

23:02

the unbelievable good that you believe

23:04

this technology has the potential to do?

23:07

I mean, we can pick any sort of

23:09

trope that we want here. Like what if we're

23:12

able to cure every disease? That

23:14

would be like a huge victory on its own. What

23:16

if every person on earth can

23:19

have a better education than any person on earth

23:21

gets today? That would be pretty good.

23:24

What if like every person, you know, 100 years

23:26

from now is 100 times richer in the subjective

23:30

sense, better off, like just

23:32

sort of happier, healthier, more

23:34

material possessions, more ability to sort of live

23:36

the good life and the way it's fulfilling to them than

23:38

people are today? I think like all of these things

23:41

are realistically possible.

23:42

That was half of the answer that you gave to the question

23:45

of sort of best and worst case scenarios, right?

23:47

I was figuring you're going to mention the other half here. So

23:50

here was the other side of it. You said

23:52

the worst case scenario is quote, lights

23:54

out for all of us. A lot of people

23:56

have quoted that line. I'm sure back to you. What

23:59

did you mean by it?

24:01

Look, I understand why people

24:04

would be more comfortable if I would only talk about

24:06

the great future here. And

24:08

I think that's where we're going to get. I think this can

24:10

be managed. And I think the more that

24:13

we're talking about this now, the more that we're aware of

24:15

the downsides, the more that we as a society work

24:18

together on how

24:19

we want this to go, the way more likely

24:22

we're going to be in the upside case. But

24:24

if we pretend like there is not a pretty serious

24:26

misuse case here,

24:28

and just say like full steam ahead, it's all great. Don't

24:30

worry about anything. I just don't think that's the

24:33

right way to get to the good outcome. As

24:35

we were developing nuclear technology, we

24:37

didn't just say like, hey, this is so great. We can

24:40

power the world. Like, oh yeah, don't worry about

24:42

that bomb thing. It's never going to happen. The

24:44

world really grappled with that. And

24:47

it's important that we did. And I think we've gotten to a surprisingly

24:50

good place. There's a lot

24:52

of people, as you know, who are sounding

24:54

the alarm bells on what's happening in the world of

24:56

AI. Last month, several

24:58

thousand leading tech figures and AI experts,

25:01

including Elon Musk, who co-founded

25:03

OpenAI but left in 2018. Also

25:05

Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, Andrew

25:07

Yang, who you backed in the last election. You're also

25:09

a UBI fan. All these people signed

25:12

this open letter

25:13

that called for a minimum six month

25:15

pause on the training of AI

25:17

systems more powerful than

25:20

chat GPT-4. Here's part of what they wrote.

25:23

Contemporary AI systems are now becoming human

25:25

competitive at general tasks. And we

25:27

must ask ourselves, should we let machines

25:30

flood our information channels with propaganda and

25:32

untruth?

25:32

We already have Twitter for that. Nice.

25:35

Should we develop non-human minds that might eventually

25:37

outnumber, outsmart, obsolete, and replace

25:40

us? Should we risk, they wrote, the loss

25:42

of control of our civilization. Such

25:45

decisions must not be delegated to unelected

25:47

tech leaders. Powerful AI systems should

25:49

be developed only once we are confident that

25:52

their effects will be positive and their risks will

25:54

be manageable. Now there's two ways I think to interpret

25:56

this letter, at least two ways. One is that

25:58

this is a cynical move by.

25:59

people who want to get in on the competition. And

26:02

so the smart thing to do is to tell the

26:04

guy at the head of the pack to pause.

26:07

The other cynical way to read it is that by creating

26:09

fear around this technology, it only makes investments

26:11

further flood the market. So I see

26:13

like two cynical ways to read it. Then I see a pure

26:16

version, which is they really think this is dangerous

26:18

and that it needs to be slowed down. How

26:21

did you understand the motivations behind

26:23

that letter? Cynical

26:25

or pure of heart?

26:27

You know, I'm not in those people's head,

26:30

but I always give the benefit of the doubt. And

26:32

particularly in this case, I think it is easy

26:34

to understand where the anxiety

26:36

is coming from. I disagree with almost

26:39

everything

26:40

about the mechanics of the letter,

26:43

including the whole idea of trying to govern

26:45

by open letter. But I

26:48

agree with the spirit. I

26:50

think we do need, you know,

26:53

open AI is not the company racing right now, but

26:55

some of the stories we hear from other companies

26:58

about their efforts to catch up with

27:00

open AI and new

27:02

companies being started or existing

27:05

very large ones. And some of the stories

27:07

we hear about

27:08

discussions about being willing to cut corners

27:10

on safety, I find quite concerning.

27:13

What I think we need is

27:15

a set, and this happens

27:17

with any new industry, they evolve. I

27:20

think we need an evolving set of safety

27:23

standards for these models, where

27:25

before a company

27:27

starts a training run, before a company releases

27:29

a new model, there are evaluations

27:33

for the safety issues we're concerned about. There

27:36

is an external auditing process that happens.

27:39

Whatever we agree on as a society

27:41

are going to be the rules to ensure safe

27:44

development of this new technology. Let's

27:46

get those in place. And you could like pick whatever other

27:48

technology you want, airplanes. We have like a robust

27:51

system for this. But what's important

27:53

is that airplanes are safe, not that Boeing

27:56

doesn't develop their next airplane for six

27:58

months or six years or whatever. And

28:00

that's where I'd like to see the energy get redirected.

28:04

There were some people who felt the letter didn't go far

28:06

enough. Eliezer Yudovsky,

28:09

one of the founders of the field, or at least he

28:11

identifies himself that way, refused to

28:13

sign the letter because he said it didn't

28:15

go far enough, that it actually understated the

28:17

case. I want to read just a few lines to

28:19

you from an essay that he wrote in the wake of the letter.

28:22

Many researchers steeped in these issues, including

28:24

myself, expect that the most likely

28:26

result of building a super-humanly smart

28:28

AI, under anything remotely

28:31

like the current circumstances, is that literally

28:34

everyone on Earth will die. Not

28:37

as in maybe possibly some remote chance, but

28:39

as in that is the obvious thing that

28:41

would happen. If somebody

28:43

builds a too powerful AI under present conditions,

28:45

he writes, I expect that every single

28:48

member of the human species and all biological

28:50

life on Earth dies shortly thereafter.

28:53

There's no proposed plan for how we would do any such thing and survive.

28:57

OpenAI's openly declared intention is

28:59

to make some future AI do our AI alignment homework.

29:03

Just hearing that this is the plan ought to be enough to get

29:05

any sensible person to panic, and

29:07

the other leading AI lab, he writes, DeepMind, has

29:10

no plan at all of DeepMind run by Google. How

29:13

do you understand that letter? Someone

29:16

who doesn't know very much about this subject is

29:19

reading a brilliant man saying that every

29:22

single member of the human species

29:23

and all biological life on Earth is

29:26

going to die because of this technology.

29:29

Why are some of the smartest minds in tech

29:31

this hyperbolic about this

29:33

technology? Look,

29:36

I like Eliezer. I'm grateful he exists.

29:39

He's like a little bit of a prophet of doom. You

29:41

know, before AI was going to be nanobots, we're

29:43

going to kill us all. And the only way to stop it

29:45

was to invent AI. That's

29:48

fine. People are allowed to update

29:51

their thinking. I think that actually should

29:53

be rewarded. But if

29:55

you're convinced the world is

29:58

always about to end, and

30:01

you are not,

30:03

in my opinion, close enough to the details of

30:06

what's happening with the technology, which

30:08

is very hard in the vacuum.

30:10

I think it's hard to know what to do. So I

30:12

think Eliezer is super smart. He may

30:14

be as smart as you can get about thinking

30:16

about the problem

30:17

of AI safety in a vacuum. The

30:20

field in general, the field of AI and certainly

30:23

the field of AI safety has been one of a

30:25

lot of surprises. Things have not gone

30:27

the way people thought they were going to go.

30:29

In fact, a lot of the leading thinkers, I

30:32

believe including Eliezer, but I'm not sure, and it doesn't

30:34

matter that much, as recently as 2016,

30:37

2017, were still

30:39

not bought into the deep learning approach and

30:41

didn't think that was the thing that was going to

30:43

work. And then even if they did, they thought it was going to be

30:46

like sort of the deep-minded, RL agents playing

30:48

games approach.

30:49

The direction that things have actually gone,

30:52

or at least are going so far, because look, it's almost certainly

30:54

going to change again,

30:56

is that we have these very smart

30:58

language models that have

31:01

a lot of properties that, in my opinion, help

31:03

with the safety problem a lot. And

31:06

if you don't consider it that

31:08

way, if you don't do actual technical

31:11

hands-on alignment work with the shape

31:13

of the systems we have and the risks

31:15

and benefits that

31:16

those characteristics lead to, then

31:19

I think it's super hard to figure out how to

31:21

solve this problem in a vacuum. I

31:23

think this is the case for almost any

31:26

major scientific or technological

31:29

program in history. Things

31:31

don't work out as cleanly

31:34

and obviously as the theory would suggest. You

31:36

have to confront reality. You have

31:39

to work with the systems. You have to work with the shape

31:41

of the technology or the science,

31:43

which may not be what you think it should be theoretically, but

31:46

you deal with reality as it comes. And

31:48

then you figure out what to do about that.

31:51

A lot of people who are in the AI

31:53

safety community have

31:55

said things like, I

31:57

never expected that I'd be able to

31:59

cope with this. exist with a

32:02

system as intelligent

32:05

as GPT-4. All

32:07

of the classical thinking was, by the time we got to a system

32:10

this intelligent, either we had fully solved

32:12

the alignment problem or we were totally wiped out, and

32:14

yet here we are. So

32:17

I think the answer is we do need

32:19

to move with great

32:20

caution and continue

32:22

to emphasize figuring out how to build safer

32:24

and safer systems and have an increasing

32:28

threshold for safety guarantees as

32:30

these systems become more powerful. But

32:33

sitting in a vacuum and talking about

32:35

the problem in theory has not worked. Of

32:38

all of the various sort of

32:41

doomsaying, right, all of the safety

32:44

or security concerns of these new technologies, cyberattacks,

32:47

plagiarism, scams, spreading misinformation,

32:50

the famous paperclip maximizer thing,

32:53

not to mention that this seems like it could be a particularly

32:55

useful tool for dictators, warlords.

32:58

You could think of every scenario. Which is the

33:00

one that you, Sam, are most worried

33:02

about?

33:03

I actually find

33:05

this a very useful exercise. So

33:08

that quote you just read, every person on

33:10

Earth, an all-biological life

33:13

is going to totally cease to exist because of the AI. And

33:16

then I try to think about how that could happen. How that

33:18

would happen. Right. Can you imagine it? I

33:20

mean, I could respond if you have some suggestions. No.

33:23

Like when I read that, I just hear

33:26

this guy who knows a lot about a technology

33:29

that I know a minimal amount about beyond

33:31

having used it over the past few months is

33:34

telling me that

33:36

it's going to eradicate humanity.

33:39

He's not telling me how, but you, I feel

33:41

like, might have a better understanding

33:44

of how you could even come to that conclusion. Well,

33:47

I don't think it's going to. I think it is

33:49

within the, it's within the

33:51

full distribution in the same way that like nuclear

33:53

bombs, maybe if we had set all

33:55

of them off at the same time at the height of the Cold War,

33:58

could it eradicate humanity? But like.

34:00

I don't think that was most, there were people

34:02

who made a great name for themselves and

34:05

a lot of media attention by talking about that.

34:07

And I honestly think it's important that they

34:10

did. I think having that be such

34:13

a top of mind issue

34:15

and having society really grapple with the

34:17

existential risk of that helped

34:20

ensure we got to continue

34:22

to exist. I

34:25

support people talking about it, but

34:28

it's not, again, I think we

34:30

can manage our way through this. Fine.

34:33

Well, speaking of nuclear, it's been

34:35

reported that you've compared OpenAI's ambitions

34:37

to the ambitions of the Manhattan Project.

34:40

I wonder how you

34:43

grapple with the kind of ethical dilemmas

34:45

that the people that invented the

34:48

bomb grappled with.

34:50

One of the ones that I think about a lot is the

34:52

question of, while

34:55

the guys that signed that letter calling for

34:57

the six month pause believe

34:59

that we should pause, China, who is

35:02

using AI already to surveil its citizens

35:05

and has said that they want to become the world leader in

35:07

AI by 2030, they're not pausing.

35:10

Make the comparison

35:12

to me to the Manhattan Project. What were the ethical

35:15

guardrails and dilemmas that they

35:17

grappled with that you feel are relevant to

35:19

the advent of AI?

35:22

So I think the way that I've made the comparison

35:24

is that I think

35:26

the development of AGI should be a government

35:30

project, not a private company project

35:33

in the spirit of something like the Manhattan Project.

35:35

And I really do think that, but

35:38

given that I don't think our government is going to do a

35:40

competent job of that anytime soon, it is

35:43

far better for us to go do that than just like

35:45

wait for the Chinese government to go do it. So

35:48

I think that's what I mean by the comparison. But

35:50

I also agree with the point you were making,

35:52

which is we face

35:55

a lot of

35:58

very complex issues at the intersection.

35:59

of discovery

36:02

of new science and geopolitical

36:05

or deep societal implications

36:08

that I imagine the team working

36:11

on the Manhattan Project felt as well. And

36:13

so that complexity of like,

36:16

you know, it feels like we spend as much time

36:19

debating the issues as we do

36:22

actually working on the technology. And I

36:24

think that's a good thing. I think it's a great thing. And

36:26

I bet it was similar with

36:29

people working on the Manhattan Project. Well, right. Like

36:31

in order to ensure that nuclear energy

36:33

was properly managed after the war, they

36:36

created the Atomic Energy Commission, but it took

36:39

many, many, many people dead. It

36:41

took, you know, it took catastrophe

36:45

in order to set up those guardrails.

36:47

Do you think that there will be a similar sort

36:50

of chain of events when it comes to AI?

36:53

Or do you think that we can get to the equivalent

36:55

of the Atomic Energy Commission before

36:57

the equivalent of Hiroshima or Nagasaki?

37:00

I am very optimistic we can get to it without

37:03

that happening. And that's part of the reason that I

37:06

feel love and appreciation for all of the doomers.

37:09

I think having the conversation about the downsides

37:12

is really important. Let's talk about the economic

37:14

impacts of this technology. You've

37:17

said that AI systems like GPT

37:19

will help people live more creatively by freeing

37:22

up their time, saving them

37:24

time that they previously used to do boring

37:26

menial tasks. But that is

37:29

going to necessarily result in significant

37:31

segments of the population, I would imagine,

37:34

not needing to work. And

37:36

the scenario most people imagined was that

37:38

this technology would first eradicate blue

37:40

collar work. Now it increasingly seems like it will

37:43

be white

37:43

collar work. It's all the people over

37:45

here at Hollywood writing television shows. How

37:47

do you think it's going to play out? Whose jobs

37:49

is it going to come for first? Who's second? And

37:52

how is it just going to reconfigure the way that we think

37:54

about work more generally?

37:57

Look, I find this issue

37:59

genuinely... confusing. Even like what

38:01

we want, I feel, I think we're like confused about whether

38:04

we want people to work more or work less. You

38:06

know, there's like a huge debate in France over

38:08

moving the retirement age two years. On the other hand, there's

38:11

like a lot of ink spilled by

38:13

people who have very cushy

38:15

jobs that get paid a ton about how

38:18

awful it would be if people who have to like work unpleasant

38:20

minimum wage jobs lose their jobs.

38:22

We're confused on what we even want as

38:25

the answer here. We're also

38:27

confused, as you just pointed out, which is one of my favorite

38:29

examples of how this

38:31

is going to impact things. The experts love

38:34

to get this wrong.

38:35

Every pronouncement I have heard about

38:38

the impact AI is going to have on jobs. It's

38:40

a question to me of how wrong it sounds. So

38:42

I will try to avoid sounding like an idiot a few

38:44

years in the future and not make a super

38:46

confident prediction right now. I will

38:49

say the following things. Number one, the

38:51

like long course of technology is

38:54

increasing efficiency, often in surprising

38:56

ways, and thus increasing the

38:58

leverage of many jobs, not

39:01

affecting others as much as you would seem like it would think

39:03

and creating new ones that are difficult to imagine

39:06

before the technology is mature and

39:08

deployed to the world. Number two, it

39:11

seems to me like the human desire

39:14

to create to feel useful to

39:17

gain status in increasingly silly

39:19

ways. That does not seem to

39:21

me to have any obvious endpoint.

39:24

And so the idea that all of us

39:26

are all of a sudden going to like stop working

39:29

and hang out on the beach all day doesn't feel

39:31

intuitively right. But I think the nature

39:33

of what it means to work and what

39:36

future society's value will change as

39:39

it always does, you know, the jobs of

39:41

today are very different from the jobs of 200 years

39:43

ago and very, very different from the jobs of 2000 years

39:45

ago. And that's fine. That's good.

39:48

That's the way of the world. The thing

39:50

that is gives me anxiety

39:53

here is not that we cannot adapt

39:55

to much better jobs of the future. We certainly

39:57

can. But can we do that all inside

39:59

of

39:59

generation, which we haven't had to do in previous

40:02

technologies. Sam, you've talked

40:04

about how AI technologies will

40:07

quote, break capitalism. I've

40:10

wondered, what does that mean? And

40:12

what aspects of capitalism do you think most

40:14

need to be broken? Okay,

40:17

I am super pro capitalism. I love

40:19

capitalism. I think it's great.

40:21

I do think that over time,

40:23

the shift of

40:25

leverage from labor

40:28

to capital as technology continues

40:31

gets more and more extreme. And that's a bad thing.

40:34

And I can imagine a technology

40:36

like AI pushing that even further. And

40:39

so I believe,

40:41

maybe not for sure, but maybe we

40:44

will need to figure out a way to adapt capitalism

40:47

to acknowledge this fact

40:49

that that capital has

40:52

increasing leverage in the world and

40:54

already has a lot, but it could have much more. The

40:57

fundamental precept of capitalism,

40:59

I think, is still very sound. But

41:02

I expect it will have to evolve some as

41:04

it's already been doing.

41:08

After the break, how close are we to

41:10

having AI friends? And is

41:13

this a technology we should let our kids have?

41:15

Stay with us.

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Therapy works. Okay. Let's

42:57

talk a little bit about the emotional

43:00

and human concerns that to me are frankly the

43:02

most interesting. I talked to Tyler

43:04

Cowan on the show recently and he thinks that

43:06

the next generation of kids are going to have

43:09

essentially what

43:11

Walking Phoenix has in the movie Her with

43:13

Scarlett Johansson, like an AI friend

43:15

or an AI pet or an AI assistant,

43:17

whatever you want to call that. Right.

43:20

And one of the things that parents are going to have to decide is how much time

43:22

to let their kids spend with their AI

43:25

the way our parents had to decide how much TV we're

43:27

allowed to watch. I think having

43:29

a relationship with a bot brings

43:32

up all kinds of fascinating ethical

43:34

questions. The main thing

43:36

though, to me is that

43:38

it's not a real relationship or

43:40

maybe you think it is and no,

43:42

I don't. Okay. Well, given the

43:44

amount of time that we see kids already

43:47

spending on social media, what that's

43:49

doing for their emotional health. In

43:51

what world would having an AI

43:54

companion be a good step

43:56

forward for kids?

43:58

Oh, I suspect it can easily. be a good step

44:00

forward. You know, already with what

44:03

you were hearing about people who are,

44:06

you know, going through something really hard that they feel

44:08

uncomfortable talking to their friends about,

44:11

or even in some cases, they're like uncomfortable

44:13

or don't have access to a therapist, and

44:15

that they're like, relying on chat

44:18

GPT to help them process emotions.

44:21

I think that's good. We'll need some guardrails about

44:23

how that works. But people are

44:25

kind of getting very clear and

44:28

deep value from it. So I don't

44:30

know what the guidelines will be. We'll have to figure out screen

44:32

time limits or whatever. But I

44:34

think there's a role for this for sure. But don't you

44:36

fear that given how good the

44:38

AI is at telling people what

44:40

they want to hear, that we can basically

44:43

create a scenario where everyone is

44:45

living in their own isolated echo

44:47

chamber, and that children aren't

44:50

developing, especially kids that are born

44:52

into a world where they're AI natives

44:54

or whatever, where they're not learning

44:57

basic human interactions, basic social

44:59

skills, how to hear things that they don't want to hear.

45:02

Like, to me, it's basically

45:04

China and kids are

45:05

to me the things that when I think about this technology

45:08

that kind of freaks me out the most.

45:10

Yeah, we will need new regulation to

45:13

prevent companies from following

45:15

like the gradient of hacking attention to sort

45:17

of get kids to use their product all the time. But

45:20

we should address what we're concerned

45:22

about rather than just say, like, there's no value here when

45:25

clearly there is.

45:25

Okay, one more question about children. And

45:28

that's the impact that this technology is already having

45:30

on education. Some people

45:32

say that chat GPT has in a matter

45:34

of months normalized

45:36

cheating that was already rampant because of COVID,

45:38

but normalized cheating among students. According

45:40

to this one study I was reading, over

45:43

a quarter of K through 12 teachers have caught

45:45

their students cheating with chat GPT.

45:48

And roughly a third of these teachers wanted to be banned

45:50

in their schools. How

45:53

much does that worry you? Or do you see that

45:55

as just sort of like we're in the liminal

45:57

space between the old regime

45:59

and the old school?

45:59

and what we considered fair, and the

46:02

new one where this will sort of just be integrated into

46:04

the way we think about education.

46:06

The arc of this has been really interesting to watch. And

46:09

this both anecdotally matches what

46:11

I've heard from teachers that I've talked

46:13

to about this and also what we've

46:15

seen from various studies online. When

46:18

it initially came out, the reaction was

46:20

like, oh man, K through 12

46:23

education is in a total bad shape.

46:25

This is the end of the take-home essay. You know,

46:29

here, here, there, it was really

46:31

not good. And now,

46:34

and it's only been a few months, like five months, something like that,

46:37

now people are very much like, I'm

46:39

going to change the whole way I teach to take advantage

46:42

of this and it's much better than the world before.

46:44

And please don't take it away.

46:46

A lot of the story of chat GPT getting

46:48

unbanned in school districts was teachers saying, like, this

46:50

is really important to my kids' education.

46:54

And we're seeing amazing things from teachers that

46:56

are figuring out different ways to get

46:58

their students to use this or to incorporate this into their

47:00

classroom. And you know,

47:03

in a world of like very overworked

47:05

teachers and not enough of them,

47:08

the fact that there can be supplemental tutoring

47:10

by an AI system,

47:11

I think is really great. As you definitely

47:14

know, there has been a lot of discussion over

47:16

the past few months heating

47:19

up, I would say more and more about

47:21

biases in tech

47:23

broadly, including a Twitter, but especially

47:25

biases in terms of AI

47:28

because human beings are creating these programs

47:30

and therefore the AI

47:32

is not some like perfect intelligence.

47:36

It's built by humans and therefore

47:38

it's reflecting our biases. And

47:41

you know, the difference, some would argue between

47:43

something like Twitter is that we

47:46

can at least understand the biases and we

47:48

can follow the people who created

47:50

the algorithm as they talk back and forth in Slack.

47:53

But when it comes to a technology like AI,

47:56

which even its creators don't fully understand

47:58

how it works, the bias. is

48:00

not as easy to uncover, it's not as transparent.

48:03

How do we know how to find it if we don't know how to look for it? What

48:06

do you say to the people who basically

48:08

look at chat GPT and say,

48:10

you know, there's bias all over this thing and

48:13

that is unbelievably dangerous.

48:15

Forget disinformation, forget the creation

48:18

of propaganda. The system

48:20

itself is a kind of propaganda,

48:22

right? Elon Musk went on Tucker Carlson. What's

48:25

happening is they're training the AI to lie. Yes.

48:28

It's bad. To lie. To lie. That's exactly right.

48:30

Yes. And to withhold information. To lie and

48:33

yes, comment on some things, not comment

48:35

on other things, but not

48:38

to say what the data actually

48:41

demands that it say. How did it get this way? I thought

48:43

you funded it at the beginning.

48:45

And he claimed that OpenAI is

48:47

training the AI as he put it to lie.

48:50

What do you make of the conversation around the biases

48:52

in this technology? You know, I mentioned earlier

48:55

that I was embarrassed of the first version

48:57

of chat GPT. I

49:00

do think the first version did not do an

49:02

adequate job of representing say the median person

49:05

on earth, but the new versions are much

49:07

better. And in fact, one thing that I appreciate is most

49:11

of the loudest critics of the initial version

49:13

have gone out of their way to say like, wow,

49:15

OpenAI listened and the new version

49:17

is much, much better. We've really

49:19

looked at our whole training stack to see the different

49:21

places that bias seeps in, biases unavoidable,

49:24

but find out where it is, how to

49:26

measure it, how to design emails for it, like

49:29

where we need to give different instructions to human labelers,

49:31

how we need to get a more reflective set of human labelers.

49:34

And we've made a lot of progress there. And again,

49:36

I think it has gone noticed and

49:38

people have appreciated it. That

49:41

said,

49:42

I really believe that no two people

49:44

on earth will ever agree

49:46

that one AI system is fully unbiased.

49:50

And the path here is

49:52

to set a very broad

49:54

limits of what the behavior

49:57

of one of these systems should ever be. So

49:59

agree on that. some things that just we

50:01

don't do it all. And that's

50:03

got to come from society, ideally

50:06

globally if it has to be by country in some cases,

50:08

which I'm sure it will, that's fine too. And then

50:10

B within that, give each individual

50:13

user a lot of ability to say,

50:15

here is the way I want this AI to behave

50:17

for me. Here are the things I believe

50:19

here's how I would answer this contentious social issue.

50:22

And the system can then act in accordance with

50:24

that. When Elon is saying that

50:27

open AI is training the AI to lie,

50:30

is there any truth to that? You'd have to, I don't even

50:32

know what he means by that. You'd

50:34

have to ask him. Let's talk

50:36

a little bit about the ethics of running a company

50:39

with such potentially world

50:41

changing technology. When open AI

50:43

started, it started as a nonprofit.

50:45

And the reason it started as a nonprofit,

50:47

as you guys articulated it, is that you were concerned

50:50

about other companies creating potentially

50:52

dangerous technology purely for profit

50:55

motivation. But recently you've

50:57

taken that nonprofit and created a capped

51:00

for profit arm

51:02

worth $29 billion with a huge

51:04

investment from Microsoft. Talk

51:06

to me about the decision to make that change. Why

51:08

did you need to make that change?

51:10

That's like how much the computing power for these systems

51:12

cost. And we weren't

51:15

able to raise that as a nonprofit. We weren't able

51:17

to raise it from governments. And that was

51:19

really it. I recently read that

51:21

you have no stake in open

51:24

AI. Tell me about the decision to not have

51:26

any stake in a company that maybe

51:28

stands to be the most profitable company of all

51:31

time.

51:32

I

51:34

mean, I already have been

51:38

super fortunate and done super well.

51:41

I have like plenty of money. This

51:43

is like the most exciting thing I can imagine working

51:45

on. I think it's really important to the world. This is like how

51:47

I want to spend my time. As

51:51

you pointed out, we started in a way

51:53

for a particular reason. And I

51:57

found that I like personally having

51:59

like very clear motivations

52:01

and incentives. I do think we're gonna have to

52:03

make some very non-traditional decisions as a company,

52:07

but I'm like in a very fortunate position

52:09

of having the luxury of doing this, of not

52:11

having equity. So you're super rich,

52:13

and so you can make the decision not to do that, but

52:15

do you think this technology is so

52:18

powerful and the incentives, the

52:20

possibility of making so much money is so

52:22

strong that it's sort of an ethical

52:25

imperative for anyone helming

52:27

any of these companies

52:29

to sort of make the decision

52:31

to be financially monastic

52:34

about it? Like if the incentive in

52:36

a kind of AI race is

52:39

to be the first and be the fastest, you sort of alluded

52:41

to other companies that are already cutting corners

52:43

in order to do that, right? How do

52:45

you, sort of having

52:48

democratically elected heads of AI companies,

52:51

what are the guardrails that can be put in

52:53

place to prevent people from being

52:56

corrupted or incentivized

52:59

in ways that are dangerous? Actually,

53:02

I do think democratically elected heads of AI

53:04

companies, or like, you know, major

53:06

AGI efforts, let's say, I think that is probably a good

53:08

idea.

53:10

Like I don't know why we sit short of that. I think that's like pretty

53:12

reasonable. Well, that's probably not gonna happen

53:14

given that the people that are in charge

53:16

of this country don't even seem to know what sub-stack

53:19

is. And, you know, like, tell

53:21

me how that would actually work.

53:23

I don't know. Like, this is all still speculative.

53:26

I have been thinking about things in this direction like

53:28

much more, but like, what if all the users

53:31

of OpenAI got to like elect the CEO?

53:33

It's not perfect, you know, because

53:35

it impacts people who don't use it. And we're

53:38

still probably too small to have a representative. We're

53:40

still way too small to have anything near a representative sample,

53:42

but like it's

53:43

better than other things I could imagine. Okay,

53:46

well, let's talk a little bit about regulation. You've

53:48

said that you can imagine a global governance

53:50

structure, kind of like Galactic Federation, I

53:52

guess, that would oversee decisions

53:55

about the future of AI. What I

53:56

would like more than like a global

53:59

Galactic, whatever, whatever. is like something, we talked

54:01

about this earlier, something like the IAEA. Something

54:05

that has real

54:07

international power by treaty, and

54:10

that gets to inspect the labs,

54:13

set regulation, make sure we have

54:15

a cohesive global strategy.

54:17

That'd be a great start. What about the American

54:19

government right now?

54:20

What do you think our government should be doing right

54:23

now

54:24

to regulate this technology?

54:26

The one thing that I would like to see

54:28

happen today, because I think it's impossible

54:30

to screw up and I should just do it, is

54:34

insight, like government insight,

54:36

ability to audit, whatever, training

54:39

runs, models produced above a

54:41

certain threshold of compute, or

54:43

above a certain capability level would be even better. If

54:46

we could just start there, then I think the government would begin

54:48

to learn more about what to do, and it would be like a

54:50

great first step. I

54:53

guess my pushback to that would be like, do you really

54:55

want Dianne Feinstein deciding,

54:58

do you trust the people currently

55:01

in government even to understand the

55:03

nature of this technology, let alone regulate it?

55:06

I mean, I think you should trust the government

55:08

more than me, like at least you get to vote them out.

55:13

Given that you are the person though running it, what

55:16

are the things that you do to prevent,

55:20

I guess the word would be like

55:22

corruption of power that

55:25

seems to me that it would be the biggest

55:28

possible risk for you right now. Like

55:30

of me personally being corrupted by power,

55:33

the company, what do you mean? Yeah, I mean,

55:35

well,

55:36

listen, you've been a very powerful

55:38

person in your industry for many years. It

55:41

seems to me that over the past six

55:43

months or so, you've become arguably one

55:45

of the most overseeing

55:48

a technology that a lot of

55:50

really smart people are warning at

55:53

best will completely revolutionize

55:55

the world and at worst will completely swallow

55:58

it or as you said, lights out for everybody.

55:59

Like how do you deal

56:02

from, I guess I'm asking a spiritual or

56:04

an emotional or psychological question. How

56:07

do you deal with the burdens of that?

56:09

How do you prevent yourself from being, I

56:11

don't know, like another

56:14

way of asking that is like, what is your North Star?

56:17

How do you know that you're making the right choices and decisions?

56:20

Well,

56:20

first of all, I want to like talk about

56:23

having power. Like I don't have, I don't

56:26

know, I was gonna say I don't have super voting shares, but I don't have shares

56:28

at all. I don't have like

56:30

a special vote. Like I serve at

56:32

the pleasure of the board. I do this the old fashioned way

56:34

where like the board can just decide to replace the CEO. I

56:37

think I like to think I would be the first to say

56:40

if I for some reason thought

56:42

I was not doing a good job. And I

56:44

do think and I don't know what the right way to do this

56:46

is I don't know what the right timing for it is. But I

56:49

do think like, whoever

56:51

is in charge of

56:53

leading AGI efforts

56:55

should be democratically elected somehow

56:57

that seems like super reasonable and,

57:00

you know, difficult to argue with to me.

57:02

But it's not like I like have dictatorial

57:04

power over opening eye nor what I want

57:06

it. I think that's like really important.

57:09

That's not what I'm suggesting. I'm suggesting that

57:11

like, in the firmament of

57:14

a galaxy

57:16

that seems like all

57:18

of the wealth, all of the ideas, all

57:20

of the

57:22

I don't mean power in the Washington DC

57:24

sense of it, but power over the future is emanating

57:27

out of this particular group of people.

57:29

And you are one of the stars in that firmament and you

57:31

become a brighter and brighter and brighter

57:34

star, like how that's changed

57:36

you and how you think about

57:37

you mean like the tech industry in general, not like

57:40

are not like opening eyes. So I mean tech in

57:42

general, and I mean, AI as the sort

57:44

of pinnacle of the tech world. Um,

57:48

it definitely feels surreal. I

57:51

heard a story once about it's

57:53

always stuck with me for some reason, about

57:55

this like astronaut, former

57:57

astronaut that would years,

58:00

decades after going to the moon, stand

58:03

in his backyard and look up at the moon

58:06

and think it was so beautiful. And then randomly

58:08

remember that, oh, fuck. Decades

58:11

ago, I went up there and walked around on that thing. That's so

58:13

crazy. And I

58:15

think I sort of hope that's how I feel

58:17

about open AI decades from now.

58:20

It's on its 14th

58:22

democratically elected president or whatever. I'm

58:26

living this wonderful life

58:29

in this fantastic AGI

58:31

future and thinking about how marvelous

58:33

and how great it is. And then I see something about open

58:35

AI. And I remember that, oh, yeah, I used to run that thing. But

58:39

I think you are probably

58:41

overstating the degree

58:44

of power I have in the world

58:46

as an individual. And I probably underperceive

58:49

it myself.

58:50

But you still just kind

58:52

of go about your normal life with all of the normal

58:55

human drama and wonderful experiences

58:57

and just sort

58:59

of the stakes elevate around you or something.

59:02

And you're aware of it, or

59:04

I'm aware of it. And I take it super

59:06

seriously. But then I'm

59:10

running around a field laughing or whatever. And

59:13

you forget it for a little bit. And then you remember. I'm

59:15

trying to figure out how to get this across.

59:17

It is somehow

59:19

very strange and then subjectively

59:22

not that different. But I

59:24

feel the weight of it. Is there a kitchen

59:26

cabinet or, I guess, a signal

59:28

or WhatsApp group of the people that

59:31

are in your field talking about

59:33

these

59:34

kind of existential questions that this

59:36

technology is raising?

59:38

All the time. Many signal groups, even

59:41

across competitive companies. I think

59:43

everyone feels the stakes. Everyone feels the weight of

59:45

it. Let's talk a

59:47

little bit about the future and your thoughts on the future.

59:50

The computer scientist and futurist,

59:52

Rick Horswild, predicted in 2017 that AI

59:55

robots would outsmart human intelligence by 2029.

59:58

So I don't know. Maybe we'll get there.

59:59

He's also been really optimistic about

1:00:02

AI's ability to extend our lifespans

1:00:04

and heal illness, cure diseases. He

1:00:06

believes by the 2030s will be able to augment

1:00:08

our brains with AI devices and possibly

1:00:11

live forever by uploading a person's neural

1:00:13

structure onto a computer or robotic

1:00:16

body. In the Kurzweil vision

1:00:18

of the future, where

1:00:19

do you fall? Does that sound realistic

1:00:22

to you? Like it's not prevented

1:00:24

by the laws of physics. So

1:00:27

sure, but it feels really difficult to me

1:00:30

right now. You know, we

1:00:32

figure everything out eventually, so we'll get there someday, I guess.

1:00:35

There's an idea that has come up

1:00:37

a lot over the past while, right? It's this idea

1:00:39

of techno utopianism, this ideology

1:00:42

based on the premise that advances in science

1:00:44

and technology can sort of bring

1:00:46

about something like utopia, right?

1:00:48

By solving depression and cancer and obesity and poverty,

1:00:51

even possibly death. Really,

1:00:53

the technology can solve all of our problems.

1:00:56

Do you consider yourself

1:00:58

sort of of that school? Do you believe the

1:01:00

technology solves more of our problems than

1:01:02

it does create them? I

1:01:05

was gonna say, I think technology can solve all

1:01:07

problems and continuously create new ones. So

1:01:10

I am a,

1:01:11

I'm definitely a pro technologist, but I

1:01:13

don't know if I would call myself like a techno utopist. Is

1:01:16

there something that comes to mind that you know

1:01:18

technology can't solve? I

1:01:21

do not think that technology can

1:01:24

replace genuine human connection in the way I understand

1:01:26

it.

1:01:28

One of the things that comes to mind for me when

1:01:30

I think about problems that I don't think technology

1:01:32

can solve, but it seems like a lot of smarter

1:01:34

people than me disagree, is the problem

1:01:37

of death. The

1:01:39

average man in the United States born today

1:01:41

will live until about 75 years old, the average

1:01:43

woman a little higher, about 80 years old. If

1:01:46

you look back to the 1920s, this is an unbelievable

1:01:48

improvement. People then weren't expected basically

1:01:51

to live past 55. You've

1:01:53

invested 180 million dollars into

1:01:55

a startup called retro biosciences,

1:01:57

whose mission

1:01:58

is to add 10 years to the human life span.

1:01:59

span, putting us at living, let's call

1:02:02

it 85 to 9 years old on average.

1:02:04

Tell me why you decided to invest in this

1:02:07

and how realistic you think

1:02:09

it is that it's actually going to be able to achieve its goal.

1:02:12

Look, in terms of avoiding biological

1:02:14

death, I share your skepticism, although

1:02:16

maybe, you know, if the computer upload whatever, whatever

1:02:18

thing works, sure. More

1:02:22

health span, that feels super

1:02:24

doable to me. Like right now,

1:02:26

I think our healthcare system, this is

1:02:28

part of why I wanted to invest, is not very good. We

1:02:31

spend a huge amount of money on

1:02:33

a low quality of life generally for someone's later

1:02:35

years. And really what you

1:02:37

would like, or I think what most people would like is to

1:02:40

stay very

1:02:40

healthy for as long as they can and then

1:02:43

have a pretty quick decline

1:02:44

rather than the way it often happens now. And

1:02:48

that feels to me doable.

1:02:51

And I think all of the advances in partial

1:02:53

reprogramming are one of the most exciting things happening

1:02:55

in bio right now. It may turn out to be way harder

1:02:57

than we think. It may turn out to be easier,

1:02:59

but it is certainly quite interesting.

1:03:03

For the

1:03:03

person who's thinking, what

1:03:06

the hell is Sam talking about? The idea

1:03:08

of technology here to extend human

1:03:10

life, that just seems so far off. How

1:03:13

can the average person that doesn't have

1:03:15

your kind of knowledge and insight

1:03:17

into technology

1:03:18

prepare for what

1:03:21

is about to come over the next five or 10 years?

1:03:24

Before this interview, I went on Twitter and I asked people

1:03:26

what I should ask you. And there was a

1:03:28

Twitter user, Alex, who wrote, if you were a

1:03:30

college senior, what majors

1:03:33

and career pathways would you decide

1:03:36

or would you recommend Sam knowing what's sort

1:03:38

of around the bend in light of

1:03:41

AI development especially?

1:03:43

I think it's like a big mistake to

1:03:45

put too much weight on advice from other people. In

1:03:47

my life, I have been feared badly

1:03:50

by advice much more often than the other way

1:03:52

around. So you don't give

1:03:55

advice ever? I

1:03:57

think I used to give too much advice. it

1:04:00

was sort of like such a part of like

1:04:02

running YC or being a YC partner. And

1:04:05

now I try to give much less advice with

1:04:07

much more awareness of how frequently

1:04:10

advice is wrong.

1:04:11

So study whatever you want.

1:04:14

Like study whatever like follow your own personal

1:04:17

curiosity and excitement. Realizing

1:04:18

the rate of change in the world is going to be high

1:04:21

and that you need to be very resilient to such change.

1:04:24

But don't take your life advice about what

1:04:26

to go work from somebody else. There

1:04:29

have been a lot of moments in the past decade

1:04:31

where people said a new technology

1:04:33

was going to completely upend the world as we

1:04:35

know it. They said that about virtual

1:04:38

reality. They said it about crypto. And

1:04:40

personally, I don't own a VR headset

1:04:43

and I have $10,000 in Bitcoin that I don't know

1:04:45

how to get out because I forgot my Coinbase password.

1:04:48

I think of the question a lot of people are wondering is

1:04:51

what makes this different?

1:04:54

Well, we might be wrong, right?

1:04:57

Like they might be right. This might not be different.

1:04:59

This could hit a wall. This could change

1:05:02

things somehow much less than we think. Even

1:05:04

if

1:05:04

AI is really powerful, it might just mean the

1:05:06

world goes much faster, but the

1:05:09

human experience doesn't change

1:05:11

that much. I'm

1:05:15

very biased. My personal belief for the last decade

1:05:17

has been that the two most important technological

1:05:19

trends would be AI and abundant

1:05:22

energy. And I've spent all my time on

1:05:24

those things.

1:05:25

And it's

1:05:27

very much what I believe in. And it's very much

1:05:29

like my filter bubble.

1:05:30

So I think that's right. But

1:05:33

I think anyone listening should have

1:05:35

a huge amount of skepticism on me saying that.

1:05:38

And it might not be different. I mean, hopefully

1:05:40

it's going to be better than like crypto in the metaverse. But

1:05:43

like even those, I think you're going to be pretty cool. Another

1:05:46

project that I work on is this thing called Worldcoin

1:05:49

that I helped put together a few

1:05:51

years ago. And it was like horribly

1:05:54

mocked for a long time. And

1:05:57

now all of the kind of like crypto tourists

1:05:59

have gone. true believers are still there,

1:06:01

people see why we wanted to start the project,

1:06:04

and now it's like, I think, super exciting.

1:06:07

So it's just like the future

1:06:09

is hard to predict. These trends take a while to untangle.

1:06:13

Sam Altman, let's do a lightning round. All

1:06:16

right. Sam, what is the best

1:06:18

thing you've ever invested in? Financially

1:06:21

or this, like, brought me the most joy? Joy. Let's

1:06:24

go joy. All of the time spending in open AI. Okay. And

1:06:26

financially? I suspect that'll turn out to be

1:06:29

Helion. What is Helion? It's

1:06:31

a nuclear fusion company that

1:06:33

I'm pretty closely involved with. What

1:06:35

is the first thing you ever asked chat GPT?

1:06:39

That is a good question. I

1:06:43

don't remember. I think it most

1:06:45

likely would have been some sort of arithmetic question. Sam,

1:06:49

do you think UFOs are real? Like do I think

1:06:51

they're aliens or do I think there's been like flying objects

1:06:54

from other militaries that we don't

1:06:56

know what they are? Flying objects. Do you think

1:06:58

that there are aliens? No. What

1:07:00

do you look for when you're interviewing for a candidate

1:07:03

applying for a job at open AI? All

1:07:06

of the normal things that I would look for for any

1:07:09

other role, you know,

1:07:11

intelligence, drive, hard

1:07:13

work, creativity, team spirit,

1:07:16

all of the normal things, plus

1:07:18

a real

1:07:20

focus and dedication to the

1:07:23

good AGI outcome. What

1:07:25

is one book that you think everybody should read? I

1:07:28

mentioned it earlier in this conversation,

1:07:30

but I'll say at the beginning of infinity. I know you don't

1:07:32

like advice, but what's the best piece of

1:07:34

advice that you've ever received? Don't

1:07:37

listen to advice too much. What is the fundamental

1:07:39

truth that you live by? You

1:07:41

can get more done than you think. You are capable

1:07:44

of more than you think. You get

1:07:46

to have dinner tonight with anybody dead

1:07:48

or alive. Your dream dinner. Who's

1:07:50

at that dinner? I think I'd have a very different

1:07:52

answer to this question like any day

1:07:55

given like what I'm thinking about, but

1:07:57

you like what I pick for today.

1:07:58

Yeah, today. Yeah, I'd pick allen-terring.

1:08:01

Interesting.

1:08:02

A few years ago, you told a colleague,

1:08:05

and it was in the New Yorker, great profile

1:08:07

about you, that you were ready for the end of the world.

1:08:09

You sort of added yourself as a prepper. You had guns,

1:08:11

you had gold, you had batteries, you had a patch of land

1:08:13

in Big Sur. Are you still

1:08:15

a prepper?

1:08:17

No, not

1:08:19

in the way I would think about it. It was like a fun hobby,

1:08:21

but there's nothing else to do. I also,

1:08:24

for all of this stuff, about like, oh man,

1:08:26

none of this is going to help you if AGI

1:08:29

goes wrong.

1:08:30

But it's like a fun hobby. Sam,

1:08:33

you grew up Jewish. Do you believe in God?

1:08:40

I want to say yes, but not in the Jewish

1:08:42

God or the way that I think most

1:08:44

other people would define that question. What

1:08:47

do you mean by that? I

1:08:51

can't answer this in a light, Neeram. Okay,

1:08:54

here's some questions from Chat GPT. Sam,

1:08:58

GPT wants me to ask, what futuristic

1:09:01

technology do you wish existed today? Can

1:09:03

I say AGI? Sure. What

1:09:07

technology do you think will be obsolete

1:09:09

in 10 years? GPT-4.

1:09:13

What futuristic mode of transportation

1:09:16

are you most excited about? Fusion

1:09:18

powered starships. And Sam,

1:09:21

last question,

1:09:22

brought to you by your own company. When

1:09:25

were you first introduced to AI? And

1:09:28

what about the concept stuck with you? What

1:09:30

made you believe in its potential?

1:09:32

I must have heard about it first from sci-fi,

1:09:34

but my subjective memory of this

1:09:37

is as a child using

1:09:40

a computer, thinking about what would happen when

1:09:42

the computer could think. How old were you? There's

1:09:48

a million more questions I want to ask you, but we're

1:09:50

out of time and I know you need to go and do

1:09:53

a lot of things at OpenAI. So Sam

1:09:55

Altman, thanks for joining us.

1:09:57

Thanks for having me on.

1:10:04

Thanks for listening. We think AI

1:10:07

is an unbelievably interesting topic,

1:10:09

one we want to cover more on the show. If

1:10:11

you were provoked by this conversation, if

1:10:13

it educated you, if it excited

1:10:15

you, if it concerned you, if it made you

1:10:17

want to go and use chat GPT and

1:10:20

find out what it's all about, it's great.

1:10:23

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1:10:25

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