Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI | Lex Fridman Podcast By Lex Fridman
Sam Altman discusses the importance of compute power in the future and the potential for systems to reach remarkable capabilities by the end of the decade. He reflects on the tumultuous experience of the OpenAI board saga, highlighting both the negative aspects and the support he received. Altman emphasizes the need for resilience and structured governance to navigate the challenges of building towards Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). The conversation delves into the dynamics of board structures, power struggles, and the selection process for board members with diverse expertise required for impactful decision-making in the future.
Highlights
she did a great job during that weekend in a lot of chaos but but people often see leaders in the moment in like the crisis moments good or bad um but a thing I really value and leaders is how people act on a boring Tuesday at 9:46 in the morning and in in just sort of the the the normal drudgery of the day-to-day how someone shows up in a meeting the quality of the decisions they make that was what I meant about the Quiet Moments meaning like most of the work is done on a day by day in the meeting by meeting just just be present and and make great decisions
what did ilas see uh oh has not seen AGI none of us have seen AGI we’ve not built AGI
watch his body language here. he starts to smile. he blinks profusely, looks around and then stares off to the right as if he’s envisioning something.
so just to wrap up this whole Saga are you feeling good about the board structure about all of this and like where it’s moving I feel great about the new board in terms of the structure of openi
when asked if is “feeling good about…”, he quickly and very directly responds “yes” while Lex is still talking. this is coming off that emotional moment he just had about Ilya. compare his body language. I don’t think he is feeling good. combine that with the interview he did Arab Emirates where he scratches his nose when asked about he’s feeling about the future with AGI.
know one of the board’s tasks is to look
he looks almost directly up into the light. envisioning what he wants the future to look like
I think with like many new fundamentally new things you start fumbling through the dark and you make some assumptions most of which turn out to be wrong and then it became clear that we were going to need to do different things
perfect story to go with Objectives
I have always had a life philosophy of you know like don’t worry about all of the paranoia don’t worry about the edge cases you know you get a little bit screwed in exchange for getting to live with your guard down and this was so shocking to me I was so caught off guard that it has definitely changed and I really don’t like this it’s definitely changed how I think about just like default Trust of people and planning for the bad scenarios
there is something about the approach which just seems to feel different from how we think and learn and whatever and then also I think it’ll get better with skill
he describes how it “thinks differently” from how humans do. then adds a “and whatever” “it will get better with scale”
- compare to MLST podcast where he says he is “a scaling guy”
- he makes eye contact but then quickly looks down to his right on that line
the way I think about it is not what percent of jobs AI will do but what percent of tasks will AI do and over what time Horizon so if you think of all of the like five second tasks in the economy five minute tasks the five hour tasks maybe even the five day tasks how many of those can AI do and I think that’s a way more interesting impactful important question than how many jobs AI can do because it is a tool that will work at increasing levels of sophistication and over longer and longer time Horizons for more and more tasks and let people operate at a higher level of abstraction so maybe people are way more efficient at the job they do and at some point that’s not just a quantitative change but that’s a qualitative one too about the kinds of problems you can keep in your head
do we need a way to do a slower kind of thinking where the answer doesn’t have to get like you know it’s like like I guess like spiritually you could say that you want an AI to be able to think harder about a harder problem and answer more quickly about an easier problem
part of the reason that we deploy the way we do is that we think um we call it iterative deployment we uh rather than go build in secret until we got all the way to GPT 5 we decided to talk about GPT 1 2 3 and 4 and part of the reason there is I think Ai and surprise don’t go together and also the world people institutions whatever you want to call it need time to adapt and think about these things and I think one of the best things that open ey has done is this strategy and we we get the world to pay attention to the progress to take AGI seriously
things come together in surprising ways and having an understanding of that whole picture even if most of the time you’re operating in the weeds in one area pays off with surprising insights
I know that I’m not the product like I know I’m paying and that’s how the business model works and when I go use like Twitter or Facebook or Google or any other great product but ad supported great product I don’t love that and I think it gets worse not better in a world with AI
it maybe changed the world’s expectations for the future and that’s actually really important and it did kind of like get more people to take this seriously and put us on this new trajectory and that’s really important too so again I don’t want to undersell it I think it like I could retire after that accomplishment and be pretty happy with my career
talking about GPT-3.5
it does make it harder for me to like look you in the eye and say hey the board can just fire me
notice the smile appear on his face as he realizes the power he has
I think when a system can significantly increase the rate of scientific discovery in the world that’s like a huge deal I believe that most real economic growth comes from scientific and technological progress
there are these like very simple sounding but very psychedelic insights that exist sometimes so the square root function square root of four no problem square root of two you know okay now I have to like think about this new kind of number um but once I come up with this easy idea of a square root function that you know you can kind of like explain to a child and exists by even like you know looking at some simple geometry then you can ask the question of what is the square root of1 and that this is you know why it’s like a psychedelic thing that like tips you into some whole other kind of reality and you can come up with lots of other examples but I think this idea that the lowly square root operator can offer such a profound insight and a new realm of knowledge applies in a lot of ways
I do think broadly speaking AI will serve as those kinds of gateways at its best simple psychedelic like gateways to another wave see reality
you have not had a great deal of genetic drift from your great great great grandparents and yet what you’re capable of is dramatically different what you know is dramatically different and that is not that’s not because of biological change it is because I mean you got a little bit healthier probably you have modern medicine you eat better whatever um but what you have is this scaffolding that we all contributed to built on top of no one person is going to go build the iPhone no one person is going to go discover all of Science and yet you get to use it and that gives you incredible ability and so in some sense they like we all created that and that fills me with hope for the future that was a very Collective thing yeah we really are standing on the shoulders of giants