korrents

korrents · Lex Fridman Podcast · #419

Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI | Lex Fridman Podcast #419

Sam Altman · 1h 55m · youtube.com

20 korrents from this recording

1h
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Every claim below is a statement made in this recording, quoted word for word and linked to the second it was said, so you can hear it rather than take our word for it. The wording comes from the transcript published alongside the recording; the sentence above each quote is our reading of the claim, not their wording.

  1. 0:03:08 · watch on youtube.com

    The road to AGI should be a giant power struggle. The world should… Well, not should. I expect that to be the case.
  2. 4 min later
  3. 0:07:03 · watch on youtube.com

    In this case, and I think one of the things with our structure that we maybe should have thought about more than we did is that the board of a nonprofit has, unless you put other rules in place, quite a lot of power. They don’t really answer to anyone but themselves. And there’s ways in which that’s good, but what we’d really like is for the board of OpenAI to answer to the world as a whole, as much as that’s a practical thing.
  4. 22 min later
  5. 0:29:01 · watch on youtube.com

    We want to put increasingly powerful tools in the hands of people for free and get them to use them. I think that kind of open is really important to our mission. I think if you give people great tools and teach them to use them or don’t even teach them, they’ll figure it out, and let them go build an incredible future for each other with that, that’s a big deal.
  6. 4 min later
  7. 0:32:56 · watch on youtube.com

    I would heavily discourage any startup that was thinking about starting as a nonprofit and adding a for-profit arm later. I’d heavily discourage them from doing that. I don’t think we’ll set a precedent here.
  8. 7 min later
  9. 0:40:14 · watch on youtube.com

    I think the question behind that question is, do people who create valuable data deserve to have some way that they get compensated for use of it, and that I think the answer is yes. I don’t know yet what the answer is. People have proposed a lot of different things. We’ve tried some different models. But if I’m like an artist for example, A, I would like to be able to opt out of people generating art in my style. And B, if they do generate art in my style, I’d like to have some economic model associated with that.
  10. 2 min later
  11. 0:42:01 · watch on youtube.com

    The way I think about it is not what percent of jobs AI will do, but what percent of tasks will AI do on over one time horizon. So if you think of all of the 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?
  12. 3 min later
  13. 0:45:11 · watch on youtube.com

    I expect that the delta between 5 and 4 will be the same as between 4 and 3 and I think it is our job to live a few years in the future and remember that the tools we have now are going to kind of suck looking backwards at them and that’s how we make sure the future is better.
  14. 19 min later
  15. 1:04:22 · watch on youtube.com

    So part of the reason that we deploy the way we do, we call it iterative deployment, 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.
  16. 6 min later
  17. 1:10:01 · watch on youtube.com

    Look, I think compute is going to be the currency of the future. I think it will be maybe the most precious commodity in the world, and I think we should be investing heavily to make a lot more compute.
  18. 1 min later
  19. 1:10:50 · watch on youtube.com

    But compute is different. Intelligence is going to be more like energy or something like that, where the only thing that I think makes sense to talk about is, at price X, the world will use this much compute, and at price Y, the world will use this much compute.
  20. 3 min later
  21. 1:13:38 · watch on youtube.com

    A lot more people have died of air pollution than nuclear reactors, for example. But most people worry more about living next to a nuclear reactor than a coal plant. But something about the way we’re wired is that although there’s many different kinds of risks we have to confront, the ones that make a good climax scene of a movie carry much more weight with us than the ones that are very bad over a long period of time but on a slow burn.
  22. 2 min later
  23. 1:15:25 · watch on youtube.com

    And I’ve said for a long time that you think of a quadrant of slow timelines for the start of AGI, long timelines, and then a short takeoff or a fast takeoff. I think short timeline, slow takeoff is the safest quadrant and the one I’d most like us to be in. But I do want to make sure we get that slow takeoff.
  24. 4 min later
  25. 1:19:04 · watch on youtube.com

    But a lot of people have tried to just make a better search engine than Google and it is a hard technical problem, it is a hard branding problem, it is a hard ecosystem problem. I don’t think the world needs another copy of Google.
  26. 1 min later
  27. 1:20:16 · watch on youtube.com

    I kind of hate ads just as an aesthetic choice. I think ads needed to happen on the internet for a bunch of reasons, to get it going, but it’s a momentary industry. The world is richer now. I like that people pay for ChatGPT and know that the answers they’re getting are not influenced by advertisers.
  28. 11 min later
  29. 1:31:32 · watch on youtube.com

    I think it’s depressing if we have AGI and the only way to get things done in the physical world is to make a human go do it. So I really hope that as part of this transition, as this phase change, we also get humanoid robots or some sort of physical world robots.
  30. 1 min later
  31. 1:32:31 · watch on youtube.com

    I used to love to speculate on that question. I have realized since that I think it’s very poorly formed, and that people use extremely different definitions for what AGI is. So I think it makes more sense to talk about when we’ll build systems that can do capability X or Y or Z, rather than when we fuzzily cross this one mile marker.
  32. 3 min later
  33. 1:35:16 · watch on youtube.com

    I think when a system can significantly increase the rate of scientific discovery in the world, that’s a huge deal. I believe that most real economic growth comes from scientific and technological progress.
  34. 4 min later
  35. 1:39:24 · watch on youtube.com

    I continue to not want super-voting control over OpenAI. I never have. Never have had it, never wanted it. Even after all this craziness, I still don’t want it. I continue to think that no company should be making these decisions, and that we really need governments to put rules of the road in place.
  36. 3 min later
  37. 1:42:21 · watch on youtube.com

    That’s a theatrical risk. That is a thing that can really take over how people think about this problem. And there’s a big group of very smart, I think very well-meaning AI safety researchers that got super-hung up on this one problem, I’d argue without much progress, but super-hung up on this one problem. I’m actually happy that they do that, because I think we do need to think about this more. But I think it pushed out of the space of discourse a lot of the other very significant AI- related risks.
  38. 10 min later
  39. 1:52:40 · watch on youtube.com

    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.