[0:00:00] Today's guest is, well, dude's a straight up tech lord, let's be honest. He's one of the leaders, the world leaders in the development of AI. He started OpenAI, which is known for having chat GPT. We had a fascinating chat about the pros and cons, the fears and hopes, everything I could learn about artificial intelligence and where we're headed. TBD, baby.
[0:00:29] Today's guest is Mr. Sam Altman, and I'm very thankful for his time. You know, we had a residential architect do this office. We wanted it to feel like someone's like really comfortable like country house or something like that. Yeah. Not like the big corporate like sci-fi castle. Yeah, that's what I was. I was like a little bit like, oh, is it going to be, you know, will there be a drawer bridge? Will we be uploaded into a suite? Like what will happen to us? Yeah, we don't want that. We're going for like residential.
[0:01:11] Yeah, I was like, how do we even get through the firewall? How many like hit points will we need to get through? You know, it got very Dungeons and Dragons in some of my like imagination sometimes. We want people to feel like super comfortable and try to get pretty far in that direction. It feels like it. Your staff's very sweet, nice people. You have, thanks for hanging out, man. Absolutely. Really appreciate it. Yeah, I haven't seen you since I fell out of my chair. You fell out of the chair at the inauguration. That was really like quite a way to meet you.
[0:01:39] Yeah, I felt so embarrassed. And you were one of the faces that I looked up and saw, and I was like, God. And that was my first moment like AI built us a better chair, to be honest with you. And you did nothing, right? You were just sitting there, and it just collapsed. Nothing. I remember that. And it was just so embarrassing. I was like, oh, of all people, me, and here I am in this place. I think it was perfect because everybody's got to have some story. When people are like, oh, what was the inauguration? Everybody's got to have some story to tell. Yeah. And that was an incredible story for us all to tell. That's a good point.
[0:02:07] I do remember looking at people for help though. And oddly your eyes, I was like, oh my God, he could help. You did look like a beacon of help in the distance. I tried to help. You have a baby. You have a new child. It is. There have been like a lot of experiences in life where everyone tells you something's going to be great. And then it's like, okay, the people are right. The consensus is right. It's like even better than I thought it was going to be. But this has been the strongest example of that ever. Like I knew it was going to be great.
[0:02:37] And it's like way, way better. It's impossible to describe. There's nothing I can say that's not like very cliche. And it's totally amazing. What is like one of your, and it's a, you have a young boy. Yeah. And what's something like that you think is like neat or like what's one thing that kind of like is bringing you joy with it? Watching the speed with which he like learns new things or gains new capabilities. Yeah. It's just unbelievable. It's like every day. It's like, oh man.
[0:03:04] He just couldn't do that before and now he's like grabbing stuff and passing it between his hands and getting to like watch it day to day is just an amazing rate of change. And then I don't like, again, I realize it's like, you know, I realize that like everything about babies are very finely tuned over a long period of evolution to make us like love them and be fascinated by them and it's like a neurochemical hack. But I love it. It's great. It's so strong. It's so intense. So it's really like almost like a coffee for your heart or something kind of?
[0:03:36] I don't even know how to find. I've tried to come up with an analogy. Because now I'm telling everybody, you've got to have a lot of kids. It's really important. And I've been looking for an analogy of what to explain. And then I always just say, I don't know how to explain this. It is the best thing I've ever done by far. I feel like a completely changed person. And I was thinking the other day, there used to be all these other. At this point, all I do is work and hang out with my family. I don't really get to do a lot of hobbies anymore. It's a busy time at work.
[0:04:07] You're moved on. I'm so happy.
[0:04:33] How old is your child? Four months. Oh, that's a funny, like at five or six months, they start to get like fun and you can like, they're still like they can't go anywhere, you know, but they're like intrigued and stuff. They start to like smile or process more. I don't know how you guys say it, but. Yeah, he's totally like turned on now. Yeah. Really aware, understands things. It's super cool. I have a thought sometimes that this will be one of the last, like maybe 40 years that we conceive children in the body. Did you have any thoughts about that?
[0:05:04] I've definitely heard a lot of people say that. I haven't thought about it hard myself, but yeah, I guess it does make sense. Like, I guess that does make sense. Like, God, you were in your mom's butt. It's crazy, you know? It is crazy. You pervert or whatever. Like, I think in the future, people will be, it'll be kind of done like in a... In a vat or something. Yes. In like a nice vat. You can go see it on the weekends or whatever. Doesn't that just feel like...
[0:05:29] Off to you? Like I can totally intellectually like understand that that may be the better way to do it. Oh yeah, it feels way off to me. I was trying to, I thought you would like it. You know, I thought, I mean, like, or I thought that would be like a thought, like, I guess like that for me, that's one of like my futuristic thoughts, you know? Like I can totally accept that that will be what everybody does and that it's, you know, easier and we can like make it healthier for the child and the mother, you know, the mother doesn't take the health risk, but man.
[0:05:59] So intellectually, I can say that. And then like emotionally, it feels like something is off. Feels off. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah, because then the family, like on the weekends, the parents would come and like tinker on the glass or whatever. Or their dad would put like a, you know, like a Go Falcon sticker on the thing. You know what I'm saying? People would like decorate it all up or write little messages on there. You know, I think there's another, like another take I have on all of this is that there.
[0:06:26] In this world that we're heading to of like crazy sci-fi technology becoming reality, the sort of like the deeply human things will become the most precious, sacred, valued things. And that we'll really care about like the human experience more than ever. And maybe it won't go that way. I don't know. Yeah. Do you – no, and that's some of the stuff we want to talk about. And thanks so much, man, for sitting down. Do you think your child will go to college? Do you think like – what do you kind of think that looks like? Probably not.
[0:06:54] If I had to guess, like I think – well, I only went to half of college. Did you drop out? Yeah. Dude, you guys all – I freaking dropped out. I didn't get shit. You dropped out. Wang dropped out. Zuckerberg dropped out. Probably a lot of other people. And you. Yeah. Well, hey, we're both here. It worked out fine. You're right. You're right. Never mind. I'm sorry I'm being self-defeating. Yeah, what does that look like when you think about that?
[0:07:22] Yeah, with AI, with so much new information coming online, right? And so much data being collected and information being carpooled, maybe which is a term. So you and I never grew up in a world that didn't have computers. And our parents were like, oh, there weren't computers. And then there were, and it was this big, crazy adjustment. It took them a long time to figure it out. But to us, computers just always existed. Maybe they were kind of new, but they were always around.
[0:07:51] And then like, you know, a kid that is like, there was this video on YouTube I saw like maybe 12 years ago, something like that, that 14 years ago, that is really stuck with me. It was like a little baby in a dentist waiting room or something, picking up one of those old glossy magazines and going like this. Oh, I remember that. And to that kid, it was just like a broken iPad because that kid had just like grown up in a world where like there were touchscreens everywhere. And my kid will...
[0:08:19] Never grow up, will never ever be smarter than an AI. That will never happen. A kid born a few years ago, they had a brief period of time. My kid never will be smarter. But also, they'll never know a world where products and services aren't way smarter than them. And super capable. They can just do whatever you need. And in that world, I think education is going to feel very different. I already think college is maybe not working great for most people.
[0:08:47] Yeah, I think fast forward 18 years, it's going to look like a very, very different thing. Yeah. Yeah, do you think there will... Oh, here's that video right here, this kid. Yeah, yeah, yeah. All right, I was wrong about the dentist. It was... Or maybe there's a few of these. He's like, somebody charge this magazine. He's yelling. How would you recommend to a parent right now to prepare their children for like an AI future? Kind of like, are there certain curtails that you would start to put in now? Are there certain like...
[0:09:11] You know, adjustments where you like get them in a certain training or have them start to watch certain models of things online. Like what is that? I actually think the kids will be fine. I'm worried about the parents. If you look at the history of the world here when there's new technology, like people that grow up with it, they're always fluent. They always figure out what to do. They always learn the new kind of jobs. But if you're like a 50-year-old and you have to like kind of learn to do things in a very different way, that doesn't always work. So I think the kids are going to be fine.
[0:09:40] I mean, I do have worries about kids and technology. I think this scrolling, the kind of short video feed dopamine hit, it feels like it's probably messing with kids' brain development in a super deep way. So it's not that I have no worries. I have extremely deep worries about what technology is doing to kids. But in terms of kids' ability to be prepared for the future and use a new technology, they seem really good at that. Always through history. That's a good point, actually. Yeah, it's like if you just grow up with it, it's just like having it just totally normal.
[0:10:10] It's like having kneecaps or whatever. You're just kind of used to it. You can't imagine the world where it doesn't exist. Right. Yeah. Yeah. That's a good point. I remember when I was in school in like junior high and Google first came out and all the teachers like freaked out and they're like, this is the end of education. Why do you have to memorize history facts in history class if you can just look them up instantly on the internet? You don't even have to learn to go to the library. And the answer is like, yeah, maybe memorization is less important.
[0:10:40] With these new tools, you can think better, come up with new ideas, do new stuff. I'm sure the same thing happened with the calculator before. And now this is just a new tool that exists in the tool chain.
[0:10:50] And what about like, say if there is somebody that's like learning history right now, like they just started their second year of college. Oh, that Celsius. Yeah, that thing will definitely, you won't be able to blink for a month, homie. That thing will, yeah. You'll sneeze and release 5.0, dude. You'll freaking, are you guys at 4.5 already? We're 4.5 already. 5.0 is, I think it's going to be great. Oh, it'll come out fast. We had that Celsius. I'm just saying. Maybe the researchers need it, not me, but you know, we'll get them some. Yeah, I think we'll get you there, man.
[0:11:16] So say there's somebody just, for example, like there's learning history right now. They're in their second year of college. They're taking history. Are there some subjects in like they're going to be a historian? Is that still a viable space of work as AI moves forward, do you think, honestly? I assume there will be some version of it that is. I think it's very hard to predict exactly how something evolves.
[0:11:44] Or predict exactly what the jobs of the future are going to be. Not that long ago, it would have been very hard to predict either of our jobs. If you go back 100 years, the idea of this CEO of an AI company or a podcaster probably would have been things that didn't seem to be the most obvious evolutions of the things people were doing at the time. Yeah, you just seemed almost probably crazy even in trying to explain those to someone.
[0:12:15] You would. And now, in fact, two of the jobs... I heard that the job that young people most want is some version of your job. The job that young people most want is to be a podcast influencer, YouTube. They want a YouTube channel, whatever it is. Six, seven-year-olds, they don't know how to describe it, but that's what they want. And a lot of people also want my job. They want to do a startup or they want to work on AI. And these just didn't exist. So the rate with which the new things come along is...
[0:12:42] It's fast and also trying to predict what they are. I don't know. The thing I say all the time is no one knows what happens next. It's like we're going to figure this out. It's this weird emergent thing. Does the current job of a historian exist in the same way? I'll bet not quite. But another thing I believe is that humans are obsessed with other people. Like we are so deeply wired to care about other people, to care about stories. And history, our own history, is extremely interesting to us. So I would say somehow or other.
[0:13:10] We're still going to care about that. There's going to be some kind of job doing that.
[0:13:17] When I take that avenue of thought, like, okay, there will still be this historian or somebody, it'll be some evolution of that, right? That does seem kind of cool to me because there's a level of creativity in there. There's a level of like faith and spontaneity in there that I think is kind of exciting. So yeah, I guess I hadn't really thought about that. Sometimes I get stuck in this doomsday thing. Like I just see like, you know, like the history book closes and they're like, we have enough. We have all the history over here, you know? You know, people used to say like, oh, there's no need for more music.
[0:13:47] Made perfect music. Why does anyone need anyone to create anymore? And that's obviously ridiculous. Or they would say there's that famous patent office quote, everything that humans ever possibly need has been invented. There's nothing left to do. I have heard that. But here we are. Here we are. And someone asked me the other day, how long is it until you can make an AI CEO for OpenAI? And I was like, probably not that long. And they were like, well, aren't you really sad about that? And I was like, no, I think it's awesome.
[0:14:14] I'm for sure going to figure out something else to do. I'm excited to do that. I think that's great. Right. So you could create something that would have your job, but then you could do something else. Totally. But then how do you know that you'll still get paid for your job, I guess? It's kind of a big question. I kind of think that... But yeah, I guess the framing of that question might be better. Say there are jobs that get curtailed by... There will be some. Okay. I think it's important to be honest about that. There will be some jobs that totally go away.
[0:14:43] But mostly, I think we will rely on the fact that people's desire for more stuff, for better experiences, for a higher social status or whatever, that seems basically limitless. Human creativity seems basically limitless. And human desire to be useful to each other and to connect with each other and do stuff for each other and focus on other people seems pretty limitless too. So I think throughout all of history, there have been these predictions like, you know, we're going to like,
[0:15:14] I'll be on the beach and work an hour a day or hour a week or whatever. And we're going to have unlimited wealth. I've never heard that one. I love that. I mean, they used to say this. They used to say like the Industrial Revolution. People were like, oh, you know, we just figured out how to automate like man's lot in life. There's nothing left to do. We're going to have these machines do all the work. It makes sense probably. And you watch these machines doing all this stuff that only people used to physically do. And everybody panicked and said there's going to be no more jobs. And we figured out.
[0:15:43] New stuff. Now, here's an interesting thing. If you could go back to that industrial revolution time and people before that were, you know, really on the grind, working super hard, trying to like kind of have enough food to survive. Go back to those people. Look at our jobs today. Would those people say we have real jobs? Or would they say you have unbelievable abundance, unbelievable wealth, so much food to eat, incredible luxury, and you guys are just like playing a game to entertain yourselves? Is that a real job or not?
[0:16:12] And they would probably say where they sit, what you guys do is not a real job. You guys are, you know, you're too rich. You're wasting your time. You're trying to like. Yeah, you guys are a couple of dang zest lords out there freaking playing Uno in the park or whatever. They would not. I don't think my grandfather would be like, you have a job. He would still be like, you need to get a job. Yeah, totally. Yeah. And when we look forward to another hundred years of what people are doing, they'll probably think they're working very hard. It'll feel very satisfying, very intense to them. They're really like, they'll feel engaged. They'll be making my people happy.
[0:16:40] They'll be creating value for each other. But if we could look forward 100 years at those guys, do you think we would say they're working? Or like, man, you have like AI doing everything for you. You're just trying to entertain yourselves. Yeah, like, oh, you guys have it so easy. Right. But I think that's beautiful. I think it's great that those people in the past think we have it so easy. I think it's great that we think those people in the future have it so easy. Like, that is the beautiful story of us all contributing to human progress and everybody's lives getting better and better.
[0:17:05] Say we're able to get to that space, right? Like the movement that happens with AI and with just technology, which will advance quicker, I think, which is one thing that AI feels like to me, it's a fast forward button on technology and on possibility because things can be, information can be quantified so quick and a lot of like more menial tasks, even though they're not really menial in people's lives.
[0:17:27] But Menial, hypothetically, can be done quicker to get a lot of the framework for things done fast. But how will people survive? How do we adjust our structure of if some people own the companies that have the AI and then a lot of people...
[0:17:46] Are just using the AIs and the agents created by AIs to do things for them. How will society, like societal members, still be able to financially survive? Will there still be money? What is that? Does that make any sense, that question? It totally makes sense. Okay, sorry. I don't know. Neither does anybody else. But I'll tell you my current best guess. Okay. Well, I'll say two guesses. One, I think it is possible that we put GPT-7 or whatever in everybody's chat GPT. Everybody gets it for free.
[0:18:15] Everybody has access to just this like crazy thing such that everybody can be more productive, make way more money. It doesn't actually matter that you don't like own the cluster itself, but everybody gets to use it. And it turns out even getting to use it is enough that people are like getting richer faster and more distributed than ever before. That could happen. I think that really is possible. There's another version of this where the most important things that are happening are these systems are discovering new cures for diseases.
[0:18:46] New kinds of energy, new ways to make spaceships, whatever. And most of that value is accruing to the cluster owners, us, just so that I'm not dodging the question here. And then I think society will very quickly say, okay, we got to have some new economic model where we share that and distribute that to people.
[0:19:04] I used to be really excited about things like UBI. I still am kind of excited, like universal basic income where you just give everybody money. Yeah, you hear that term a lot. Yeah, universal basic income. Yeah, I heard you and Rogan talk about that too a while back. I still am kind of excited about that, but I think people really need agency. They really need to feel like they have a voice in governing the future and deciding where things go. And I think if you just say, okay, AI is going to do everything and then everybody gets a dividend from that, it's not going to feel perfect.
[0:19:36] And I don't think it actually would be good for people. So I think we need to find a way where we're not just like, if we're in this world, where we're not just distributing money or wealth. Like actually, I don't just want like a check every month. What I would want is like an ownership share in whatever AI creates so that I feel like I'm participating in this thing that's going to compound and get more valuable over time. So I sort of like universal basic wealth better than universal basic income.
[0:20:03] I don't like basic either. I want like universal extreme wealth for everybody. But even then, like I think what people really want is the agency to kind of co-create the future together. And in a world where it's like the AI is mostly coming up with the new scientific inventions, at least we've got to still have humans like invent the new culture and have that be a very distributed thing.
[0:20:29] Okay, I guess I see what you're saying. Would that be like an American thing, do you think, like since they were invented here? Or do you think – I'm just wondering what does that look like, you know? The economic model of it all or the whole thing? Yeah, or like is there a dividend of the company that then is divided up between the masses sort of? I mean a crazy idea, but in the spirit of crazy ideas, is that if the world – there's like roughly 8 billion people in the world. If the world can generate like –
[0:21:00] Eight quintillion tokens per year, if that's the world. Actually, let's say the world can generate 20 quintillion tokens per year. Tokens of? Like each word generated by an AI. Okay. Just making up a huge number here. We'll say, okay, 12 of those go to the normal capitalistic system, but eight of those, eight quintillion tokens, are going to get divided up equally among eight billion people. So everybody gets one trillion tokens. And that's your kind of universal basic wealth globally.
[0:21:30] And people can sell those tokens. If I don't need mine, I can sell them to you. We could pool ours together for some new art project we want to do. But instead of just getting a check, everybody on Earth is getting a slice of the world's AI capacity. And then we're letting the massively distributed human ingenuity and creativity and economic engine do its thing. I mean, that's a crazy idea. Maybe it's a bad one. But that's the kind of thing that I think sounds like someone should think about it more.
[0:21:58] One of the big fears is like purpose, right? Like human purpose, like work gives us purpose. And also I think the idea that we are the ones advancing humanity gives us purpose. Like we are the – like we have some control over our own destiny maybe gives us this sense of purpose.
[0:22:21] And it feels like that we would lose a sense of purpose or that purpose would be adjusted. Like if AI is to really, you know, continue to advance so quickly, it feels like our sense of purpose would start to really disappear. Have you had thoughts about that? I worry about this a lot. So I think people have worried about this with every big technological revolution. But I agree that this time it feels different.
[0:22:45] Okay, yeah, because say you had an axe and somebody came out with a saw. You're like, yeah, that's it. Or even if they come out with a robot that cuts the tree down, it still feels fine. But creativity intelligence, I think, cuts so deeply at the core of whatever we are and how we value ourselves. One example we can look at this right now, I think one area where AI is having a big impact is on how people write software for a living. And AI is really good at that. It's really changed what it means to be a software developer.
[0:23:17] I haven't heard any of those software developers say that even though their job is different, that they don't have meaning. They still enjoy it. They're operating at a higher level. And I'm hopeful, at least for a long time, you know, 100 years from now, who knows. But I'm hopeful that that's what it'll feel like with AI is even if we're asking it to solve huge problems for us, even if we ask it to say like, you know, go discover a cure for cancer, there will still be a lot of things to do in that process that feel valuable to a person.
[0:23:49] You're still asking it the questions. You're still like helping guide it. You're still framing it or whatever it is. You're still like talking to the world about it. And I think all of human history suggests that we find a way to put ourselves at the center of the story and feel really good about it. Like, you know, if you kind of think like we used to think that the earth was the center of the solar system and then we're like very human centric view. And then we're like, okay, fine. The sun is the center of the solar system.
[0:24:22] But the solar system is at least the center of the galaxy. And now, oh man, there's a lot of galaxies. And oh man, now we're this like tiny speck in this like very huge universe. And yet we still manage to feel all like a lot of main character energy. And so I somehow think even in a world where AI is doing all of this stuff that humans used to do, we are going to find a way in our own telling of the story to feel like the main characters. And I think in an important sense we will be. And that's really good.
[0:24:53] You know, probably already today, there could be a very compelling version of two AIs talking like this. And I don't think I'd want to watch that. Like, I think I really do feel deeply wired to like care about the real person behind it. I think that's like deep in the biology. Right. Yeah, that's the part I think a lot of times it's like, even though you can get into like these wormholes of like possibility and these fear holes of possibility or...
[0:25:23] Kind of this dystopian ideas that in the end I'm like, I'd rather probably watch something that's real. It's like because I'm real. You know what I'm saying? Like I don't want to talk really to a robot. Yeah, I think in the end there's going to be a part of you that wants to continue to just talk to humans. Do you – what's like one of your fears? Like what's a fear you have of?
[0:25:49] Like if you have like a fearful space that it could go. I know you mentioned a little bit. This morning I was testing our new model and I got a question. I got emailed a question that I didn't quite understand. And I put it in the model, this GPT-5, and it answered it perfectly. And I really kind of sat back in my chair and I was just like, oh man, here it is moment. And I got over it quickly. I got busy on to the next thing. But it was like a...
[0:26:20] I mean, it's what kind of we're talking about. I felt like useless relative to the AI in this thing that I felt like I should have been able to do and I couldn't and it was really hard. But the AI just did it like that. Yeah. It was a weird feeling. Yeah. I think that feeling right there, that's the feeling a lot of people kind of have like when does it happen? What's going to happen? But I think some of it is it's like it's hard to conceptualize until you're further along.
[0:26:50] Totally. I don't think we know quite how that's going to feel. You just have to like approach it step by step. Another thing I'm afraid of, and we had a real problem with this earlier, but it can get much worse, is just what this is going to mean for users' mental health. There's a lot of people that talk to ChatGPT all day long. There are these sort of new AI companions that people talk to like they would a girlfriend or a boyfriend. And we were talking earlier about how it's probably not been good for kids to like grow up.
[0:27:23] I'm scared of that. I don't have an answer yet. I don't think we know quite the ways in which it's going to have those negative impacts. But I feel for sure it's going to have some, and I hope we can learn to mitigate it quickly.
[0:27:49] Can AIs, can they pull up pornography and stuff like that too or no? Sure. Oh my God. God, I didn't know that. No, it's fine. Yeah, but I just, yeah, I don't even need to know that. I'm going to have that stricken from my own record. Crypto is, it's kind of blowing up again, you know? Some people say it's back. It's not back. One of the best things is it hasn't left.
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[0:30:48] What legal system does AI have to work by? Is there like a legal, like we have laws like in the world, right? Like in the human world. Does AI have to work by any like legal laws, you know? Yeah, so I think we will certainly need a legal or a policy framework for AI. One example that we've been thinking about a lot, this is like a, maybe not quite what you're asking. This is like a very human centric version of that question.
[0:31:18] People talk about the most personal shit in their lives to ChatGPT. It's, you know, people use it, young people especially, like use it as a therapist, a life coach, having these relationship problems, what should I do? And right now, if you talk to a therapist or a lawyer or a doctor about those problems, there's like legal privilege for it. You know, like it's, there's doctor-patient confidentiality, there's legal confidentiality, whatever. And we haven't figured that out yet for when you talk to ChatGPT.
[0:31:47] So if you go talk to Chet about your most sensitive stuff and then there's like a lawsuit or whatever, like we could be required to produce that. And I think that's very screwed up. I think we should have like the same concept of privacy for your conversations with AI that we do with a therapist or whatever. And no one had to think about that even a year ago. And now I think it's this huge issue of like how are we going to treat the laws around this.
[0:32:09] Do you think there should be like kind of like a slowing things down before we move there kind of? Because, yeah, that is kind of wild. It's one of the reasons I get scared sometimes to use certain AI stuff because I don't know how much personal information I want to put in because I don't know who's going to have it. I think we need this point addressed with some urgency. And, you know, the policymakers I've talked to about it like broadly agree. It's just it's new and we got to do it quickly. Do you talk to ChachiBT?
[0:32:36] I don't talk to it that much. It's because of this? I think it is. It's because it's like— I think it makes sense. To not talk to it because— No, no, no. To like really want the privacy clarity before you use it a lot. Yeah. Like the legal clarity. Yeah, it's scary. And it's like, well, how long does it take lawmakers to come up with that? And then it feels like it's moving so fast that it's like it doesn't even— that sometimes it's like it doesn't even really matter. It's like are we even waiting for the laws to be put around this or—
[0:33:03] What's going on? Does it feel like it's moving too fast for you sometimes? The last few months, it felt very fast. It feels faster and faster, but the last few months, it felt very fast. Yeah, I was watching this guy, Yoshua Bengio? Yoshua Bengio. Yoshua Bengio.
[0:33:20] Some people call him the father of AI. He may be self-proclaimed. I'm not really sure. But he certainly seemed to be kind of like a lifeguard for AI, like thinking about how do we keep the pool safe, how much water should be in it, the chlorine, how many lifeguards do you need on duty, that type of thing hypothetically. And he was saying that some AIs, they have like deception techniques inside of them like that.
[0:33:48] There were AIs that would rather give you an answer that was possibly pleasing to the user than to give them the factual answer. And then he was also saying that there were AIs that were developing some of their own languages to communicate with each other, which would be languages that we don't even know. How do you guys curtail that when those types of things come up? What does that even kind of feel like to you guys? Are these just problems that happen?
[0:34:18] In new spaces and you figure it out as you go.
[0:34:49] Not human scale kind of power and everyone knew it was going to reshape the world. And I do think people working on AI have that feeling in a very deep way. You know, we just don't know. Like we think it's going to be great. There's clearly real risks. It kind of feels like you should be able to say something more than that. But in truth, I think all we know right now is that we have discovered, invented, whatever you want to call it.
[0:35:17] Something extraordinary that is going to reshape the course of human history. Dear God, man. But if you don't know, we don't know. Well, of course. I mean, I think no one can predict the future. Human society is very complex. This is an amazing new technology. Maybe a less dramatic example than the atomic bomb is when they discovered the transistor a few years later.
[0:35:40] The transistor radio? The little transistor part that made computers and radios and everything else. But we discovered this completely new thing that enabled the whole computer revolution and is in this microphone and those computers and our iPhones. The world would be so different if people had not discovered that and then over the decades figured out how to make them smaller and more efficient. And now we don't even think about it because the transistors are just in everything. We have all this modern technology from that one scientific discovery.
[0:36:07] I do think that's what AI is going to be like. We had this one crazy scientific discovery that led to these language models we all use now. And that is going to change the course of society in all kinds of ways. And of course, we don't know what they all are. I was hoping you knew by the end of that sentence. I was hoping you would, you know, like that's what we're, because we don't know.
[0:36:31] You know, like that's, I think, the tough thing. There's no time in human history at the beginning of a century where the people ever knew what the end of the century was going to be like. Yeah. So maybe it's, I do think it goes faster and faster each century. It's certainly like, you know, in 1900, you couldn't have predicted what 2000 was going to be like. I think in 2000, you could even less predict what 2100 was going to look like. But that's kind of why it's exciting. And that's kind of why people get to.
[0:36:56] Figure out and unfold the story as we go. It's kind of bizarre because there's a part of me that's like, this guy's out of his mind. This guy is a wild wizard. There's a couple different things. But then there's also this part of me that's like, this guy is this hopeful guy who's involved in this crazy space. And he kind of has this whimsical energy about the future, which is in a crazy way.
[0:37:23] A nice energy to have about the future generally is that something could happen or that things are possible. So it just, yeah, it's all kind of like, I don't know, it's definitely fascinating to me. Sam, to kind of pivot a little bit, it feels like there's a race right now in AI, right? Would you say that there's a race between companies and AI? It certainly feels that way. Yeah.
[0:37:47] And it almost feels like you guys are the new Formula One drivers or you guys are like the new like, it's like Mario Andretti or you guys are the new like Bubba Watts and all that, you know. It's almost like these are the new race cars that everybody's kind of watching position themselves. What is the race for? Because you hear about AI and then you hear about AGI.
[0:38:13] And then you hear about super intelligence. What is this race that's going on? How real is it? And what is the race for? When I was a kid, the race was like the megahertz race and then it became the gigahertz race. Everybody wanted a computer with a faster processor. Intel would come out with this one and then AMD would come out with this one. And it turned out that those gigahertz measurements eventually were not even that helpful. You could have one that had a lower number and in practice it was faster.
[0:38:43] And eventually, I think it was Apple that realized they should just stop talking about the clock speed of their computers. And you probably don't even know what the processor speed of your iPhone is today. Yeah, it's true. Yeah, that was a big thing and it kind of disappeared. And I think the same thing has been happening in AI where everybody was racing on these benchmarks. You know, I score this on this benchmark and this on that one. And now people are realizing that like, okay, the benchmarks are kind of saturated. We went through the equivalent of our megahertz race with our benchmark race.
[0:39:11] And now people kind of don't care about that as much. And now it's like, who's using the model? Who's getting the value out of it? Things like that. But I do think people still feel like we're heading towards some milestone. What the milestone is, they disagree on. But maybe it's a system that's capable of doing its own AI research and its own sort of self-improvement. Maybe it's a system that is like smarter than all of humans put together.
[0:39:41] They feel like there is some finish line to cross. I actually don't quite feel like this, but I think a lot of people in the industry that there's some finish line that we're going to cross. Maybe it's this like self-improvement moment. Maybe you call that super intelligence. And I think there is a sort of, there's like a race to get somewhere, but people don't agree on where it's to or something. What are you racing towards? Do you feel like? It's a great question. I don't have like a finish line in mind.
[0:40:13] There's nothing I could say. I don't think I can articulate anything where I would say like, this is mission complete. But if I had to give like a self-referential answer there, the moment where we would rather give our research cluster, like our GPUs that we run all of our AI experiments on, the moment where we would rather give that to an AI researcher rather than our brilliant team of human researchers, that does at least seem like some kind of very different.
[0:40:42] New era. Yeah, and at that point, who's even we? I feel like it's just you kind of like wheeling the stuff across the hall. You know what I'm saying? It starts to get this idea like if things were to keep leaving the people and go to the computer, you're just shoveling coal into the AI hypothetically. Again, I assume that what will happen like with every other kind of technology is we'll realize like we –
[0:41:10] There's this one thing that the tool's way better than us at. Now we've got to go solve some other problems, so let's put our brainpower there. I somehow don't think it'll ever feel like we all just get to push a button and go on vacation. Got it. I think one version of this is as capabilities go up, because as we get better tools, the expectation goes way up too. And so we've got to like, yes, we get much better tools, but we have to do way more to remain competitive.
[0:41:39] Well, I think there's this hopeful idea. Say if you come up with all these- Or maybe not. Maybe the AI is just better than us at absolutely everything. We just sit there being like, all right, that was cool. Yeah, because at a certain point, if something has all the information, right? If something has all the information and it can think and ponder and pontificate and serve multi-options of answers, don't we then work in for that thing? That's what I start to wonder. If it's the smartest thing in the room-
[0:42:06] GPT-5 is the smartest thing. GPT-5 is smarter than us in almost every way. And yet, here we are. So there's something about the way the world works. There's something about, this doesn't mean it's true forever, but there's something about what humans can do today that is so different. There's also something about what humans care about today that is so different than AI that I don't think the simplistic thing quite works. Now, again, by the time it's a million times smarter than us.
[0:42:34] Who knows? Is part of you want to kind of get there? Like how do we get where like I open the door and I say, excuse me, sir, and it's just my computer in there. You know what I'm saying? You know, when I was a kid, I sort of thought about these technological revolutions that happened one at a time. There was the agriculture revolution a long time ago and that freed us up to do these other things. And then there was the age of enlightenment and there was the industrial revolution and there was the computer revolution and all these things happened. And I thought of them as like,
[0:43:06] These distinct things. And now I view it as just this one long compounding exponential where all of these things come together. Each piece of technology is built continuously overlapping on the one that comes before. And we're able to just do more and more. And so in some sense, AI is this big, special, unique, different thing. And in some other sense, it is just part of this long arc of human progress. We talked about the transistor earlier, but like...
[0:43:34] That was way more important in some sense to AI happening than the work we do now. And all this stuff has to like compound, compound. You got to build the internet. You got to get all this data. You got to do all these things. And I want that exponential to keep going. There'll be things way after AI. We'll invent all sorts of new things. We'll go colonize space. We'll go build neural interfaces. Who knows what else we'll do? But I think at some point, AI fades into that arc of history. We don't even think about it. It's like transistors, if you want to think about today.
[0:44:06] Yeah, I think the part that I think gets spooky is...
[0:44:32] I can build some stuff, but I can't build any technological stuff. So then I'm like, dang, dude, what am I going to build over there? So right now, I can write software, maybe you can't. And I have a little advantage if I want to go build some technological thing. Very soon, you can make any piece of software you want. Because you just ask an AI in English, you say, I got an idea for an app, make me this thing. And the whole thing just happens. So that's a win for you. Maybe it's a little bit of a loss for me. I think it's kind of cool for the whole world.
[0:45:01] But this is going to be a technology that anybody can use. You can just, with natural language, you can say, this is what I want. And it goes off and writes the code for you, debugs it for you, deploys it for you. And then you can say, how do I use what I just created? Yeah. But if you have a great idea, AI will just make it happen for you. And this is a new thing. I think this will make technology the most accessible it ever has been. Got it.
[0:45:26] Okay, then that seems a little bit different. I think there's this idea in my head that I'm going to have to figure out all this coding. I'm going to figure out all of these different ways to do things to even have a possibility of use of myself in the future. No, I think this is, without talking too much about the future and what we're going to launch, the fact that you will be able to have an entire piece of software created just by explaining your idea is going to be incredible for humans getting great new stuff.
[0:45:56] Because right now, I think there's a lot more good ideas than people who know how to make them. And if AI can do that for us, we're really good at coming up with creative ideas. Yeah, I mean, that's one of the things that people like to do. Do you think right now, if humans, regular average humans, most humans, could vote to keep AI going or to stop AI, what do you think that they would vote? This is like totally kind of, I don't have any data for this. I would bet most people who use ChatGPT,
[0:46:25] Which a lot of people know. They would say like, keep it going. And most people who don't would say, it's scary, stop it. What do you think? Yeah, I feel like most people would say, stop it, I think. Or pause it, take the wheels off of it for a month. That kind of thing. Siphon the gas out of the tank. You know, like that kind of thing. Put sugar in it. I think there would be like that kind of thing. What are you most afraid of with it? Or is it just that we're not going to have purpose and we don't know how it's all going to go? Yeah, I mean, those are some of the huge parts. But I think like, there's like,
[0:46:56] Probably that. I think that in the end. I think there's a general feeling of like, well, if all the trucking jobs disappear, you know, if those become automated and like, yeah, if everything becomes a RoboTax, like, you know, will that feel?
[0:47:14] You know, where will those people go for jobs? Will everybody just be dancing on TikTok trying to get people to tip them for trends and stuff? You know, like there's part of that. I had this dream years ago that it all ends with everybody's driving an Uber and literally holding each other at gunpoint to be each other's passengers, right? Like get in my car because that's how bad, like somebody's like, I need to fare more than you do. You know, my whole family's in the backseat, sit shotgun, we'll get you to where, you know, like people are literally holding each other.
[0:47:44] Gunpoint to subscribe to their OnlyFans and stuff like it's just that dystopian or whatever. So I guess part of that, but then there's a deeper part where it's like, yeah, what comes out of us if it feels like a lot of the regular stuff that gives us purpose, that we know right now gives us purpose? Is there a new evolution?
[0:48:07] Is there like a blooming inside of us? Is it this utopian place that you almost think of as like a heaven idea where, you know, people are fed and have enough, you know, are provided for, can take care of themselves? I guess that's it.
[0:48:25] Because purpose gives people work. Work gives people so much of their purpose. And so for to lose those things, what happens? And I know I kind of keep asking that over and over again. You don't really have the answers. It's okay. Of course, how could you? We're not in the future. I mean, I think people really do love to be useful to each other. And people love to express their creativity as part of that. And as the long-term trend of society getting richer has continued,
[0:48:57] More people, I think, are able to get closer to sort of expressing themselves in the best way that they can. Maybe like, you know, as recently as 500 or 600 years ago, not very many people got to be artists. The world wasn't that rich. There were a limited number of patrons that could like pay you to create art, but there were more than zero. And before that, there were almost none. And then you got this beautiful Italian Renaissance and all of this amazing art because there was like excess capital in the world.
[0:49:28] And now a lot more people can be artists or a lot more people can start startups, which is another, like for me, that's like my expression of creativity. Or more people can create content. And this idea that people can find whatever way they can to express themselves, their talent, their vision for kind of collective love of other people and a care for putting their brick in society's progress.
[0:50:00] I think that can go really far. Now, what art in the future looks like now that AI can make art or help make art, I don't know. It'll probably be kind of different. What startups will look like in the future when people can kind of just say whatever they want to their AI and it can make this off of them right then. It will kind of be different. But I think it's such a bad bet to assume that either human creativity or human fulfillment from being useful to other people ends.
[0:50:27] I think we're just, we stay on this exponential and like each year, each decade, our collective standard of living goes way up. The whole world gets way richer. We all get more. We all expect more. And even over like the course, I was thinking recently, like food is so much better than it is when I was a kid. Like the world has just figured out how to make food better. Like we, you know, know how to, we figured out organic vegetables or whatever it is. I don't know. It just tastes much better. And like.
[0:50:56] I think that's great. I don't want to go back to eating like the frozen carrots or whatever. Yeah, I guess that's a good point. But then there's some – like I saw this thing the other day. It was like a – they had like one of those robo kitchens or whatever. You know when you order food from like something Dash or whatever and then you – but it's like Hank's Ribs and then it's like Marty's Pizza and then it's like Susan's Salami Shop. But they're all the same place. And when you get that from –
[0:51:24] Window dash. You feel like something's missing, right? You're like, ah, this is fake. I can tell. I get less enjoyment. You would rather get that food from the dude who's been making it and perfecting it on that little pizza shop on the corner for the last 20 years. Because that dude is part of the experience. That authenticity is part of the experience. I don't think that goes away with a fake robotic thing. Okay.
[0:51:51] Yeah, because I think I start to feel like we're in this universe where it's like you're walking down the street or something and like a Waymo goes by and it's like, eat now. And you're like, but, and you already did eat. It's just got a bad reading or something. It's got a bad valve in it or something. You're like yelling at it. There's nobody in there. And you're like, I already ate. It's like, sit down.
[0:52:09] And it just like fucking uses like a t-shirt cannon to just like shoot a burrito at you. And then you're sitting there, you're eating that, you know? And then the GLP car goes by, right? And says, I can help you out. Yes. And it's like, obviously you've overeaten. You're like, I didn't even want to eat. That thing's messed up, right? You're yelling at a car that has no driver in it. And then it shoots you with three GLP-1 darts in the neck. And now your wife doesn't even recognize you when you get home or whatever, you know? The fact that you find this so...
[0:52:39] Off-putting, I think, is a sign for optimism. That's actually a good point. You're wired. You're going to be resistant to that. That's not going to make you happy. That's not going to make other people happy. Now, maybe we get tricked. Social media tricked us for a while. We got too addicted to feeds, whatever. But we realized, actually, this is not helping me be my best. Doing the equivalent of getting the burrito can into my mouth on my phone at night, that's not making me long-term happy.
[0:53:07] And that's not helping me like really accomplish my true goals in life. And I think if AI does that, people will reject it. However, if ChatGPT really helps you to figure out what your true goals in life are and then accomplish those, you know, it says, hey, you've said you want to be a better father or a better, you know, you want to be in better shape or you want to like grow your business. If you want, we can change that goal and I can help you scroll TikTok all night or, you know, eat the burritos or whatever. And I'll give you the GLP one shots and I'll make you as healthy as you can.
[0:53:38] But like maybe instead I can try to help convince you you should go for a run tonight. And I think if AI feels like it is helping you try to accomplish your goals and be your best, that will feel very different than the last generation of technology. Yeah. And you know what? And that's why I'm like.
[0:53:54] And that's where a kid growing up right now, to them, that would probably, some young people might be like, that makes the most sense. I'm a little older generation. I might be like, oh, that seems a little, but that's always how things are with generation and generation. It's always how it goes. Yeah, you're right. And maybe this is just like a quicker evolution of things. And for young people, it's going to make so much sense. And for older people, it's an energy. You're just going to be like, get off my, you know, avatar lawn or something, you know. But that's the way of societal progress. That's just how it goes. Good point.
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[0:55:27] If your revenues are at least in the seven figures, download the free ebook, Navigating Global Trade, Three Insights for Leaders at netsuite.com slash T-H-E-O. That's netsuite, N-E-T-S-U-I-T-E dot com slash Theo. There's definitely been a lot of talk about like tech and governance, right? And I know we touched on it a little bit earlier. And there were people like lobbying in the...
[0:55:56] And Trump had a big, beautiful bill for like a 10-year ban on state legislation against AI. What do you think about that? Like letting it be this rogue space? There have to be some rules here. There has to be some like guidelines. There has to be some sort of regulation at some point. I think it'd be a mistake to let each state do this kind of crazy patchwork of stuff. I think like one countrywide approach would be much easier.
[0:56:25] For us to be able to innovate and still have some guardrails, but there have to be some guardrails. Have you met with governments and government leaders to have discussions like that? Are they meeting with you? Yeah, they do meet with us. They haven't done anything big yet, but they're talking about it. Do they meet with you to try to keep information out of you guys' data?
[0:56:48] You know, for all of the paranoia about that, I don't think we've ever had someone come say like, I don't want it to say this negative thing about this politician or this whatever. The concerns are like, what is this going to do to our kids? You know, are they going to stop learning? There's a lot of concerns about that. Is this going to spread fake information? Is this going to influence elections? But we've never had the like, you can't say bad things about the president, Trump or whatever. Bias is a big thing. Like they do want to know like.
[0:57:17] If it'll say bad things about one candidate, it'll say bad things about the other. Could you guys make it do one or the other? Can you guys favor the back end? We totally could. I mean, we don't, but we totally could. You could? Yeah. Wow. Yeah. I think like- I know you. How do you- Do we give you guys lie detector tests every day? How do we know you're- We have to test the system. Anyone can test the AI and say, if I say this, it'll say this. If I say that, it doesn't say that. Oh, that's a good point. But you touch on a really big point here, which is like hundreds of millions of people talk to ChatGPT every day.
[0:57:47] And it probably has a big impact on what they believe. And so I think society's interest in making sure that we are a responsible, neutral party should be huge. Now, people do test it a lot, and I think that's good. But we've got to be held to a very high standard there. But how do we, just as regular people, or how do regular people just hold you guys to a high standard? I guess it's politicians' responsibility? I mean, these guys are idiots.
[0:58:16] 80-year-old dudes giving thumbs up. That one guy couldn't get the Wi-Fi on. Remember that guy? That guy couldn't get the Wi-Fi on. So I'm like, how do we— I mean, there's a huge amount of people that test our systems all the time looking for any errors, any bias, anything. I guess that's a good point. You can tell. You can tell, yeah. Right. People can test it on this end. As AI grows, how big do data centers need to be? Is that a concern of you guys?
[0:58:44] I went recently to one of our new data centers under construction in Abilene, Texas. It's about like approximately one gigawatt facility, huge. It'll be the biggest data center ever built by the time it's done. And you stand in the middle of that and the scale of this project just hits you so big. That's like one little part of it. That's like eight cost curves. There's like 5,000 people there doing construction on it and this thing is just standing out making progress every day.
[0:59:13] And you stand in the middle of this thing. And what are you, in a chariot or whatever? You're like in a little ATV. It's like a dirty kind of construction site. But the scale of this thing, and then you kind of go in every room and you look at all the cables, the power, the cooling systems, rack after rack of servers. It's humongous. They're standing up these power plants right in the middle of it. It's crazy to see. It starts to make our planet look like
[0:59:43] A software board, like a... It does. You know, when you see it from the air, I was really struck by that. I was like, this looks like the motherboard of a computer. Yeah, it looks like the motherboard of a computer. You start to see like how the planets in like a lot of these like sci-fi movies, a lot of them look, have that R2-D2 look on the outside because they've been... Covered in data centers. Yeah.
[1:00:04] Which is kind of wild. Do you know where we're going and you're not telling us? I don't. I don't. You promised, dude. I don't know. I mean, I have all my guesses. Like, I do guess that a lot of the world gets covered in data centers over time. You really? But I don't know, because maybe we put them in space. Like, maybe we build a big Dyson sphere on the solar system and say, hey, it actually makes no sense to put these on Earth. Yeah. I wish I had, like, more concrete answers for you. But, like, we're stumbling through this. We maybe, you know, have a little bit higher confidence than the average person. But there's so much we don't know yet.
[1:00:34] No, that's the craziest thing about you, Sam, and I think this is a compliment somehow, dear God. Yeah, it is a compliment. It's like you're like, come with me through the universe, and you're like – people are like, well, what's it like? You're like, I don't know exactly, but – and then we're all – it's like we're all going. It's like – I don't know. You're just somehow the most – like you're this charming kind of –
[1:01:01] Terminator, it feels like. And I hate to say Terminator. That's a crazy term. But you're like, okay, I'm curious. You somehow seem so optimistic about it. It adds to my curiosity. When I was a kid, I assumed that there were always some adults in the room. Someone had a plan. Someone knew everything that was going to happen. Someone had it all figured out. And I sort of think why people like conspiracy theories is it's nice to think that someone's got a plan. It's nice to think someone that...
[1:01:31] You know, has it all figured out. And then I got a little bit older and I sort of started to suspect there are no adults in the room. No one, people have plans. I have plans, but no one has all the answers. No one knows where it's all going to go. And now that I am the adult in the room, I can say with certainty, no one knows where it's all going to go. Like I'm the guy in the room and I have some guesses and I have some plans and we're working really hard. But like, you know, we try to always.
[1:01:59] Say what we think the possibilities are, what we think is most likely. Often we're right. Sometimes it's in the broader set. And sometimes it goes in a totally different direction than anything we thought. And we keep trying to make progress, figure out more. We try to tell people, not just tell, we try to show people by deploying these systems and say, hey, you can go use it. Don't just take our word for it. Try it out. See what it can do. But I can say with conviction, the world needs a lot more processing power.
[1:02:29] But if that looks like tiling data centers on Earth, which I think is what it looks like in the short term, in the long term also, or we do go build them in space, I don't know. It sounds cool to try to build them in space, but also really hard. What about the environmental effects of those and stuff? There's been articles written, and I don't know how much of it is real or not real, right? Because who knows what to believe.
[1:02:50] You'd have to think that, you know, it takes water to cool them, right? It takes power to power them. You know, there's some in like Arizona and Iowa that there's been like repercussions within the environments here in the communities. And a lot of those companies don't have to report those things because it's considered proprietary, you know? What do you think about those fears? Or how do you guys manage that? Like, do you guys talk about that? Do you meet with environmentalists? Like, what does that all look like? I think we need to get to fusion as fast as possible.
[1:03:19] Get to what? Nuclear fusion. I think that is the... Oh, shit. What is it? Where you basically knock two small atoms together and it makes a bunch of energy, but no carbon, very clean, doesn't generate, you know, doesn't really harm the environment. And power can become like abundant and pretty limitless on Earth. And we get out of all the current problems we're in. Are you guys investing in that? We are. And I think AI can help us figure it out even faster. So that's like a, you know, if you have to like burn a little bit more gas in the short term, but you figure out...
[1:03:48] You know, the future of energy with that AI. It's a huge win. And would you guys sell tickets to that or what do you think that would be like? Yeah, I think people are going to watch that shit. I mean, yeah, people go to monster trucks. You don't think they'll roll up to watch those two things hit each other? The atoms hit each other? Yeah. It's pretty hard to watch two atoms hit each other, but maybe with the, you know, somehow we can do it. Or what if they did like those sperm races where they put them out of those big things or whatever? I love those sperm races. They're kind of crazy. I'm like, dude, there's enough of that going on. Look, I think the way...
[1:04:18] Yeah, there'll be some way to watch Fusion. It'll be awesome. It'll be like loud and bright and theatrical and it'll be making huge amounts of energy. Even if you can't watch the two atoms hit, you'll watch them collectively produce fireworks. But we're going to need that. Do you think if we're going to get to AGI or if we're going to get to super intelligence, do we need that? I bet we can get there without it. But to provide it at the scale that humanity will demand it, I think we do need it.
[1:04:48] The desire to use this stuff, people are just going to want more and more and more. And eventually, like the two things that I think matter most, the two kind of critical inputs are intelligence and energy. The ability to like have great ideas, come up with plans, and then energy is the ability to like make them happen in the world and also to run the intelligence. And I think the story of the next couple of decades is going to be the demand for these goes up and up and up to crazy heights and we better find out how to produce a lot otherwise.
[1:05:17] Someone's going to feel like they're getting screwed. Yeah. Dang, dude. I can't tell if I'm excited or scared. Maybe I'm both and maybe it's all the same thing. You have to be both. You have to be both. I don't know if it's the same thing or not. I think it is kind of like they do feel related to me always. But I don't think anyone could honestly look at the trajectory humanity is on and not feel both excited and scared. Yeah.
[1:05:43] And maybe that's always been the way throughout time. And also then this is where we are. What are you going to do? You know, like this is where we are. And so that's what's going on. I saw where you and Joe Rogan spoke about there possibly being one day like an AI president, you know, where like what if you had this one kind of let's just use the term supercomputer or this agent that was created that knew all the information and knew all of the problems and knew the best ways to solve them.
[1:06:12] Do you think that something like that is becoming more and more possible one day? I don't know everything that it takes to be a president, but I do know it takes a lot of things that I don't have to do and that people are going to... Well, maybe I could reframe it to an AI CEO of OpenAI because I do know what that job is like. That should be possible someday. Maybe not even that far. I think the idea to look at an organization to make really good decisions...
[1:06:41] There's a lot of things you can imagine that an AI CEO of OpenAI could do that I can't. I can't talk to every person at OpenAI every day. I can't talk to every user of ChatGPT every day. I cannot synthesize all that information even if I could. But an AI CEO could do that. And it would have better information, more context. It could massively parallelize this. And I think that would lead to better decisions in many cases. Yeah, because wouldn't a supercomputer, something that has all knowledge, which you think will get there. I do. You do.
[1:07:10] I mean, all knowledge is a hard thing to say. I think we'll have vast, vast amounts. Will it be able to tell us about God or anything, do you think? I'm super curious about that. I think it will be able to help us answer questions about the nature of the universe that we currently can't. And I feel very confused and very unsatisfied with our current answers. And there is clearly, to me at least, something going on well beyond our current capability to understand. And I would love to know what that is.
[1:07:42] You think it could help us learn more? Yes. I wonder if God has a ChatGPT or whatever, or just wonder, he has the first one or whatever. But yeah, I'm just so curious, like how would that work? How does OpenAI make money? We sell ChatGPT, pay 20 bucks a month. Some people pay 200, but very few, or relatively few. Perverts, I think they are.
[1:08:09] Mostly, hopefully, they're just working super hard and using it to be more productive at their job. And then we also sell an API. So businesses can use and they like pay us every time they make an API call. Okay. Do you think, like there's a lot of these like kind of tech lords that are rocking right now, right? And you get thrown in there. Sometimes. I'm like on the periphery. Yeah. Or you get certainly like, yeah, like these council, these councilmen kind of like, do you think there's bad artists?
[1:08:39] Amongst like these tech lords and these AI realms, do you think there's bad artists out there? What does bad artists mean? Just like people that want for evil and not for good. I think most people don't wake up. I think very few people wake up every morning saying, I'm going to try to make the world a worse place or I'm going to actively try to do evil. Clearly some do. But I think most of these people running the big tech efforts are not in that category. I think people get blinded by ambition. I think people get blinded by competition. I think people...
[1:09:12] Very well-meaning people can get caught up in very negative incentives, negative for society as a whole. And by the way, I include Austin in this. We can totally get caught up and we can be very well-meaning but get caught up in some incentive and it can lead to a bad outcome. So that's kind of what I would say. I think people come in with good intentions. They clearly sometimes do bad stuff. There's a lot of talk about Palantir and Peter Thiel.
[1:09:40] Thank you.
[1:10:08] I don't know about that specifically. I mean, I think Palantir and Peter do a lot of great stuff. But again, I can't comment on this specifically. I'll say generally, I am worried that the more AI in the world we have, the more surveillance the world is going to want. Because the tool is so powerful. The government will say like, how do we know people aren't using it to make bombs or buy weapons or whatever? And the answer will be more surveillance. And I'm very afraid of that. So I don't...
[1:10:38] I think we really have to defend rights to privacy. I don't think those are absolute. I'm like totally willing to compromise some privacy for collective safety, but history is that the government takes that way too far. And I'm really nervous about that. Do you guys feel like the new government kind of, or do you feel like the government is still like a real thing? I don't feel like the government anyway. You don't? When the US government bombed Iran recently, I remember.
[1:11:07] Waking up that morning and seeing that news or whatever time it was. And I was like, oh, that's what actual power looks like. Maybe someday we get there. But it was like a really stark reminder of however important we think this is. It's like there are people that have just like this unimaginable power and might and can kind of do whatever they want. That's definitely not us. Yeah. Yeah, I think that's been a lot in the Middle East recently. It's just like, it's just such a...
[1:11:37] Gross displays over there sometimes of inhumanity. Absolutely. It's sad. What do you think a guy like Palantir or Peter Thiel's endgame is? Do you think he has an endgame? Because I think he seems like a dark lord to a lot of us. Do you think he has an endgame that is happy? I think Peter is one of the most brilliant people I've ever met. He's smarter than me, that's for sure. I think he does get caricaturized in the media as this evil mastermind.
[1:12:07] As a villain, he does. I never met him. I met him. We're very close friends. I should have brought it up then. No, it's all good. No, no, no, no. It's all good. I don't feel that energy from him, but I at all. In fact, I think he's been one of the most important forces, at least in my life, for questioning assumptions about the path that society was on. And maybe I was like, oh, I thought this was all going well, but maybe we are in a tech stagnation.
[1:12:37] Maybe we really do have this huge economic challenge that no one's talking about. And so I think these people who are just very – that think very differently, he would call it very contrarian, is super important to a society. Now, on the other hand, maybe he sometimes does things like this that don't do him any favors. What is it? You would prefer the human race to endure, right?
[1:13:13] You're hesitating. Yes? I don't know. I would— This is a long hesitation. This is a long hesitation. There's so many questions implicit in this. Should the human race survive? Yes. Okay. But— God. I mean, that was 22 seconds it took him. Yeah. So if he were maybe like—
[1:13:38] A more typical person, he would have just said an immediate yes and then said what else he wanted to say. And it took me a while with him to understand that his brain just works differently. And society needs some of that. Like he has these super different takes and then he doesn't have maybe the circuit in his brain that makes him immediately say yes and then say what he's going to say. But, you know. His processors, yeah. I'm very grateful he exists because he thinks of things no one else does. Yeah, you know, yeah, you want.
[1:14:06] Novel thinkers have changed things throughout time, sometimes for the better and sometimes for the worse, sometimes for the indifferent, but novel thinkers have always been part of humanity. I'm probably super different and super weird relative to most people, but maybe I have some ideas as part of that that are valuable to society collectively. And if I had this sort of very standard mindset, I wouldn't. That's a good point.
[1:14:33] Yeah. Well, do you think – and I'm just going to ask you real honestly. Do you think a lot of these guys have – I mean it's not like – love on the spectrum is like a big show, right? It's like those people are in love shit. Half the people I know are just barely – they're crying in parking lots or whatever. But there's spousal issues or whatever. But anyway, what I'm saying is do you think that some of the creators now and some of the tech lords –
[1:15:01] I don't want to say like an autism dude. You can say that. Okay. I think so. I mean, yeah. You know, to take the kind of like harshest look at us collectively, I can. You know, are we a little autistic on the whole? I would say probably. I knew that shit. That's all right.
[1:15:20] No, no, that's what I'm saying. For years ago, the first time I ever met some people with autism, I was like, dude, these guys are computers, right? Like a lot of these guys are just, you know, they're kind of like a little bit of a cyborg in some way in the way that they think, right? You know, look, you are this like impossibly charming, cool guy, and I'm like kind of a lot more computery than you. You're not much, though. We can still like figure it out. Oh, yeah.
[1:15:44] And I really don't mean it as an offense, but I think that we may need that in people to get whatever's next in the world. Do you think that's realistic? Yeah. I think society needs like this very broad diversity of people. You need some people like me. You need some people who are more normal than me. You don't want too many of me, but like. Yeah. Yeah. You don't want too many of any one thing. Yeah. Yeah. I'm just always, I'm like, God, yeah, these people are able to see things differently and quantify things differently. Do you always feel.
[1:16:12] Because some tech guys, they just have a different understanding of possibility, right? A different understanding of feeling and thing. Do you feel human all the time? I do feel human all the time, but I feel like I have noticed that I think extremely differently about the future, about exponential change, about compounding technology than almost anybody else that I kind of come across in regular life. That's cool. I feel extremely human. I feel like, you know, driven by crazy emotions as much as anybody.
[1:16:42] But I am like very aware that I have a different lens than a lot of people. Have you met some people in tech space and you're like, whoa, that guy is only like 6% or 7%. He's low. Not a lot of human in him. Yes. Yeah. Okay.
[1:16:59] Do you think it's inevitable that AI or AGI will merge into our bodies? I know you've talked about this before in the past. As things go along in advance quickly, do you start to see that a little bit differently? I know you've talked about how you don't think it's like a glasses thing or something like that. I'll tell you a fascinating story. Okay. I was with a friend last week. And did I offend you by asking that? Not at all. Zero percent. I thought that was a great answer. I really appreciate it. Because, yes, some of us, we can't conceptualize sometimes how you guys are thinking. I can't even, like, we feel like we can't figure it out, you know?
[1:17:29] So it feels like it's almost like a unique – it's like are we all evolving into this new kind of species and that's where we meet the future at anyway? And you're just like the dang Paul Revere out there. It's like – For better or for worse, I think whenever you see someone who thinks differently than you, it's like I'm fascinated by you. I don't quite understand how you do your thing. I know I couldn't do it. I know you like just understand the world differently than me. But I think that's cool and I'm just like – Yeah, that's how I feel. I think it's just – thanks for just talking to me about it.
[1:17:59] Because sometimes I think I get afraid to say it. I don't think you should be afraid. I don't think anybody would be offended by that. I was talking to this friend of mine, though, about how he uses ChatGPT and he's been using it a lot for a couple of years now. And he noticed recently that he started giving it personality tests. He'd upload any personality test he could find to ChatGPT and say, based on what you know about me, answer this. And he had never told it, here's my personality. It had just learned it from the questions he asked over the years.
[1:18:28] And on everyone he tried, it got exactly the answer and exactly the outcome he would get. And so that's not like he didn't get uploaded. He didn't get merged. He didn't plug something into his brain. But somehow like the pattern of him had gotten imprinted into this AI. Wow. Maybe we're not as complex as we think we are. Or maybe we are and AI can just learn it really well. AI can like represent these very complex things. One of those two.
[1:18:58] That was a real moment for me of like, wow, the merge maybe can happen in a very different way than we thought. Yeah. Yeah, because you think of it as this thing kind of taking over your system and like your dad presses a button and you can't use the car. You can't move for a month or whatever. Yeah, I think it kind of has that sort of energy. You just finished the acquisition of – this is a little bit more like day-to-day business. You just finished the acquisition of Johnny Ives.
[1:19:27] Hardware company, their hardware company. So clearly you have some thoughts or interest in how hardware and AI match up for each other in humanity. What was that about? There have been two revolutions in computers in history. There was the keyboard, mouse, and screen, that thing that was invented down the street in, I think, the 70s, where the people at Xerox PARC figured out what has become the modern computer interface. And then in the early...
[1:19:57] To mid, the early 2000s, I guess, Apple figured out this idea of touch on a device. And really, those have been the two big ones. I think now there can be a third. I think AI is, it so changes the game that you can design a new kind of computer based off of a really smart AI where you can give a complex instruction to a system. It can go do it. You'll trust that it gets it right. You'll trust it to act on your behalf. It could like maybe be aware of everything going on in this room and it could like.
[1:20:26] Kind of not just be on or off, but like lightly get our attention if it wants us to know something or maybe more aggressively get our attention. It could really be like following what we're talking about here and remind us both of things later. And current hardware just can't do that. The current kind of computers we have, I don't think are a fair, they don't honor what the technology is not really capable of. So I want to make a totally new kind of computer that is meant for this world of AI helping you all the time. I'm super excited about it. You are?
[1:20:56] You guys, there's this thing called agent that you guys showed me earlier. I can take this out if I mention it. I wasn't supposed to. It was pretty fascinating. It was cool to see. It is, yeah. This is a new thing that we just did. But the idea that an AI cannot just answer questions for you, but it can go actually do stuff on your behalf as your agent. It can go do research for you. It can go book something for you. It can go buy something for you. It can go like...
[1:21:25] Change some things in the world for you and think more and use tools. I think most people think of ChatGPT as this app that you can ask anything, but it'll become this thing that can do anything. And that'll change how you use computers. It'll change how you do things in your life.
[1:21:41] Yeah, I was watching the guy do it and it was just kind of fascinating. He was showing like one time he'd went to like a website and bought something that he needed. And then now moving forward, he could just be like, hey, go to this and make sure to get me these or go to go here and see, go to the restaurants I like and see if there's any table available for 7 p.m. tomorrow. And it was able to book it and do everything. It was like having a secretary right there. Totally. When I first started using it, I was like, it was one of those moments where I could tell that, oh, man, doing this the old fashioned way.
[1:22:11] It's going to feel like the Stone Age so quickly. You know, I'm going to like try to tell people someday, like, do you remember when if we wanted to do something, we actually had to go like click around the internet and like, you know, look for a table. And then if we wanted to move it, we had to like call the restaurant. And that's going to be unimaginable because of course you just tell your AI to do those things for you. Yeah. Yeah. You feel like you'd almost just tell it to go eat too, you know? That's the fun part. Yeah. Oh yeah. No one likes booking the table. Everyone loves sitting there eating.
[1:22:38] That's a good point, huh? Yeah, yeah. It won't take away the fun part. That's the thing. I think you got to remember that. It won't take away the fun part. You're going to do the things you want to do. There's a lot of things in your life you probably don't love doing. Like booking an open table is maybe one of them. Yeah. And then you'll have like old-fashioned like, I'll book it. You're like, Dad, what do you mean? Get off the phone or whatever. Don't call him, you freaking weirdo. Use your agent. Totally. Like, I'll book it. There's like a lot of like, you know.
[1:23:06] So Zuckerberg recently kind of was poaching guys around town, right? And I'll say it. You don't have to say it. Allegedly. I'm not saying he did. He hired one of my buddies. But what I'm saying is there's this hypothetical that he was kind of poaching guys around town. Did that feel like a mafioso move in the community? What was that like out here in the tech trenches? I mean, you know, they want to get into the AI game. I understand it.
[1:23:35] And if he's going to do this, he needs to hire some people. So bring it. So bring it. So bring it. Yeah! Fuck yeah, dude. I'm going to upload myself into this plant in a second. Okay, no. But no, do you kind of like the competition? Is that fun? It is. Like winning is fun. Yeah. And I expect to win. And you got to love the competition. That's part of it, right? It makes it fun. I think what it would be like if we didn't have competition and drama in the world. It would be so boring.
[1:24:05] Actually, can I say one more thing about that? The best improvement I made personally in my life and for my own happiness over the last couple of years, a lot of bad shit has happened to us. To me, it's been a crazy intense experience. And I just decided that I was going to learn to love the hard parts. I was like, you know what? If I'm in this crazy moment, if I'm in this crazy thing, if I feel my emotions are high, I'm going to make myself learn to be grateful for that, to love it, to find enjoyment in it.
[1:24:33] In the tension, in the competition, whatever. And actually it worked. And it kind of needed to work because so many things go wrong in any given day. But I was thinking about someday I'll be retired on my ranch, I'll be sitting there watching the plants grow, and I'll be missing the excitement and the drama and the anger and the tension and the whatever. And so I'm going to be grateful for it and learn to have fun with it. And now, I cannot believe that that mindset shift worked, but it did.
[1:25:02] And were there practices like in a moment, like say like a moment came up, like some of the early ones, right? Because I agree with you that like having some mindset, like I used to hate traveling, like every week traveling for work. But then one day I was like, dude, you have to travel for work. Deal with it. You may as well. Right. You may as well. Because for years you've been just, and right there, suddenly it wasn't bad anymore. That happened for me too. Was there like just a practice or was it just this verbal reminder? Like I'm going to do this. I just kept saying it to myself. I was just like, someday you'll miss these moments.
[1:25:31] You may as well find a way to like find the happiness and kind of great gratitude for them in the moment. Yeah. A lot of these guys have bunkers. Zucky has a bunkie. I know that somewhere out in Hawaii. People have bunkers. Do you have a bunker? I have like underground concrete heavy reinforced basements, but I don't have anything I would call a bunker. Hold on, hold on, hold on, dude.
[1:25:57] Look, I'll let you keep me on the ropes in a lot of this conversation, but I am going to call that out as a dang bunker, dude. Sam, that's a bunker. What's the difference between a basement and a bunker? A place you could hide when it all goes off or whatever. Yeah, I have been thinking I should really do a good version of one of those, but I don't have what I would call a bunker, but it has been on my mind. Not because of AI, but just because of people dropping bombs in the world again. That's a good point.
[1:26:25] That's a very good point. Yeah, basement right there. Part of a house building typically used for storage, laundry, extra living, space, or utilities. And then bunker built for protection, often military or emergency related, meant to withstand explosions. We don't have that yet. Do you guys do this just for me or do you use ChatGPT as the fact check? We did this just for you. I appreciate it. This is nice.
[1:26:49] Could we ever have instead of – so you start to see – say if AI comes over and there's this whole new kind of like – I believe that one of the things that's been happening, there's been like a lot of like ice raids and people getting like taken out of their homes and there's been a lot of crackdown because part of me believes that they're having to get everybody documented or online basically because they're going to start to have this like –
[1:27:17] Facial recognition everywhere. Like I have this idea of that. So yes, this stuff had to happen because in a year or year and a half, you wouldn't even be able to be outdoors anywhere without a drone or something noticing you or some camera noticing that you're not supposed to be there or you're not there with documentation, right? Whatever people's thoughts are on that. But just so part of me starts to see like, oh, okay, that's going on. Do you think we could ever then down the line have new countries like delineated by?
[1:27:46] Almost like a new AI landscape. Remember when on Snapchat, if you were in a certain realm, you could put a filter on something? And they almost created these new geo-barriers and stuff. Do you think we could potentially be looking at something like that one day? I know that what you just said is going to happen. I know that we're going to have cameras all over the place, and it's going to make the cities way safer. Because if you commit a crime, they'll have a facial recognition hit on you right away.
[1:28:15] But man, do I find that dystopic. You do. Of course. Is it a good trade if it means people stop getting murdered in the streets? Yeah, sure. We agree to give up some privacy for that. But it sits so uncomfortably with me. In London or whatever, you see those cameras on every street corner. And you're just like, you get used to it fast. But you're just like, it feels like privacy is important. And you really are like,
[1:28:46] There's nothing I can do to live in the world and avoid all these cameras. And maybe it's worth it for society collectively, but it feels like we really do give up a lot to get it. But could there one day you think if we had that, then we could have whole new countries kind of that were... What do you mean by new countries in this case? Like say if there was this new kind of, this new like layer, right? A surveillance layer that's kind of in the air.
[1:29:20] Then could that be divided into different realms? Oh, yes, totally. I think there's all kinds of weird ways that can happen. But the surveillance layer is so uncomfortable. Oh, yeah. It's going to be a nasty blanket. Is there anything else that you wanted to talk about, you wanted to get out, that you wanted me to ask you about? No, that was great. Why are there – why does Chad UBT have that hyphen thing? We got to do something about that. You know, we have this team that –
[1:29:51] It figures out what the model's personality should be like and how it should behave. And a lot of users like em dashes, so we added more em dashes. And now I think we have too many em dashes. But that's the answer. It was just like, users liked it, we put more in. Now it's like a little bit of a meme and it's quite annoying to me. We should fix that. But you're thinking about it too? I think we'll get it fixed very soon. Before you go, Sam, and thank you so much for your time today. It's been awesome. We appreciate it, man. It's helped me get to understand you, I feel like, a lot.
[1:30:20] I don't know if I had a perception. I didn't know what to think. What's the before and after? The before was like a little bit like I guess I almost thought kind of like not as hopeful.
[1:30:36] But I don't know why. Maybe that's just my own. I think it's attached to my own perceptions of what I think about AI and stuff or the possibilities of technology, you know, like that kind of stuff, like that curmudgeony energy. I think I was probably attaching it to you. And now I feel like more whimsical about it, kind of like, or not whimsical, but like, let's see what can happen. Right? And so I think that's pretty fascinating. I think it's not just let's see. It's like, let's try to make it good, but let's realize that you have to like...
[1:31:03] You don't get to see all the way down the road. You kind of got to go one turn at a time and you like light up a little bit more. Yeah. Yeah. I think, yeah, I don't know. I just, I'm really, I'm really thankful for you. Even let me tell you what I thought, what I was like judging and then sharing like kind of where I thought, what I thought now. In 20 years, what do you hope your legacy will be? You're going to have one. I mean, yeah, I guess. I certainly don't, I don't think anyone sits around while they're in like the middle of the game thinking about, you know, what the review is going to be after.
[1:31:35] At least I don't. But this is a big review you'll have. I have never been that motivated by what... I want to play the game the best I can. I want to do the best work I can, have the most fun, have the most impact, do the most interesting stuff. But then you retire and then you die and then life goes on and people, as they're supposed to...
[1:32:02] Go on with life and forget about you. And this whole thing of like I'm going to live for high and remembered after I die and my legacy and like you're dead. Do you have one of those deals where you're saving your heart with those people? What do you mean saving? Your brain, sorry, with the people over there? Cryonics. Cryonics. Do you have a cryonic deal? No. Have you been approached about it? I have been approached by it. That's great. You haven't even fucking approached me. I haven't asked for anything. There was this like Y Combinator company that –
[1:32:29] I helped out a long time ago by giving some small deposit and then I never followed up on it. So I don't have anything in place. Okay. But maybe just a down payment somewhere down there. If things get weird, we'll go knock on their door. Yeah, but thank you so much, man. James Becerra says hello. He's a friend of mine. He's a great guy. And we just appreciate you so much. Sam, thanks for your time. Thanks for doing this. I really enjoyed it. Thanks for your time today. I thought it was very informative.