[0:00:00] Sam, you are a pioneer of artificial intelligence, you are considered a genius. What characteristics of you will artificial intelligence never be able to replace?
[0:00:30] We still have to figure out what to do, what other people want, what other people will find useful. And I think that'll be quite important. I think in many ways GPT-5 is already smarter than me at least. I think a lot of other people too. GPT-5 is capable of doing incredible things that
[0:00:58] Many people would struggle with or find very impressive, but it's also not able to do a lot of things that humans could do easily. And I think this will be the course of things for a while where we will see that AI systems can do some things incredibly well, struggle with some others, and humans use these tools and bring their sort of human insight, creativity, and genuity to bear in ways that are really important. I expect, though, the trajectory of the capability progress of AI to remain extremely steep.
[0:01:28] So we've seen just in the two years or three years since ChachiBT has launched, it's almost been three, how much more capable the models have gotten. And I see no sign of that slowing down. I think in another couple of years, it will become very plausible for AI to make, for example, scientific discoveries that humans cannot make on their own. And I think to me, that'll start to feel like something we could properly call superintelligence.
[0:01:56] Do you have a precise prediction in which year you expect this superintelligence?
[0:02:25] We don't see a similar rate of progress we've seen in 2024 and 2025. I'd also be surprised. And that means that by the end of 2026, I would expect models that, if we had them today, would be quite surprising.
[0:02:51] Within 30 years, I would expect a lot of change. But in 30 years, jobs change all the time. And if you think about the jobs that we did 30 years ago that may not exist at all today, or new jobs that were kind of difficult to imagine 30 years ago that are now commonplace today. I remember reading a statistic once that about every 75 years, half the jobs in society change over. That's even without AI. It may happen. I expect it will happen faster now. The thing that I find useful is to think about the percentage of tasks.
[0:03:20] Not the percentage of jobs. There will be many jobs where a lot of what it means to do that job change. AI can do things much better. It can free up people to do more and different things. There will, of course, be totally new jobs and many existing jobs will entirely go away to be replaced by these new jobs. But I think the more interesting thing is of everyone's job, what percentage of that, what percentage of the tasks you do every day will be done by AI? And I can easily imagine a world where 30, 40% of the tasks that happen
[0:03:49] In the economy today, get done by AI in the not very distant future. The meta skill of learning how to learn, of learning to adapt, learning to be resilient to a lot of change. I mentioned this earlier, but learning how to figure out what people want, how to make useful products and services for them, how to
[0:04:19] Interact in the world. I'm so confident that people will still be the center of the story for each other. And anything in that world, I think, will be great. And I'm also so confident that human desire for new stuff, desire to be useful to other people, desire to express our creativity, I think this is all limitless. In all these previous technological revolutions, people wonder, rightly so, what are we all going to do? In the industrial age, these machines came along and we watched them do the things that we used to do and said,
[0:04:49] What will be the role for us? And each new generation uses their creativity and new ideas and all of the tools the previous generation built for them to astonish us. And I'm sure my kids will do the same.
[0:05:00] You sound very optimistic, but of course there are also AI critics who especially see the dark side and the dangers. For example, the famous AI researcher Eliezer Yudkowsky. I'll quote him. He says, for example, the relationship of superintelligence to humans would be roughly like the relationship of humans to an ant. We don't think about whether we destroy a bunch of ants. We just do it as far as it's in our way. So how big is your personal fear that
[0:05:28] I've heard many people describe many different ways of what the relationship between an AI and humanity will be. The one that has always been my favorite is my co-founder Ilya Sutskovor once said that he hoped that the way that an AGI would treat humanity or all AGIs would treat humanity is like a loving parent.
[0:05:58] And given the way you asked that question, it came to mind. I think it's a particularly beautiful framing. That said, I think when we ask that question at all, we are sort of anthropomorphizing AGI. And what this will, I believe, will be is a tool that is enormously capable. And even if it has no intentionality, by asking it to do something, there could be side effects, consequences we don't understand. And so it is very important that we align it to human values. But we get to align.
[0:06:28] This tool to human values and I don't think it'll treat humans like ants. Let's say that.
[0:06:54] First of all, we still have a nonprofit entity and we always will. I hope that we will have, I believe we will have the best resourced and hopefully the most impactful nonprofit of all time. And this is very important to our mission. Also important to our mission is the governance role of this and ensuring that we stick to our mission and that we prioritize safety and the well-being and the maximum benefit of humanity. We've obviously made some mistakes as we understand this new technology. We'll make more in the future, but on the whole, I'm extremely proud of our team's track record on
[0:07:23] Figuring out how to make these services safe, broadly beneficial, and widely distributed. One of our core beliefs is that if we can figure out how to build this tool, align it with human values, and then put it out into people's hands and have them express all of the things they want to do with this, that will be great for the world and is deeply in accordance with our mission.
[0:07:41] In Europe, there is a lively discussion about the AI Act to regulate artificial intelligence. What is your view on this? Are the rules good? Are there too many rules or should they simply be thrown away?
[0:08:10] But also hope that regulation can be sensible and protect the European people and the world. And I am also hopeful for a good balance there. I was very impressed. We had a great discussion about the need to build infrastructure in Germany to offer AI services in Germany, by Germany, for Germany. We're very excited about our recent announcement yesterday.
[0:08:37] with SAP and Microsoft to offer a sovereign cloud for the German public sector to use frontier models and maintain sovereignty. So we had a great discussion about that as well. So certainly the energy costs are a challenge for AI. However,
[0:09:05] We had also a good discussion about how to address the energy needs of AI. And more than that, I think that use of AI will be one of the best uses of energy, whether it's used in Germany or you run on servers that are somewhere else because you don't want to build the data centers here, which would be a very valid choice. The importance of delivering AI in Germany to German businesses and German consumers is very important. Germany is our biggest market in Europe. It's our fifth biggest market in the entire world.
[0:09:35] Virtually all young German people use ChatGPT. So AI is here and people are getting value from it and we'll keep doing that and we'll address the energy challenges. Look, again, this is up to the German people and I don't understand all of the sort of trade-offs locally. I personally believe that nuclear energy
[0:10:08] Advanced fission fusion, the whole set of approaches, is one of the most promising approaches to energy and it's something that the world should pursue more. In the race for artificial intelligence, the USA and China are clearly dominating. Germany is lagging behind. What should Germany do to win in the AI race?
[0:10:31] I was very impressed in my meetings with German CEOs yesterday. I think the companies here really plan to make a big bet on AI, implement it in big ways. They believe that it can add huge value to what they're doing. Heard the same message from the government about its ambitions for AI. So again, given what we are seeing for AI adoption in Germany, it's like unbelievably strong. I think it's up 5x in the last 12 months. Incredible. I'm optimistic about this.
[0:10:57] It will be looking good. I think we've only had one or two big revolutions in how we use computers in a long time.
[0:11:27] We had the mouse and the keyboard and the idea of the monitor displaying this sort of windowed system, and that was a breakthrough for sure. And then we had the touch devices, which adapted that, took out the mouse, let you just use your finger and have this very personal device. And this is huge, but fundamentally, we have never had something as powerful as AI. Computers really can understand what we want, can think, that has let us reimagine what it could mean to use a computer.
[0:11:55] We're still exploring. It'll take us quite some time. Don't expect anything very soon. But over time, I expect we'll make a small family of devices. They will look good for sure, but that's not the main thing. I hope if we work hard, if we do a really great job, they will change what it means to use a computer and how you do your work and how you play and live your life. But there's a lot of work and a lot to explore between here and there.
[0:12:21] Now you've made me curious, of course. I have to ask. Tell me one feature or ability that such a device could have. An example.
[0:12:45] And you can just trust that the computer will understand it, do it for you, come back to you when it needs help. But you can imagine asking a computer a very nuanced, complex, but brief question and then just trusting that it's going to do the right thing and come back to you when it needs help. And that would totally change what it feels like to use the computer instead of launching a bunch of apps and having notifications constantly come up. So that's one thing.
[0:13:11] In the tech industry in the USA, there has been a liberal-democratic foundation for a long time. Now many tech gurus and tech bosses are also showing up with Donald Trump. You were also in the White House right after his inauguration. You announced a big initiative. How do you explain this vibe shift, this political one in the tech industry? Why are everyone suddenly happy to see Trump?
[0:13:40] The American president is. But in this specific case, I think there have been some welcome policy changes. The ability to build infrastructure in the United States, which have been quite difficult and quite important to companies like ours. President Trump has done an amazing job of supporting. And a more general pro-business climate and pro-tech climate has been also, I think, a welcome change. So, you know, that's kind of how I describe it.
[0:14:06] I don't think people want that anytime soon. What I expect though is that presidents and leaders around the world will use AI more and more to help them with complex decisions. But I think we all still want a human.
[0:14:35] Signing off on that at some point. I don't use it as much for that as other people do. I've tried it, but no, that's not one of my big personal use cases. It's clearly something a lot of people use it for.
[0:15:02] Okay, Sam Ortmann, thank you very much for this conversation and thank you very much for your interest. We will continue with the news here. This was the World Talk Special with OpenAI CEO Sam Ortmann.