[0:00:00] Sam, just looking at you, I feel like the chaos of India is getting to you. It's day two. It's been a busy two days. Very warm welcome to Express Adda. Guys, a very special day for us. Forbes magazine calls OpenAI one of the most important companies in the world. And the man who is... If we look back at today, 20 years from now, we'll probably... I think I'll just wait for the audience to settle down a bit.
[0:00:34] Okay. If we look back at today, 20 years from now, I don't think it'll be an overstatement to say that the gentleman in front of me today is probably that one person who has made a tectonic shift. If anything close to the Industrial Revolution, it probably is the gentleman in front of me right now who it all probably started with. Is that a fair statement to make, Sam? No. You know, I think this is generally true for many companies.
[0:01:05] The person running the company gets way too much credit relative to the work everybody else does. But in our case in particular, this has really been a story of a scientific discovery. There have been a handful of researchers that did a miracle and figured out a very deep thing about the way the world works. And the thing that is so special about deep learning is what has led it to be so general, which is that we figured out
[0:01:34] This small set of researchers figured out this algorithm that could learn anything. And at scale, it gets better and better. And then a whole set of people have worked very hard to deliver that scale on these models. And then the whole world has figured out how to build incredible products and services around that. But more than anything, this is a story of the scientists. And the last time you were in India to now, a lot has changed in the world.
[0:02:04] But what do you think has changed in India with respect to AI? Just a little over a year ago that I was here. And before talking about what's changed in India, I think it's worth talking about what's changed in AI, because this will ground this. A year ago, AI was just able to do high school math. And this was incredible. AI could do a very good, not an excellent, but a very good job at high school mathematics. And people couldn't believe it.
[0:02:36] In India, I was speaking at an event like this, and I was talking about it, and people were, it had just happened. People genuinely felt wonder about it. They're like, you know, this can do what an 11th grader can do. This is amazing. Because only a couple years before that, you know, AI couldn't really like do any math at all. It couldn't do grade school math. It was struggling with that. By last summer, it was competing at the hardest mathematics competitions we had in the world and doing okay. And last week,
[0:03:07] There was a new thing called first proof where mathematicians put out 10 research problems that were the solutions to which were not known and took our best mathematicians, the cutting edge of research, new knowledge to figure out because it hadn't yet been shared. And I believe our latest AI got seven of those problems right. So AI has gone from doing okay at high school math to being able to do new research level mathematics, figure out new knowledge. It's also happening in physics.
[0:03:37] And this is an amazing change in a year. We've gone from AI that could do what we expected a very smart high school student to do to pushing the edge of human knowledge. So that's change number one. The other change is that AI has gone from being able to write a little bit of programming to completely changing what it means to be a computer programmer. Last time I was here, people were amazed at these sort of auto-complete tools for code.
[0:04:04] And now if you type in an idea, one year later, if you type in an idea in something like Codex, you can have an entire application created. The job of a programmer is now, I think in this last year, changed more than it's changed in any year that I've been an adult. India is our fastest growing market for Codex, so especially what's happening here. To get to the next part of the question is really amazing.
[0:04:32] The biggest change that I feel from last time I was here is when I was here last time, it felt like India was a consumer of AI. People were using these services. People were doing other stuff. And now the builder energy in India is off the charts. And you, in fact, said something a little controversial last time. Now it's controversial because at that time you said, you had painted a picture of despair that a $10 million fund would not be enough to build an LLM, a meaningful LLM.
[0:05:01] And now, yesterday you were talking about a full stack coming out of India, and India can actually lead in AI, so. Yeah. That comment, I mean, that got taken out of context. That was a few years ago. But the comment was not that India couldn't do an amazing job with a $10 million company and a $10 million model. I think that clearly is the case. It was just, could you make a very frontier model for $10 million?
[0:05:27] I think you couldn't then. I think it's even more true now that you can't. It's even more true now that you can't? Make a frontier model for $10 million? Yeah. They've gotten very expensive. But if India, with enough funding for sure, an Indian company could do that. And the smaller, narrow models that India is doing are incredible. So is that surprising to you? Is there anything that actually surprised you between your last trip and this trip about India and AI that you didn't expect in terms of?
[0:05:58] That stat that I mentioned a couple of minutes ago, that this is the fastest growing market for Codex in the world, I'm very happy. I guess I shouldn't be surprised, but it's great to see. I was at IIT Delhi this morning, and the energy from people building this new generation of startups, that is a place where I expect India to surprise the world on the upside. And obviously the other side of that coin is the disruption in the jobs, especially in the IT enterprise service sector.
[0:06:26] About 8% of our GDP comes from that one space. And a lot has been said about this in the last 10 days because of Codex. Before Codex, there was another Claude, and it just showed how fast software has kind of just moved out. I know a lot has been said about this in the last week, but I still want you to reflect on that. How much of that is a threat for Intel? How should Intel think about that? I do think that is going to change a lot, and there's going to be a big impact there.
[0:06:54] I think it is never helpful to pretend otherwise. However, what I expect to happen, as has happened with every other step forward in computer programming, is people will operate at a higher level of abstraction. There will still be a need for IT broadly. The amount of product and code that's produced will increase a lot. The expectations will go up.
[0:07:24] I think as long as the country and the companies that do this adapt quickly to this new world, there will be plenty of new things to do. I'm not a jobs doomer in the sense that I don't think there will be jobs for people in the future. I think there will be a lot of jobs. Every technological revolution has panicked about jobs going away, and every technological revolution has found new jobs on the other side. The promised leisure has never happened.
[0:07:50] This idea that we all get to go on permanent vacation, it's never quite worked out. I don't think it will. I hope we get more in that direction. But our desire to be useful to each other, our desire for more and better stuff, our desire to express our creativity, we never kind of reach the end of that. I think there is no natural limit to that. There's a whole big universe out there to go explore if we can figure out space travel or whatever. I don't know where it's going to go. But I do think...
[0:08:20] Clearly, things are going to evolve fast, and you have to be on the right side of that. And you know that statement about jobs is a very loaded statement in India because 500 million people under the age of 30. You understand the gravity of jobs and that anxiety that India has. Do you discuss this when you meet the prime minister, when you meet people who matter in policy? How much of that comes up, and what are the answers you have to that anxiety?
[0:08:50] Yeah, the main thing that comes up with political leaders are infrastructure, jobs, sort of fair distribution of benefits, and safety, broadly speaking. And the proportion of those is different in different countries. And also the level of focus on the upsides versus the potential downsides is different in different countries. We talk about jobs impact a lot.
[0:09:22] One version of this that comes up in, it feels like almost every conversation I have socially, is what should my kids study for the future? What's it going to look like? This is a version of asking that question. Where is the economy going to go? It's really hard to answer that specifically if you study history. One thing I love to do is to read about the history of technology.
[0:09:52] And if you look at, say, the primary source material of people that were experiencing the industrial revolution, there was a lot of panic about jobs. There were a lot of predictions about what the jobs were going to be. A lot of fear there was going to be no jobs and a lot of prediction about what the new jobs would be. They were sort of shockingly wrong. And none of them were like, I'm going to be the CEO of an AI company. Certainly none of them were like, I'm going to be a YouTube influencer. So I think this is very hard to predict.
[0:10:22] The skills that will work no matter what, fluency with AI tools, resilience, adaptability, figuring out what people are going to want and how to be useful to them, how to work with other people, these are all very good things to learn. And I think it's useless to pretend there won't be a big change. The change won't be as fast as some people in the AI industry predict because society's always got more inertia and it always takes longer.
[0:10:53] But eventually, the change will be huge, and we'll find all sorts of new things to do. I want to come back to that a little later about where that resistance you think will come from, that inertia of society. Does it come more from the developed economies or from the underdeveloped economies? But before that, a little bit more about India and AI. That five-layer cake that Jensen spoke about, the whole AI stack, the energy, the data centers, the chips, the models, and the applications, that entire five-layer cake,
[0:11:23] Which areas do you think India has the ability and the right to win in? And which areas do you think it's just a very risky bet for India to kind of make? I think India should, you know, whether you subscribe to it's a five-layer cake or a seven-layer cake, people define it a little bit differently. But I think India should play at all of those levels. I think that there are important advantages to vertical integration and being able to
[0:11:56] Work across all those levels for an economy of the size and importance of India is a good thing to do. And I talked with the prime minister just before coming here. He is certainly motivated to play at all of those levels, and I think it's important. And if we do play at all those levels, and you're talking about more than 70% of the population already on the internet. I don't know what percentage of that you estimate is doing artificial intelligence, but assuming we want a lot of that to move into the AI domain, and that's a big change.
[0:12:26] Last time you were here, there was a lot of fear and anxiety about AI. Now we're all about let's embrace it and let's kind of run with it. Does the world have the computing power it needs for India to become an AI-first society? Not yet, but the world is rapidly going to have to work together to solve that problem. A question I'd love to ask people is how many GPUs would you like working for you all the time? How many GPUs would you personally like thinking about your problems?
[0:12:55] Helping you with your work, implementing your ideas, writing the software you want, operating the humanoid robots you'll have in your home and garden and everything else, and building new houses for you, whatever. How many do you want? And people give different answers. No one ever says less than one. Some people say 1,000. I would like 1,000. If you go multiply that out, let's say there's 8 billion people in the world.
[0:13:24] We have no way to deliver 8 trillion GPUs anytime soon. I mean, that just seems ridiculous. We're not going to do that, to be clear. We're not going to do that on Earth, at least. But I do think it points to the level of ambition we need to have about how much compute capacity we're going to build out. And this will be the most expensive, complex infrastructure project the world has ever collectively taken on for all of our welfare.
[0:13:54] We're going to need a lot of compute capacity. The good news, it would be impossible to build this out the old-fashioned way, but we'll have AI and robots helping us do this, and we'll figure it out. And is that why space keeps coming up nowadays? There's another space race that I keep hearing about. I honestly think the idea with the current landscape of putting data centers in space is ridiculous. It will make sense someday.
[0:14:25] But if you just do the very rough math of launch costs relative to the cost of power we can do on Earth, to say nothing of how you're going to fix a broken GPU in space, and they do break a lot still, unfortunately, we are not there yet. There will come a time. Space is great for a lot of things. Orbital data centers are not something that's going to matter at scale this decade. But then all this infrastructure build-out, Sam, it feels like it kind of forces you.
[0:14:54] Organizations like yours to have a very intimate relationship with government. And is that something that's kind of changing with AI, this whole power structure that now the, at one point, big tech was a very privatized force with a very complicated relationship with government. Now it seems to be that you need to have a good relationship with government, whether it's Indian companies with Indian government or companies like yours with the US government. Is the government a big enabler?
[0:15:20] Yeah, I think it's going to be really important, not just for building our infrastructure, but just given the level of impact this is going to have on society and the need to truly democratize this technology. Governments are going to have to be involved, and companies like ours are going to have to partner with governments. And how was that? I mean, have you ever thought of, paused and thought about that evolution of that relationship between big tech and government? By the way, can I call you big tech or not really? I don't think most, I don't feel like big tech. Okay.
[0:15:50] I don't think we're there yet. Okay, all right. But tech companies like yours and government, I mean. I think the tech industry started out as this extremely libertarian, you know, we don't need the government, the government doesn't need us sort of view. That has changed a lot, even before AI. Like the last couple of decades as the companies got bigger and more central to the economy and the way the whole world works, that's changed significantly.
[0:16:23] But maybe never before has it been this important, just given the scale of the infrastructure that needs to happen. And how do you feel about that? Because one of the things we keep hearing is that this White House is very close to Silicon Valley. Silicon Valley was a very close sponsor of JD Vance. That whole relationship is a very intimate one. Is that true? Is that good? Is that bad? I would say close in some ways and not close in others.
[0:16:53] There are some tight ties, and then also this administration has had some big criticisms of tech. Is that good or bad? I think a close cooperation between tech companies and the government is going to become increasingly important over time. It obviously won't be a perfectly smooth relationship, but the better it can be, I think, the better for all of us. What about government-to-government relationships? What got announced today was
[0:17:23] It's a very interesting partnership of several countries who are thinking about AI in a very advanced way. Is it all these countries versus China? Is that what's kind of playing out? Or are we all kind of in a race and somewhere China is also in that race? I suspect it'll turn out to be way more complex than that. I think it will shift over time. I do sort of think that AI will become...
[0:17:54] One of the most important political issues in the world. One of the highest order bits of geopolitical tension and cooperation. But I don't think it'll be a fixed thing. I think as it develops and as... I mean, this has always happened, that sort of political alliances shift over time. I expect them to shift more in the future, not less as things move faster. But what is...
[0:18:20] How do you think about China in all of this? I mean, you know, we keep hearing that China's leap years ahead and China's got all this energy and China's got all this renewable energy and China's got all this robotics and all this technology. Are we hearing the right thing? And why are they leap years ahead? What have they done? I would say very ahead in some areas and not ahead in others. I think this is like, I mean, that sounds like a boring statement. It's probably always true in the world. Like in terms of manufacturing physical robots, clearly ahead.
[0:18:49] A big edge on things like electric motors, magnets, stuff like that. Clearly ahead on energy build out. So there are places where China is significantly ahead of other countries. And then there's places where I think we're ahead of them. And my guess is that that's sort of always what it's been like and what it will continue to be like. It's hard to be ahead on everything or behind on everything. Maybe if you have like the only super intelligence in the world, you could do it. I think that would actually be bad for other reasons.
[0:19:19] But is it a race, Sam? I mean, we keep framing it as a race. Sort of. Is it a collaborative journey or is it a race? Yeah, I mean, both. That's like the hard part of this, right? There are always ways in which the global economy is interdependent and very collaborative, and then there's always ways in which it's a competition. And it's so tempting to say it's all one or the other. Reality is always messier than that. But I...
[0:19:50] I do think it's important to look at the net differences in power and the impact that could have. And I think it's really important that democracy leads with AI. And when you say democracy leads with AI, you mean China should not lead with AI? It was a little bit more nuanced of a comment than that. But if you want to reduce it to that. No, because in your speech yesterday, you mentioned authoritarian a couple of times.
[0:20:23] How do we think about China? How do we unpack China? What I meant more is I don't think there should be any single superintelligence in the world. I don't think there should be any one person or any one country or any one company in charge of superintelligence, including the United States. I think that would also be bad. I think the world is at its best when power is widely distributed, when people have a lot of different ideas, and when there's enough of a balance in power that we can all...
[0:20:53] We countries, individuals, companies, whatever, sort of keep each other in check and all have input. And over time, even though we'll do some dumb things along the way, people kind of get to pick the best ideas and let those rise up. So what I meant by authoritarian here is you don't literally want one AI in charge of the world, no matter who has it. I think that would be bad. Yeah. And do you think if you compare it to the big tech era of seven years ago,
[0:21:20] AI is going to fragment power more or is it going to concentrate it more? Because it seems to be that big tech, the old big tech is equally sort of staying, you know, keeping pace. That is, at some point, it's in some sense, I think, one of the most important questions in front of us right now. You can totally imagine a world where AI massively concentrates power, where, say, a single company or country is able to hold on to AI and use that to...
[0:21:49] Amass a gigantic amount of power and wealth in the world. You can imagine another extreme where everybody on earth has a super intelligence with no rules whatsoever and some pretty terrible things and chaos happen. You can imagine many worlds there in the middle. I personally think something way more towards the democratized version of that is good. We of course will need some regulation. We of course will need some guardrails.
[0:22:17] But I think putting this technology in the hands of lots of people is possible. And that will be a decentralization of economic power. The clearest example of this you can see is in the last six and especially three months, the power that a one or two or three person company can have. This just didn't happen a few years ago. It was impossible.
[0:22:45] In this new world of things like Codex and general purpose knowledge working agents, we're going to have to get used very quickly to one-person startups that have enormous amounts of success, or two-person, three-person startups. And I think this is great. And how competitive is all of this from your seat? I mean, we saw a little awkward moment on stage yesterday.
[0:23:13] Several memes about it going around, but... You've got to give the internet something to laugh at. It is definitely competitive, but I will say that... It's also very incestuous. I mean, you guys, because a lot of people were building out stuff for working with you at one point, and everybody knows everybody, and everybody's like, NVIDIA's investing in you, you're buying NVIDIA chips, and then... It is a weirdly small world, for sure. I think it's very competitive commercially.
[0:23:42] But almost all of the efforts that have a very advanced model, I think, fuel the gravity of what's happening. And they're very committed to getting safety and alignment right and willing to cooperate there. A little bit more about what happened yesterday. If you want to share, this is a good opportunity. I don't really have that much more to add.
[0:24:04] I won't push it. OK. You know, there's just so much to cover, Sam. And I learned so much. I'm very grateful for you, because I learned so much to prep for this conversation. I was like, three days, I was just like, deep into it. So I thought I'd just kind of break it up into a game. Great. And we can get, you know, I can just try to cover more and more stuff rather than having a conversation about it. And we'll see what we kind of do. So it's not a rapid fire, because it's just too long to be a rapid fire. And I tried to make it shorter, but I couldn't.
[0:24:32] Is there any one thing you admire about Google's catch-up in the AI race? Because 10 years ago, they were out of the water. Well, 10 years ago, Google was the only serious AI effort. Five years ago. Maybe three years ago, when we launched ChatGPT, they were then way out of it. But the first thing I admire about Google is Demis and the Google team.
[0:24:58] Started working on AI before anyone else in the modern era with a lot of conviction. And I think without their inspiration, we certainly wouldn't be here. So that's one thing I admire. And then a second thing more recently is their relentless focus and execution and ability to really scale the model after being pretty far behind is quite impressive. OK. Were you surprised when Apple partnered with Google for Siri? Not particularly. OK.
[0:25:29] The one country that is by and large on the right path for regulation on AI. I don't think any of us know the answer to that yet. A thing that I'm happy about is countries are trying different approaches. And I think this is a good thing about many sovereign powers in the world. We will get to observe over the next few years very different approaches and see what works and what doesn't.
[0:25:56] Pretty quickly, I believe the world will move towards more of what works. But I'm grateful for the experimentation and different countries trying different things. OK. So a short game that I'll give you some criticisms of AI. And you give me a short defense of each of these criticisms. I might not have one for some. You might not have one for some. That's fine. And there's so many questions that you can always duck or pass. Too much concentration of power.
[0:26:22] Fair unless we push super hard to democratize, and I think everyone in the world needs to hold countries and companies to this threshold of you don't get to say concentration of power in the name of safety. We don't want that trade. It's got to be democratized. Okay. The amount of natural resources that are going into the data centers, the amount of water, the amount of... Water is totally fake. It used to be true. We used to do evaporative cooling in data centers, but now that we don't do that...
[0:26:51] You see these things on the internet where, don't use ChatGPT, it's 17 gallons of water for each query or whatever. This is completely untrue, totally insane, no connection to reality. What is fair, though, is the energy consumption, not per query, but in total, because the world is now using so much AI, is real, and we need to move towards nuclear or wind and solar very quickly.
[0:27:16] There was a tip, you know, we had Bill Gates last year and I asked him this question. And he gave a very interesting statistic. At that time, apparently, we calculated that there were 10 iPhone worth of battery would go for every chat GPT query. And now it's come down to one iPhone or one and a half iPhone battery life's worth of energy for every chat GPT query. Is that correct? There's no way it's anything close to that much. It's much less than that? Way, way, way less. Okay. All right. But his theory was that...
[0:27:43] That the AIs will learn from human evolution to be more efficient in how much energy they consume. One of the things that is always unfair in this comparison is people talk about how much energy it takes to train an AI model relative to how much it costs a human to do one inference query. But it also takes a lot of energy to train a human. It takes like 20 years of life.
[0:28:07] And all of the food you eat during that time before you get smart. And not only that, it took the very widespread evolution of the 100 billion people that have ever lived and learned not to get eaten by predators and learned how to figure out science and whatever to produce you. And then you took whatever you took. So the fair comparison is if you ask ChatGPT a question, how much energy does it take once its model is trained to answer that question versus a human?
[0:28:34] Probably AI has already caught up on an energy efficiency basis measured that way. Wow, okay, fantastic. AI is making my kids dumber. True for some kids. Look, when I hear kids talk about AI, there are definitely some kids who are like, this is great, I cheated my way through all of high school, I never did any homework, thank you. And I'm like, what's your plan for the rest of your life?
[0:29:12] And they're like, well, I assume I can still use ChachiBT to do my job. This is very bad. We absolutely have to still teach our kids to learn and to think and to be creative and to use these tools. That's not what most kids say, though. Most kids say, I can't believe what I can accomplish now. Look at this thing that I've just made. I've built these incredible new workflows.
[0:29:38] Sure, I may use ChatGBT and the way you use Google when you were in high school to help with your homework. But now that I have this new tool, I'm doing these amazing things. I think we will need to find new ways to teach and evaluate in school to make sure every kid is brought along. But the potential of this technology, the ability to learn more, do more, I have no doubt about that. When I was in school, Google had just come out.
[0:30:07] My middle school teacher was like, this is the worst thing ever. There's no point to teaching anymore. Why do you have to memorize the date that someone in history was born if you could just look it up on Google? And my answer was, I think it's a complete waste of time to memorize what year someone was born. I will just go look that up on Google if I ever need to know it again, which usually you don't that often. And then I watched over the next few years, teachers come to peace with this. The education system evolved. And like always happens,
[0:30:37] With new tools, the potential goes up and expectations go up. And we'll have to teach people to think harder, create more. And I'm pretty sure that a kid born today, when they're 18, graduating high school, will be able to do things that no one today can. And I think that's great. The other criticism is that it's just not democratic enough, as in the people who want to pause AI don't have a voice. And I want to take this, double click on this question, is that
[0:31:06] Where do you see the resistance coming from? Is it coming from the people who have experienced technology at its highest levels, and then they say, we're nervous, we want to pause? Or do you see the resistance coming from those who have never experienced and are nervous to experience, and then they feel the vulnerability? I mean, it kind of comes from, parts of it come from everywhere. Although, as more people use the technology, I think there's less of a, let's totally pause it. People like it. And there's more of a...
[0:31:36] What is this going to mean? Can we have more of a voice? Can this go a little more slowly? Okay. The one thing Silicon Valley should learn from Chinese technology? Move fast. The one thing Silicon Valley can learn from Indian technology? Move faster. The one real and one imagined fear of Chinese dominance in AI? I think the imagined fear is that...
[0:32:07] You know, the Chinese military is going to send a billion humanoid robots marching through the streets and overpower the U.S. Army or something like that. And the real fear is, and I think that's like an example of fighting the last war and thinking it's going to be the same. I think the real fear is a new kind of war between nations that gets fought over the Internet where you influence people and hack into a bunch of critical infrastructure. And that feels totally possible. That's a very scary reality where we say.
[0:32:35] Surveillance state, all those kind of things, you don't? Super worried about that. I think increasingly so, people are using fear of AI going wrong to justify a surveillance state. And I don't think that people doing that have fully thought through the downsides of the surveillance state. OK.
[0:32:59] You urgently need to look something up. Your phone is discharged. You borrow my phone. The letter T on my touchpad doesn't work. So you can only key in Grok, Claude, Gemini, or DeepSeek. I guess if I have to look something up, I'd pick Gemini. OK. All right. For other things, I'd pick other models. The most compelling reason you have moved from a not-for-profit to a capped profit to pretty much any revenue, including ads.
[0:33:34] The need to democratize AI and the need to stay at the forefront of research, both of those require huge amounts of capital. And do you think you're research-first company or product-first company? Research-first company. The coolest thing about AI, I think, is that the great majority of making a good product is doing good research. We make a great model, the product is pretty good.
[0:33:58] The early version of ChatGPT was almost no product at all. It was like a text box that fed into a model and then put the output on the screen. So research to continue to push what a model is capable of is what enables everything else. OK. The one criticism about you that bothers you when you hear it? I've heard basically like every possible criticism. And at some point, none of them bother you because you're just like, this has gotten so insane, so detached from truth. I guess the one that...
[0:34:34] What makes me the most sad is that he's just doing it for the power. He doesn't really care about trying to do something that's going to be helpful to the world. What were you thinking when you decided not to take any equity in OpenAI? What was going in your mind at that time? That was truly one of the dumbest things. As I say, this is someone who's made a lot of dumb decisions. The conspiracy theories that that brought about, like the one I just mentioned, it was totally not worth it.
[0:35:00] We were like a nonprofit. There was like a kind of quirk of it where to be on the board of a nonprofit, you had to be sort of disinterested. And I had been very fortunate to have a successful career, and I was like, I don't really care here either way. But it was a very dumb thing. And if somebody today were to offer and figure out a way for you to get into the cap table with FedEquity, would you take it? I mean, at this point, I feel like so tired of the whole conversation and so trapped I'm not sure what to do. It's like a lose-lose thing for me. Okay.
[0:35:31] So one thing, in spite of all the differences you have with Elon Musk, the one thing you admire about him? Is there any one thing you can put all the differences? No, I'm going to think of something, but give me a minute. He's extremely good at physical engineering and also extremely good at getting people to perform incredibly well at their jobs. Okay, super.
[0:35:59] ChatGPT is not known for its opinions. It's known for giving facts and factful answers back. So I'm going to ask your opinion on the news. There's been a lot of stuff in the news the last week. So we want your views on, would you support the government-ordered ban on social media for kids under 16? I don't know if a total ban is right. Maybe it is. I think at least heavy restrictions would be good. I have a young child. I'm more interested in...
[0:36:29] What I think are the very negative impacts of infinite scroll. I would like my kid not to just be one of those iPad kids going like this all the time. So that seems very important. But yeah, probably social media for kids is something we have to be very careful with. OK. It seems the clouds of war are again upon us. A lot of talk about in Iran.
[0:36:56] If government were to ask to use AI companies like yours to help figure out how to get into war, how would you respond? Is Pentagon just another client for you, and they're the customer, you do what they ask, or do you draw a line somewhere? I don't think AI systems should be used to make...
[0:37:23] AI systems should be used to make warfighting decisions. I don't think they're at a level of sophistication and reliability where this is a good idea. That said, we certainly want to support the government. And there's a lot of things we can do already. Someday there will be, I think, applications of this, really important applications of this to defense. But right now, the models have clear limitations. It was used for Maduro's capture, I believe. Is that true?
[0:37:51] No, I just don't know. I'm sure it was used in some ways. There are things that AI can do a great job of today. I think using AI to analyze a huge amount of intelligence reports, probably a great use of AI. And maybe it was used in some way like that. Your views on Claude Safety Chief, Mrinal Sharma's dramatic resignation. I don't know if you followed that, but it made a lot of news. I heard something about it. They resigned and sent a letter about it.
[0:38:18] Useless or something. Yeah, world's going to go to hell. I want to go write poetry. It was that direction. A lot of safety people are getting, I think, overwhelmed. I mean, that's the real piece that I wanted you to reflect on. The part of it I agree with is the inside view at the companies of looking at what's going to happen. Like, the world is not prepared. We're going to have extremely capable models soon. It's going to be a faster takeoff than I originally thought.
[0:38:47] And that is stressful and anxiety-inducing. Okay. Reflect a bit on the future, the future of love and relationships. We keep hearing of people using AI agents to open up conversations on dating apps. How much of authenticity are we losing with love and relationships, or how much of it is coming away? My bet would be that in the future we value human relationships much more. I think we are wired to do that. There will be some people who will like...
[0:39:16] Fall in love with an AI or talk about their AI boyfriend or girlfriend or have AI send messages on dating apps for them. There will be some small percentage of the world that does that and there will be a lot of breathless articles written about the end of society and all of that. But I think for almost everyone in a world with more abundance, in a world where you can kind of have anything, human connection, human attention, human warmth will be one of the most valuable commodities and we will...
[0:39:44] I bet we will care much more about that in a world with AI. Okay. You've invested in over 400 companies. I don't know if that's accurate. I mean, counting Y Combinator, like 3,000. Wow, okay. If you take all the Y Combinator investments, fair. But given the speed of AI growth and the disruption, where would you advise people in this room to invest today? Is there one place that you think they should? The cool thing about a moment like this, when the ground is shaking, is sort of everything is up for grabs.
[0:40:15] Things are going to change so fast. Things are changing so fast. As we talked about earlier, you can have these one-person companies doing the things that used to take much bigger companies, but they can move faster, much more efficiently. So there will be all of the do the existing things better, and then there's a whole set of new things we just couldn't imagine before. It feels like the investment landscape is more open than it's ever been in any of my time as an adult.
[0:40:43] There were many times before where I felt like there was only one thing to invest in. There was only one frontier. And now it feels like you can kind of do whatever you want. Okay. How far are we from ASI? You said AGI, we're a few years away. How far are we from ASI? No, I said from ASI, we're a few years away. So AGI, how far then? I mean, AGI feels pretty close at this point. Okay. Like if you had asked me, I think if you had asked most people six years ago,
[0:41:16] What would you think if we had systems that could do new research on their own? What would you think if we had systems that could make an entire complex computer program on their own, that could do pretty sophisticated knowledge work in all these different fields? You know, you could have one system that could act as an AI doctor or lawyer or computer scientist. We'd say, okay, that sounds pretty general and pretty intelligent. We get used to whatever we have, but...
[0:41:43] Just watching how much the technology we already have is accelerating us internally, I would say it's pretty close. And given what I now expect to be a faster takeoff, I think superintelligence is not that far off. The one thing you'll never ask Chad GPT? I think I would never ask it like how to be happy. I would rather ask like a wise person. That's really interesting because...
[0:42:18] That's really interesting because one of the most uses of AI is for companionship, for that categorization to the extent of therapy. Yeah, I think for things like therapy or life advice, it can be pretty good. I think for life philosophy, I'm still not going to take its advice there. Okay, wonderful. So which is less likely to happen?
[0:42:48] TSMC loses its monopoly over world chip manufacturing? Or Musk and you become friends again? Which one is less likely or more likely? I think Musk and I becoming friends again is less likely. I feel like I have more control over that one. Both very unlikely things. What is it about TSMC that the semiconductor?
[0:43:14] Taiwan Semiconductor Corporation. What is it about it that makes it so... I mean, the whole world is kind of just... They have just this relentless focus on getting better at what they do. It's an incredibly complex process. And they are just a machine at how they optimize and get better and learn at every level. Okay. The most recent update you can share with us about your partnership with Johnny Ives. You're talking about these new cool devices. It's going to change the form factor of a cell phone, how you interact with machines.
[0:43:43] Anything you can share with us about that? We have basically used computers for the same way for like 50 years. I think the work that Xerox PARC did to invent all the concepts of Windows and pointing devices and everything that we now take for granted is amazing. Putting it on a phone and adding multi-touch was also amazing. But fundamentally, it's been a similar kind of idea.
[0:44:13] And then AI came along and AI is stuck in that same form factor. But AI is like a quite different thing. AI, you can now talk to a computer in natural language and it can do incredibly complex things for you. It can understand a huge amount of context. And the form factor of computers does not quite work for this. You know, I want to use a piece of technology that is observing my whole life and that has all the context and is maximally useful to me and that is in my way the least.
[0:44:41] And that can not just be on or off, but these sort of subtle states in between. And we may fail at this. This is very hard. But I think we have a chance to make a new kind of products, a new family of products that were really designed around AI that are kind of participating in your life and not in the way of it. So that's a theory, but what is the product? You'll have to wait and see. When can we see this? Because it's sounding very revolutionary.
[0:45:13] I mean, we hope to be able to talk about it late this year, but hardware is hard. OK. The one thing that governments should regulate and one thing they should avoid regulating. This is not a competent answer. Generally speaking, I think it's probably a good idea for governments to focus on regulating the really potentially catastrophic issues and being more lenient on the less important issues until we understand them better. OK.
[0:45:47] Is there any one introspection or learning from your professional disagreements with any of the co-founders you've had? It's hard to reduce that to a single soundbite. One thing that Greg and I have disagreed on a lot over the years is how much the company should focus versus do a lot of things. And I think I've been wrong about trying to do so many things, and I've really learned from him the importance of extremely narrow, deep focus. Okay, interesting.
[0:46:29] One mistake, the biggest mistake you have seen corporates making in adopting AI? I was in a meeting yesterday with a big company who was planning to spend 2026 strategizing, 2027 getting the company ready, and 2028 deploying. And that may work for other...
[0:47:02] Kinds of technology. Apparently, if you do like a giant ERP migration, that's the kind of timeline it takes. Doing that for AI will be a catastrophic mistake. The nimbleness required, the speed, the commitment required is just totally different. Okay. Okay. Get to the last piece here. Following heads of state want your opinion on one thing they need to do for their people's future in this new AI context. Xi Jinping, Narendra Modi.
[0:47:31] Putin, Trump. What's the one thing you tell each of them that they should do? I would say the same thing to everyone, which is you've got to democratize this technology and put it in the hands of people. They're not all going to listen to that, obviously. It's a fair answer, of course, but it's a safe answer. But is it a different thing that a young country should do to an old country from a head of state perspective? I mean, I feel increasingly radicalized on this point. I don't think any other strategy is going to work. Okay. Fair.
[0:48:11] If I can ask you to describe your relationship with Satya Nadella, because he calls OpenAI a frenemy. I would just say friends. Your most expensive hire ever. You don't have to tell me who, but how much money did it cost? We are no comparison to Meta here. Okay. My last question now. Which of these four statements that you have made and you have now upgraded or revised?
[0:48:46] Do you regret? Statement one, that India building a foundation model with $10 million is hopeless. Statement two, that you will remain a not-for-profit. Sorry, can I cut off? Yeah. I said anyone building it. The point was anyone building a foundation model with $10 million. Okay, so that was statement one. Statement two, you will remain a not-for-profit. Statement three, too much AI regulation can stifle innovation. And statement four, OpenAI won't accept advertising. I don't think I ever said we won't accept advertising.
[0:49:13] I don't think I ever said we won't accept advertising. I think maybe I said I had misgivings. I guess I'll pick the nonprofit one. Okay. All right. Super. It's been a great... I've tried to cover as much as I could. This has been a lot. You only gave me an hour, man. I would have wanted a few. We'll take a few questions from the audience. Great. Okay. Can I get a show of hands while I'm here? I would love another meme. So if anyone wants to ask me about Indian foundation models, let's run it back. Okay. Yeah. Can we...
[0:49:45] Okay. Yeah, can we get Rajesh, please, first? Rajesh is the founder of MakeMyTrip. He makes money when we are holidaying. All right. Thank you. Thank you, Anant. And welcome again, Sam. Incredible one-hour chat. And you did a great job, by the way, keeping yourself calm, while Anant did a great job on provoking you a hell of a lot. So that's a good job. By the way, partners, I met Brad earlier today. I just have one question. It got triggered from your comment, actually.
[0:50:14] That you are a research-first company, right? And if I think harder about that, the kick for researchers, the satisfaction that they get every time they go deep into research and they strike gold, right? You know, in terms of innovation, in terms of something really crazy that they discover. Do you think, given the power of AI,
[0:50:44] There's equal amount of focus needs to be on responsible AI as well? Yes, I do think that. And I think one of the things I'm most proud of with our research team is how much they feel that. As we get closer and closer to superintelligence, they, of course, feel it more and more. But it's been a core part of our DNA from the very beginning. And I think the researchers that succeed the most with us have that process going on in their brains.
[0:51:12] I think we don't have time. The last question is that I'm getting some hand signals. Yeah? Okay, last question. Let's do a few more. I'll answer fast. Race for talent. Where do you think it's heading? As AI does more and more research in engineering, I suspect teams will do much more with smaller amounts of people. And so you'll have... I think the race for talent should ease somewhat.
[0:51:46] You'll see small teams in research labs just do a huge amount of work. Can chat GPD help you with the question? I have to admit, I use a lot for research, but if you ask OpenAI for any interview to help you and give the questions, it just feels very synthetic, so I don't end up using it yet. That's good. Sam, do we have time for one more or no? Yes? Okay, cool. Can we just show of hands? I'm not getting a sense.
[0:52:25] Can I do some affirmative action and get some women hands, please? Yes, please, right there. Thanks. Please. Hi, Sam. This is Tuti. Before I ask you my question, I think I might have manifested this. I'm a podcaster, and I asked ChatGVD. It's not a short question. It's quick. Because this is what I manifested. This is you and me sitting in your OpenAI three weeks ago, and here I am.
[0:52:56] But my question to you is, as a creator, of course, we use a lot of chat GPT. But what concerns you more? Will AI become too powerful, or will humans become very passive? Especially for creators, you know, chat GPT, like even an unset, that it sort of becomes very superficial when you rely only on that. I don't think humans will become too passive. So I guess I'll take the other one.
[0:53:22] Watching what creators are doing in particular, where they can use these tools to help have a quicker, tighter iteration loop from idea to feedback to idea to feedback. I think we'll get better stuff. I think we'll get more creative podcasts, better writing, better images. But I don't think we're going to become passive in that process. I used to worry about that, but it doesn't seem like it's what's happening. OK, I actually have got a list of people who we had promised questions to. So Mr. Abhishek Ketan is here. Sorry. No? Oh, there he is. Can we get a mic to him, please?
[0:53:52] Hazel, is Hazel around? Yeah, please, go ahead. First of all, it's a very interesting session. What I wanted to ask is, according to which profession, because of chat GPT and AI, will be most under threat? I think a lot of professions will almost go away, a lot of the current ones. We will find new things to do for sure, and people will adapt those. But if you think about...
[0:54:28] Well, I'll pick my own. I was trained as a software engineer, and the way I learned to write software is now effectively completely irrelevant. So it doesn't mean there's no longer a software engineering job in the future, but writing C++ code by hand, that's over. And I think there's a lot of other professions where, in the old sense, they're over. There may be something totally new. There will be other professions that change almost not at all.
[0:54:57] But big categories of jobs, AI is just going to completely obsolete, and what those people do will have to completely adapt. Sam, let's flip the question. What's the least vulnerable job? Well, there was a question about creators. One thing that I think is interesting is when AI started generating images, people said, graphic artists, that's over. That's done. And that might be true for the kind of graphic artist job that was to sort of like...
[0:55:29] You know, make someone's birthday card invitation or something. But for fine art, the price of AI-generated art is zero, and the price of human-generated graphic art has continued to go up since this has happened. And so there are many things like that where we care about the person who does it. You know, another example is, like, I really care about... I had to go to the hospital recently. I really cared about the nurse that was taking care of me.
[0:55:57] If that were like a robot, I think I would have been pretty unhappy no matter how smart the robot was. OK. Hazel? Hi, Sam.
[0:56:06] I'm from Chitkara University. Just taking from the previous question on responsible AI, how do you see your role? Do you invest in time, putting in checks and balances? And does the pace of the checks and balances are in the same line as the advancements that we are seeing in AI? So just around that. Thank you.
[0:56:32] Yeah, it's a huge focus of ours as a company and mine personally. Sometimes we overdo it. Sometimes we're too conservative with a new technology or a new level. Sometimes we put in too many checks. People get mad about that. There is a tension between democratizing AI and enough safety. But I think our principle of starting conservative and then broadening access has served us well, and we plan to continue to do that. Sam, we're completely out of time. Sam, thank you so much. Thank you so much for your time. Thank you for being here.
[0:57:02] It's really a privilege to have you with us. Thank you. Please take your seats. Please remain seated. I now invite Raj Kamal Jha, chief editor of the Indian Express, to present a memento. Request everyone to please remain seated. This illustration is by Indian Express cartoonist E.P. Unni, and he wanted you to know that it is not AI-generated.
[0:57:47] I now invite Abhishek Khaitan, Managing Director, Radhiku Khaitan, to present Sam with a bouquet. Thank you. I request our other partners to also join on stage for a group photograph. Ms. Hazel, Prasant Tripathi, Rajesh Nambiar, Anupama Sharma, and Karel Lahiri. Please join us on stage for a group photograph. I request everyone else to please remain seated. Please remain seated.
[0:58:39] Till Sam moves out. We would appreciate everyone to please remain seated. Please remain seated. Thank you, everyone, for joining us today. I would like to thank our partners, presenting partner, Radhiko Khaitan, co-presented by 361, associate partner, IMS Ghaziabad, Chitkara University, IKFAI Hyderabad, FRR Immigration, and broadcast partner, NDTV.