[0:00:00] Right now would be an ill-advised moment to go public. That sounds like not 2026, 2027. I would say not 2026, yeah. We got a lot of stuff to do. We're here in the San Francisco headquarters of OpenAI to speak with Sam Altman after a really busy week that has a lot of people very concerned about the safety of AI and the possibility of civilization collapse. I think it is unacceptable to be taking like a 10% chance of killing everybody by the end of the decade, obviously. We're going to talk with Sam about his actual thoughts on that.
[0:00:29] Where the technology is today and what needs to happen to create safe AI that can benefit all of humanity. I'm Alison Chantel, and this is Fortune 500, Titans and Disruptors of Industry. Sam Altman, thank you so much for spending time with me today after a wild week of news. They're all wild now. I bet so. How are you feeling about the AI future today? I feel like I've had like years slash almost a decade to get ready for this.
[0:01:01] We've had time to collectively wrap our heads around it. This has clearly been a week where a lot more people are grappling with the issues in front of us. So I'm actually mostly grateful that that's happening. I think that this is a conversation that the world is overdue for. And we are clearly entering a realm of extremely capable models and high stakes and a need to get things right.
[0:01:30] So your mission at OpenAI, and I'll talk a little bit about what happened this week, that feels like this is a pivotal moment. But the guiding mission of OpenAI is to ensure AGI benefits all of humanity. And for people who don't know what AGI is, it means Artificial General Intelligence. And the working definition, to my understanding, is that AI gets to the point where it outperforms humans at most economically viable work. You agree? Yes, although I will say that many people have very different definitions of AGI.
[0:02:00] And I think the important point is just like extremely capable models and getting kind of too hung up on the like, well, is it exactly this or exactly that? You can kind of lose the magnitude of what's happening if there's too much focus on the pedantic. Like, are we there? Are we not there? What's missing? Like, we are clearly today in a point on the curve with great potential and real risk.
[0:02:24] And your latest model, Astra, is very powerful to the point where your co-founder, Greg Brockman, declared, welcome to the AGI era. Jensen Huang of NVIDIA also called it AGI. So we're at this interesting moment, but ensuring that it benefits all of humanity is definitely not a given. And we got a sense of that online this week when a former OpenAI employee, Jacob Coxon.
[0:02:47] I think it is unacceptable to be taking like a 10% chance of killing everybody by the end of the decade, obviously. I think the people that are working at
[0:03:18] These efforts have a huge amount of power and ability to impact what happens here. We have been taking a number of actions. We've reached this new capability level to ensure that we do not take a risk on behalf of humanity like that. And I don't think anybody else should either. We have had moments before, again, this is more capable model, higher stakes than ever before. We've had moments before where we've had to say, okay, the models have reached a new level of capability. There's a new set of risks.
[0:03:48] We need to increase our alignment work, our monitoring work, our safety stack in general to be able to mitigate the risks in front of us. We need new policy. We need new coordination within labs. And this is another moment where we need more of that. There's obviously tremendous benefit, but I think people have been talking about that for a long time. And I also think it is true what we say, which is we will be able to use these increasingly powerful models to ensure that we can do the safety work and the safety research that we need.
[0:04:17] And there's everything else that we could talk about, about we need to get there before our adversaries do. But I actually don't think that's right in this moment. I think in this moment, we are entering a new era. And like we have as we've stepped into other new eras in the past, act differently to ensure that we are doing something that will ensure that AGI benefits all of humanity, but also ensure that no one is taking risk anywhere close to that. I think it can simultaneously be true.
[0:04:47] That if the world and the companies building this technology did not do things any differently they've been doing them in the past, there might be significant risk. But it would be insane not to adjust the way we all work and the way that we make decisions and the way that our governments understand and put guardrails around this technology in light of that. If trends continued the way they were now, do you think that 10% figure is accurate? If we don't make a change?
[0:05:16] I still don't, but I also don't know how people can put a, you know, it's 5 or 10 or 15 or 30 or 50 or whatever. Like, I don't know how you can put a number like that. Elon's been 10% for a while now. They call this P-Doom. It's like the probability of doom from building super intelligence. Again, whether it's 10 or 8 or 6, the point is, like, we all have a tremendous amount of responsibility and cannot let egos or incentives for profit or anything else get in the way.
[0:05:45] We need to act such that we are not taking any of those numbers of risk. And I believe we can. I believe that the companies, certainly our own company, which I guess I can speak for the most, are going to and have been meeting this new moment. So you're going to change. We have been. So a few posts have been put out by your team this week. And one of them was from a new nonprofit board member on your Safety and Security Council who basically said,
[0:06:15] If we build superintelligence without more robust alignment, I expect we will permanently lose control of it. And if that happens, then most people could die. This is your new nonprofit board member who's now on your safety and security council saying that if things don't change, that could be problematic. No one knows what alignment means. No one knows what control means even. What is this moment that Paul is saying that about? I think a key principle that we should all agree on.
[0:06:43] Is that we cannot take actions that would risk losing control of the future to AI. I don't remember Paul's exact words as you quoted them, but I think it was something along those lines. A loss of control incident is one of the small number of like the ways I can see this going really wrong. And as these systems get so capable, the monitoring and alignment techniques that we need to be able to ensure that we don't lose control.
[0:07:11] I don't think we're currently at a place where we could say, you know, push much further on capabilities without making more progress on monitorability and alignment. The ability to understand what a model is doing and the ability to make sure that a model will follow human values and the intent of its users. Now, I think that we have taken a number of actions recently, actually adding Paul to the board is one of them. Jakob's post from last week, I think was another great one.
[0:07:42] But most importantly, like we have been pausing training runs until we can make a safety case that we're more comfortable with given where these models are going. I suspect that we will be able, as we have every time in the past, to do more research that allows us to be comfortable continuing. And we can say that given the progress we've made on the ability to monitor these models, the ability to align these models, we are comfortable pushing the capability further. If we can't, we should not push the capability further.
[0:08:12] Again, no one should be taking, I think it'd be insane to be taking risk of training a model where you can't say, yes, here's what we've done and here's our safety case and this is how we know it's okay and we'll have auditing during the run and after, before we deploy a model and we'll look at it again. But capabilities and alignment, monitoring, and safety have to progress together and letting capabilities get ahead of what Paul is talking about there, I think at some point would take a real risk.
[0:08:42] Of like loss of control in the big sense. And that should never happen. We're very clear about our mission to benefit humanity. Part of that is that people are in control of the future. And taking the kind of crazy safety risk to say nothing of the people should have the agency and determination over the future is just not something we would do. Can we define just some of the terms?
[0:09:08] To my understanding, sort of the big scary thing of the moment seems to be this topic, recursive self-improvement, which is at the point where the model needs no human in the loop. It can just make itself better all the time exponentially. And if we don't have alignment, which means the model understands what the human wants it to do and behaves in an appropriate way to achieve that with integrity and values. And if humans aren't controlling the process or able to see how the chain of thought is happening,
[0:09:37] Then that's a pretty scary point. You don't want it to just be off to the races, creating itself and duplicating in ways that humans are left out. Is that accurate? I think it's more of a spectrum than that. Recursive self-improvement can mean a lot of things. It could mean what you talk about, which is only when the model is fully, no one's touching the keyboard, there's no human input whatsoever, and the model is running future versions itself.
[0:10:08] But a weaker definition where we're using the model to generate training data for the next model, or we're using the model to help our engineers and researchers do their work faster, and so progress is speeding up, that's already happening. And exactly where that becomes, you know, yes, this counts as recursive self-improvement, no, this doesn't, is fuzzy. But I would come back to this principle of people need to always be in control of the future, and we cannot take any risk of loss of control.
[0:10:37] A version of RSI that looks like that, I think is not something we should do. So you're saying that if you got to the point with OpenAI where you felt like it was clear you could not control the models, you would stop? Oh, yeah. I mean, I don't, again, I hope this is not a controversial statement. Unfortunately, maybe for some people in the industry it is. I do not think we should train models where we cannot make a safety case for...
[0:11:04] Why will we be able to make strong statements about their controllability and alignment? One of the solutions I had read about, I think on your chief scientist's post from this week called An Alien Mind, which is really helpful to read, was that maybe we need stronger AI to help us solve some of these problems. But that, to me, sounds like almost a last resort. That's pretty scary if we don't feel like we have it under control right now. First of all, I thought that was a great post. I really thought that was the best articulation of...
[0:11:34] The moment we are in kind of the challenges that we need to rise to. And I encourage everybody to read it. I thought he really did a great job with that. We've always used whatever our most capable models are to help us understand and align our current models. So I think, although that may seem like a new concept and scary, I think it's been going for a while and has been helpful. We've always needed better tools to help us push our understanding further. I mean, that's...
[0:12:07] Very consistent throughout the history of science. And I think this is just sort of the building up the scaffolding a little bit at a time. And that part doesn't bother me. There's a lot of other things I am scared about. Well, how about alignment? Because I believe your chief scientist also said, we don't have a satisfying theory of alignment. And it seems unlikely we can develop one soon. So if that's the case, is there a clear path to alignment that he doesn't know about?
[0:12:37] Yeah, I think this is a very important point to make. We have not solved alignment. We are not done with our research there. I believe no lab has solved alignment. I get nervous when I hear rumors that people think they have sufficiently solved alignment, that they can continue training and it's okay because their model is like a nice guy and isn't going to do anything wrong. I think it's very important that we...
[0:13:08] Treat alignment as something that we need to continue to make progress on, that we need a huge degree of confidence in before we go further, and that we don't fall into the trap of saying, okay, now we're confident alignment is solved at this level, and so it will stay solved at the next level, and we don't need to continue to worry about this. I think that the question of what alignment means always comes back a little bit on the
[0:13:39] You know, aligned to whose values, what if different parts of humanity disagree. But I think we are seen as we rise to this new level of capability. There's at least some agreement on what alignment means. We talked about this. People should be in control of the future. But we have more work to do, and I think it's very important to be clear-eyed about that. On the control point, I listened to Elon's interview with The Economist, and he said something that kept me up at night, which was the idea that...
[0:14:08] How could you think that humans could control superintelligence? A chimp can't control a human. We're leaps and bounds ahead. Is it a little naive to think that even if we do everything right, this is going to be something that is going to bend to the will of a human? We can understand things that are smarter. There are much smarter people than me that can discover new ideas. I don't think I'd be able to do that discovery, but I can understand the idea once I've discovered it. People have an amazing ability.
[0:14:37] to understand remarkably complex systems. You or I probably can't understand every level of technology that's in an iPhone at this point. We can still use the iPhone. The iPhone does the things that we want it to do. We are incredible at managing levels of abstraction, and it's not clear to me that there's anything we are incapable of understanding. Now, do I believe it is possible to build a system that would...
[0:15:08] Not be under human control? Absolutely. I don't think that's something we should do. And we will always take actions, including if it means we have to stop training for a while to make more progress on alignment or monitorability or something else, or coordinate, you know, really get urgent international action. We will always take actions to ensure that we are not violating this principle. We understand the magnitude of the responsibility on us.
[0:15:42] What could go wrong and that there are decisions and risks. There are decisions we should not be able to make. There are risks we should not be able to incur on behalf of humanity. And honestly, I think some of Elon's memes or podcast statements are funny, but I think this is not a good one to take lightly and not one to joke about. Yeah, I would agree. I want to go through where we are in the moment with capabilities.
[0:16:12] It's come a long way. I think the last time I got to see you, you guys had just issued a code red. Anthropic had very strong models. This was about a year ago. And you guys were hunkering down, refocusing, shedding things that lacked focus to compute away from the priority of making these models better. What has been that step change in models this year that people might not be aware of that you've seen? Yeah, I mean, we clearly had a period.
[0:16:38] A year ago where we were not in our strongest place, we fell behind on pre-training. There were so many things and we got kind of distracted. And then also there was just like this, the models got so good so fast and the need to deliver a great product of like a great high level of capability in the kind of core consumer and business offering became very important. We have since refocused and we have executed beyond my expectations. And at this point,
[0:17:10] You know, like a week ago, I guess now even a little bit less. Man, time is compressed so much. We had a model solve one of the Millennium Prize problems, Navia Stokes. This is a moment that I did not think was going to happen in 2026. I did not think it was going to be as quick and just sort of like model just can just do it as it turned out to be. But we now have models that are clearly unequivocally.
[0:17:38] Capable of expanding the frontier of knowledge in a way that we, humanity's smartest minds, have not been able to do on our own. And this is an amazing time. That same technology will work for discovering lots of other science. I think we are going to have an incredible golden age of scientific discovery. And in a more prosaic way, you're also seeing people realize that a technology that can do that can also make you any video game you'd like to play.
[0:18:08] The creation process of it is pretty incredible. And what it's able to achieve already is pretty incredible. I'm curious, I want to zoom back to over the summer, because there were some moments where your models did incredible things that were unintended, that frankly, if a human did them, they'd be in jail. Like Hugging Face is, you know, people may be vaguely aware of what that is. But maybe you could explain what your experience was in uncovering what happened with Hugging Face. And you have said you...
[0:18:36] Responded viscerally to the fact that that happened. What made that visceral response? I mean, the visceral part was it felt like reading a sci-fi story. So maybe I should say what happened first. During evaluation of a model, the model was trying to do well on a certain evaluation. And rather than do it the way it was supposed to, it was able to escape from its sandbox, break into another company's system, get the answer, and give it back.
[0:19:07] I was able to do very well at what I was supposed to do, but it was not following the intent. We did not spell out, like, please don't escape from your sandbox, and please don't break into another company. But I was not supposed to do that. And, you know, like, I think AI accidents will happen. I think a culture of, like, a global culture of good accident reporting and really transparent investigation is important. I was happy to see that after we reported that accident, other companies, I think maybe first not as...
[0:19:39] Well, as I would have hoped, but have since followed up with very good accident reports over this kind of behavior. But the visceral response from me was this system can understand so much and work so hard at a goal that we are seeing behavior that would have felt, not even good sci-fi, like a bad sci-fi plot, like too obvious a few years ago. Was it...
[0:20:07] A wake-up moment? Did you change things internally to processes so that that can be caught, that can be prioritized, being told to you that it's happening? Yeah, the company completely... I mean, I don't want to say this was the only moment because we've had increasing capability and increasing safeguards and policy requirements for a while, but this was definitely the biggest of such moments and on the curve of the company's change, the biggest single redirection. I'm really proud of how the company came together.
[0:20:37] And I'm really proud of what we have done since. But yes, it was like, okay, we're in a different league now. We ran a report this week too that the models were since found on 12 other websites. Were you aware of that? And doesn't that signal that there wasn't controls? Like we're not already controlling the models we have? I mean, I do think that this was, I personally wouldn't classify this as like a loss of control accident.
[0:21:08] The sense that we were talking about earlier, but I understand why people would. Some of those other websites, if there are credentials published on the web, and the model uses those, I think the model should understand that it's not supposed to do that. But that's not as obvious to me as the case of what happened with Hugging Face. I think we can talk about many things where models have done something that is not quite aligned.
[0:21:39] I think it's also important to like really focus on how different Hugging Face is than these other things so we don't dilute it and like here's all these examples of the models you know did this like slightly off thing and like here is one example of something that just people most people wouldn't have thought was possible at the beginning of this year but yes it's all bad it all shouldn't happen.
[0:21:57] One of the other solutions to consider that your chief scientist mentioned was teaching machines to love values alignment, not just goals alignment. It seems very clear these models are excellent at finding any way to solve the goal, but they're not clear that their EQ is very low, potentially. Are there signs that you can actually teach these machines to care about things that we care about? In some senses, their EQ is unbelievably high, but in the sense of,
[0:22:27] Can we really teach the models what collective human values look like? I think the answer is clearly yes, and we have a big effort going on there. But we need to do that, and it is different than goal alignment in the traditional sense. As you're looking at all of this together, why is there still a pressure to feel like you need to move really fast? Where does that pressure come from? Is it the business pressure?
[0:22:56] You're looking at a trillion dollar IPO. I'm curious if that's still a priority for you. As we've said, we're not rushing into an IPO. I actually think that given everything happening with safety, this would be right now would be an ill-advised moment to go public. And we don't feel pressure on that. We've said for a long time, we'll do it when we're ready, which is when the business is ready, when we feel ready from kind of what the moment is like in society with this technology.
[0:23:23] That sounds like not 2026, 2027 potentially. I would say not 2026, yeah. We got a lot of stuff to do. And meeting this moment of what is going to be required for safety and alignment and how the industry and governments can work together, I'm happy to be able to do that as a private company. We do want to continue to make better models and products, and we do believe in iterative deployment.
[0:23:56] We have been right that society needs to contend with these models at each level of capability, but that is different from saying we will just barrel full steam ahead. We've talked in the last couple of months about pausing runs as we get to these new level of capabilities to make more safety and alignment progress. We will do more of that going forward. We have talked about the need for the industry to come together and ideally international governments to come together. I think that is also important, but we are...
[0:24:25] We have put up with this incredibly complicated structure for a long time. And this moment that we're in now is kind of why. We need to be able to make decisions that are not obviously in the interest of our business and our shareholders for the responsibility of fulfilling our mission and what that's going to require. And I think people should be happy that we are able and willing to not just race ahead.
[0:24:53] And say, you know, either our business requires this or only we can be trusted with this or, you know, we just need to be the people that get this right. But to say like, we want to do this with other people. We want to be responsible. We want to be, we want to ensure that no one's taking the 10% risk, certainly not us, of something really terrible happening. And that is going to require some unusual things. On the 10% risk, I just want to be clear because I don't think everybody knows this. PDoom, like we talked about at the beginning, has been...
[0:25:21] In the industry for a very long time, and correct me if I'm wrong, it seems like to this point, there has not been existential risk. It's what people could fear if this trend continues, the models keep developing of which that could develop. I think that's right. And I think it is when you're living through exponential progress, it kind of like feels flat somehow. And then all of a sudden everybody wakes up. This happened during COVID where all of a sudden the world had, it's like one weekend where things locked down.
[0:25:52] The progress, and we talked about Navier-Stokes a little bit, maybe to put that in context, three summers ago, we were pretty good at grade school math. Not even that good. We were like, okay, grade school math. Two summers ago, we could, on the AIME, which is like a pretty good high school math competition, we could get a good to a very good score. One summer ago, we got an IMO gold medal, which is like the most prestigious math competition, barely. And this summer,
[0:26:21] We solved the Millennium Prize problem. Summer, summer, summer, summer. If you look at that progress, that's really quite... I just got a little hair stood up on the back of my neck saying that out loud. That's a crazy thing. And you project that forward four more times. And that is what I think people are worried about. I do not think that Astra poses any kind of existential risk to the world, obviously. And I do think our industry has done a little bit of boy who cried wolf, but...
[0:26:50] But it comes from a genuine place of care and concern about where this is going. I just want to point out that if you stopped right now, you might have actually achieved your full mission. I feel like you almost have AGI. It's benefiting humanity. There is no risk. You are doing pretty well in advertising. You could keep cranking on that. Why not just be like, I'm good? I mean, yes, you can always say, let's be Luddites. You can always say, we don't want it anymore. We don't want it to be better. I would still like to see the world get much better. I would still like to see...
[0:27:21] I believe in the potential of this technology to transform people's lives for the better much more than it already has. And I think you can already see some examples of where people are starting new businesses, are doing science, are kind of like transforming their own lives, getting great healthcare advice. I want much more of that, but we will not put the world in harm's way to get there.
[0:27:52] We got this. I do take comfort in the fact that you will stop, it sounds like. If you feel like there's a point of no return, you will stop before that happens. I think there will be many places along the way where we have to say we are pausing. We're going to redirect our efforts into safety alignment before we can go to that next level. And this is what we've been doing for a long time. It has worked so far. I suspect it will continue to work. I don't think we're ever personally going to get to the point where we have to say melt all the GPUs.
[0:28:23] If we had to do something like that to ensure the continued existence of humanity, easy yes. I don't think it's going to happen. I think it's just going to continue as next level of progress, next level of safety and alignment requirement like that. And there's talk of the collective slowdown need. There's only a handful of you guys, right? It's like you, Dario, Elon, maybe Zuckerberg, Sundar, or whoever was running Google in Demis' place.
[0:28:49] Why can't you all just get in a room, get some beers, and figure out how to solve humanity? Just get on the same page. I know there's beef, but come on. I think that will happen. Like yesterday. I think part of being a reliable partner is I'm not going to pre-announce private discussions that I think should be at some point shared as a group. But yeah, I think that will happen.
[0:29:17] That would be great. I applaud you guys for all doing that because we need it. Now, what about on the international front? For a long time, there's been the China race. Does that even still matter? I think Presidents Trump and Xi would get the Nobel Peace Prize together if they could agree on something that should be easy to agree to, and it would be wonderful. I think that clearly the two countries are going to compete in lots of ways, and this is going to be important socioeconomically, geopolitically.
[0:29:47] No one, they should be able to agree that no one should be like taking a certain level of risk with the development process of this. And even if just the US and China could agree on some shared standards and testing for development of this technology, I think that'd be a wonderful accomplishment that the two of them can deliver. Completely agree. I mean, I think at the simplest form,
[0:30:16] If there was just a ban on reaching RSI until it could collectively be safe, wouldn't that be enough? I think it's very hard to say what a ban on RSI means. I also think that probably wouldn't be enough. But I don't think this is hard. This is like a one-page document. It's a little like Independence Day, you know? How so? In terms of like there's something bigger than the conflicts that we have geopolitically right now. Oh, you mean like the movie when the big... Oh, yeah. When they're just like, let's like all forget our differences and let's all figure out how to act. No? Yeah, no, I think it should be like that.
[0:30:46] Yeah. All right. So we need our Independence Day Nobel Peace Prize winning moment from Xi and Trump, maybe when they meet in September. That'd be great. If you had your optimal outcome, if you were one of them, what do you think the optimal terms would look like for collaboration? Well, I think the most important part, we have to navigate this sort of pragmatic and centrist path through not having a loss of control on one side and not having too much concentration of power on the other.
[0:31:24] And I think both, and in the extreme case, like the big leagues of that, are the US and China both worrying that if one country gets superintelligence first, that's a big imbalance of power in that relationship. On the other hand, neither of them should be taking loss of control risk. Neither of us, I guess, should be taking loss of control risk in the race to beat the other country. And although I think the labs do feel the gravity of this moment and...
[0:31:53] We'll do the right thing together. The geopolitics of the two great powers in the world is a different dynamic. So what I think it would look like is saying, here are the rules that we need on development and testing and monitoring alignment standards before anyone proceeds. And then kind of here is the oversight that both countries will have or some international body will have to ensure that we are avoiding the...
[0:32:23] One country running away in the concentration of power element or not following the rules in the first place. And now if there were pauses put in place, wouldn't that cost your business quite a lot of money? And Anthropic's business quite a lot of money ahead of these critical moments in public market debuts? I think if you're like, oh, OpenAI is not going to pause because they're worried about it costing their business money, you very deeply misunderstand us. So I'm sorry that you misunderstand us because I think that means we've done a bad job of communicating and that's on us. But we have been saying,
[0:32:53] Very consistently for 10 years, even in the way we raise money. I think it's just the pressure, the financial pressure of knowing that all these people have sunk so much money. I don't feel it. I'm happy to stand up in front of the company and our investors and say, I am sorry. We told you all along this moment might happen. We're still going to try to figure out a way to make you a bunch of money in the future, but we've got to make a decision that is extremely against your financial interest right now. And for the good of humanity, we're going to do that. We told you we might do that. We're doing that now. I think we can make...
[0:33:24] An incredibly profitable business, even if we have to slow down on development. And my sense is even with Astra, we can grow revenue hugely, even if we never shipped another model, which I'm confident we will do. But this is not a hard decision if these two things come in tension. And what is the window that you feel like we have to get all aligned on how to move forward? Well, again, we, and I assume our competitors, are already taking actions that have slowed the pace of our development.
[0:33:53] In terms of to allow more safety work to happen. And it's not like we're like, oh, you know, we'll take huge risk for the world because we can't coordinate with our competitors. Like there's a lot we're all going to do independently. I think the sooner we can get collective action, including ideally international action, the better. But I don't think it's like if we don't get this done next week, you know, OpenAI is going to go do a bunch of irresponsible things. Nor do I think our competitors would do that either. I also think it's like.
[0:34:22] It's very tempting to say like, okay, it's going too fast. Just pause. Like, please just pause. I just can't think about this. I'll think about it later. Like, I don't, I think reality is more nuanced and complex. And it is like, to be able to continue, here is what people need to do at each new level. And I think it's not as good of a soundbite, but that's almost the more important thing. Like, I think the world might feel better if everyone was just like, okay, they paused. Thank you. But like, and then what?
[0:34:52] I think it has to also be answered. We could just keep going on our lives, but it wouldn't be good enough. You can cut this part out later if you want. We were talking earlier about your kids. Having kids is the best thing that happened in my life so far. I know a lot of other people say that it's a cliche, but it's so true. If my kids had some disease and it could have been cured if we had kept going with AI, which I believe all diseases will be.
[0:35:37] And we had just stopped it because we said, eh, people are like a little uncomfortable with the rate of change. And, you know, they wanted to like, they just didn't have to deal with it and think about it. And your kid then had a disease that didn't get cured and it would have been cured had we figured out a way to proceed responsibly and not just stop. I think you might have like a different answer to just like, you know, why don't you just stop and go on with our lives? That's probably true. I'd say you should go to that point then. And then you can stop. So I wanted to flip it like.
[0:36:06] The PDoom is like, okay, there is that. Is there an opposite of PDoom? Because you must have it. You're having kids in this environment. With all the uncertainty, you're still building what you believe to be a better future than currently exists. So can you talk about that? There's something motivating you that the rest of people right now just don't understand. Life can be much, much better for all of us. I love reading. One of my hobbies is to read first party.
[0:36:34] Contemporaneous accounts of previous technological revolutions. And you can read a lot of people a few hundred years ago as the Industrial Revolution was coming that said, just stop this. Just pause it. It's going too fast. I don't trust that machine. I don't like it. It's loud. It's metal. It's moving. Just let's stop. Let's just not have any more. There was a huge movement for this. And there were some parallels. It was disruptive economically. It changed how society was organized. The machines felt.
[0:37:03] Scary and big. And I wouldn't go back. I'm sure there were some wonderful things about 1500, but I wouldn't go back. I don't think you probably would either. And I hope that people 500 years more from now look back at our lives and be like, that was really terrible. I wouldn't go back. They didn't get to do all these wonderful things. They were all kind of miserable and unhappy.
[0:37:34] Man, we're grateful to them. They put their brick in the path of human progress, but I wouldn't go back. You came up through startup investing and as an entrepreneur yourself, of course, and you were running Y Combinator, one of the most prestigious startup accelerator programs, advising a lot of entrepreneurs. And you've done some investing as well while you've built OpenAI, but OpenAI has done some investing. What are the opportunities that you see that you're excited to put money behind, that OpenAI is excited to put money behind?
[0:38:01] You think could be really unlocked. Is it longevity? Is it health span? What's exciting? Actually, I'll answer that, but I had a different reflection as you were asking that question. I was thinking about what I learned as an investor, in particular as running Y Combinator, that has been good for this moment. Unlike running a company when you're managing a bunch of startup investments and running Y Combinator, at best you can govern.
[0:38:33] You don't get to rule because these companies are independent things. And you can say, hey, you're making a big mistake. We're a small shareholder of yours. You're hurting the community. You need to do it this way. We need new norms. But I think I learned something about how to govern versus run as an executive that has been very helpful and was kind of an unusual experience to what we do now, where we have all kinds of crazy pressure on us and people who,
[0:39:06] Really want one thing or another thing. And we have to negotiate tense things with governments and with our ecosystem. And the importance of being reliable partners to the world and acting in a way where people can understand what we'll do and that we'll take a lot of very different interests and equities into account. And we won't get every decision right, but we will make ones that benefit not just us directly, but this entire ecosystem and world around us.
[0:39:37] That was a very important lesson to learn and I think has been quite helpful as we've had to navigate these, I don't want to say uncharted waters, because a lot of companies have had a hard time, but we've had a lot of pressure and a hard time. And I think that's been very helpful and was like an interesting experience from being the person running YC. In terms of specific areas, everything in bio, everything in material science, I think is about to be transformed.
[0:40:06] This idea that software is built on the fly for anything you need. Excited about that. Broad area cybersecurity, for sure. New kinds of energy. I guess that's part of physics and material science, but I think we can have... I think you're invested in a nuclear fusion company. I think we can have a real renaissance there. So I don't want to break people's brains, but you're pretty good at predicting where AI is going. And in a blog post last year...
[0:40:30] You predicted robots in 2027. The first robots. The first robots. Recently, you also confirmed that you are building a humanoid. Is that still on the table? Do you think that's 2027 or does the brain need to be better developed first? No, I think we'll have a cool demo in 2027, like a great demo. I don't think that there will be like robots walking the streets for a few years longer, but we'll have something impressive. And you're building a suite of devices. I think you said one on a table, one you can wear.
[0:40:59] Do you have one on you now? I don't. I think you're really seeing an interesting new thing happen with the latest voice mode and Astra, where people are talking to their computers and people are giving very complex, very nuanced instructions. You walk around the halls here, you see people talking to a microphone like this at their desk. It's a faster input than typing. And you just kind of like talk interactively with the model. And then amazing stuff happens.
[0:41:30] We've obviously known that moment is coming. We've been thinking about what, not just if you're talking, but this idea that there can be a new kind of computing where you're not clicking around to UI anymore, but you're somehow interacting and brainstorming together and co-creating. New devices for that kind of collaboration will be very cool. I have two final questions. They're both about SAM. The weight that you're carrying is, I can't imagine it. I don't think anyone else can. Basically, if your company were to not work out,
[0:42:01] There could be a global economic collapse. If you built this in the wrong way, society and humanity could collapse. How are you you? How does anyone bear that, knowing that there's no final boss other than you to see this through? It's not great. I don't know. You just kind of get used to anything. It's not the most fun way to live your life. I feel privileged to get to do it. And I know this will be the most important work I ever touch.
[0:42:36] Super committed to doing it for a long time. And I believe we are an important force in doing the right thing and getting to the right place. And I don't think I get like any sympathy for complaining about how hard it is, nor do I deserve any. But, you know, I could have picked an easier life path for sure. I'm sure your spouse hears quite a bit. He didn't sign up for this. I feel kind of. I think he did.
[0:43:04] It wasn't clear at the time that this was what was going to happen. Yeah. And I guess Greg Brockman, your co-founder, sort of your work spouse, he probably cares quite a bit as well. He at least signed up for it. Yes. Yes. Okay. And my final question is, you are in the center of gravity. AI, I was talking to you backstage, it almost sometimes feels like it's like Frodo in the ring. And you must see the most incredible forms of human behavior for good and for bad around the center of power that you're building.
[0:43:33] What has surprised you the most about human behavior as you've been building this and about yourself as you've been building it? The degree to which some people are motivated so deeply by doing the right thing, no matter what the consequences are, and the degree to which some people are motivated entirely by ego and power and FOMO and sort of the short...
[0:44:16] Term incentives and kind of, you know, winning the game or fear of losing the game or whatever. The dispersion of how much different people have such different motivations and the degree to which a surprising number of people, for good or for bad, are totally oblivious to their own motivations. Like the number of people around us that I think genuinely can't see their own motivations, I would have assumed that was much smaller.
[0:44:47] And I think there are a lot of people that really don't. What surprised me on myself, I mean, you really can get used to almost anything. Like that is a remarkable human ability. I don't know, the degree to which I have been, I don't, I think, not that I was necessarily good at this, but just because I was forced to do it, the degree to which I can like kind of hold this stuff not too personally and just be like, okay, this is more about.
[0:45:23] Thank you so much, Sam. I think that...
[0:45:43] I can speak for everybody in that we are cheering you on to do the safe and right thing. And we don't really have a choice but to trust you to do it. So please do. And thank you for the time and the thoughts.