[0:00:00] For energy, and there's no one better place to talk to us a little bit more about this new frontier, energy and AI, than the co-founder and CEO of OpenAI, Sam Altman. Please join me in welcoming him. And following Sam's remarks, we're going to have a Q&A with the editor-in-chief of The National, Mina Al-Arabi. Sam, it's our great pleasure to welcome you here to the 42nd edition of Out of Peck. Thank you. Your Highnesses, Your Excellencies, distinguished guests, it's an honor to be here.
[0:00:36] And it really is an honor to witness the determination and resilience and leadership of the UAE in such a time. It does not go unnoticed by the rest of the world. And I have just tremendous respect for everything you all are doing. Dr. Sultan said something that really resonated with me, which is for a long time, the AI industry has talked about what it needs from the energy industry. And now I think we can repay the favor.
[0:01:05] And not only can we repay the favor, not only can AI enable the energy industry in an incredible new way, the world is going to need much more energy. For my whole career, my two greatest interests have been AI and energy. I never thought they were going to come together in quite this way. But the idea to have new ideas and to give people more potential to use AI is good, but it's much better if people can do things in the world. And to make things happen in the physical world where we all live.
[0:01:34] is going to require much more energy. So I am tremendously excited for AI to begin to help enable the energy industry. And I'm even more excited to see what the world can do with the inspiration and ideas and output and leverage that people are getting from using AI with abundant energy to sort of make all of these wonderful things happen. This is a very interesting time in the field of AI.
[0:02:03] In recent years, we've seen AI begin to transform the way work is done. People can use things like ChatGPT to work at a much more efficient level. And we're even beginning to see people use AI as a sort of virtual colleague or teammate and have the ability to get much more work done with fewer people and much more leverage. But as excited as I am about enabling people to be able to do more and be more productive,
[0:02:31] I'm even more excited for what's beginning to happen with AI and discovery. In the last few months, we have seen AI begin to solve math problems that people have been unable to solve. We are benefiting from new knowledge as a society, as humanity, that we didn't have before because AI is now so smart and so capable that we can get this. And that same technology is going to apply to every field of science.
[0:03:00] And it's going to apply to the complex problems that you all face to produce and deliver the energy the world depends on. And the ability for an energy company to say, I need to produce more energy more efficiently, and maybe that'll need new materials, maybe that'll need new turbine designs, maybe that'll need better operations. But whatever that is, to ask a sophisticated AI system to figure this out, I think is going to transform the abundance and efficiency of energy for the world.
[0:03:30] And the models that we have now are capable of this for the first time. This is really just a few months old. And this is part of why we're so excited and so grateful for the partnership with AdNoc. The ability to bring this technology, this ability, this new ability of AI to innovate and to invent with such a forward-thinking partner and nation is something that we've been waiting to do for a very long time.
[0:03:56] And we hope that it's something that the world will be able to look at as a case of this new generation of AI. And so we've been thrilled to be able to work with AdNoc and to put ChatGPT and GPT-6 and future models that we'll have soon in the hands of people. But now I think we really have the opportunity to do something transformative. For a while, people have talked about AI as this new industrial evolution. And that's OK. But I think we're now seeing the potential of something much better.
[0:04:26] And the way we started talking about it is it feels much more like a new renaissance. The ability for someone to sit with AI, talk about a broad range of problems and ideas, come up with a sophisticated solution, invent great new stuff, really just hugely lever up what they can do in their understanding of the problem and how they can contribute to society is something that I've never seen before. I certainly didn't think we were going to be here at this moment with AI, but it's tremendously exciting. And again,
[0:04:55] Back to the point about AI needed energy, now AI can benefit energy, and soon the world is going to need much more energy to enjoy these tremendous benefits. I think what we will see the citizens of the world do to be useful, to create, to provide new things for each other, is something that is hard to really imagine the depth of at this point. But it really does feel like we are on the precipice of enabling people to thrive and create like they never have before.
[0:05:26] We'll see an economic transformation along with that. It's really quite amazing. I gave this math example earlier. It was one of the most incredible moments I've ever seen in the history of AI. And I think you will all soon be able to witness a moment like this in our companies when we proved the first Millennium Prize problem. It was 10,000 agents of the model that is going to be released soon, the next GPT, working for about four days.
[0:05:56] Non-stop, collaborating with each other perfectly. There was no hierarchy. There were no bosses. It was fully decentralized. The agents were able to explore whatever direction they wanted. They were able to share progress. They were able to learn from each other and make their own decisions about what to work on. This is an incredible new way that work can happen, that discovery can happen. And the opportunity to be at the forefront of that and to hopefully partner with all of you to transform this incredibly...
[0:06:25] Important asset for society is something that we are very honored to get to play a role in. So I look forward to the Q&A. Thank you very much for inviting me here. And I look forward to doing great work together. Your Highness, Highnesses, Excellencies. Sam, thank you for those compelling words. A new renaissance. Now, of course, this morning we had the announcement of agreements you've signed with Abu Dhabi across energy, education, investment, government.
[0:07:04] It's incredible to see. Can I ask you, what makes this approach stand out here in Abu Dhabi, the adoption of AI at scale? And what can we learn from this partnership? I think the UAE has consistently been the most forward-looking country in the world for AI adoption. Going back to right after ChatGPT launched and even before that, this is a country that has decided to bet all in on AI throughout the government.
[0:07:35] Throughout the economy, the use, I think it's 80% of young people are ChatGPT weekly active users, one of the highest of any country. It's an incredible embrace. And I think it has come from the leadership. And there has just been an acknowledgement that societies have to bet on this technology and the societies that embrace it the most and the earliest will thrive the most. So we're thrilled for the partnerships today.
[0:08:04] And I think they are just another step along a long relationship between OpenAI and the UAE and a shared belief in what AI can do to transform a country and an economy. Of course, we're here at the opening ceremony of ADIPEC and the ad-hoc agreement with G42 and, of course, OpenAI for OpenAI frontier adoption.
[0:08:27] Tell us what that means, how that can reshape the energy industry. This is the first energy company in the world to adopt OpenAI Frontier, so quite exciting. How will it reshape the energy industry, but also looking at what should they be thinking about next? G42 in particular has been a longstanding and visionary partner of ours. And the relationship between G42 and AdNoc and us is something that we've been talking about.
[0:08:57] for a couple of years, and now the models have caught up. I think there is really an opportunity to say, we're gonna use the ability of these models now to understand a complex system, to invent, to innovate, and say, we're gonna take the hardest, most valuable problems that AdNoc faces and figure out how we can use the absolute frontier of AI with a lot of capacity to deliver fast and huge results. And I think we are all
[0:09:28] We're all not dreaming big enough because we're all kind of used to last year's models. And so we have maybe some intuition for what was possible. But watching what these models can do now, you know, we've got to go find the biggest problems to take on that we can. And I think that we're all going to be surprised on the upside. I mean, not dreaming big enough is not a problem we have in the UAE. It's one of the reasons we love it here. We can't keep up with the dreams here.
[0:09:54] Now, there is a lot of concern about how much energy AI will need. And as Dr. Sultan said in his speech now, we also now will see what AI can do for energy. So I want to ask you about that, between the concern of how much energy is needed for AI, but also the hope of what it can unlock, that dreaming big enough. Looking five years out, where do you think we land between the concern of AI needs, but also the incredible potential? On one hand, the energy per query.
[0:10:26] is falling incredibly dramatically. We're just delivering huge efficiency gains. We're thousands or hundreds of thousands of times maybe more efficient than we were three or four years ago. On the other hand, as we make it more efficient, people just want to use it much more. And I think we, the AI industry and the energy industry, have an obligation to society to deliver that. If people can get great medical advice to say nothing of new drugs, if every child in the world can get a great education,
[0:10:56] If people can have a much higher quality of life, like we want people to use a lot of AI. A statistic that I find amazing about this is six years ago, the token leader in the world that worked at OpenAI was using 100,000 tokens a month. And it seemed ridiculous to us. The global average was like zero. Now the global average per capita is about 100,000 tokens a month. And the token leader uses about 500 billion tokens a month.
[0:11:24] So this is just an unbelievable growth rate of how much people want to use AI. And I think this is going to keep going. And I think we need to enable this for people because there's so much good. Now, as you said, we're going to see what AI can do for energy. We would like to more than return the favor of the energy demands that we'll have by making a net gain for energy availability in the world. And then there was a second part of what you said, which is people are nervous about the impact AI is going.
[0:11:55] At the start of this year, this is very approximate because it's spiky, and it's not true in all ways, but AI was mostly not as smart as our smartest scientists, and now it's mostly smarter than them. And AI was mostly not able to do a lot of white-collar jobs, and now it mostly can do a lot of parts of that. I think we're going to navigate through this all fine. I think we're going to be reminded of how much people care about other people, how much human creativity matters, how much human judgment matters.
[0:12:25] How much we want people to stand behind that judgment. So although it looks incredibly disruptive to the economy and people are nervous about that, I think we're going to navigate our way through it. We'll find ways to adjust our jobs. I think there are, though, going to be big questions about as these systems get so smart, how do we guarantee and how do we give the world comfort with that guarantee that we are going to avoid serious safety and alignment incidents? And I think that'll be increasingly important for our industry to demonstrate.
[0:12:57] It's great that you bring up this point of answering to it and that, you know, how you see your own responsibility in that, because of course, you know, what's driving this conversation in the last few weeks, we've had a lot of questions about the points you raise about where AI takes us as societies. So I want to see how you see your own responsibility in that. We feel a lot of responsibility.
[0:13:24] We don't think we should get to be the decision makers, but we see what's coming. And we also don't think we should be sort of amoral tool makers. We want to express our values in what we build. And here is a very central point. And I can't believe that this differentiates us from other AI companies, but it does. We think it is absolutely critical that people remain in control of the future. Like there are a lot of other things we can debate, but on this one, we think there must be no room for debate. There should not be a handoff to AI.
[0:13:52] There should not be a gradual, you know, we're going to let AI decide what is best for us. AI needs to be a tool built for people. AI needs to serve people, not the other way around. And this is a value that we intend to really go fight for. And I wish it didn't need to be said. You spoke now about the fact that nobody could have envisioned the growth of the use of GPT. So I want to ask you personally,
[0:14:18] Did you think it would change the world in the way it has and how the world sees AI? I thought that AI would, of course, change the world. But did we know that ChatGPT was going to be the particular product that kicked off the revolution? No, of course not. We had launched products before. We've launched products after. We had models before. We had better models after. That particular intersection of GPT 3.5 being the first model that was good enough.
[0:14:47] And chat being the right form factor. We were excited about it. We were optimistic about it. But we did not know that this was going to be the moment. Okay, so this is fire round. Brief questions so we can help everyone get on with their day. So very quickly, what's one challenge you're facing today? Energy. We're going to solve it for the next four days. I think this is a really remarkable observation about the world.
[0:15:23] Everything else we're going to make huge progress on. We're going to make more efficient models. We're going to have robots that can make chip fabs more efficient and assemble racks for us. We can bring down the cost of delivering great AI in almost every way, except, you know, atoms are still atoms. And the physical world that has to power this, that's going to be...
[0:15:50] I think the very dominant factor of the cost and the abundance and how much we can create. Here in the UAE, we always think about what excites us about the future. So I'm going to ask you that. What excites you about the future? I kind of feel awe looking at what the models can do and especially watching kids use the models who had, you know, they never grew up not expecting a computer to be able to do anything they asked. And so I feel my own limitations because I kind of...
[0:16:24] Have some thoughts. And I'm like, oh, that problem is going to be too hard. The AI is probably not going to do that. I'm not even going to try. But the idea that people can sit in front of a computer and dream up anything, any wish, and co-create that with the AI. And the quality of stuff we're all going to get, the creative expression, the way we're going to be able to kind of contribute to our communities and how much better life can be for people. To say nothing of the AI, inventing new science that we all benefit from too.
[0:16:53] This is just amazing. And on that note, thank you very much, Sam, for your time. Thank you for taking my questions. Thank you all for your time. Thank you very much. Thank you. That was great. And on that note, this does conclude our opening ceremony. Thank you so much, Your Highness. Thank you so much, Your Excellency. And we wish all of you a very fruitful and productive ADAPAC. Thank you.