CCF At Home with Sam Altman

well thanks everybody for joining us for this the first edition of our clayton community foundation speaker series for 2021 tonight at home with sam altman the entrepreneur and venture capitalist one of the most quoted people in silicon valley now of course the ceo of open ai but most importantly perhaps a native of st louis in particular clayton missouri so we'll get into that but first a word about our friends at the clayton community foundation we started in 2008 we're a partner to the city of clayton focused on four things largely art history parks and sustainability the foundation has already raised about 10 million dollars since it started including two million dollars for the centen commons at shaw park which will transform the old ice rink into a year-round recreational facility for people of all ages and with the support of the community the foundation is now fundraising to save the pocket park on maryland avenue just east of the library and that's going to be very exciting stay tuned for more details about that the clayton neighborhoods video debuted in december just last month it features st st louis county historian esley hamilton who's sharing insights on eight neighborhoods the first video highlighted the hillcrest neighborhood and subsequent videos are going to take a look at carswell beamiston and others the foundation is also working on a historic site rather historic marker program and the first one which will be unveiled soon features the old attic school which was clayton's second school catering to young african american students and if you haven't seen the clayton autocast tour please do so now this is an audio tour taking you to public art and historic sites in clayton the ralph clayton society honors donors who have given a thousand dollars annually and you can learn more about that and other great programs with the clayton community foundation at claytoncommunityfoundation.org okay so much for the preface let's get to the heart of the program sam alton what can i say he has recently partnered with elon musk to start open ai researching artificial intelligence just got a billion dollars from microsoft to do that to just that was president of the y combinator this is an accelerator that nurtured and funded little companies that became big companies like airbnb dropbox stripe and reddit he was the founder of luke started that at the age of 19 and then sold it at the age of 26 for 43 million dollars forbes magazine in 2015 called sam one of the 30 under 30 in venture capital businessweek described our guest as one of the best young entrepreneurs in tech and as i said earlier one of the most quoted people in silicon valley sam altman thank you so much for sharing your time with the ccf this evening how are you i'm great thank you for having me here well it all started in clinton what do you remember uh cutting your teeth in clayton missouri um i was just thinking about that uh it was sort of like this idyllic place to go up i was uh we had like a gate out of our backyard and there was like a hole cut in the fence of captain i remember like very proudly the first day that my parents let me like walk to school by myself um through that little like up and alleyway and then through this sort of hole in the fence um and just sort of like goofing around in the backyard and yeah it was very lovely uh did you haunt qualities yeah a lot still do actually when i uh last time i was in town and at captain school i understand at the age of eight you had your first computer so in the second grade you were becoming computer literate is that accurate uh yeah yeah it was actually um it was in some sense like an easier time then to get started with programming you just sort of we had these old apple computers that would uh two gs's that would just sort of like boot up immediately into this like very simple programming environment so um i sort of it's sad for me that kids don't have that in quite the same way today uh but i think there's some companies that are trying to make it easy again yeah we got one at home when i was yeah maybe in third grade something like that did you take it apart and put it back together uh yeah yeah i actually just bought uh the same computer that we had at home um uh which was a mac lc2 i found one on ebay and uh i was amazed how much i remembered about the actual hardware of it so that was fun hadn't seen one in like 25 years or something and from the ralph elm captain school you uh took your studies to wydown middle yes most people don't like middle school how about you sam altman uh i mean it wasn't perfect but it was like pretty good on the whole i wouldn't want to go back to middle school but yeah i have i think fond memories at this point um now of course you're the ceo that's cool that's great high school was john burroughs of course yeah i think high school is easier than middle school well talk a little bit about your current mission at open ai um i am correct in saying that you're partnering with elon musk in this capacity we started open ai because we thought that this thing that was happening of us building digital intelligence us like humanity collectively building digital intelligence uh is going to be one of the most important milestones in human history and it could either go really well or really badly and uh we did not think there was enough effort to make sure that it happens safely and in a way that sort of humans broadly benefit um it's very hard to think about what the world is going to be like when we have superhuman capacity inside of a computer computers that can learn anything uh that can think billions of times faster smarter than the smartest human on every topic simultaneously and that eventually sort of become self-aware and have their own desires and will and none of the limitations that humans have and that is such a hard thing to think about that i think most people just don't or at least not for very long and we wanted to start an organization that was dedicated to kind of getting across that event horizon safely and in a way that humans as a whole were or as happy about as possible um i think this is going to be a bigger technological revolution than the the three great ones so far the agricultural revolution the industrial revolution the computer revolution all put together because fundamentally our our phenomenally phenomenal ability to think to learn to reason to generate new ideas like that's what makes us human uh that's part big huge part of what makes us human and when a computer starts doing that uh which is happening more and more every year everything is going to change so we started this org to see how we could contribute now science fiction writers have written about the harm that artificial intelligence can cause you know terminator 2 that sort of thing i mean do you fear that a computer that can do everything that a human mind can do and more could possibly uh pose a threat to civilization for sure the most important research we do is research around safety so how do you build these systems when we started it was maybe how do you build these systems at all and now that we're more confident that it's uh quite possible our most important research is how do you do this in a way that aligns with the collective set of human preferences how do you make sure these systems act in the interest of humanity that manage to be an extension of individual human will while also still like following the rules and not using their immense power to sort of like wreak havoc on the planet in the process and uh i'm more optimistic now that that's gonna be possible than i than i was when we started uh we've had a good last couple of years of safety research um but i think it's still quite challenging and and yes like i think the sci-fi writers have been right to be fretting about this for the last 50 years um it's interesting to go back and read the sci-fi sort of each decade as we learn more and more about what how the systems are going to work and kind of what the feel of the intelligence was going to be um i i think a lot of sci-fi still portrays that it's going to be very human and and my guess is that it will be quite intelligent um quite general purpose intelligence but in a pretty alien way where it will do some things that are just wildly better than what humans can do and still struggle with some things that we do and and so it's been interesting to watch as we've learned more and more about the technical roadmap how the sci-fi has updated every every decade and now everything's moving so fast how it updates every year well i'll tell you what when it comes to language it's updating really quickly almost to the point where some computer-generated voices and language sound identical to uh people down the street sam yeah um voice has been there for a few years but really last year we released something called gbt3 which could actually come up with the language the sentences uh that in many cases are human-like and i think in a few more years in in many cases will be superhuman you won't be able to tell if if something was written by an ai or a human um i'm excited for this i think uh we will be able to interact with computers in ways that are have been only in the realm of sci-fi when we can talk to them in natural language and they can really truly understand what we want them to do and manipulate language sort of as flexibly as we can um i think that is going to lead to a whole different way that we we interact with computers how about computers really truly understand us um the jobs question is tough and i'll tell you why like so so jobs jobs change by technology all the time if you look at this back the last several hundred years uh on average about 50 of the jobs turnover every 75 years because new technology comes along and you know we can adapt at least at that pace if it was 50 turnover in five or ten years that would maybe be hard um but when we think about policy to address the sort of the unavoidable changeover of jobs it's hard for two reasons number one is the what the new jobs of the future will be is quite difficult to predict um if we were sitting on the other side of the computer revolution it would have been very hard to predict the job of computer programmer um but also because technology itself often doesn't go the way you think if you had asked me 10 years ago to predict the order in which ai could do human jobs i would have said first blue collar labor then white collar labor and then finally like the last thing humans would hold on to is creativity so music art things like that and to my great surprise i would have been exactly wrong and the order in which ai is sort of rolling out is create creative applications first um so already it's quite good for making uh visual art and music um white collar job second so you'll you know people doing ai lawyers for example um and then it turns out that robots are just really hard and so doing like physical things in the real world i expect that to be less that's actually fascinating because you're right people think just the opposite um of course the business applications are pretty obvious though because uh now companies will be able to use artificial intelligence to lower the payroll among other things yeah um again as ai sort of joins the workforce i think we will see that unfold in lots of ways both wholesale replacing jobs but more commonly and i think this is going to be better for all of us and ai will do the 90 or the 80 percent of your job that you like the least and give you much more leverage to do the 10 or 20 that is hard for an ai to do that you really enjoy do you think there's any governmental applications i mean recently we've seen where the government's ability to handle a crisis is uh limited shall we say do you think that artificial intelligence can maybe tackle problems like modern day pandemics in a way that might be better than human beings have yeah i think for very complex coordination problems or very where you have to do like a lot of sophisticated modeling uh ai today can probably make much better decisions than humans can it's just too much to think about all at once so what was the interest in microsoft in uh partnering with you with a billion dollar investment by the way that's a billion as in b baby oh baby that's that's a lot of money sam um the the sort of i was gonna say the dirty secret but i don't even think it's like that bad the surprising thing about is that a lot of ai progress over the last few years has been has come from not coming up with smarter and smarter algorithms but just running them on bigger and bigger computers and so microsoft uh is incredibly capable of building super large super computers and like that span multiple data centers and uh we partner with them to do that then we and then uh we sort of help we're interested in doing the research to try to build this general purpose intelligence they're interested in taking it to create um products and so that's like a nice partnership for us both what what do you see in the near horizon how artificial intelligence through the work of open ai will manifest itself that people on the street might recognize uh the the one that i think some people have seen now and it's a good preview of what is to come are uh some of the self-driving features on cars it's it's far from perfect but it can do amazing things and once in a while you see this glimmer of like real reasoning in in the newest self-driving systems um but i think the next another big one soon will be the uh you will you will chat with systems like either via text or via voice and you'll be talking to a computer and it'll be so good you don't realize it so maybe a customer service call for sure very soon how about world leaders instead of speaking from a lectern or a podium just uh having a computer generate a speech for them with some sort of electronic signature i think that electronic signature is going to be important i think another thing that has started to happen but it's going to happen much more in the next couple of years is sort of the extreme version of deep fix where there will be videos of world leaders saying anything you want incendiary stuff you know claiming to have bombed some country on twitter and they'll be totally fake um but it will be the ai will have gotten so good at generating that it'll be almost impossible to tell without some sort of cryptographic signature so i think that's going to become really important sam before ai open ai you were of course with y combinator a silicon valley-based company that nurtured coached funded small companies that became big ones such as instacart doordash strike airbnb reddit and dropbox in fact you were there with the founders of airbnb on the very early days before they were a household were in america weren't you uh yeah it's a really wonderful program i didn't start that one but i did run it for a while i took over from the people that founded it uh it's it's sort of like a school for startups or sort of like a replacement for business school except it's only three months long and we give you the money instead of you paying us tuition um but we have you know tens of thousands of companies from around the around the world apply we would choose about 400 a year to fund um and these are just you know a handful of people and an idea and maybe a prototype and it is amazing how quickly they can make progress um and then we would sort of coach them help them and then you know later connect them to investors that could write larger checks than we could um but that was the model it was just sort of find the most talented but unknown entrepreneurs in the world and give them some money and help them as much as we could now if you took a look at the market caps of all the y combinator alums and added them up do you know what that number would be uh good question would be a lot um and we only own a tiny tiny slice maybe like 400 billion something like that 400 billion maybe what was it like what were the founders of airbnb like for example before they were rich and famous as it were uh one of the things that's surprising about y combinator the experience of that is that how quickly the founders of these companies go from being sort of like uh very unsure of themselves and unpolished and awkward to sort of just incredibly confident competent people and so that at least for the best founders the rate of transformation is just absolutely immense uh people start sort of you know like kind of you can even like you can see like a physical transformation in the way they walk into a room from the beginning to the end of the three-month program um but i'd say people start off uh on the whole like absolutely unremarkable and then very quickly through the challenges of having to run this company um become relentlessly determined and that that really comes across and it's it's uh it's very fun to watch i think it's probably like being a teacher in some sense are you the one who said for a young startup it's better to have 100 people who love your product or service than a hundred thousand people who like it yeah this was this is like a deeply counter-intuitive thing uh and it it it's it's so surprising to me how true it is um the explanation that i would give is it's it's much harder to build a product that people truly love um than it is to get more people to love it once you uh and so most startups want to like scale out and they take this thing that's okay and say oh we'll just get more people to do it and that gives us sort of like more total thrust um but the other way is to keep the same number of users and just make the product much better and then expand from there and uh almost without exception if you look at our best companies this is the way they go they first focus on the small number of users make the product incredible and they know that once they do that basically no matter what else they do it's going to grow i know you've been asked this question too many times but humor of me will you what do you want me what do you look for in a startup uh so there's a lot of things i'll try to talk about a few of the non-obvious ones um one is just you know can this founder become this relentlessly determined person that it takes to sort of face all of the trials and tribulations of a company over a decade and and continually learn and adapt and rise to meet the occasion um so that's like a big one another big one is is this person a fast mover and a fast improver that for me personally is one of the biggest and the way to that's very hard to tell in a single meeting but if you get to see them two or three times and you can note how quickly they're making progress and doing the things that you discuss in between meetings you can you can get a great sense of that um and so the rate of improvement and the rate of action is a huge thing that i look at um a third is how like founders end up having to sort of be the chief evangelist for the company you have to recruit people you have to talk to investors to raise money talk to the press sell to customers uh and and can this founder kind of be this infectious evangelist um does this founder make me want to join their company and if not that's sort of like fairly hard to teach it's hard to like really authentically fake the path the level of passion for a particular thing that takes to get there and then finally like do i think that the business makes sense do i think the market is going to grow quickly most investors want a market that's very big right now i think that's a mistake i'm a big believer and you want a market that is small today but going to grow quite rapidly um quality of the product i guess that's it that's the first question you once said and i'm paraphrasing here that you notice that successful startups are headed by people who didn't grow up in the most in the richest households or the poorest ones can you kind of follow up on that um yeah i i don't it was more like an observation than a diagnosis of the reason but like looking around at most of the successful founders we funded they kind of grew up upper middle class and not with very little deviation in either direction how how did um your parents feel when you dropped out of stanford at the age of 19 sam altman um well a cool thing about stanford is that they make it they like let you go back no questions asked for a long period of time i forget exactly how long but a long time and so i sort of was like oh i'm going to do this i have no idea what's going to happen um i don't remember exactly how they responded it wasn't bad it was they were just like okay like you sure but at the very worst it was like are you sure and maybe it was like that sounds great i don't remember it wasn't it was just like okay that's kind of a blessing for a younger shower it's a huge blessing huge blessing and and um okay so you started a company called loot and uh you were 19 years old looped kind of identified where people were right yeah and uh you you had seven years with that before you sold it at the age of 26 for 43 million dollars yeah it didn't go quite how we wanted um but you know like i think a good thing about silicon valley is it's okay to just say well we learned something and on to the next thing and we'll try to make this next one better boy it does there seems to be a pattern here uh between you bill gates steve jobs michael dell a lot of guys are dropped out of college i think college is there are things about college that are very good um but i do think and you know i think this has now become like a especially in the last year a more mainstream belief is it is um given the cost and amount of time uh it is easy to imagine that there are better ways to spend those four years i certainly felt like i learned i loved the time i spent at college um but i certainly felt like i learned more in the two years right after college than the two years during now stanford allows you to go back are you thinking about doing that someday i've passed the i i can't go back anymore i passed it oh there is a um there's a limit as to how many years there is yeah something tells me though that if you apply you might get admitted i don't know maybe um might be some stanford connections in the clayton community who can uh you know pull a string or two for you sam altman um a couple of questions in no particular order of importance if you don't mind at one point point you were the ceo of reddit for 10 days what was the story there um we had a ceo quit during a board meeting which is like a very rare thing to happen never seen it before since uh and it took us a little while to figure out the succession plan we were caught totally off guard so everybody you know the management team sort of yeah technically reported to me i had joined i was a recent investor and joined the board and kind of was the only person local so i got very involved for a few days and uh then we had an interim ceo and then the after that the original founder returned to run the company well i hope you agreed to a uh a nice pension when you left the firm i did not get one but that's okay it's very enjoyable people talk about the diversity or the lack thereof in silicon valley i haven't been out there what is the demographic makeup of silicon valley uh unfortunately it mostly looks like me um it's i think there has been a lot of effort to diversify silicon valley um and there's been moderate success but not not enough uh i think it's like a a hard problem and it's like hard to talk about without sort of it you know devolving into like a lot of fights and name calling um i think it is finally on a better trajectory uh and we're making material progress but it is it takes a long time to to get these changes to actually sort of propagate all the way through the system um because it sort of changes what you it really means like change what you sort of study in high school in college and then it takes however long it takes you in your career to be able to you know become an investor and then i think change really happens so i think it's moving um in the right direction but it's it's been slow can somebody fund some scholarships for minorities there's a ton of that um that has not that has not moved the needle enough i think what is having a better effect are dedicated efforts around mentorship and uh like startup funding um but even that it's just like it's a very long cycle how about some of the folks from st louis who have pretty decent presences in san francisco and silicon valley one that comes to mind is john doerr d-o-e-r-r uh big venture capitalist another would be uh jack dorsey of uh square and twitter jim mckelvey also do you ever run into uh the diaspora from st louis i do yeah i see i see them all occasionally um and we always talk about stainless do you think that st louis could possibly be a tech startup hub or a silicon valley of the midwest anything in that order sort of what i think is gonna happen is that uh startups and tech are just gonna disperse all over the country now um i think like a it's just an interesting field b the bay area has been like horrifically badly managed uh and the cost of lineage has gotten super high so i i don't think that there will ever quite be like another silicon valley with the same level of density but i think there will be lots more startups and technology everywhere yeah it has kind of moved around hasn't it because before you were around there was the route 128 corridor in boston yeah and then that kind of moved to san francisco or silicon valley and now i mean from what i read in the paper you know about this better than i do a lot of firms are moving to austin texas sam i still don't know what to make of that um again i think like there's just this drive out of california right now for a bunch of reasons um how long and how far that goes and where that settles and if it's one place or just sort of a scatter everywhere i think we really don't know now um would you consider starting an office in austin or st louis we decided that for now like we're actually a relatively small organization by a number of people that work there so we've decided it doesn't make sense for us to have multiple offices um but yeah it's something i could imagine us doing some day if we were like five times bigger than we are now you know and sometimes people are looking at san francisco these days and they see that uh at least in the pandemic it's not the city that it was and the the price of real estate is actually going down a little bit we're told i don't know if that's quite possible but um is it possible that san francisco's warts will actually discourage people from moving there or is there sure i mean it even discourages me from living here it's really like quite a shame i think the state that the city has gotten into like how so um i think that the lack of success that the city has had dealing with homelessness and drug abuse and crime and sort of just general unpleasantness and broken infrastructure like that's all basically true as reported and it's really just sort of depressing and sort of inhumane and it just doesn't feel good to be a part of it i think we're all hopeful it'll get better um but it hasn't it's it's been trending worse we're getting some questions via text we encourage everybody to do that plus we also have some questions out there that we're gonna get some answers to we had some zoom poll questions for those who've joined us with you sam um someone just suggested that you finish your degree at washu okay um i barely have time to even like read books anymore i i don't i actually would love to just have a couple of years to study but it doesn't seem super likely uh and here's some of our poll questions um what would you like artificial intelligence to do give medical advice drive your car teach you new things solve pressing world problems um i'm going to guess sam that you would probably say solve world problems yeah i'll pick that one okay uh our other question and by the way folks we're asking you to vote on these now are you willing to share your personal data to make your experiences with technology more tailored to you yes probably or no i'm not sure what the the last possibility there is so we'll get the results of that we ask people to um uh respond to those accordingly um sam i don't want to get too personal here but you once credited your mom with being one of the big reasons for your success very true she was not she's not a tech pioneer she's a dermatologist by trained right but what was it that your mom did that was so helpful to you uh oh man so many things i i i mean i think like fundamentally there's like all these things that are like luck of the draw of how you're born but having good parents who are like are very sort of supportive uh who sort of make sure you get a great education who sort of like help you discover who you what you're good at and what you're going to be and sort of whatever that is help you do more of it um that's that's probably like the most unfair advantage you can get in life uh and i had a you know outlier like 99.99 percentile mom in terms of that um and yeah i don't think people ever acknowledge like of all of the injustices in the world like what a great thing that is to have um but my mom is super great about that where did you develop your love of learning um i'd say it's more like a curiosity and i don't know where that came from you always had it i mean if you're taking up our computers at the age of eight i guess so i don't um i actually didn't yeah i don't remember i didn't love school when i was a very little kid i eventually did um sort of like academically i would say somewhat of a late bloomer um but i was always like quite curious okay uh and we have some answers to the poll i guess uh most people would like artificial intelligence to solve world problems so they're agreeing with you on that one and uh are you willing to share your personal data name location etc to make your experiences with technology more tailored to you 69 say probably but would like some control over my privacy are you concerned about privacy yeah i i like i i think most people act and me too i think net out to that answer that was the top of the poll answer which is that as long as i can have some control i'm willing to trade some privacy in exchange for better services but ai is going to push that so far you know i think if we look forward five or seven years from now we'll all basically have like an alter ego ai that listens to everything we ever say it reads everything we ever type it knows everything about us um and in exchange it sort of like all of the information we could ever want to sort of like right there at the moment we need it uh but that the the depth of the trade-off of privacy for utility there is going to be bigger than anything we've faced before and i'm not entirely sure how people are going to think about that um do you believe that we can build a machine that can do everything that a human brain can do i do how many years are we away from that sam that part i don't know um i think like i think that sort of nothing that is not prevented anything that is not prevented by the laws of physics we will eventually figure out how to do and you know in a human brain uh everything you are everything you think every memory you have every part of your personality everything you know um is stored in about a hundred billion neurons in your brain that have about 100 trillion synapses in between them and are kind of connected and trained they learn in this very complicated uh way and then you know it's there's also like we could sort of say there's like some hormones having an effect on neurons that we need to model as well but for the most part it's just energy flowing through this network of 100 trillion connections that's it that's you um and remarkable complexity comes out of that uh we will eventually replicate that same thing uh artificially in a computer we still have a long way to go like 100 trillion is massively big even relative to our biggest computers of today but we'll get there and we already have one algorithm that can learn like this is a miracle the big miracle i think of building ai is already behind us once you have an algorithm that can learn um everything else including eventually i think self-awareness emerges because the sort of smarter if a system is going to be really smart it has to understand every other agent in the world including eventually itself um and so i think we have this one thing from which everything else emerges and we know that uh at a fundamental sys at a fundamental level sort of this idea of a neural network whether it's biological or inside of the computer can seem to produce uh and learn and remember almost any behavior so we have a lot more research to do in a ton of engineering but yeah we'll get there uh how long i don't know that's that's really hard but what about love so this is a big question i think all eventually i think things that the full range and depth of human emotions will eventually come in these systems but that may not be in our lifetimes okay questions from those who are following us tonight we thank everybody for joining us here's one what will be the impact on the human brain if we don't have to work it the same way that we do now will our brains be impacted so yeah in the short term i think probably people growing up today are already having their own their their what we call wet neural networks trained differently um because they're faced with different things and sort of what you study in school is different how you spend your time is different when you work on your job is different memorizing facts is not as valuable as it used to be so i think that change is already happening a longer-term question about the impact on our brains is what happens when we connect them to computers a company called neurolink also started by elon in san francisco is working on connecting human brains to computers and although it's quite early they're finding that even with their very rudimentary device they can have a huge impact on change in the human brain today mostly by sort of producing uh neural hormones on demand but they can also cause certain neurons to fire and not fire and um i think the line between human and machine is going to get quite blurry around the brain do you think that young people with uh constant use of cell phones are already re wiring their neurological networks 100 guaranteed and i would i would guess not in a good way although maybe this is like sort of always you know it was better when i was a kid kind of thing and maybe it's fine but for sure it's very different okay let's get another question here um could we be more creative if we don't have to do other stuff i i believe that that is uh almost certain to be the case um every time we have been able to free up more of our collective brain power and capacity to think about newer and more interesting problems by removing the sort of base things we have to do we have stepped up to the occasion and uh you know done wonderful things um wondering if sam read the crucible by james rollins for a non-tech for non-tech person opened my eyes on things under discussion it is in my book stack but i have not read it yet i'm i'm looking forward to it also any recommendation for reading um i don't think any of the books about sort of general purpose ai and what's going to happen are great um i think a book called super intelligence by nick bostrom is one of the best um i think the best i think there's like many good short stories uh two that just came to mind um one is called the last question and one is called crystal knights i think crystal knights um about sort of ai sci-fi excellent well hopefully somebody's writing these down so we can share them uh how about this some of your favorite places when you're back in st louis any restaurants um sadly coffee cartel closed but the uh mocha frappe coffee cartel was basically like my favorite item at a restaurant anywhere for many years no kidding yeah they closed just about two years ago yeah i might concur with you on that one what are your thoughts on japanese robots meant to replace human emotional interaction i find it uncanny valley and uncomfortable um although at some level i realized that's hopefully not replaced but that they are going to supplement human emotional interaction um probably what i think the bigger thing that's going to happen is our people uh something closer to the movie her where people talk to chatbots and really develop these super deep emotional connections not to a physical robot but just something that they're texting in the ether um and that i expect to happen fairly soon um and i have like very complicated thoughts about that but i think it is probably unstoppable do you believe that um artificial intelligence should not try to look like a human being i don't have a strong opinion about like how that it doesn't seem to me to be the most important problem but i could easily be wrong and it really is quite significant with god without getting in too much detail give us a little insight into the one and only elon musk um what do you want to know well you're probably one of the few people who's actually uh i don't think people around st louis work with them know the man um tell us what it's like to be his partner it's super smart uh really cares about sort of being maximally useful to humanity surprisingly funny uh which it just like actually like laughs a lot and like quite funny much more so than you would sort of think given the seriousness of how much he's uh how much he works um and just sort of like yeah fun-loving pretty jolly guy um super good at uh not ever super good instincts on what is possible versus impossible when it comes to sort of engineering the limits of physics um i definitely want to like like just such an outlier for capacity to work another question for you do you believe ai is possible without the next big unlock in computer technology quantum software hardware co-design etc i do um i do but i i think that is not a majority opinion um i i have heard the theories about why there's some weird quantum coherence going on in the brain that we can't for consciousness that we can't get to with um classical systems i think it's unlikely personally um i i think we may need bigger chips or faster interconnects or both probably but i think we're on the linear path not the kind of we need a new miracle path um do you get stressed um sometimes but like one of the advantages of working do it being around startups for a long time is you realize that like almost nothing is as bad as it seems and even if you sort of don't know what to do in the first moment you can figure it out and evolve as you go um i definitely do get stressed thinking about like what's gonna happen if we like really screw up agi um but it's more like that kind of like long-term existential stress rather than the kind of like short term i'm annoyed at this person or you know like something's blowing up at the company um but that happens sometimes too the new york times had a story on you and others out of silicon valley that a number of people in your neck of the woods are you know preparing to live off the grid if necessary in some in case of some eventuality can you and the term used to describe people who do this is prepper which i don't completely understand maybe you could fill me in it means like being prepared so be uh that's where prepper comes from you know like i think we used to all get made fun of a lot more before the pandemic struck and then people were like oh maybe we should have like you know put slightly more mental energy into this um i think technology is just going to make the world increasingly high vol and a little bit of effort to think about like okay what are the kinds of things that could go wrong like a new pandemic um and how can i put a little bit of effort into being ready for that is super reasonable um the characterization of the press like looking for another reason to hate on text people which i don't blame them for um i think bears like very limited connection to reality yeah i once interviewed an associate conductor for the boston pops harry ellis dixon who described the press as unnecessary evils but you've done pretty well when it comes to uh press coverage sam oh i would say terribly but but again i think that's okay like we're i think like you know tech got to run around unaccountably for a while and that was bad and uh i think like a tough press is um like a necessary pain um but i think the kind of all sure it goes too far and it's like you know too reflexively negative but um some accountability for tech is is certainly much better than them how much do you work each week on average and what do you love to do when you're not working um [Music] not a crazy amount i'm not one of these like 100 hours a week so i can't do that and i i'm i don't understand the people who can and i choose to just believe they're all taking adderall or something but uh i wish i could do that but i can't i probably work like a productive i don't know maybe like a pretty productive 60 hours in a week um and what do i like i don't know hang out with friends go hiking be outside exercise read books cook eat nothing to it nothing nothing too exciting do you think most people have no idea how hard successful startup business men and women work yeah i think in the first few years of getting a new business off actually no just all the way through uh i think these most of these people tend to work super hard i was once told if you don't want to work hard don't start a company buy a franchise because interesting you get to work much less hard then well you could buy a franchise that's like like a bunch of great clips you're not cutting the hair but you kind of own the place so that the franchise is for the entrepreneur who doesn't really want to put in 60 to 100 hours a week interesting yeah yeah startup startups are tough uh we we always try to like advertise this um to people that were thinking about applying to yc but uh if it if you are successful the degree to which it will take over your life um i think most people underestimate oh absolutely and um do you have any favorites that you nurtured at the y combinator and that really benefited from your expertise in coaching and that you're proud to say wow look at them a great american success story or maybe a great israeli or european success story because i know many of uh those who went through your boot camp are from all around the world but any that you are especially proud of to see how well they've done you mentioned my mom earlier uh one thing that she was always very good about despite our uh lobbying efforts to the contrary was never picking a favorite child um i will not pick a favorite child here um but categorically the companies that are working on kind of what i call the hard tech problems nuclear energy sort of infectious disease stopping infectious disease um going to space those those are the category of companies that i have the most fun with and nuclear energy has typically had some issues such as where to dispose the waste but by and large it's clean it's cheap and it sure would be nice if we could get more of it sure would be nice so you're a proponent of it you are huge yeah i think we're gonna get um some new progress there in the next few years um one of our companies called the oculos submitted an advanced reactor design to the nrc that sounds like it'll be accepted first one ever it's pretty cool and and of course the big question what were you to dispose the waste to have they addressed this so one of the things that i think is really cool with the new reactor designs is how much you can reuse waste back as sort of new fuel via reprocessing um and there may still be tiny amounts of waste that need to get stored but i don't think we're kind of no one's advocating that we well some people are i'm not advocating that we just sort of scale up the old existing designs and generate a lot of waste i think there's just much better ways to do this now sam you have been too generous with your time with your native clayton missouri this has been a real pleasure the pleasure was ours and we thank you so much um on behalf of everyone with the clayton community foundation and the entire uh city we thank you for the time you shared with us if we could be helpful in any way to you please let us know uh best to all the altmans and as they say to be continued thanks for having me thank you so much sam altman ladies and gentlemen thank you so much for joining us we sure appreciate it we'll be back next what month with another installment um so please stay tuned by following us at claytoncommunityfoundation.org have a great evening and go greyhounds or whatsburrows the rams the bombers the bombers go bombers thank you so much you

Channel: Clayton Community Foundation

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Id: DEm696JYrBQ

Length: 50min 40sec (3040 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 14 2021