Sam Altman on OpenAI, Future Risks and Rewards, and Artificial General Intelligence

Sam thank you again for being here backstage Sam said this was the most fun thing he'd be doing all week so I hope you don't the only fun moment Whole New York this is great um we have a lot of questions for you appreciate uh your time the first one I think uh on the minds of many people in the room tonight uh what the hell happened um it's a good opener thank you a lot of things it it's honestly it's been a crazy whole year like in the context of everything that has happened to us this last 3 weeks or month or whatever it's been it stands out but not as much as you would think it should we we kind of like went from this unknown research lab to this like reasonably well-known tech company in a year and I think that takes most companies like 10 years and that's been a wild experience to live through um of course these last few weeks have been particularly crazy uh and sort of like painful and exhausting and happy to like be back to work um to say something like empathetic uh I think everybody involved in this as we get closer and closer to Super intelligence um everybody involved gets more stressed and more anxious and we realize the stakes are higher and higher and I think that all exploded how do you think this moment has changed open AI um it's been extremely painful for me personally but I actually think it's been great for open AI um we've never been more unified uh we have never been more sort of determined and focused and we always said that some Moment Like This would come between where we were in in in building AGI I didn't think it was going to come so soon but I think we are stronger for having gone through it uh again I like wouldn't wish it on an enemy but it it did it did have an extremely positive effect on the company and what did you learn from it um I haven't like fully recompiled reality yet it like I didn't I haven't had the time to like emotionally process all of this because it was like it all happened so fast and then I had to like come back in and pick up the pieces um that I haven't had time to like sit down and really reflect as much as I would like but I I would say the most important thing that I learned um you know a thing I had always heard as like a cliche or whatever is that your job as a CEO is how much like the people you hire and how much you sort of develop and Mentor your team and the proudest moment for me in all of this craziness was realizing that the executive team could totally run the company without me I can go retire opening eye will be fine and I'm super proud of the people to do that and to watch them work at a time where I couldn't really talk to them um but they did an amazing job really made me very proud and it also made me very optimistic because I think as we do get closer to artificial general intelligence is the stakes increase here um the ability for the open AI team to operate in uncertainty and stressful times is is like really that should be of interest to the world you you describing how high the stakes are here what do you say to someone who says this company brought itself to the brink of self-destruction how can we trust its leader and how can we trust its company with this transformative technology um we have to make changes I I we we always said that we didn't want AGI to be controlled by a small set of people we wanted to be democratized and we clearly got that wrong so I think if we don't make if we don't improve our governance structure if we don't improve our the way we interact with the world people shouldn't but we're very motivated to improve that on those changes um your former uh co-founder Elon Musk former person of the year um has described open AI as a closed sourced maximum profit company effectively gr effectively controlled by Microsoft uh is Elon wrong on all of those topics and any others you and you know I actually in spite of his like constant attacks on openi I'm very grateful that Elon exists in the world I think why because I think he's done some amazing things I I think the transition to electric vehicles is super important um I think getting to space is super important uh and I'm grateful for those things you know we're definitely not maximum profit seeking although you could talk to Elon about some of his Ventures for that one um and we open source a lot of stuff will open source more in the future and we're certainly not controlled by Microsoft um and I think all that is something that someone can say but does not actually reflect the truth um a thought on a question about another competitor Google released Gemini last week um a model that Google claims outperforms GPT for on many performance tests what do you make of Gemini and why did it take them so long to release it I'm happy for more people to be making AI progress I think I think AI will be the most the single most transformative technology of this era and so more people doing that I think is great when the Big Gemini model I forget what it's called I think Gemini Ultra when that gets released sometime next year we'll get to look at it I can weigh in on it then um certainly there's been a lot of confusion around the metrics but I'm I'm I'm sure Google will do great work uh in an interview earlier this year with Edward Felsenthal you said uh my my predecessor As Time editor-in Chief you said I am a Midwestern Jew I think that fully explains my mental model yeah that's like is that true you still feel that way no I think it's like a compressed one sentence to like explain everything about what I I think that's pretty good as a um as a New England Jew I have to ask you um how does Judy judism shape your worldview and what has it been like to been a Jewish leader since October 7th you know if you had asked me this question at the beginning of the year um I would have said there's all of these like subtle but important cultural things that have I think shaped my worldview and how I act and how I sort of live my life and I wouldn't have talked about anything other than that and one of one of the weird things about being Jewish and getting internet famous is like most of your online experience is people saying like horrible things about Jews and I don't know if that was always the case or if that's like ramped up but that's certainly been my experience this year and on double time since o since the last couple of months um I think I was just like wrong to be so dismissive of this I was like look anti-Semitism we're done with that the world has moved on there's other problems let's talk about those and I have really seen in this this last year and particularly in this last couple of months that I was just completely wrong about that and it's like a sad sad thing for the world you're someone who likes to take on intractable problems as you've thought about that you know how do you think about Solutions towards that that one seems harder than AGI uh speaking of difficult problems uh next year is a historic year for democracy there will be elections in 40 countries um are you concerned at all about ai's ability to contribute to disinformation and or do you have do you think there are specific conerns that we're not concerns that you think we're not taking seriously enough yeah so I think AGI will be the most powerful technology Humanity has yet invented and like any other previous powerful technology that will lead to incredible new things I think we'll see education change deeply and improved forever I think the kids that start kindergarten today by the time they graduate 12th grade will be smarter and better prepared than the best kids of today I think that's great I think we talk about the same thing in a lot of other things Healthcare people who program for a living a lot of other knowledge work but there are going to be real downsides and one of those I mean there'll be many that we'll have to mitigate but one of those is going to be around um the persuasive ability of these models and the ability for them to affect elections next year and I think we're going to really confront something quite challenging so what's that going to look like you could have so so right now um there like troll farms and whatever foreign country who are trying to interfere with our elections they make one great Meme and that spreads out and all of us see the same thing on Twitter Facebook or whatever that'll continue to happen and that'll get better but a thing that I'm more concerned about is what happens if an AI reads everything you've ever written online all every article every tweet every everything and then right at the exact moment sends you one message customized for you that really changes the way you think about the world um that's like a new kind of interference that just wasn't possible before AI I find in most conversations with you people are processing Their Fear so if you'll allow me um is is AI good or bad for media one thing I always say is no one knows what happens next I think the way technology goes predictions are often wrong the future is like subtle and nuanced and dependent on many branching probabilities uh so the honest answer is I don't know but I think it's going to be more good than bad it will be bad in all sorts of ways but I think it Nets out to something good as people have more free time um more attention and also care more about the people they trust to help them make sense of the world to help them decide what to trust and how to think about a complicated issue I I think they're going to rely and care more about their relationship with someone in the media more and more and care more about high quality information in a world of like massive amounts of generated content so I think it should be net good but it will be different how do you think about your company's role and your role in helping to preserve an ecosystem where high quality information remains it's obviously super important to us the but that's like a sort of empty statement um the kinds of things that we try to do are build tools that are helpful to people I if to people in media people in other Industries if if you had asked us five years ago what was going to happen we would have said we will be able to build you know trusted responsible AI but fundamentally it's going to be going off and doing its thing and now I think we see a path to what we do is instead build tools for people and we put these tools out into the world and People Media or otherwise use them to architect the future and that is the most optimistic thing I think we have discovered in our history and the the safety story changes in that world the way that we are responsible actor in society changes in that World um I think we now see a path where we just Empower everyone on Earth to do what they do more and better uh and that's That's so exciting that's so different than how I thought AI was going to go but I'm so happy about it speaking about where AI is going to go um one of the challenges I think we had in in talking about the work that you've done and that open AI is doing is helping people understand your vision of of what artificial general intelligence means for our future and so can you help this room understand how their lives will be changed you said you can't predict the future but as we move forward you know what will AGI mean for all of us I think the two I mean there's many like important forces towards the future but I think the two most important ones are artificial intelligence and energy um if we can make abundant intelligence for the world and if we can create abundant energy then our ability to have amazing ideas for our children to like teach themselves more than ever before for people to be more productive to offer better healthare to uplift the economy um and to actually put those things into action with energy I think those are two massive massive things now they come with downsides and so it's on us to figure out how to make this safe and how to like responsibly put this in the hands of people but I think we see a path now where the world gets much more abundant and much better every year and people have the ability to do way way more than we can possibly imagine today and I think we're I think 2023 was the year we started to see that 20124 we'll see way more of it and by the time like the end of this decade rolls around um I think the world is going to be in a unbelievably better place it sounds sort of like silly and sci-fi optimism to say this but if if you think about how different the world can be not only when every person has a you know today they have like chat gbt it's like not very good um um but next they have like the world's best chief of staff and then after that every person has like a company of 20 or 50 experts that can work super well together and then after that everybody has a company of 10,000 experts in every field that can work super well together and if someone wants to go focus on curing disease they can do that and if someone wants to focus on making great art they can do that but if if you think about you know the cost of intelligence and the the quality of intelligence the cost falling the quality increasing by a lot and what people can do with that it's like a very different world it's the world that sci-fi has promised us for a long time and and for the first time I think we get to start to like see what that's going to look like two quick questions to to wrap up this conversation and again thank you for being here uh disqualify yourself in consideration and remember there are a lot of CEOs in the room tonight who should be the the 2023 CEO of the year if not you there are a lot of good choices for that um I mean I I I'm hugely biased on this I do think uh AI was sort of the most exciting impactful thing to happen this year so I'd give it to one of the other AI companies but I'm like really biased smooth answer um uh a much harder question to end this conversation uh what is your favorite Taylor Swift song uh that is a hard question to pick like a not super popular one I would say wildest dreams okay but oh they like that but all of the like all of the super popular ones are great too uh well Sam Alman times 2023 CEO of the Year thank you very thank you very much thank you

Channel: TIME

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Length: 15min 42sec (942 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 13 2023