You do all your prompting on Ultrafast?
You know, seven people's thoughts can working together create something new that kind of existed in all of our heads to some degree, but was like an emergent thing.
Hey, this is Dan Shipper. You might be wondering what happened to AI and I. This is the same show. We are just rebranding it to the Every Podcast. I'm really excited for our first episode with Sam Altman. Here it is.
Sam, welcome to the show.
Psyched to have you here. So, we're here at DevDay. I think if you had told me 4 years ago that the coding models were at this level of capability, I would have been like, "Wow, I don't know if there would be a lot of developers at DevDay." But, there's more developers than ever, it seems like, and more work to do than ever. So, what has the like riding the increasing capabilities of coding models and seeing the impact on engineering taught you about the future of engineering and more broadly like the future of work with AI?
I think people just want so much more stuff. People's expectations are so high. And I think that's a wonderful thing. I think this is why we'll all have this incredible future in front of us to explore. But, developers they've never been able to do more, but there's never been a higher bar either. And I think that's great. I think that's like a nice thing about society.
Is that something that surprised you? Did you expect that to happen?
I think I was never like as doomy about the job stuff as other people, but it still has surprised me somewhat on the upside of just how much latent demand existed in the world. And also how much like people have remained the center of everything that is happening with AI.
Do you think there's a limit to that, or do you think that translates pretty cleanly to other areas of work?
I think there will be some areas of work where there's actually not much creativity required, and we don't care about the person doing it. And many of those tasks or jobs will be done by AI. But I think there's so much other stuff people want in the world. There's going to be no shortage of new things to go do. I think that's been one of the lessons of recent time.
Why do you think it's so human-centered even though we talk a lot about automation?
I mean, one observation is we just we don't care that much about what the machines do. And in some sense we never have. And we're just like we're obsessed with other people. We want to know about the person behind the art or the person behind the company or the idea or the product. And I think this is like a wonderful positive surprise that we probably should have all known before.
I agree. It's I've been thinking like if an agent solves an obvious bug in a data center but no one finds out, did it really solve it, you know?
I think that was like a great example where, you know, 10,000 agents worked super hard for 4 days in perfect coordination with each other and did this amazing thing. And almost none of the public reaction was about that actually, the problem being solved. A lot of talk about the interpretation. A lot of talk about like the people involved in it in different ways. But, you know, that was like a good thing.
Yeah. So, it's DevDay. You launched by my count 22 new things today, which I've been at all four DevDays. And I think last year was like nine and the year before that was like four or five. So, it's a lot more than usual.
Okay. I'm tired. I'm tired.
We cut a bunch of things that we were going to launch today just because you have to like fit it in 50 minutes. But you know, like we try to practice what we preach. And if we are saying these tools can make people much more productive and build more and that people want more stuff, like we better build more ourselves.
What are the new kind of bottlenecks and best practices for doing that? Because I can see for myself and I assume you guys are seeing this too. Like now that you can build everything, you're like what should we build and how do we make it all coherent? How do you think about that?
Moving to this world of sort of persistent intelligence, active intelligence, whatever people want to call it. This idea that you're going to have these agents that are running in the background 24/7, connected to your systems, doing stuff proactively for you. This is clearly a direction that feels important to explore. I think we're going to see amazing stuff happen there. Another thing we really wanted to do is there's just there are now so many ideas that are capable of being built. And what we are missing is the creative spirit to figure them out and build them. So we wanted to really open up our ecosystem, let people build apps in ChatGPT and like the same way that we get to do them, let people bring their subscription wherever they'd like, have the marketplace, and really try to let people get connected to all the stuff that people will now be able to build.
Yeah, I mean I just looking at all the platform features that you launched and the way that you talk about platforms, it reminds me a lot of the way that Bill Gates used to talk about Windows as a platform where you create more value than you capture. What have you learned, you know, you said this in your keynote and I've observed it as well. There's at the end of the day there's always an app store. You've been taking swings at app stores for a while. What have you learned about building a platform and what do you think makes this one different?
I mean that we clearly have not yet figured out the app store equivalent, but we have figured out how to build a platform that a lot of people are building incredible value on top of. I think there are really kind of two schools of thought among people building AI model companies. There are people that believe or hope that there's only going to be one company in the world. And then there are people like us that believe we are going to see a renaissance in the number of companies and just an absolute lowering of the bar to people, one-person companies, small-team companies creating incredible new products and services. And we want to go as hard as we can with the platform to enable people to do that. And although I think we haven't figured out the App Store yet, that's totally fair. I think we have figured out how to help like millions of people build and create significant new products and companies.
If you had to narrow in, you said you talked at the keynote about an industrial revolution versus renaissance which you just mentioned now. If you had to narrow in on the key things that make the difference between those two worlds and maybe OpenAI's part in it, but maybe even the broader ecosystem, what do you think those things are?
One take on this would be that the renaissance was fundamentally centered around people and the industrial revolution was fundamentally centered around machines. There were a lot of good things about the industrial revolution. It had a hugely positive impact on the world in many ways. But I think a lot of people did not have a purely positive personal impact from that. And this feeling that people had these like rich lives and did all these things. And yeah, of course they like struggled and wanted more and better stuff. And that's the part the industrial revolution did deliver in some ways. But they were kind of turned into in many cases this like cog in a machine doing some extremely specialized thing and kind of like disconnected from a lot of the parts that made life good. I get sad to hear people talk about like oh, AI is going to automate everything. There's going to be no role for humans. We're going to be like house cats and the AI will decide how to reward us and tell us what to do. And I have heard people say that.
That's certainly not what we think. What I am hopeful for is that this is just a huge new wave of scientific discovery, art, company formation, like everybody that wants to start a new thing. And that people do get the benefits of all of the economic growth and the new stuff happening here. But also people get to back in control their lives and ability to kind of do the things they want and spend their time the way they want.
One of the things that strikes me about the Renaissance versus the Industrial Revolution is in the Renaissance you have a sort of different understanding of what it means to be a person and like an individual as opposed to sort of the cog in the machine. Do you feel like you're starting to see any difference in how we think of ourselves as human that's comparable to the way that we changed how we think of ourselves during the Renaissance?
I mean so much happened during the Renaissance. It's hard to say there's like this one thing. But definitely a big part of it was about people like sort of reconnecting to a lot of things that had in the distant past. And you do hear and then also like this kind of combination of that with this crazy futurism and discovery of science and engineering and just sort of this feeling that the human potential had massively expanded. And you do hear people talk about both of those things simultaneously with AI, which is kind of how I got interested in this as an analogy in the first place. I mean this is like a very trivial example relative to what is going to be possible or already is possible. But the Dots, the new thing we launched today, is the first thing that has given me back control of my mornings and like my mental space in the mornings. I used to love the early mornings. It was my favorite time of the day to work. It's like maximum creativity. That's when I would like do the really deep complicated project of the day. And then now I like run this like big company and something is going wrong all the time and overnight a lot of stuff happens. And if I don't check my phone right away then you know, sometimes it was fine and sometimes there was like a real disaster that if I ignored for an hour just got much worse. The problem had been that as I checked my phone, I polluted my brain with all these other things and I lost the deep work period. But now I trust my dot to go have good judgment about what I need to think about and I'll think about if there's something very urgent, otherwise handle things for me. And I get this space for kind of like creativity or to just hang out with my kids back and that has been like, you know, it sounds small but like a significant improvement to my life.
That's what I was going to ask is so it seems like it's deflecting a lot of things that you might have had to deal with immediately that you can just like leave for later because you're confident you get the thing you need when you check it in the morning.
Yeah. I mean two things that happened today about that. During the keynote we had like a big production. This is the risk of live demos and trying to deploy many new features at once.
I was like curling. I was
So that happened. Thibault got a message from his dot 5 minutes before the demo saying, "Just to let you know, I see that you're in the DevDay. You know, I know you were working on it. I know what the demo is because I was able to like look at the presentation in space or whatever and there, you know, this sub is probably going to make the demo not work. Would you like me to try to fix it? There's like a few minutes to go." And now it couldn't fix it yet but like maybe the next version will be able to go fix that in prod. And like think about that whole like all the stuff that had to come together to make that work. Just right now before I came here, I've been like back-to-back stuff all day. Very very behind on all of my normal stuff. My dot just before I had walked into the last thing said, "You have one little break between now and this thing you're going to go to with Dan. You have to pay attention to this one thing." I never would have found that otherwise and like it would have been a big mess. And just the fact that I like don't have to worry about that feels super different.
I tried I had it Alfred earlier. And then like many people are calling it Dotty for now but I'm trying to like think of a great name.
What do you think so far? I know it's like super early and still rough.
I like it. It has become the default way that I use chat, which I think is a very promising thing.
And I shared with you like I think you know, I'm in the beta, so I was in the early period, so I think it has limits. It's like has been a little bit buggy for me, so there's a lot of different surfaces that it can be used on like mobile and it has its own cloud computer and like all that kind of stuff and I think those kinds of things getting that cleaned up is a big deal, but yeah.
That I think this is the kind of thing where it's going to get like better rapidly each week from here, but it's going to definitely take some time to smooth it all out.
I had a similar example where I was trying to reschedule a flight and it was like, "Hey, you have a meeting during this flight that you're rescheduling." but it wasn't on my calendar. It had just like read it in Slack.
And then it was like, yeah.
That thing about the ability to bring context together from across your entire life and like really do things in ways that would be hard even for an attentive person to get right has been super impressive. That's been one of the things I've found most useful about it.
What had to happen from a research perspective to make this possible?
This is like a very complicated system with a lot of stuff, but maybe most important was Astra. We needed like a You needed a smart enough model. And then there were a lot of other things you had to build, too, but getting the model over the intelligence bar was a key part.
Mhm. You told me that there's like there've been a couple times, not just for like scheduling or things that are urgent like filtering, but there've been a couple times where it's helped you see something or make a decision with an AI that you could not have. You said you couldn't have hired someone to do that. Like it just be too complicated. Do you have any specific examples you can share?
There was one like new feature that I was kind of excited about and it would have been very hard to explain it to people in enough detail to get it built. And even then there were like a lot of ways to do it and I wouldn't have been confident in which one. And I just like I would just like constantly jot notes as I thought of something or as I was like on a walk or whatever to my dot. And then the dot went off and built like five or six versions. I was able to get feedback. I was able to iterate. And it was just like whenever I had a spare moment or had an idea and that kind of like the ability to just like dump that in raw form, the ability to like get and give pretty continuous feedback on it was very cool. And then there's like many categories like that where like an idea that would be you'd be so unsure about or it would be too much effort for you or for someone else to build. You can actually just kind of like continually iterate on and it's like it's pretty cool to go to sleep and like just leave a long voice note as you're kind of drifting off with a bunch of thoughts and like wake up in the morning not only is the thing built, but it like went off and did like the next seven steps. It's the best. And it's like all right, this is like a very cool way to express stuff. And then also like there's a set of tasks that I would normally give up on or that I would have given up on before. There was a thing that I was sure I had seen in Slack. And Slack search is obviously terrible, so I mostly use Codex to search it. And I had been searching for this thing because I wanted to find it again. I wanted to reference it. And I spent like a good 10 or 20 minutes trying to search with Codex and find this and I kept trying different things and didn't find it. And I was like, man, like maybe I dreamed it and this didn't really happen because Codex doesn't usually fail. And I kind of gave up on it. And then the next day my dot was like, hey, I noticed you were trying to do this thing and you didn't find it, but I like kept thinking about it overnight and I found it for you.
And I was like, what? And it was a screenshot.
I had forgotten in my head it was a screenshot not text in Slack. And it just like sat there very patiently looking for something to do to be helpful to me and like looked at every image, checked every screenshot and found the thing. And I was like that's really that's really
I would have given up on that.
