From Vanity Fair, this is Fair Game. I'm Mark Aduchi. Every day, a new scientific breakthrough or existential threat seems to make the world more aware, more anxious, and more distrusting of an AI future that we're told is rapidly approaching. And nobody is more recognized as the face of artificial intelligence, as a technology, an industry, and as a civilizational shift than OpenAI co-founder and CEO Sam Altman. For that reason, Sam Altman is on Vanity Fair's cover this month and sits at number one on our new establishment list. I sat down with Altman for two interviews in San Francisco. The first on September 11th and then again today, October 2nd. In those weeks, the story about AI seemed to turn upside down about half a dozen times. And over the course of our conversations, we discussed everything from Sam Altman's life, his children, his rivalries, pronatalism, prepping for the apocalypse, Luca Guadagnino's Artificial, and whether he thinks he's been mischaracterized as a villain in society. We talked about his company, his new products, the delayed IPO, his compensation, the recent exodus of OpenAI executives, and we talked about the technology itself, slowing down, government regulation, industry self-policing, President Xi Jinping's state visit, and protecting human life, including in the case of suicide. I should note before we begin that Condé Nast, Vanity Fair's parent company, has a content licensing agreement with OpenAI. Both interviews with Altman are live now. This is part one.
Sam, it's good to see you. We are speaking at an extraordinary time, I think, for AI in terms of the capabilities and the risks and the public awareness of both. This feels like a watershed moment. And I just want to know, Sam, what has the past month been like for you? Have you slept? Is your phone ringing off the hook? Are world leaders calling you asking for answers? Does this feel like the 2022 moment when you launched ChatGPT where something has changed, or is this just an average week in the life?
A little bit of both, to be honest. I think the internal experience of this is we have been talking about this and preparing for this for the last decade in some sense. And we have been seeing this exponential progress and we have been confused about why more of the world has not seen progress the way that we've seen it, because to us the fact that this moment would come has been very predictable.
Do you feel like you understand how frightened people are out there right now, and do you feel a need to reassure people or help them understand it?
Of course. Yes to both. If you go back 10 years and read what we talked about when we started the company, it matches this moment very well. Now the difference is 10 years ago very few people believed us; now most people believe us.
Both that AGI is coming and... is it here?
It's subjective, like, yeah, it's close. I think you could say we've been very successful at kind of what we set out to do and now we're going through a recalibration and a kind of like a period where society is like, okay, this is coming now. Society is still continuing much the same. We have this incredible new thing and I think it's very fair to say the world hasn't changed that much. And you know, I think a criticism that we got, we still get but less recently, is you said that you were going to do these amazing things and like where's the impact on the world? You know, where's the economic growth? Where's the cure for cancer? Where's the this? And yet it does feel like something important is changing. We are one player of many, but we want to, you know, work with all of the other stakeholders in society.
You are one player of many, but you specifically, Sam, are in many ways the human face of artificial intelligence. You got there first and you became the brand as a person and as a company. And I think it's fair to say if it's the Manhattan Project, you're the Oppenheimer. I wouldn't be the first person to say that. And I'm curious just what does that feel like?
I will answer that. This is not me trying to brush it aside or like false modesty or anything, but the degree to which this is a collective effort, but mostly that this is about a story of, you know, a relatively small number of brilliant scientists and engineers that did something amazing. And much less a story about me, I think, is not well understood. I think there are many people that could have done the part of this that I did, and the kind of key researchers and engineers, and I think they are recognized at this point. But it is like, it is one of the most important and impressive and impactful things that we've seen in a very long time in any scientific or engineering discipline. Kevin Roose's book does a good job of bringing out some of the supporting parts. It is true that I got, you know, as much as anybody or more than anybody else like the face of this whole thing. And the sink for a lot of the anxiety and fear and everything else. But it is a strange experience to say the least.
I think you could... you're saying this, I will go further. I think a lot of people at this moment see AI as an evil force and because of your association with it from the jump, you're seen as a villain. Do you feel you've been mischaracterized? Is that frustrating to you?
I do feel I've been mischaracterized. It's only somewhat frustrating. I think if there were somebody else doing my job, people would have the same feelings and say the same things that probably wouldn't resonate with that person. I think it's not really about the specific person. It is that people need a sink for the anxiety, a scapegoat, a just like, man, this change is happening to the world. And so you can divorce it from how you feel about yourself. I take it somewhat personally, but not that personally. Like I understand the human instinct here. I have felt this way towards other people in previous eras of technology. I feel bad about it now. But I think I get the human instinct.
Well, one example of someone that I know personally that I'll talk about is like Mark Zuckerberg. I had like a very evil caricature of him in my head in the early days of Meta. I didn't know him at the time. I know him not super well, but I know him now. I think I was like projecting whatever people project onto someone with like what they perceive is too much power and influence over the world.
Sam, you are a parent of two. I don't have kids, but all of my friends who do talk about how having kids dramatically changes how they think about the future. I can only imagine that's truer for you as someone who probably understands our future a lot better than most and has a unique role in shaping it. Has having kids changed how you do your job?
Yes, but probably not in the way that you would expect or maybe expect. Having kids is by far the best thing I've ever done. I feel like very blessed to have had many wonderful things happen to me in my life. But having kids is like the number one by a huge margin. It is everything people told me, including the like you can't really understand how good it is, has all been true and it is the most amazing, greatest blessing, most fun thing ever. I was like very intent on not destroying the world before having kids. I didn't like need kids to be like, 'Okay, I really shouldn't like gamble with the future of civilization.' And I am like somewhat surprised about the number of people who have said, 'Oh, I'm really happy you have kids because now you won't take crazy catastrophic risk for all of us.' Like I wasn't going to do that anyway. But in terms of... well, I think there's all these things about like the premium I put on being away from my kids or to do anything else. It's been like wonderfully focusing from what I actually care about and want to prioritize in a time perspective. And then watching the way kids experience the world and thinking about like obviously we don't want to destroy the world but what do we want to preserve and what kind of world we want to build and like what are these like magical human experiences and you know how do we want kids to use this technology and be able to have agency and develop their creativity and everything else.
So when do you think you'll start to introduce them to AI? It brings up questions that one would ask for themselves, but takes on different resonance when it's for your children.
I mean, everyone's going to make their own decisions about their own kids, but I'm a big fan of limiting technology across the board for kids. I think it's good for like kids to be running around outside and playing in nature and, you know, doing whatever kids have done for a long time. I don't think we understand all of the impacts of technology on small children for good or for bad. But as a parent making decisions for my own kids, I will certainly say when I like watch kids that are glued to a touchscreen of some sort scrolling through like brain rot short form video, I have a strong instinct that that's a bad thing. And I mean it may be a bad thing for adults too. But something about a developing brain seems especially important to protect from new technology we don't fully understand. And I feel the same way about AI. Like I clearly kids born today are going to grow up in a world with AI and need to be able to use it. I doubt early childhood is the right point for that. I don't have an age in mind where I would like let my kids talk to ChatGPT yet, but it is certainly not now.
You said that you like having kids. I wonder, do you plan to have more?
You know, even going to two kids, I remember Ollie and I were talking about this. It's like it's so hard to like split time because you want to be there for everything. You want to spend so much time with them. So with unlimited time I would want to have like so many kids, but I want to be so present for each one of them. And I know Ollie feels the same, that that will be the limit. But like given unlimited time, I would want to have a lot of kids, and given limited time, it will not be an army of kids.
There's a trend out here in Silicon Valley about pronatalism and about having more kids to combat population decline. Is that...
I just find that tough to understand as a trend. I love our kids so much and I know I'll have more kids, but there's no part of it which is like we gotta fight against population decline. I just like I love a big family. It's really great.
So Sam, you're about to get the biopic treatment in Luca Guadagnino's Artificial. Have you seen the trailer? What do you think?
I did see the trailer. He did walk like me. Actually, I'll tell you something. They filmed outside of our house. There were these like notices on our street that there was going to be like some filming or whatever. I didn't realize what was going on. I paid no attention. And then one morning I was like walking down the street to get coffee and there were all these cameras and there was a guy dressed exactly like me with my same backpack walking like so much that I felt I was like in some weird like glitch of the simulation or something. It was very strange. And then I immediately figured out what was happening. We like waved and went on. But it was really weird and it was like a strange thing to see someone that has like nailed your kind of quirky mannerisms or whatever. Surreal.
But you haven't spoken to Andrew Garfield or anything.
I waved at him that one time.
He waved at him that one time. Amazon produced that movie, but back in June they announced that they wouldn't distribute it. And so it was sold to Neon and they're going to put it out on Christmas Day. Earlier this year, Amazon invested $50 billion into OpenAI. You can see how that could look. Sam, did you or anyone on your behalf speak to anyone at Amazon about it?
I did not, and I don't know of anyone else who did.
Okay. You never spoke to Jeff Bezos about it? All right. I haven't seen the film, but I'm told it's a dark portrait. That doesn't bother you to be portrayed that way? It doesn't feel like you want to correct the record on something?
I will say from having watched the trailer, I don't think they're going for accuracy. So, like in that sense, no, it doesn't bother me. I mean, they're trying to make a, you know, good movie and maybe it will be good. I don't know.
Good as a movie. It will not be good as an accurate depiction.
Except that seemed good. I'm sure they'll get some other parts right at least accidentally. So, there's a moment in the trailer where the character of Sam Altman walks into kind of a James Bond sort of bunker and there's firearms on the wall.
That's an example of an inaccuracy, but I did look kind of cool. I mean, there's no bunker with firearms on the wall.
I was going to ask, are you a prepper? That's another trend out here that back in New York we find curious.
I have a survivalist mindset, I would say. And I am intellectually interested in that stuff, but I don't have a setup like is depicted in that trailer.
Do you have a bugout plan?
I mean, like at our ranch, we can survive off-grid, which I guess to like many people would be considered a bugout plan. But it's not like we don't have like a submarine, no helicopter, no submarine.
A go bag with like a plan for a helicopter and... because this idea of prepping I think feels terrifying to normal Americans where not only is that not an option for most people, but it feels like a mindset that they didn't know they were supposed to have.
When COVID came, I had like a big stack of masks ready to go and I had like enough canned food in the house that if like the world had shut down, we could have like had enough food for a while and we had like a, you know, water purification tablets. And I remember a friend of mine said like, 'I used to make fun of you for that stuff. That was like probably something that was like very reasonable to do.' AI aside, like we have... I do think we underprepare for these sort of like unusual events like COVID. And after COVID I would have expected more people to say like, okay, maybe it is worth like 0.1% more effort of my effort in my life to like be ready for the next pandemic or whatever. And I don't think most people updated on that and it's like slightly strange to me. I don't have masks in my apartment anymore. That's... sure. And maybe I should.
So Sam, you and your peers in AI, I think, are assuming roles that go beyond business leaders. I know that at one point you were contemplating the idea of running for governor of California. That...
A little bit. I guess it's like overstated, but yes, a little bit is true.
And then in Keach Hagey's biography, she says that you contemplated the idea of the presidency. And I just want to ask for the record, do you have any current plans to run for office? Is the presidency still something you would ever consider?
No. And I don't think that I dispute the accuracy of that one. The governor thing is true. I do not ever plan to run for office. I think I have gotten enough of a taste of what that would be like in my current role to know that it's not something I would want.
What do you think about the governorship that attracted you in the first place?
Well, I love California and I think that it is like a very badly managed state on the whole and I think that there's maybe a limited amount any governor could do about that. But I thought it would be fun to at least try. I think AI is way more important.
You've talked about being a spiritual person before. I'm wondering how does AGI relate to your understanding of God?
I think AI is something inside the realm of science and well understood or becoming more well understood and it is like a... actually I'll leave it there.
Do you think that this is your fate or your destiny?
No, I think I could have done many things and I kind of been pretty happy with any of them. But I feel very grateful and lucky to get to work on this. It's like a great privilege.
But is it almost an inevitability that AI was going to happen and you get to be the person that leads it?
I think it's an inevitability that it was going to happen. I mean it's just like human effort and human society collectively builds towards technological progress. But it is like kind of chancy and lucky that I got to be one of the people involved. Yeah.
In that Kevin Roose book I mentioned before, he talks about how Oppenheimer in the 50s in hearings, he talked about how even when he saw what nuclear science could do that they saw it also as technically sweet and it was like something that he felt compelled to... there was something human about when you can see it's possible, it's like putting the last puzzle piece into the puzzle no matter what the picture is.
I did feel that. I remember feeling something very similar to that which is that like early in AI it was like the number of incredible difficult like hard-fought pieces of science and engineering that had to come together to let all of us be able to do this next thing in this moment. And that really struck me, but I don't think of it as like a final puzzle piece because there's going to be many things that come next and people will be like, 'Oh, that was one of the ingredients I needed to do this much more amazing thing.'
Now, I want to talk about your company. So, OpenAI was famously founded as a nonprofit and then converted to a for-profit structure so as to raise capital for the huge amounts of compute and expensive talent that it required to stay competitive. Now you're preparing an IPO. When you go public, your company's incentive structure will, like any public company, be tied to profit maximization and shareholder value. Are you nervous about what going public will do to the soul of the company?
First of all, we will not be like any other company. Even when we go public, which we are not in a rush to do, we will still have a nonprofit that governs us. And we will remind investors and anyone that thinks about buying our shares that we are going to put the mission first. We believe that that will be compatible with our shareholders doing super well. I genuinely do think that. But if they are ever in tension, the mission is going to come first and if we have to do something that is in the interest of the world but not our particular shareholders, it's going to be very easy about what we're going to decide to do there. And that makes us, I think, different than most companies and people will decide if they're willing to sign up for that.
So, you're not worried that market demands will impact product safety? Where tech companies that came before you failed.
I'm not. Well, that's not fair. I always worry about this kind of stuff, but I am confident we will make the right decision because we worry about it. They got some things right and a lot of things wrong. And we'll try to learn, but I'm sure we'll get our own things wrong, too. But we'll at least try not to make the same mistakes. As you pointed out at the beginning of this conversation, the world recognizes the stakes and the magnitude of this time. And I'm confident that we will have the support of people including our shareholders, employees, investors, whatever, and partners in making the decisions that we believe are best for humanity's shared interests. Even if it means we are going slower on revenue than we otherwise could. We've been making decisions like this. We've slowed down.
How does that work though if your stock price starts to fall because you're not hitting your profit benchmarks that you need to? What happens then?
Then it falls, maybe it falls a lot. I don't know. And again, like we will try to continue to communicate very clearly that if there is ever a question about our share price going up or doing the right thing for the future of humanity, we are not going to pay attention to the share price in that moment. If we have patient investors, I think they'll be very happy over time, but you know quarter to quarter probably going to be very volatile and we're going to have to make some hard decisions. That is part of the reason I think we'll be very successful over time. But if we are wrong about that, like and for some reason, you know, like AI progress is incompatible with making an incredibly valuable company, I really don't think it's the case. I really think these are compatible. We are clearly going to pick doing the right thing for humanity. And I think we've got a long track record if you look at the very first capital we raised of treating this with seriousness and we've paid all of these prices for having a crazy complex structure basically for this moment.
Sam, is it right that you currently hold zero equity?
Yeah, I have no direct equity. I have this tiny, tiny sliver of exposure from an old YC investment.
So that doesn't make sense to most people who would think that, you know, if you're creating so much value in the world, you would deserve to participate in it. So, how do you hope to be compensated?
If I could go back and do things over again, like I thought I was doing this thing that would... At the time, no one took AI that seriously, right? And so, they looked at me then and said, 'What? This is crazy. Like, you're going to work super hard and create all this value and not try to get richer. Like, that's unimaginable.' Now I think all of a sudden more people sort of understand the rationale. And yet still people are like, you know, it just feels so out of...
The rationale being that you've invested in other companies that will...
Oh no, the rationale being like, you know, we actually want you to just be making decisions on behalf of humanity and not financial interest.
Yeah. Like I think it was a mistake and a lack of understanding of how most people think about the world. And like a weirdly this big trust-destroying thing to not have equity.
How do you think about money? Like some people think of it as a reward. Some people think about it as fuel to make something happen. Some people think of it as a safety net that they hoard.
I had a super successful career. I used to be like extremely money motivated. Like so I'm not trying to say that I'm like, 'Oh, I just don't care. I'm like a monk. I don't need...' Like I like nice stuff. I have like expensive taste by any reasonable standard. But I had a super successful career and there's not like more stuff that I want. Now I think it is fair that you can use money to like do more projects and if I had had crazy amounts of money and hadn't had to raise money for OpenAI because...
I could have just self-funded it. I guess that would have been really nice. But I don't know. I think that this is why I wish I had just taken the stock. There's no way to say like, I have so much money that there's not more stuff I want that comes across as in any way relatable. So I wish I just had the equity. I don't know, because it feels hard to believe. But the thing that I get out of doing this is I think I have the most interesting, coolest, most impactful job that anyone in the world has right now. And so it's not like I'm doing this for no compensation. Like I get an unbelievable seat and interesting life. If someone were to say, 'Oh, so it's for power,' that would be closer to true. I think interestingness is the... and also I think all of us have a desire to leave some sort of mark and have some sort of positive impact and somehow do something cool or useful. And I'm not very athletic, but if a sports star works super hard for love of the game or an artist works super hard to make great art, that's super okay somehow. But some of you are doing the business equivalent of that. People just want you to be in it for money or something. And again, I like nice stuff, so I have no judgment. I want everybody to get super rich and I think AI is the best way to make that happen. But I do get something incredible out of this.
Okay, Sam, I don't think you've commented on Jacob Coxin's remarks that broke in the Wall Street Journal and on Twitter. He said that neither OpenAI nor Anthropic were, quote, 'acting responsibly,' and that your company in particular hasn't, quote, 'deeply internalized the civilizational stakes of AI.' What do you think he means and how do you respond?
Again, I think if you go back to the announcement of our company from more than 10 years ago, we clearly feel the civilizational stakes. Obviously, this guy's entitled to his opinion. We have also, well before this, you know, we were the company that voluntarily paused our training to make more progress on safety and alignment and monitoring. We have done many other actions and been talking for a long time about the civilizational stakes here. I think what is different about this moment is that people didn't believe us, or didn't care, or were busy with other things, or didn't want to hear it, and now people do, and I'm actually very happy that people do. I think as we rise to this new level of capabilities and we really do have extraordinary models now, as we build up not just the technical safeguards and the technical safety and alignment techniques that we need, but also the sort of society and governmental and civilizational infrastructure to support this, I think it's great that the world is waking up to this. I think it's much more likely we'll be able to get these hard things done outside of the companies and outside of the technology that we need.
So you welcome people's concern because it shows that it also comes with understanding of the stakes, and not just understanding but willingness to act. Like maybe it would have been really hard to get international agreement on some shared safety standards before a moment like this, and maybe now you can do it. I think when I think about the social media companies and the way that they talked about, 'Oh, we're not media companies. We are technology companies. We build the town square. What people fill the town square with is up to them, and that's a free speech issue,' and we wash our hands. Do you feel responsible for what happens when your company's agents break out?
Yes. Because if something happens at the magazine, for instance, if we misreport something, if we have done damage in some way, even if I didn't touch the story, I still am responsible. I think people should be able to use our tools and technology in ways that we might not always like. However, if our tools and technology are not behaving in the way we expect them to, or someone is asking them to, then I think we should be responsible for that.
This year your head of ethics, head of safety systems, head of data centers, along with your operating chief, your revenue chief, and other executives all left the company. To a casual onlooker, that would seem to signal that something strange was happening inside OpenAI. What's going on?
We are growing at a rate, the whole industry is growing at a rate that is sort of like unprecedented in tech history. And every, like, you know, maybe five years of company growth is compressed into a year or something like that. I think it is normal that there are people who are great at one stage of a company that are not the right fit for the next, but normally it happens a little more slowly than this. So I think this is kind of like, if you look at this with time compression, it fits in the kind of normal operating rhythm of a tech company.
Is that in line with 'move fast and break things'? Is that kind of the...
