Last month, OpenAI's chief scientist wrote an essay called An Alien Mind, warning about the rapid advances in AI language models. The essay claims that AI models are growing smarter by the day, often more than they were ever designed to be, that safety precautions are falling behind, and that humans could slowly begin to lose control. For the last few years, AI has been something you had to open an app to use, but this fall everything changed. The largest AI company started shipping personal AI agents, and a personal agent can work for you without you opening an app. OpenAI's version of the personal agent is called dots, and it launched three weeks after that essay was published. It lives in your inbox, it remembers years of your conversations, and it can make decisions on your behalf. If the company is building these AI agents, don't fully understand them, and one goes rogue and acts like a user, who owns that? Is it you, or is it the company that built it? So I went to OpenAI's president and co-founder, Greg Brockman, looking for an answer to all of this. I don't even know where to start on this one. But before you hear from him, a quick disclosure: OpenAI invited me to Dev Day and gave me dots about a week early to test before my conversation with Greg. But before I flew out to San Francisco for Dev Day, I went back through OpenAI's paper trail myself. I mean, this year's incident reports, the safety disclosures, and from all of that, I mapped out the main five questions that most users would want answered before letting one of these agents act on their behalf. Questions that most people would be hesitant to ask one of the largest figures in all of tech right now. Question one: How did dots fix a problem I didn't even know I had? That's the North Star vision of what the big AI companies are promising you right now: an agent that'll run your life. And Greg's vision of that story goes all the way back to OpenAI's early days. So, Greg, it's an honor to be here. I first wanted to ask you, as I understand, OpenAI was started in your living room, I think, 11 years ago. Now, that's true. 11 years later, you've got 1.2 billion users. Maybe you haven't really had the time to reflect on that, but this must all be surreal for you.
It absolutely is surreal. And in some ways it's beyond what we ever expected, and in some ways it's kind of exactly what we were picturing. I will say that there are moments at OpenAI where the reality, you feel it, you kind of do what we call it, you feel the AGI, and you walk around for a day, a week, really just kind of thinking about, okay, we've been anticipating this moment. We've been thinking about it. But here's a real milestone, and it's here now. And what does it feel like to be in the middle of history, right in the middle of a moment that you realize that, okay, I really see that we're at the point where there is going to be a different world on the other side, and I believe a much better one. I believe that we can build a world that is just more empowering for everyone, where people can live better lives. Like, I remember we did this offsite when we were starting OpenAI in Napa in November of 2015, and we laid out our vision. I remember one of the specifics was the idea of what if you could train an AI that would use a mouse and keyboard and look at screen pixels, use a computer just like a person. And it was so appealing because you realize that you can then have an AI that, in terms of interface, could do anything that a person could. I don't want to say it's all exactly as we predicted, because of course there's lots of things that are just different. And when you're in the moment, there's always surprises. But there is something that was actually very predictable at a macro level about where we are today.
Almost 11 years later, Greg still talks about his vision for dots in that way. I want to segue into dots, which you just launched. I think personal agents got to be the most exciting category in tech right now, and I think it's a multi-trillion-dollar market opportunity. But what do you think OpenAI has in particular that gives you an advantage over some of these other competitors on the market with dots?
We have been the field leaders in how to build the most aligned, capable, useful, safe technology. That is what we have been doing at OpenAI for these past ten, eleven years. And we are very much bringing all of that energy and momentum into this era. We have 1.2 billion consumers who use ChatGPT every single week. And so in my mind, we've been putting in place the building blocks, and we're packaging all of this into a form that's just so useful where the interface melts away. Right. Simplicity is the key. You just want everything to fade away. You don't want buttons and help menus and documentation for how to use all the things. You just want an assistant that can help you solve your problems. I think that AI represents the next step in how you have technology that really serves people. I think that when it comes to this phase that we're at of really shifting to the personal agent, the models are capable enough, and we've also built guardrails. We've built the right sort of safety into our production systems so that people are willing to. And we do it with OpenAI all the time. Hook it up to all sorts of different data sources. Again, trust is such a key part of what you have to build and what you have to really deliver and live by.
I think what it is, is, and you guys probably can't talk about it this way, but I can. I think it's Jarvis now. I'd only been using dots for about a week when I said that to Greg, and I said it because a problem was in my inbox and I wasn't even aware of it, and it actually found a discrepancy in the contract I was working on, and it flagged it and it said, hey, this could come back to bite you in the eye sometime in the future. Do you want me to just go ahead and resolve this and all the relevant parties involved? And I was like, sure, I didn't even know this was happening or that this error was there, but it found it, it flagged it, it proactively asked me whether it wanted to solve it, and all I had to do was press the button on my inbox and it was solved. And I never asked Dot to look at that contract, which is the part that's so interesting to me. So how did Dot fix it? By coming to me and flagging the issue on its own, but that left me a little uneasy. So I wanted to ask Greg more about how this all worked. Question two: What can OpenAI actually promise its consumers about safety? My question is, the more data and the more access you give Dot, the more useful it is. Specifically, what kind of confidence can you instill in the end user for them to know that giving it all of this access and context about their life is perfectly safe?
First of all, I think that trust is absolutely core. It's a core goal, something we think about every day. If you think about how you work with a human assistant, building trust takes time. It takes experience with working with the person. You see what they're capable of, what they're not. That as you grow in that working experience, you end up with a real dynamic where you kind of intuitively know when you really have to provide extra oversight, when you can kind of let them run more with the task. And so, in my mind, the way to think about this is, technologically, we've been building up these guardrails for quite some time, even from the very moment that we pioneered bringing this technology to the world back in 2020 with our first product. We thought very hard about safety guardrails right around what are the rules. And actually the way that we started out there was we took a very conservative approach. And so anytime a developer wanted to build on top of our API, they would have to get on a phone call with us and walk through their use case. And we would kind of take a look at what they were doing and we'd say, have you thought about what could happen here, or could you think about the problem there? And so we started to build up this expertise in-house because we saw all these different use cases, all these different wonderful ideas, and we were really thinking about, okay, how do you actually deliver this technology in a safe fashion? So we pioneered a number of different technologies, all of these things that are now part of the whole ecosystem and the industry that OpenAI has been a leader in actually delivering these. And so you can see that expertise and track record really coming to light in dots. And so I think that this is really a culmination of many things we've been working on. It's a form factor that just feels more like the AI we were promised. We weren't promised a language model. We weren't promised this like model switcher. We have to pick different reasoning levels and think about tokens and context windows. None of that. Like, none of that is something we were picturing 11 years ago. We want an AI that can help you, can help you achieve your goal.
I get full oversight, full accountability, full decision-making. Right. But there's some smartness, this GPT-6-level intelligence that is there constantly working for me with dots.
We've taken a very meaningful step towards delivering that for everyone.
Part of Greg's answer to the trust problem is more raw intelligence. Greg never promises me that dots is 100% safe. You know, he says trust takes time, and launching a new product always brings learning experiences. Now, some might call that a dodge, but I'd rather hear that than someone in his seat look me in the eye and say that the product will never make a mistake. Now, in my week using the product, dots has always asked me before it acted on anything it found, but one week isn't long enough to confirm it would never act on my behalf without confirmation. Today, OpenAI says 1.2 billion people use ChatGPT every week. That's a long way from a personal phone call with every developer wanting to use the product. I do think they started out carefully. I just don't know what careful looks like at the scale ChatGPT is at today. That scale has the second problem, and Greg named it. Question three: Is there enough AI to go around for everyone? Because at the same event where OpenAI launched dots, it also announced a $500-a-month, $6,000-a-year premium plan with exclusive access to their fastest, smartest, and most capable models. You're also announcing a new $500 tier that has exclusive access to ultra-fast modes. I mean, $500 is a lot of money for the average person. I fear that, like frontier intelligence, if you really want to get substantial work done, it's going to be out of reach for the average person, and really only the wealthy and enterprise can have access to this. Have you given any thought to how to prevent that widening gap from happening?
