How y'all doing tonight? What's up? How you doing? I brought my little purse here. Welcome to Manny's at the City Arts and Lecture stage. Thank you all so much for coming tonight. Thank you for being here. We appreciate you. Ganon, I'm going to throw this to you.
Very good. I'm going to start with some thank yous. I want to thank our sponsors tonight, the Mayfield Fund. I want to thank Gazy and Empire Records and GAP. Those three sponsors have helped make tonight possible. Thank you guys so much. The conversation you're about to hear, it's going to be fun, fascinating, exciting, but it's also the result of a lot of work of a lot of people. So, I want to thank the people here at City Arts and Lectures, Stacy Horn and Molly from my team, and all the people that got involved to make it happen. And you all, thank you for buying tickets and spending your Monday night here to hear about leadership and innovation in San Francisco. Thank you for giving us your time and your attention. And before we actually get into the meat of things, I have a very special guest who's going to give you a welcome that only he can give you. So, please join me in welcoming the amazing mayor of San Francisco, Daniel Lurie.
Thank you all. I appreciate it. All right. All right, that's enough. Okay. Thank you, Gazi. The last time I was on this stage, Manny was grilling me. That's a story for another day. Here's what I'm gonna say. Just I'm gonna be very brief, and I'm just gonna say this. I have the honor of being the mayor of the greatest city in the world. And I never lose that. I never lose that. I was just in my office in this beautiful building and I walked over here and I saw all of you pouring in to listen to a conversation that can only happen in San Francisco. These two that you're about to hear from tonight, they didn't travel in. They're not on a book tour. They live here. They work here. They care deeply about this city. I've had many conversations with Sam and OpenAI. I know that they are committed to San Francisco and they just re-upped and they said they're not going anywhere. So that's good news for the state and I know that Sam knows that he has a responsibility and an obligation to our city and he reiterates that in public and in private. And then you have the greatest coach I think that has ever graced the game. And here's what you really should know about him. He is a better person than he is a basketball coach. And I told him a few minutes ago, this guy is a consummate gentleman. I went to an event that he asked me to come to. There was 15, 20 people. We're talking about gun control and how do we keep people safe. This coach who has a lot going on in his life, he wrote a handwritten thank you note to me. And that doesn't happen anymore. So, if the one thing I'm taking away is I'm writing more handwritten thank you notes. Now, you have an amazing interviewer in Manny who I love, and you're going to have an amazing night. And one more thing, let's go San Francisco. Thank you.
Hello. Hi. How you guys doing? I have a prop for you for this first question. This is Sam Altman and this is Coach Kerr and I'm Manny. I'm so excited to get in this conversation. It's going to go in a lot of places and I'm excited to see where it goes. The inspiration for this was I went to a conference many years ago that you probably were at. Oh. Oh, sorry. I'm sorry. Go ahead.
Will you help? Isn't a subpoena for Sam? No. Go. Can you take him off the stage?
Thank you. Wow. Getting off to a dramatic start already. Holy moly. Well, this is very apropos of the first question I'm going to ask you, Steve, which is I need a pep talk. Can you give it to me? Now, I definitely need a pep talk. So, you're doing great. You're doing great. I feel like we all kind of need Coach Kerr to give us the pep talk that we need. If you have like one word of uplifting hope and inspiration to begin this night as a coach, if you were my coach.
Well, is Steph Curry here so I can throw him the ball or... No, I... You actually need advice?
Advice? Just like a little spring of hope, I guess.
Spring of hope. Yeah. When you're in the locker room and you're about to go out for a game, is there like a thing that you say to pump people up and give them a little... We have 82 games a year. And if I started giving motivational speeches before every single game, the guys would be like, 'All right, coach, enough. Let's just get to the game.' So, there's really not a lot of that. It's more everyday interaction. We're a family. We have really strong relationships. There's a lot of emotion winning and losing and a lot of ups and downs, but we've got an amazing group of people and we know that our job is to get through the tough stuff, the adversity, because it's always there.
Do you guys know each other? Have you spent any time together? Is this like the first meet?
We just hung out for like... Yes. But other than tonight in the green room? No.
Okay. By the way, what do you do for a living, Sam? I forgot to ask you that. Yeah, there was this very funny thing happening backstage where half the... there was like a small number of people that asked Coach Kerr to please scooch over to the side so they can get a picture just with Sam and vice versa. Do you use ChatGPT at all?
Do you recall the last time you used it?
You know what? I actually used it for a medical question and it was amazing because it's like you could just have 10 doctors all together at once who are collaborating and sort of... it was actually stunning and it's the first time I've really used it for anything other than basketball. We use it a little bit in basketball, but more in our front office organizationally. They use it for predicting players that they're thinking about drafting or trading for. We have used it in player development. We have cameras and a whole setup in our gym where we track every single shot every player takes. So player walks in, facial recognition, guy starts shooting. At the end of the month I have a chart of every player has taken this many shots, how many he made, this was the arc. We're interested in the technique and the process of the shot. So it records everything. It records the depth of the shot, the arc of the shot, and then we can have all these graphs and charts to show where they're missing, their spots on the floor, but also are they missing long, are they missing short?
And you use ChatGPT to kind of sum all that up?
No, we use a system called Noah. That is what? Yeah, that's okay. We don't play basketball.
And you, my friend, are you a sports ball liker, lover?
I like watching. I cannot play basketball at all.
Do you like basketball? You go to the games.
Yeah. Watch them do their thing. It's very fun.
Okay, good. Great. Basketball. I love it. Actually, there's an interesting thing we were talking about backstage which is how much the intensity of sports and just the pace of sports has increased over the last couple of decades. And when you watch old vintage sports, not even that old, like 20 or 30 years ago, it looks like slow motion. It's amazing what's happened. So, the last game I was at, I was like, just the athleticism is so unbelievable. There's more energy in them or they move so fast. Is that true? You were a player a long time ago.
Yeah. Trust me, it's very slower then. Very true. No, I'm glad I played when I did because it was easier then. The sport, the athletes in every sport. I was telling Sam that if you watch a replay of the US Open in the mid 80s between John McEnroe and Bjorn Borg, do you know who those guys are?
I don't... I don't know who.
So I was hoping you would not ask for that, but they were the greatest. Are they well-known people? These people. Okay. They were the greatest tennis players. He's trying to get you guys to turn against me right now. That's what's happening. But if you watched their match, Bjorn and John, next to Nadal. Rafael Nadal. Have you heard of him?
That's a different sport.
No. No. No. Same sport. No. Anyway, I thought we were talking about basketball.
Well, so anyway, so... Oh my god.
Let me finish my metaphor. If you watched Borg and McEnroe from 30, 40 years ago, and you watched Nadal and Djokovic today, it's like a different sport. It looks like Borg and McEnroe are rallying back and forth just like on a Sunday afternoon at the park. The same thing has happened in every sport. The athletes are bigger, stronger, faster. We have more knowledge. We have better training techniques. We have more coaching. And I was telling Sam that I actually told our team today that I feel like the NBA is starting to change at the rate of technology like AI. It's like the game is so different now from when I started 11 years ago. And you were saying that's kind of everything, right? Everything is changing rapidly.
Do you think it's the technology that's part of that change?
It's part of it. Yeah. And it's definitely a part. The analytics that we use that go into our strategy are dramatically different now. But also the training methods and the knowledge that we have, how athletes know how to take care of their bodies now, it's very different.
You would like to... I would like to move away from sports knowledge for my own survival on this stage. I've been able to watch you from the very beginning start this thing and then create it and it's been amazing to watch. And I guess I was wondering at the beginning of this, like what is the end goal? You've had a lot of things happen the last few weeks and months, there have been a lot of releases. When when what is the kind of grand plan with OpenAI?
I don't think there is an end goal. It's like if you zoom out enough, it's like one smooth exponential. Not just our company, but the whole of AI, the entire tech industry, the whole progress of society. It's always tempting to say, okay, we get to that point, we're done. Season's over. We get to go home and rest. But then there's the next season and the next one, the next one. And I think it's just going to keep going like that. I used to think that there would be a moment where AI would get so good that it would be able to design future versions and this thing they call recursive self-improvement and I think that still will happen but I somehow think the story is going to be much more complicated and the company is going to... people are going to have to keep working very hard still.
And do you, how are you holding on while this is all happening? I mean the fact that it's not ending, that there really isn't an end in sight. How are you staying grounded?
I think one of the most amazing things about people is we can get used to anything. And that is a remarkable thing. Good or bad, our ability to just sort of say, okay, this seems like it would have been really hard or seems like it would have been really strange and I've just gotten used to it and it's life now and I'm going to keep doing my thing. I have always been impressed by the general ability of people to do that.
Steve, I was wondering about this. I have a two-for for you. One specifically about the Warriors. See, now moving back into sports. What do you think is the secret of the Warriors' success? Why has it been so successful? And second, and this is a bit more of an esoteric question, I feel like sports more than government and politics has become something that is so core to people's sense of cultural identity and their connection to physical place. And I was wondering if you could try to answer the question of why has it become why is it so much more than just a game for people and why has it become part of people's identity?
Yeah. So, first part of the question, secret to success. For a friend, when I say Steph Curry, I don't mean it as a joke. We are successful because of Steph Curry. Let's just lay that out there. I was lucky to play with Michael Jordan in Chicago. Have you heard of him?
I've heard of there. Good.
I know that one goes with Rafael Nadal. Basketball is very interesting. It's a star-driven sport, but it's not just the talent. It's people like Steph or Michael Jordan. There's something magical about them. It's the talent, but it's the humanity. It's the transcendent presence that they have. And that's just a connection with people, right? You can't... It's hard to define it, but Steph has this magic and the way he plays. First of all, he kind of looks like you could actually become Steph Curry, right? Like none of us could become LeBron James, right? No. But every little kid in the Bay Area can kind of look at Steph and go, 'Well, I could do that.' From a physical stature standpoint, he looks like he could be your neighbor. But he happens to be the guy with the greatest hand-eye coordination on earth and an insane work ethic and an incredible sense of perspective and humanity. And so my job is so much easier as the coach of the team because he and I collaborate and we are together as we lead the group. And he makes it easy, but he's magical. He really is.
I feel like you're probably underselling your role a little bit, but I know that he's a very good player. So, I just keep digging the hole deeper and deeper. Yeah. I did want to ask, you mentioned it about kind of your role in the team and how you have a player who's an amazing talent, but and I'm sure you too, Sam, you have a lot of amazing engineers and people who are probably best of the best. Talk about both of you how you've been able to build and nurture these teams to be winning teams because you both have had to create these organisms that have to perform excellently in some of the most competitive environments that exist and you've excelled at them. You've built winning teams. So, how have you done that and how do you nurture those teams now to make sure that they stay on top?
I was very struck by Coach Kerr's comments because for AI research, which is different than a company, it really has also been like the culture matters a lot and if you build a great culture I think that can help you win over a long period of time. But stars in the same way that it's not just what the one person can do but the impact they have on the whole rest of the team, these sort of people that the team can rotate around are unbelievably important. That to me was one of the most surprising things about learning how to build a research culture is these small number of stars have this thousandx impact. And that's very different than when you're trying to build a normal technology company. So, a lot fewer people know the name like Alec Radford or something than Steph Curry, but he's like an equivalent world.
He's the researcher that invented what became the GPT-1 and then onward to the whole series.
And did you like see something in him and bring him?
Yeah. Anyone who met him would say, 'All right, it's obvious that this guy is just smarter than everybody else, but also like insane work ethic, really obsessed with understanding systems and details, but also someone that everybody else just does better work because they're around.' And sort of just incredible energy that impacts an entire research organization around them. So yeah, I think the stars of research have really mattered in AI and then the culture of the kind of people that have scientific rigor, good camaraderie, the ability to push towards repeatable innovation. Good research culture is very rare. I think it's rare in general. It's been rare in AI, but it's unfortunately just been rare in the world. And it took us a long time to learn how to build a good research culture, but I think at this point that's been one of our most important advantages.
What like if you were to build a hotel lobby in the style of a very strong research culture, like what music is playing? What's the decor? Tell me about the lighting.
I have no idea. Well, you said it's hard to go. Not the kind of people that hang out in hotel lobbies. Okay. Where are they? What is going on? One thing that we did that I think was very good, this was one of those decisions that in retrospect turned out to be important. Our longtime office, the architects that built it were residential architects, not office architects. And our office felt like someone's really nice house. Very strong plant game. There is a very strong plant game. And furniture like people could just sit on a couch and work all day and there's good places to have coffee and just stare at a wall. And I think that was surprisingly important. It was definitely not a hotel lobby vibe, but it was very comfortable, very casual.
Okay. And what is the ideal basketball team culture vibe? I'm going to ask you the same question. If you're creating space for your team to have a strong culture, what is that space like? And how have you built that culture?
Well, it depends on the leaders. The leaders have to establish what that culture is. And the culture really is just the values that you espouse coming alive every day. And when the players and the people who work for the team, the training staff, the front office, the scouts, when they come into the building, there should be a vibe in the building. But that vibe is going to be a little different depending on who the leaders are. And so, what I learned playing for some of the great coaches of all time, Phil Jackson and Gregg Popovich, there's just a vibe based on their personalities, but it was authentic to them. And so, I wanted our culture to be authentic to me, to my values, and what I stand for. And it just so happened that Steph and I share a lot of the same values. And so for example, joy is one of our values. We want to feel joy every day. You can't fake that, right? It has to be real. And so you make sure that the culture includes a lot of joy. We invite all of our players' kids to come in after every game. The family room is right behind our practice floor and after every game, win or lose, the doors open up and the kids run out and there's pickup games. It's my favorite part of every game. It's just because the players come out and they've just gone through this incredible competition. Sometimes they're elated, sometimes they're devastated. There's all these kids out there running around playing. That's joy, right? And that's going to happen whether we win or lose. And so the values that you hold true to yourself have to come alive to form a culture.
Where does your joy come from?
Where did my joy come from? I was incredibly lucky growing up in a great family. I was very happy. My dad was a professor at UCLA. I loved sports from the very beginning. I'd come home and my dad put a hoop in the driveway. My brother and I would play and we'd go to the UCLA games and I lived in a great environment and was very fortunate, had everything I needed and loved my life. And I've just been very lucky and I've been able to do what I love for my whole entire adult life. That's a lot to be joyful about.
I love that you guys have led teams that have been very successful. The Warriors, very successful. And OpenAI, it's been amazing to see it continue to just kick ass for many years and just take on these giant companies and win. But you also have been leaders in times of great loss. The Warriors have lost many games. You've had some drama with OpenAI.
That's true. Just a little bit. I think they're making a movie about it.
So it's easy to be a strong leader and manager when things are going well, but talk to me about how you learned to be a good manager and leader when things were not going well. And what that kind of lesson was for both of you.
I actually think it's... I don't want to say easier. I find it especially rewarding to be a leader during the hard times. When things are going well, things are going to go well. You need to keep the bar really high and keep a sense of momentum and make sure people don't lose their drive, but it's kind of clear what to do. And there are a lot of days where I feel like, yeah, I could do this job or not do this job. The company's going to be fine. And I could be hanging with my kid and it's like, am I banging my head against the wall for no reason here? But there have been plenty of hard times and I feel like that's where I've gotten the fulfillment of, okay, if this were someone else, maybe things would have gone differently. When I look back on the last 10 years of OpenAI, I remember the big victories, the amazing research discoveries, and then I remember how I showed up at the hard times and I'm proud of those. One thing I have learned is being calm when things are not going well. That is more than half of what works. Just showing up and saying, look, even if you have no idea how we're going to get through this one, this seems really hard, but we figured out a lot of hard things before and we're going to figure this out. Everybody can take a breath. If you can show up that way in hard times as a leader, I think that's more than half of it. And that does have an immediate calming effect on the whole team. And also, it's maybe different in sports than in business, but when things are not going well, that is the worst time for the big inspirational speech. I used to be an investor, so I'd work with all these founders and you see a lot of companies go through horrible shit. And a lot of the first-time founders in particular would have this dream in their head where they were going to be the sports coach and show up and give their team this big inspirational rallying speech and it was all going to turn around. And that really doesn't go over well. During hard times, what a company wants is clear, focused, no-frills execution. And you just get back to work. You do the thing. You grind out the momentum and then you can give the big speech later if you want to.
I agree with Sam. I think leadership is most important when things aren't going well and all the values that I was talking about before, the most important time for those values to come out is when you're actually losing, right? Otherwise, it's fake. Everybody's happy when you win. So, joy is one of our values I talked about. Competition is another one. Compassion is another one. We had a season about five, six years ago. I know you remember this well, but we had the worst record in the league. This was about six years ago. Everyone either retired or got traded or got injured and we were wiped out. And so we knew we were in some trouble. And I knew that our values had to remain strong. But what also has to happen, to Sam's point, is that the players need a vision. What are we doing? We know it's going to be a long year. So what's the point? The point was we've got a bunch of young players. This is going to be a year of development and we're going to get ready for next year and the year after because everybody on earth is going to go through this stuff in every business. You have success, you have failure. So, you always have to be planning and working for the time when things start to climb. And so that year was really dedicated to the perspective of the players: understand what this is about. This is going to be great for your careers. You're going to develop. You're going to get a lot of playing time that you wouldn't have gotten otherwise because all these other guys are injured. We're going to lose some games, but we're going to get better. And I was really proud near the end of that year. We ended up having to trade four or five players because it was basically to save money. And usually if you have the worst record in the league, everybody can't wait to get out of there. And they all basically, four of the five came to me and said, 'I really don't want to leave.' Wow. I was really proud in a weird way. I just felt like that means a lot. We've set a good tone here even when we suck.
Wow. That's amazing. Yeah. So it made me feel good. Stay calm, stay cool, look towards the future. Don't give a big inspirational speech.
