What an amazing day this is to be a part of the IIT Delhi community. Let's have another huge round of applause for our guest guys. Come on.
They say the best way to predict the future is by inventing it. And today we have two stalwarts from different generations who have each foreseen the future for the world by building it themselves. Our first guest is a name that resonates deeply within these walls. He's not just a global icon, but he's also our very own alumni. In the early 80s, he co-founded Sun Microsystems, a company that fundamentally revamped the structure of Silicon Valley. At a time when computing was closed and proprietary, he championed open systems. His vision led to workstations that powered the early internet and the creation of Java. Later he founded Khosla Ventures. He has consistently backed ideas that aim to solve society's largest problems from clean energy to digital tech and as the first institutional investor in OpenAI. Ladies and gentlemen, let's have another huge round of applause for Mr. Vinod Khosla.
With him we have arguably the most influential person in technology right now. Steering the development of the most powerful AI models in history. As the CEO of OpenAI, he has kicked off the generative AI era, changing how the world interacts with information, creativity, and intelligence itself. A huge round of applause for Mr. Sam Altman.
To formally welcome our distinguished guests and set the context for this historic event, I would now like to call upon the stage the director of IIT Delhi, Professor Rangan Banerjee.
Good morning. So nice to see so many of you here. When it was known that Mr. Sam Altman and Vinod Khosla are going to come here, we quickly realized that the Dogra hall is not going to be enough and all of you are actually privileged. We could have two Dogra halls here if we wanted to fit in all those who had registered from IIT Delhi itself. We have the minor exams going on. I don't know how many of you have skipped the minor exams to come here. And I was told some people have finished the two-hour exam in an hour and come down here. How many of you are from outside IIT? Please raise your hands. Excellent. So we hope that all of you would also come for our student tech event next week.
I'd like to just take this opportunity to say that as a higher educational institute, IIT Delhi AI provides an opportunity but also a challenge and we need to figure out how we train the future generation of people who are going into the workforce. Towards this we created a committee of faculty members, students and staff to look at how do we integrate responsible AI and what is ethical use of AI by faculty by students. And this is an ongoing conversation we have again through a dedicated school of AI. We have an MTech program in machine intelligence and data sciences. We have a PhD program. We've also setting up this year we'll be starting the MTech program in machine intelligence and data sciences in our Abu Dhabi campus. We did a curriculum review last year and in that curriculum review we ensured that every student of the institute has exposure to AI in terms of courses AI and sustainability. This was one of the features of the curriculum review. I'm not going to go on about this because we want to hear Mr. Sam Altman and Mr. Vinod Khosla. I just like to say that just give you one example. We with the ministry of tribal affairs developed a tool called Adibani which are in four tribal languages Santali, Bhili, Mundari and others where we are looking at AI for the community in communities which currently do not have access to this kind of content.
We are looking at ways and we are delighted that we are entering into a partnership with OpenAI. We are looking at ways where our students and our faculty will engage with both companies like OpenAI as well as with sovereign AI models so that we can co-develop and create responsible AI which makes a difference in people's lives.
I'd like to say that we are delighted to have Mr. Sam Altman here. He's a person who's been ahead of the curve in terms of thinking on AI and generative AI. We're also delighted to have with us one of our own Mr. Vinod Khosla who has always been ahead of the curve and as a student here I think 1971 to 1976. During that time he set up one of the first computer laboratories in the IIT system and so he was ahead of the curve at that time. He was also ahead of the curve when he in 2004 I think he donated to our institute for setting up the school of IT which is named after his parents.
We at IIT Delhi are now a 65 year old institution and we are in the process of reimagining our future. We want to be ahead of the curve in education. We are looking at IIT Delhi 2035. We are looking at changing our infrastructure. We are going vertical and we are hoping to have Mr. Khosla's support in form of ideas as we do this reimagination. So with these few words I'd like to just say that like all of you I'm looking forward to this conversation. Thank you so much.
Thank you. I'd like to call upon the stage Mr. Vinod Khosla and Mr. Sam.
Where should we start? Hopefully somebody will keep us honest on time. Sam, maybe first I'm always excited to see so many young people. So maybe you can talk about your observations here.
Yeah. This has been a wonderful trip to India for me and I have a lot more exciting stuff today. But this is the thing I've been most looking forward to of the entire trip. Watching what's happening with young people around the world, especially in India though, building with incredible energy with AI. The new startups that are going to happen are already happening. The new products and services that are going to get created, the just total embrace of AI and the excitement and the desire to bring all of this agency and energy and speed to the future is awesome. I don't know about you Vinod but I think this is the biggest shift that has happened in the landscape of what a young person can accomplish in my entire life.
Yeah. It's totally amazing to see and watching what people are doing is just incredible.
India has its 100th anniversary of independence in 2047 and I can't imagine a larger shift by that date than anybody would imagine. So imagine 2047 and what India might be like by then. We haven't prepped our question. We just wanted to have a conversation.
I mean it's going to depend what all of these people do. You all will enter adulthood with super intelligence and that's going to change things a lot but that is an incredible opportunity.
I have a one-year-old kid. And he is never going to know a world where he was smarter than a computer ever. He was born just at the right time to never outrun a computer in raw intelligence. And for him it'll be totally normal life. For us, it's a big adaptation. For you all, it's like a little strange, but you know, you're excited about it. What people can do with GPUs now will be the way that new value gets created in the world. So I don't know what that's going to look like. Vinod doesn't know what that's going to look like. We got a bunch of high-level guesses, but we're not going to be the ones that build that into all of these incredible new companies that people will do with that. Examples that we both like are education is clearly going to totally change. Healthcare is clearly totally going to change. What it means to do work is going to totally change. Companies may be a few people and a giant data center and build incredible new kinds of value. What it means to do physical work will change as robots can automate more and more manufacturing. Certainly what it means to discover science is going to change. The growth rate of economic value in the world. The increase in quality of life. A quote that someone from OpenAI said to me recently that has really stuck with me is we built up a lot of instincts and institutions, policies, structure to deal with a world of scarcity. But almost none of that applies well to a world of abundance. And in addition to building all these new kinds of companies and products and services, society is going to have to get reimagined for this world of incredible abundance.
You've thought about this a lot. Yeah, I've spent a lot of time. Let's ask some practical questions. Do you think GDP rates from whatever is projected by economists today and every country has its 15 and 25 year forecasts. Do you think they more double more than double? What happens?
I think GDP is going to turn out to be a terrible metric because AI is so deflationary. What we want to measure and I think what GDP is meant to approximate is sort of quality of life.
Yeah. And quality of life technically it's a definition of goods and services but it's measured in dollars which is money will be a whole different thing.
Yeah so I think a proper metric of what GDP is trying to approximate will growth rate will more than double for sure. GDP measured in nominal dollars that probably gets kind of squirly actually.
Let me ask you a weird question. Interest rates in five more years, negative 2% or 20%?
I think by 2035 for sure we will have a hugely deflationary economy that the world isn't thinking about. It's interesting because Google just issued 100-year bonds and I said by 2035 you should own all those bonds because the world will be so deflationary that it's hard to imagine anybody pretending. And this is sort of this notion of the world doesn't yet know how large the changes and they're going on as business as usual.
I think one of your engineers wrote a great manifesto. Can you talk about that a little bit?
People do a few of these. Forgetting the name. I just mentioned it earlier in the conversation. Essentially that the world is clueless about what's going on and the magnitude of the change. It'll come to me in just a second.
I think even people who work in AI, we feel a little bit clueless about the magnitude of the change. Codex is an example. By the way, Codex is growing in India faster than anywhere in the world. And mostly with young people. But Codex is an example of where everyone's intuitions even though we knew this intellectually emotionally we were all hit by it. We have like lots of Codex access inside of OpenAI and what it means to be an engineer, what it means to be a researcher changed so much so quickly that that is just going to happen again and again throughout the economy. And if you believe, which I do, that the top level driver of the economy and of life getting better and better every year is scientific discovery. And then the second most important thing is the economic engine around that that brings these new capabilities out into the world. And both of those are going to get automated at the same time. We're going to automate scientific progress. We're going to automate the whole economy. And you think about what that really would mean if these things can happen 10 times faster, 100 times faster than we've been able to do it on our own. We did not evolve to have intuitions about that kind of a growth rate and that kind of compounding. So I don't know. But if you were back here as a student, what would you do tomorrow?
No, I've thought about it a lot. The way I frame the minimum level of change to imagine 15 years from now. So imagine 2040. I have to say I imagine life the delta being the same between now and 2040 as it is between today and 1970. So look back at technology in 1970. That's my assumption about Delta and I think that's too conservative a notion because...
I think that's too conservative.
Yeah. So that's the magnitude of change and people ask me so what should we do? I say learn how to learn really really fast. Like your area of expertise doesn't matter whether you're electrical engineer or a mechanical engineer is largely going to be irrelevant in fact I scared the director a little bit saying nothing you learn will be relevant even in 2030. But when the first year students graduate you won't have learned anything that the AI doesn't know better. I don't know Sam if you agree with me or not. You won't know any technical field better. You may understand better what people want. You may understand much better how to interact with people, motivate people. How to come up with creative ideas, how to sort of adapt quickly and create value. But yeah, any technical skill that you learn day out, it's still worth learning.
You know like someone asked me recently do I regret learning to program because you know clearly the AI is a better programmer than me and the answer is not at all. I also don't regret learning math you know I never use math as an adult. Learning how to think, learning how to learn quickly this was all a valuable skill but it was all of the meta skills that matter. I mean the one thing that I think we could say with confidence of a specific skill to learn is when I was in school, learning to program was the obvious thing. Now, learning to use these tools is the obvious thing. And the fluency that people pick up with each new generation if you sort of are pushing as much as possible on the edge, that seems very valuable.
If you're a college student, what do you think matters the most? What will matter when the technical knowledge they have doesn't matter? And an electrical engineer can do a structural engineer's job quite easily. And by the way, we're building both structural engineers, chip designers, and electrical engineers today that'll be used pervasive everywhere. So, what do you think matters?
Well, I know I just said this, but I can't emphasize enough how important I think it is to stay on the forefront of the tools. I expect that to be a compounding accelerant. So building projects all the time just figure out what's going to be possible and it's going to rapidly increase every couple of months from now on that really matters. The class that I wish my college had offered the motto of Y Combinator is make something people want and it is I think for 20 years now been like the best motto of any investor. And I wish my school had offered a class on that because I think that is a learnable skill figuring that out. And that's going to be ever more important in a world where you can sort of make anything happen, figuring out how to get good ideas, which like anything else, deliberate practice seems to improve. That seems to matter a lot.
Yeah. So my personal view what's most important to learn is curiosity and agency. Can you tell me if you agree, disagree, elaborate on that?
I totally agree. I think agency is also a learnable skill. The world kind of beats it out of you. So you have to resist and continue to believe that you can sort of figure anything and make anything happen. And the more times you do it, the more self-belief you develop. Many people learn this late in their careers. It is super valuable to learn early. Like other things, you just have to start and you have to keep doing it and you'll develop confidence in it. But the returns on agency clearly have never been higher. You know, we've talked for a long time about what one person is going to be able to do with AI. We're finally seeing it now. A single person with drive and an idea and willpower can make incredible things happen. And in some sense, the most important learning of my entire career has been that if you are right on the idea, no matter how unpopular it is, in fact, it's often better to be unpopular because you have no one else you're competing with doing it, and you stick with unwavering conviction over a long time, and you just knock down obstacle after obstacle with no loss of enthusiasm between each setback, you can accomplish amazing things. This was certainly the story of OpenAI. Now it obviously looks like a great thing, but when we started it seemed totally crazy and it was just like a bunch of us were in a room with force of will and sort of an attitude that we were going to do it no matter what. And then even the first like four or five years of OpenAI, it was sort of it seemed like a very bad idea. Thank you for believing in it by the way. And the agency that we had all developed earlier in our careers, which I wish we had developed even earlier, was critical to making it happen.
Yeah, I would say you heard a couple of quotes. I think one said the best way to predict the future is to invent it. I go on to add to it. That was Alan Kay who said that and I say invent the future you want because now more than ever that's possible. The key is agency and it's always been available where you can make the world you want happen. The director said I was part of four students who started the first computer programming club at IIT Delhi which was any programming in any IT had never existed. We just wanted it so we made it happen. I also with Professor Gua here in 1970s started the biomedical engineering program which is the other side which is I got curious as an electrical engineer about electrical phenomena in the body and convinced Professor Gua to start the first biomed program anywhere in India with the All India Institute of Medical Sciences. I give that as example of I was 16 or 17. You can make anything happen if you want to. And that's what agency is about. And when technology and tools make almost anything possible agency is what matters. Curiosity for learning and always staying at the leading edge and agency to make the world happen. There's never been an opportunity to do startups. I'm very excited by this little company we invested in. They approached me a few months ago. Emergent launched a product in July or August. Last week they called me and said they'd exceeded 100 million ARR rate in 8 months, the fastest I've seen anybody grow, even Lovable or Replit or any of those companies. So that opportunity exists for all of you. I don't know if you want to do a finishing comment.
I can't really say anything better than that. This is like a special time. I think this is the best time ever to be starting off careers and yeah the opportunity is incredible.
Yeah, I'll finish by last quote I have. Most people especially in India are especially averse to risk. There's a Harvard Business School where the case that starts with a quote from me saying, 'My willingness to fail allows me to succeed.' So, I really encourage all of you to go be risk-taking. There's so much opportunity to take advantage of it. Take advantage of tools, curiosity, agency, risk-taking, and then persistence because the path is never simple or smooth. So you have to persist through the hard times. Thank you. I think we are at the end of our talk.
What a wonderful conversation guys. We had Miss Anita Williams a month back and the idea that learning is such an important thing for such huge personas for such huge stalwarts. I think that is one of the most humbling things we learn here today. Now we'd like to open up the floor for students to ask their own questions. For this I'd like to invite on stage Mr. Raghav Gupta, the head of education for OpenAI in India. He's currently leading partnerships with academic institutions ensuring that AI is integrated responsibly across all dimensions.
Good morning. It's incredible seeing a packed hall. Sam, I know you have a packed few days in India and there are many senior meetings but to me it seems like this is going to be the most exciting session. Would you agree? I do. And I'd love to ask the students as well. Are you all excited for this conversation? I mean come on now we can do better. Are you all excited for this conversation with Sam?
So, we have some of India's bright young minds here and they're studying engineering, they're studying computer science, I think we have health sciences, management, design and so on. I think you all sent us like 800 plus questions. We can't take all 800 but I've shortlisted the broad themes and we'll invite you to ask them live. I'll kick us off a little bit. Sam you wrote this article in Times of India earlier this week and the headline kind of captured your message very nicely where it said that AI will define India's future and India will define AI's future as well and I know at the AI summit you've seen a lot of what's happening around development in AI would you like to talk a little bit about your impressions there?
India is already our second largest market there's 100 million ChatGPT users a third of them are students fastest growing Codex market in the world. India should be our largest market over time. More than just usage of products like ChatGPT the building energy in India seems like it is growing faster than anywhere else the desire to really create new kinds of products and services brand new companies that are all about AI. This is yeah it's just amazing and so it's been great to be here.
Wonderful. So we're going to go to the students next and we'll open it up live. I think we have Mukund who's going to ask the first question and Mukund is from IIT Delhi. Let's get started with Mukund then.
Hi Sam, I'm Mukund from the department of mathematics IIT Delhi. I'm in my final year pursuing an integrated master's degree. So my question is you have talked about intelligence becoming a cheap utility but we are seeing specialized high reasoning models being sold by premium subscriptions. So how do you reconcile the concept of broad access with the economic viability of these frontier models?
I think the most amazing thing well there's many amazing things I can't say the most. One of the amazing things happening is the rate at which AI is getting cheaper at a given level of intelligence. We are, if you look at a hard reasoning problem, what it would have cost you to solve it using an OpenAI API a year and a half ago versus now, it's down about a thousand x. A thousand x in 18 months is just that doesn't happen very often. I don't think we'll be able to sustain another thousand x over the next 18 months, but maybe we will, but there will be a significant decrease in cost. So our goal here is to relentlessly drive the cost of intelligence down as close to zero as we can. And then make that available to the world as a very low-cost asset. And for a bunch of reasons accessibility being one of them. That's a critical part of our mission. There are going to be a bunch of societal disruptions around that. Like part of society has maybe we talked earlier about this issue of abundance versus scarcity, but society has been used to intelligence being a relatively scarce resource. Also the ability to make things happen in the physical world, energy, robotics, whatever. If all of that changes, I don't think society yet has a consensus on how things are going to work and where the natural limits are going to be. But I do think the cost of intelligence is going to trend down and down and in terms of empowering the entire world that's very important.
We'll go to Tejas next who's also from IIT Delhi and I know the director also spoke a little bit about safety and I think Tejas your question is related to that. So go ahead please.
Yeah. Hi Sam I'm Tejas Raj Mangla. I'm currently a final year student here at IIT Delhi. I'm pursuing my bachelor's in computational mechanics. My question for you is how do we keep AI safe without blocking innovation from things like prompt injection that are happening recently?
I think there's three things here. One, we have to figure out how to technically align AI. We have made better progress there than I thought we might have, but there's still things to do as we get to these systems that are truly much smarter than we are. How we supervise those systems requires new ideas. As we get to a world where AI is writing so much source code and doing so much research, we can't review all of it. There's a bunch of things that used to feel like sci-fi that are now clear alignment challenges that we have to address. We've been doing work here for a while. Other labs have been doing work here for a while. On the whole, alignment has looked easier than I feared, but we're clearly not done. So, bucket one is technical safety work around alignment. Two is there's a whole new kind of security infrastructure that needs to get built. You mentioned prompt injection. I think that's a great example. Open Claw is an amazing thing. Codex is an amazing thing. I thought that I was going to be a very disciplined person and not let them run on my computer with root access. Because I thought that was an insane thing to do and that lasted about 2 hours and then I was like it's really annoying to approve everything. It's so convenient. I'm going to just let it rip. And if I'm willing to do that a lot of other people will be willing to do that too. I should be one of the more conservative ones there. So I think we need to develop a new kind of security architecture different from the model technical alignment to let people be able to use these agents without insane things happening. Like it is awesome that you can run something on your computer and it can get to know everything about your life and record your screen and use the web for you and everything else. It will be significantly less awesome if it starts randomly telling your secrets to people it shouldn't. And then third and most important you mentioned not blocking innovation. I super agree. The kind of these are caricatures because everybody is a little bit in the middle but the two paths the world is looking at right now is either we accept an AI company or country or model having sort of effective totalitarian control over the world for no safety problems at all. You have one AI to rule them all has been people's vision over time. The other is that we super democratize access and we put powerful AI in everyone's hands and we trust that if you out of 100 people 99 are going to be good one person bad the good people will stop the bad some things are going to go wrong in that world people are for sure going to misuse AI in small and probably in big ways but for a long time the world I think has shown that if people are basically most people are good and the good people stop the bad people as long as there's not a huge power imbalance. We can get to a world where we democratize AI, everybody lifts up and that kind of keeps the new powerful bad forces in check. This is the story of society for a long time. It will be messy. Things will go wrong. But I think empowering everyone and having a wide distribution of power is the best, fairest and safest path forward. We call this resilience. So instead of just there's AI alignment, there's security and then there's this newer idea of resilience where I think it no longer works for OpenAI to just say we will block our models from telling people how to make a pathogen because some open source model is going to help some bad guy make a pathogen and we have to have society ready to defend against that with rapid response vaccines, sort of new ways to block respiratory transmission, whatever else. Yeah, that's what I would say.
So the next question is from Yash and he's not here so I'll read it out on his behalf. I read that a lot of research behind study mode in ChatGPT happened in India last year and so if OpenAI were to build a product specifically for India not adapted but designed for India first what problem would you want it to solve?
I would rather one of you figure out the answer to that. Way more innovation is going to happen outside of OpenAI than inside of OpenAI. And our strategy is to build the core model and the basic way to use it, ChatGPT, the API agents like Codex and the general agent and really empower everybody else to build it. One of my learnings from OpenAI is that most innovation in the world comes from startups and we want to empower them.
Wonderful. I think we're going to shift gears a little bit to a health related question which is going to come from Arnesh. Arnesh you have the microphone. Yeah. Go ahead.
