You're like in the middle of the fastest growing but most rapid changing thing in human history.
We don't always even know what the next model is going to be great at.
Kevin Weil, the chief product officer, leads all the product functions at OpenAI. Coming off the back of a storied career in companies like Twitter and Facebook, right? I think everybody knows you. For those who don't know me, I'm Peter Diamandis.
Do you ever look at what the other products are doing and sort of say that's a great idea or let's not go there? Google is competition for us. They're moving very quickly and building good models. So is Anthropic. So are a bunch of other players. It's motivation for us to also go faster.
I do have an important last question. Has OpenAI fully reached AGI and what is Johnny I delivering for you?
Oh man, I've been waiting to talk about this since we started. All right, so now that's a moonshot, ladies and gentlemen.
Everybody, welcome to Moonshots. I'm here with my moonshot mate Dave Blendon and we're here at OpenAI headquarters in San Francisco. We're about to have a deep session with Kevin Weil, the chief product officer of OpenAI. So, let's dive in. Welcome to Moonshots. Kevin, congrats for GPT-5. That is a huge milestone. You know, as chief product officer, I can't think of a bigger product to be announcing to the world.
Yeah. It was probably the most anticipated AI launch of all time, the most anticipated product launch. We've been talking about it for a while, but we're super excited. We put a lot into it. A lot of the things that actually people might not even think about, like we did a lot of work on the health side. So, added a lot of health data because one of the things we see is that people are using ChatGPT all the time to ask about health data, whether it's just this thing happened to my kid, what should I do, or all the way to, I just got a cancer diagnosis, here's a bunch of data, how should I think about this? And it doesn't replace a doctor, but it sure is helpful to have this super smart thing that you can talk to 24/7.
I love that part of the launch, by the way. Everyone on Twitter has got different opinions of that part. I love that part of the launch. Were you a big part of scripting that whole day or how did that work?
Oh, no. We have an incredible team that puts that together. The GPT-5 one was fun because we had so much to talk about because it wasn't just health. It's also the smartest model we've ever launched. It is an incredible coding model. It can do a lot of highly agentic things that you may not see as much in ChatGPT but are super valuable for developers building on it. You can follow very complex instructions, make lots of different tool calls to different services, integrate things without losing the plot, which has been a real area that the whole industry is making models better in. So GPT-5 is the best across the board in a whole bunch of areas and we wanted to try and figure out how to show all of these things. But we needed a lot longer than our normal 20-minute live streams.
And the simplicity of one product serves all. It was brilliant.
Yeah, there's something cool about models that way, right? It's like the Google homepage, right, when it was a simple search bar, right? That's what allowed it to dominate over Yahoo and everybody else. So that simplicity is amazing. Well, it's also complicated because it's so anticipated. Like you said, probably the most anticipated product launch of all time, but if you think about an iPhone launch, the features are obvious. AI is so open-ended. You can do anything on that stage. And so trying to script that and make it relevant for this really wide audience, it's got to be extra challenging for the team here to figure out how to do that.
Well, it's the fun thing about working at OpenAI, too, because we don't always even know what the next model is going to be great at. You know, you have some sense. You can kind of see it coming through the mist at you a little bit, but other times there's something emergent and we're surprised.
So that's the most interesting thing, the fact that AI's properties and capabilities are emergent and I mean no one predicted any of this two years ago, let alone a year ago, right?
Yeah. So you had to have had, you in particular, got all these comments from the world. I mean, people are super excited and people are critical and so how do you deal with all the feedback and does that feedback actually tie back into how you iterate?
Oh it totally does. Because like I said, these models are so powerful, so generic, there's lots of things that we obviously test internally all over the place and we're testing externally in various ways before we launch. But then you give it to 700 million people and all of a sudden they're testing in all kinds of new ways. So we listen a lot. People have feedback on Reddit, on Twitter, on LinkedIn, all the ways that you'd expect. We have people coming into our customer support. We have friends who are giving us their feedback and then you're also just looking at the data, right? And the data tells a really good story. We had one of our biggest Plus upgrades. But, you know, we heard the feedback. I think there were a couple things that we didn't quite get right. One is the model's personality was a little bit wooden. And so we iterated and shipped a fix very quickly for that. Just a little bit more of a warm personality.
That is an interesting subject in itself because there's probably not one personality that will meet everyone's needs. It needs to be fairly dynamic to the individual. I've got to say the voice models and the interactivity as a voice on OpenAI for me is my favorite of all of the large language models. I mean really it feels natural. Oh, really crossed a tipping point too where if you're on a long drive you can talk to it for hours now. You used to talk to it for maybe a minute or two and then you kind of flip out and move to something else. Now you just go for infinite time.
Yeah, it's just engaging and interesting. And to my kids, it's completely natural, by the way, that they would take my phone and just talk to ChatGPT for 20 minutes.
You're a new dad as well. How old is your newborn?
Uh, no, no, we have a, our oldest is 11 and then we have 8-year-old twins. So we're a little bit into it. We're kind of middle stage.
I was looking at the photo on your WhatsApp. Yeah. Okay. So, I mean, you got to admit people were expecting AGI. People were expecting GPT-5 to be... Yeah. I know. I know you will. I'm very confident. Yeah. I'm sure you will. So, they had people that were expecting that and then they got actually a very usable product at like half the price point. Which is extraordinary on its own.
Yeah. Less than half the price point. And also what you said a second ago, I really want everybody to understand. Nobody knows what next year's capabilities or even 3 months from now's capabilities will be. A lot of people think like, hey, no one at Brown knows exactly what's going to happen next. But it's not true. Humanity doesn't know what capabilities will and won't exist because as you scale it's not obvious.
Are you thinking consciousness or what?
No. Well, no. I wasn't thinking about... Noam has a bunch of incredible research ideas and we have some sense and things are starting to work and you have a rough sense of the capabilities but what will that enable? Yeah. That's the kind of thing that only becomes clear as the model comes together and sometimes not even then to our earlier discussion. Sometimes you launch and then you realize the model has these emergent capabilities that you...
When we were here before I was asking, because I teach a class at MIT on foundations of AI ventures. How to build an AI company and all these people want to be at OpenAI because they want to be in the middle of seeing it happen day to day. Yeah. I said, 'Why don't you open an office in Boston where all this talent is?' You're like, 'At the rate that AGI will arrive, it won't matter. We're not doing that because it won't matter. The timeline doesn't line up. We're going to keep the headcount small. The AI is going to be the workforce.' And by the time we got a building built and got it all populated, it wouldn't matter anyway because AGI will be here. So, I don't know if that timeline lines up with what you're seeing because you're on the inside. You're like in the middle of the fastest growing, most rapid changing thing in human history.
Yeah. I mean, we're very optimistic. There's also something magical to being in person to the point about, you know, Boston office. There is, you're in person, you're drawing on whiteboards together. It's a very researchy culture.
I keep on telling my team that it's like, you know, I want the team to come back together again physically. I want to co-locate as much as possible. Zoom is fantastic, but there's the human nature. One of the questions I'm going to ask you later is what's not going to change in the next 5 to 10 years, right? And I think that human nature is part of it. Every week, my team and I study the top 10 technology meta trends that will transform industries over the decade ahead. I cover trends ranging from humanoid robotics, AGI, and quantum computing to transport, energy, longevity, and more. There's no fluff, only the most important stuff that matters, that impacts our lives, our companies, and our careers. If you want me to share these meta trends with you, I write a newsletter twice a week, sending it out as a short two-minute read via email. And if you want to discover the most important meta trends 10 years before anyone else, this report's for you. Readers include founders and CEOs from the world's most disruptive companies and entrepreneurs building the world's most disruptive tech. It's not for you if you don't want to be informed about what's coming, why it matters, and how you can benefit from it. To subscribe for free, go to diamandis.com/metrends to gain access to the trends 10 years before anyone else. All right, now back to this episode. Here's a question. So, you're constantly creating increasing capabilities within the OpenAI ecosystem, and you've got to decide how much of that capability to launch to the public and how much to hold back. How do you think about that? Because I'm sure you have much more capable models and capabilities than are accessible right now. Is that something that's internally sort of constantly you're metering it out at a specific rate? How do you think about that?
Not really. I mean, our mission is to ensure that AGI benefits all of humanity and the way that we do that is to put AGI in people's hands as much as possible. And we believe in this process of iterative development, iterative deployment. So rather than holding it back and then bestowing it fully formed upon the world, we want to get AI out to people as soon as we feel like it's ready. And we'll do that early and we'll do it often. We want to do it safely, obviously. So that's its own sort of guard. But other than that, we'd rather put something out to people earlier and let them play with it and build awesome stuff with it and learn from it. And then we get their feedback and that helps us build better models. It's not a kind of thing where we're like, there's obviously a bunch of stuff we have internally that's ahead of what we have launched but that's also stuff that is very much in research mode, in development, and will make its way into models over time. It's sort of the ability to learn to harness it. But we try and put stuff in people's hands because the fun thing about this world right now, I think every service, product, device we use is going to be reinvented.
So that answers in terms of core model capabilities but what about just raw speed because I write code with GPT-5 every single day. And you watch the lines of code come out and it's incredible. I mean as a force multiplier like 1000x more productive than I would be without it. But I'm watching the lines of code come out and I'm picturing like when you guys are using it internally, it must be many more GPUs blazing fast, lines of code just pouring out of it. Am I right?
Well, we use pretty much the same settings that everybody else does. But that's really just a function of the number of GPUs we have. So, I mean, right now we are... We do have a few. We have a little bit more than a few, but we're also completely maxed out at all times. This is one of the reasons that we talk about Project Stargate where we're going in with a bunch of other groups and building out more than 500 billion dollars of infrastructure.
It's extraordinary. Computronium covering the planet.
Totally. I mean just every time we get more GPUs, they immediately get used whether it's, we can take them on the product side and use it to lower latency or speed up token generation or launch new products. Take a product that's only available to Pro users and bring it to Plus users or free users or it just means that we can run more experiments on the research side. There's basically infinite demand for GPUs within these walls and that's why we're doing so much to build capacity.
I'm really glad you said that because there is a school of thought out there that GPUs will commoditize and it's just so wrong. It's so incredibly wrong.
We're far from that moment at the very least.
I think that will never exist in the world.
It's one of those things. It's like the internet, you know, every bit that we lower latency, increase bandwidth on the internet, people do more things. Video used to be impossible, now video is every day because the capabilities are there, the network can handle it. The more GPUs we get, the more AI we'll all use.
So last year I made four trips to India. And you know, population of 1.4 billion, huge amount of builders there, massive latent talent for building. And I saw Sam's tweet about building for India and I'm curious how do you think about that because India needs it for education, needs it for healthcare, needs it for governance, needs it to help uplift 1.4 billion people. It's the only thing that's going to do that. How does it enter your mission as a chief product officer? Do you think about that differently from just in general?
It's a huge priority. I was out there with Sam and a bunch of people from OpenAI. I don't remember, four or five months ago. And the reception was just incredible everywhere we went. Talking to developers, people are using ChatGPT, building on top of our APIs. It's the biggest country in the world. There's so much we can do. The most youthful also. One of the things I'm really excited about, talking about coding today, there are something like 30 million developers in the world, 30 million people that know how to code. With an AI coding model we can give a couple more orders of magnitude of people, we can take it from 30 million to 300 million to 3 billion people that effectively know how to code, that can create software. And when you can create software, it's such a general purpose skill, you can build personalized tools. You can build all kinds of stuff. And every time you increase something like that, access to a general purpose tool by an order of magnitude, the world changes. So whether you're talking health or education or just frankly the ability to build software, I think this is why AI is going to be the biggest transformational force in our lives. And I think in places like India, it's going to be that much more powerful.
Yeah. And I mean there are nations that need it more than others and India is most definitely going to be one of the biggest beneficiaries.
Yeah, we actually just launched this morning a paid plan in India just for India. So it's a much cheaper plan but it gives Indian users a lot of access to ChatGPT, like 10x more access than you get as a free user. But a heavily discounted plan because we're trying to bring as much of the benefit of AI to people in India as we can.
So how much do you think that's going to unlock a latent talent base because you start in India you think globally there's talent everywhere. And a lot of it is latent. It can't get into a great school. It can't get into a great ecosystem. AI is going to be an incredible leveler of that starting with coding. So is that part of the motivation of going in with a lower price point in India?
Yeah. There's talent everywhere and there's also hustle and urgency. So, yeah, we want to bring as much AI as we can and we've got limits on GPUs and all of this. We have to pay for it one way or another, but we want to put this in the hands of as many people as we can. And so, one of the interesting things about OpenAI, one of the things that's different about this company relative to anywhere I've ever worked, normally when you build products, you move things behind the paywall. So there's a product that starts out free and then at some point you make it a paid feature to try and get people to pay more money for whatever you're building. We go the opposite way at OpenAI. Stuff starts in our Pro or in Plus and so you're paying $20 a month for it. Our entire goal is to make that a free product because we want to give a more powerful product to more people because we think it makes the world a better place. So if you look at the progression of a lot of our things, Deep Research started out as a Pro feature and then we brought it to Plus and now as a free user you can do a bunch of Deep Research every month. So our goal is actually to just make the most powerful product we can and give it to as many people as we can.
So you're probably in charge of balancing the need to create as many GPUs as possible, Stargate and just you need a massive amount of infrastructure and that takes money. And then you want to balance that against, yeah, but we also want to put this in the hands of as many people as possible as cheaply as possible. That's got to be incredible tension inside the building trying to figure out how do you balance those two objectives.
Not so much tension actually. You might be surprised because we have just a long-term belief. I have a long-term belief that the idea that we used to live our lives without AI helping us every day is going to feel crazy in a few years. And so if we're building a product that adds a ton of value to people's lives, we're going to put as much as we possibly can available for free, but there are always going to be things that are super heavily computational and expensive for us that will be in a Plus plan or in a Pro plan. And if we do our job, if I do my job and the team continues to do their job, then those features are going to be super valuable. They're going to be ever more valuable, right? AI is only going to be able to do more for you. And while you're sleeping, rather than waiting, ChatGPT today is a pretty reactive product. You go there, you ask a question. It can do things for you that would have been crazy two years ago, but you're still asking it first. You're still starting to prompt, but you can definitely imagine a world where ChatGPT is much more proactive because of what it knows about you.
You prompt it to be proactive. It's actually proactive.
Totally. But why not think 24 hours a day? You're asleep and it's thinking about what it can do for you. So, there's always more that we can do.
My favorite model is still Jarvis. I want Jarvis in my life. It's doing things for me all the time. I still want my AI to do surprise and delight. The doorbell rings and something shows up that I'm not expecting and it says, 'I bought this for you because I think you'd like it. I heard the conversation you had.'
Yeah. And that for me, that's when... I'll do that for you. I'll ask ChatGPT, okay, what random thing I should buy you and it will show up at your doorstep. We'll see what it does. That's a Peter Diamandis edition.
Fantastic. I love it. By the way, what happened to your hand?
So, I just had an RFID chip implanted today.
As one does. I was over at Frontier Towers. Over at Frontier Towers, a guy named Cass that runs their sort of longevity and biohacking. And I had done this. I had, if you can feel it right here, there's a little chip in there. It's made by a company called Dangerous Things, which is great marketing, right? But this is the more advanced one. So I put it so I can open my Tesla with it and wave in front of the elevator.
Wow. Check out with Apple Pay.
Exactly. I will not put my crypto keys on this because then my hand is at risk.
Yes. The hammer attack. $5 wrench attack.
Wait, how big is the chip?
Oh, it's... Yeah. You want to see the photos here? It's bigger than you would have thought. So, this is what it looks like, right? This is, they actually put this giant needle in your hand about the size of a straw. Make some space and then they slip it in.
It will heal on there. I'll put this up on the video.
And how long will the batteries last?
Oh, it's not battery. It's a near field. So, basically an electric current comes in after. So, anyway, that was fun. It was an hour ago. So, you guys said keep it compressed.
Conversations internally. I have to believe that you, I mean OpenAI is like the most progressive but between Gemini, Anthropic and Grok and everybody, it used to wonder would there be a hard takeoff and there would be one company that just takes off across everybody else and it looks like there's really a leveling up continuously across the pack. Do you ever look at what the other products are doing and sort of say that's a great idea or let's not go there. How do you...
For sure. I mean there's so much innovation happening, right? And there are smart people within these walls and there's a lot more smart people outside of these walls. So we watch what other folks are doing. We also look at how people are using our own models and get a lot of feedback about things they wish they could do, things they love about our models. So I kind of think of that all as part of the feedback that you take in. But what matters at the end of the day is are we executing because I think we have the best people in the world. We have a very clear mission. People are here because we want to build AGI and we see a path to it. So, at the end of the day, it's about our own execution, but I think we'd be crazy if we weren't watching what's happening and trying to learn from it.
So, I met your EA outside and I asked him, has Mark Zuckerberg called recently? Mark's after researchers. Oh, that's got to be crazy. I would love to ask you some questions that will help. We have this huge ecosystem of startups that are building AI companies. And, it's funny. You were there when the internet was everything. And if you're trying to build an internet company, it's pretty obvious that the TCP/IP stack isn't going to change. You're going to be right on top of it. Compare that to AI today and you're like, wow, it's such a moving target that you're building on top of. And so, if you can help the teams in any way understand, are we going to build our own Windsurf, Cursor type capability or is that available? Are we going to... meaning where is OpenAI not going to go that leaves space for the entrepreneurs to go? Exactly. Exactly. And I'll give you a case study. So, Mark Orberg, the chairman of MIT, really wanted Sam to come to campus and meet with the president, Sally Cornbluth. And Sam said, 'Yeah, I'll come and do that if you introduce me to 50 startups back to back.' And so, Mark set it all up. And they did the 50 back-to-back meetings. And then...
Sam was on stage. But, you know, Sam, genuine Y Combinator background, absolutely cares about the startup economy thriving on top of OpenAI. So, the mission is right in alignment. But then knowing what's going to happen next is harder than anything I've ever seen before. So any insight you can give on what's your advice to entrepreneurs wanting to build on top of OpenAI? We've seen a lot of OpenAI wrappers in the past. What's your advice though?
So here's the context that I think is most important. Every single product we use, every single service that we use today, every single device that we use, practically all of them were pre-AI. Any of the ones that are at scale were pre-AI. They're all going to be reinvented.
It's like adding electricity to every mechanical thing.
Exactly. It's a really good analogy. Everything is going to be reinvented. And sometimes the incumbents are going to figure out how to do it themselves. If history is any guide, not many of them are going to figure it out, right? And that's a huge opportunity for startups, for entrepreneurs because we're in this complete transformation. So that's super exciting. I think it's an awesome time to be an entrepreneur. Certainly we're going to try and do some of that reinvention ourselves. No matter how big we get, how many things we do, I mean I'm talking everything is different, right? And it's not just tech, it's also the way you interact with your doctor is different. Material science is different. So we're only going to be able to do this much. And so what we say to the developers is if you're building right at the edge of what the models can do, you're so far at the bleeding edge that the models can't quite do the thing you want, but you can just see little glimmers of hope. That's a great place to be building because 2 months from now, we're going to launch a new model and the thing that you've been just barely getting to work is going to sing. And that's going to be awesome. If instead what you're doing is patching a problem with the current model and you're afraid of the next model launch that we are going to come out with because it's going to disrupt, it's going to obviate the need for the thing you're building, like don't do that. Assume that the models are going to keep getting better at a crazy pace and build something that's just at the edge so you're excited about the next model because it's going to make your thing awesome.
Yeah. Arvind Srinivas over at Perplexity talks, he calls that AI complete when he was designing the Perplexity business plan. It had to be AI complete, which I think he just made up. Nobody... but it means exactly what you just said. It rides the wave. It doesn't get swamped by the wave.
Yeah, that's a much more concise way of saying what I was saying.
I have a question I've been dying to ask you. As the chief product officer, what does AGI look like as a product? Is it just like ChatGPT, but it can do anything better, faster?
That's a good question. Well, I mean, chat is such an interesting format because it mimics how humans communicate. We can text you, we can write on the keyboard, but I can also talk and we can look at each other and a chat interface kind of gets at that full generality. So it's really powerful as a backdrop, but it's...
Not the only interface. I think when you have AGI, your model is going to be in real time creating UI on the fly to build the most economical, sensible solution for the thing that you're trying to accomplish. And you're going to have all kinds of software being created and thrown away because you can just produce it again in an instant.
Yeah, that's the vision. When you're just talking to it, it's really obvious that it's going to be super empathetic. But then you start to see the video generation. You're like, 'Oh, wait.' Now my mind is blown because it can create scenes for me in real time. It can create images. It can create entertainment, but also if I'm designing something, it can, like Jarvis, create the design in thin air. And so now I'm thinking, okay, Jony Ive is going to be working on something.
Let's talk about that one second. I always come back, by the way, to the if you've read Ender's Game, of course.
You know, like the jewel in your ear. It can see what you see. It can hear what you hear, but it also is super intelligent and connects back to the information across the galaxy.
Like that's kind of I think where we're going.
Yeah. They lost that in the movie actually. You got to read the book.
Yeah. So I think we're going to this multimodal world where there's video capturing everything and you're always being seen in your environments and where AGI becomes anticipatory. It knows what you likely want, right? And it's making the world automagical is the term I use for that.
So, I'm just still trying to dig into what does AGI as a product from OpenAI look like. Is it fully anticipatory? Is it just like doing things you don't expect it to be doing? I guess you could turn that feature on.
Yeah. And I think it's also there, and I don't even know that we need to be fully at AGI for this, but I think you want the product to be taking every whatever AGI is.
Yeah. And just doing, I mean you think about the number of things that you do every day. You wake up in the morning and you have a whole bunch of emails. A lot of those are mechanical probably. Some of them are like ones that you really want to type out every word of response. Most of them are mechanical. They're scheduling. They're responding. I want my AI to have already done all of those for me before I wake up.
Maybe every once in a while I need to say, 'Yeah, that's right.' Or, 'I want to edit that sentence.' But mostly it's just like, 'Be done.' And you're going to have that across. How much of your browsing is semi-mechanical? You got to get the thing done.
But you actually don't care about reading the words on the page and waiting for things to load and clicking links. You're just trying to get a job done. All of that should be gone.
Yeah. But what do you think about the future of media? Because you know one thing that's really interesting about media in general is that everything competes with everything else. So you know you don't really think of sports as competing with news but it does because it's all competing for mind share. And clearly AI is going to take a huge amount of our mind share, it's just so engaging. And so you know that's got to come from somewhere, that time and that mind share has to come from somewhere. Do you guys think through like how is this going to affect internet media, TV, movies, all of that attention economy?
Sure. I mean it probably becomes hyperpersonalized right today. And there are good and bad things about that. There's something magical to every single person in the US watching the same, you know, two news shows at night. And we don't have that anymore.
There's something cool about the shared experience of we can all, you know, the same movie is in the theater for all of us at the same time and we can talk about it. But there's also something pretty cool about it. This movie is, you know, totally personalized to me and I'm the only one that it matters to. So I mean you got to think that kind of thing starts to become possible. Also probably though there's always the sort of you go to extremes. The other extreme is then you value the thing that was created by humans that much more.
Yeah. It's like sports are the last business model in TV that still really works well.
Well you're an ultramarathoner. You'll still be doing that. I think that what's not going to change in the next 10 years. I mean we can list so many things that will.
Yeah. Well, I think humans are still going to be humans, right? We're still like us connecting in person is really going to matter. The feel of this is very different. Us doing it here sitting around a table relative to us doing it through, you know, Zoom or something.
So, that's still going to matter. You know, a handwritten note is still going to matter. Personal connection is still going to matter.
I would think it's going to matter a lot more actually. The way things are, you mentioned earlier, you just love having everybody here in the building. It's just different.
Yeah. And since you have so many AI force multipliers, you actually don't need regional offices all over the world. And so the relative importance of communication inside the team is probably higher than any company you've been in before.
I could run my Abundance Summit virtually through the year, but we're five days together in March.
And those five days are, you know, just magical in terms of the energy.
So what do you guys think? What stays the same and what does AGI look like? I think one thing that after that GPT-5 launch that occurred to me, you know, up until this point, you think about, you know, I had my kids working with GPT-2 writing content and then GPT-3 and then GPT-4 and they've been watching this crazy progression. Now it's pretty clear that the AI community is going to try and not change too many things too quickly. Like let the AI become super intelligent. Let it solve healthcare. Let it solve, you know, like but don't go rampaging across San Francisco tearing down buildings because actually that's creating more problems than good. And it's now becoming clear to me the AI community is really small as a fraction of the world. And the last thing it needs to do is change everything tomorrow, even though it potentially could. So it's starting to feel to me like, you know, the physical world won't change as much as people might think, while the virtual world will change at warp speed.
Mhm. I think the importance of purpose is still going to be right because one of my biggest concerns about the future of, you know, the end point here is when everything is being done for you or can be done for you and you can just sit back and be, you know, a couch potato.
The thing that's going to make you live in a Star Trek universe, not a Mad Max universe, is purpose.
Like so that importance and Yeah.
Yeah. I completely agree with that. I think the I always have a hard time with the futures that people paint when it's like, oh, we're all just going to sit back and, you know, eat grapes and write poetry and receive our UBI because I just I don't think that's what drives us as humans. If you go back and look at we don't have to like, you know, cross the United States in a covered wagon. We don't have to hang our laundry on clothes lines as, you know, very much anymore. There's probably, if you go back a 100 years ago, people look at our lifestyle today and they're like, 'Oh my god, everything is done for you. What are you talking about?' But of course we take those time savings and go do more interesting stuff with it.
Yeah, it's always going to be true. It's all about time savings, right? One thing that's true is every single human, 8 billion of us have 7 days in a week, 24 hours in a day, right? 365 in a year. And it's what you can do with that time that defines wealth, success, impact, everything.
And AI is the greatest, you know, time multiplier period. And I think it's one of the most powerful parts of human nature that we all strive for something bigger than ourselves and you want to leave the world a better place than you found it. And that's so innate to humans. AI is not going to change that. It's just going to supercharge it.
So without, you know, I won't ask you now to tell me what Jony Ive is building for you. Okay. But we are going to interact with AI in different ways. So, how do you think about that future besides it's been typing and now voice is amazing.
Mhm. Yeah. I mean the jewel in your ear thing is the model in so many ways because you don't want, take ChatGPT, right? It's just one of many AI products that we'll all use. But you don't want ChatGPT to just like sit inside of a phone app or a browser waiting for you to go there. You want it to be wherever you are. You want it to effectively see what you see and have all the context that you want to give it so that it can be smarter and act more proactively for you. And it shouldn't wait for you to open a phone app to do stuff for you. It should be just sort of constantly chugging away behind the scenes, speaking about GPUs, but it should be constantly chugging away behind the scenes taking action for you and saving you time. So that's going to be much more of the future than today where you like go to a website and ask it questions.
Can we come back to GPU for just one second? Yeah. So, and let's talk about Stargate, too.
Yeah. Stargate like so Chase Lock Miller is walking around like he's our MIT classmate alum. And you know he's walking around Abilene, Texas with Sam and you know there's concrete and pipes and like just stuff everywhere.
And but it's not up and running right, that none of the functionality is delivering yet. Getting closer.
Is it getting closer? Is it very soon or is that all secret?
Yeah. I don't remember what's public and what's not, but we're very excited for that to come online because we could use all the GPUs we can get. I'm sure. And all we know is in the Oval Office there's a $500 billion budget. So it gives us a sense of the budget. But why stop there?
I mean I don't think we will.
No. Yeah. It was about 18 months ago that I partnered with one of my closest and most brilliant friends Dave Blodgett to start Link Exponential Ventures. At Link, we manage about a billion dollars of seed stage money based out of Kendall Square in Cambridge right between MIT and Harvard. When Dave and I both graduated from MIT, each of us immediately started companies. But at that age, everything is working against you. You have an idea, you're challenged to raise money, and you can't afford rent. And even with all the accelerators out there, you're competing against thousands of other startups for the same pool of investors. Both Dave and I have spent a big chunk of our lives focusing on how do we inspire and support founders to knock down those barriers, to go big, to create wealth, to impact the world, to build and scale as fast as possible. Especially in today's AI everything world, we're seeing so many companies reaching multi-billion dollar valuations in just 2 to 3 years faster than ever before. Some companies are adding millions or tens of millions of dollars of value in just weeks. So, we started asking ourselves, how do we help these founders go faster and not skip a beat? As an example, a couple months ago, we bought an apartment building adjacent to MIT where a graduating entrepreneur can move in immediately without slowing down their tech build while they search for a place to live. And so, we're doing everything we can to accelerate builders and their super smart teams. Of course, funding is part of it, mentoring is part of it, connecting them with my personal network of abundance-minded CEOs and investors is part of it. We house 66,000 square ft of purpose-built incubator space, and 26 AI startups call Link XPV their home. And the returns have been amazing. I have nothing to ask, but if you are building a company in the AI era, check us out at linkventures.com. Now, back to the episode. So, I just got back from Brazil. So, I was there delivering five keynotes, talking to entrepreneurs, builders, and they're all asking what will sovereign AI look like for us? How do we make sure we're not passed over, right? Same question being asked probably in India and other parts of the world. Speaking to those entrepreneurs and they're extraordinarily passionate. What's the advice to the leadership in those regions, South and Central America?
I mean, a part of this is why we try and offer everything. I mean, ChatGPT is a free product.
Download it from the app store or on the web. You don't even need to sign in. You can just go and get access to the greatest intelligence the world has ever seen.
For free on your phone at all times. And like you said, we launched GPT-5. We cut prices dramatically. Like if you look at prices today relative to what GPT-4 costs when it came out, even as models have gotten way more intelligent, they've gotten like 100x cheaper. So you're on this crazy cost curve and we want to keep going because the more intelligence we can put in people's hands, the more they can do with it.
Do you feel like that ever would have happened if OpenAI hadn't forced the timeline? Because you know you've been at Meta, you've been at Twitter, you've seen like if this stuff had stayed inside Google's labs and OpenAI hadn't come into the world and said, 'Hey, we're going to make this available right now' because right now, you know, Google is throwing it out there the same way OpenAI has. But that's because it's a reaction.
So, where do you think we would be if OpenAI hadn't existed in this? Would it all be hidden somewhere still? We wouldn't even have access to it.
I mean, we wouldn't be where we are, right? Competition is great. As a friend of mine likes to say, capitalism is undefeated. Like this, it's amazing to have competition. And by the way, Google is competition for us. They're moving very quickly and building good models. So is Anthropic. So are a bunch of other players. And that, you know, it's motivation for us to also go faster.
Do you remember the moment consumers and businesses benefit is great. Do you remember the moment in your life when you first said, I want to go work at OpenAI. I need to go get in that building and meet Sam and get there.
Uh yeah, I so I've known Sam for a bunch of years. Not super close, but just, you know, we were friends. We could text, that kind of thing. And I would call him whenever I was like thinking about going from one job and, you know, doing something next because he's such an incredible thinker and futurist and, you know, connected. He's highly connected, but he's also just involved in interesting things. So I'm a physicist by background and before my previous job is like four or five years ago I'd called him and he introduced me to some companies building fusion.
And I almost went and worked at one of those companies.
So I just, you know, periodically would talk to Sam and this last time I called him, he said, 'Well, actually,' and so, you know, I hadn't even really thought about it. And then I came in, met a couple people and was just like, 'This is the most interesting thing I have ever seen. Like, I will work for free. Please just let me in the door.'
So you could literally be working on magnetic containment for fusion reaction somewhere completely unrelated.
Pretty amazing, right? Like 37 venture-backed fusion companies. I would have never imagined.
Are there 37? Yeah, that's I mean I love hearing that. By the way, I'm so glad that there has been a renaissance in deep tech and investment.
Yeah, it's like you know there are venture-backed rocket companies and fusion companies. It's like you know okay this stuff is becoming real.
Yeah, we need more of it.
How can you possibly keep up with the speed of change? I mean I think in your role trying to keep up with how rapidly the tech is progressing. How do you think about that?
Part of it is staying as connected to our research teams as we possibly can.
Yeah. How big is the research team here?
I don't know. Order of magnitude a few hundred. Yeah. Something like that. So and it's a very independent, it seems very independent, right? People can work on a project and sort of begin to launch features.
It's I mean there's kind of a spectrum. Parts of the research team are super academic. They're doing like novel research that may or may not work out, may or may not see the light of day for a while. Because this is such a new field, there's a lot to discover. You're not just productionizing things that somebody else figured out. You got to figure out this stuff from scratch. And then there are parts of the research team that are much closer to product where you know you're taking a model and helping to post train it and making sure that it's good at certain things that are really important for our customers in various shapes. And you kind of have everything in between. So one of the things that I think differentiates OpenAI is how closely product and engineering and research all work together. Because like I said, there are parts of research that are very separate. But the parts that when we work closely together and we get a tight iteration loop from like building model capabilities, turning that into a product, getting feedback, taking that feedback back, improving those model capabilities and iterating that way. Like that's how we built deep research. That's how we build agent functionality. Like the best stuff comes from that.
So in your role, you know, so here's research, you know, ultra science, then here's product features and functions, you know this voice, this button, then over here you got data centers. Do you span all of that as a CPO?
No, no, just the products that you use so think the API, think so Mark is overseeing all the yeah Mark leads research. Greg leads everything sort of data center infrastructure scaling all that kind of stuff.
Yeah, there's a lot going on. So we divide and conquer.
You know, the feature I'm looking forward to is my BCI connect.
Yeah. So, a friend of mine is involved in, you know, Merge that was just announced, leaked, I guess. So, you know, we have 100 billion neurons, 100 trillion synaptic connections.
And being able to have a feature set that lays on top my neocortex. Do you actually, do you think that far ahead in your conversation?
Is Merge, by the way, is Merge doing are they going invasive or is it sitting on your scalp or how are they doing?
I know the details of the company. I don't know what I can say about it.
But there are a multitude of companies that are invasive and a number that are external. And there are those that are subcranial but above the dura of the brain. So, lots of different layers there. But I'm super excited about that, too.
So, Oh, yeah. I mean, I would do it in a heartbeat. Would you?
No. No. Absolutely not. But that's only because well, look, I use AI literally six, seven, eight hours a day.
And it's getting so far ahead. There's no, you know, the original vision there was I need to increase the bandwidth of communication between my brain and this really slow laptop.
But now the AI moves so fast that it's clear that I can give it a concept and it can just run with it. And I haven't had the next concept yet. Like the increasing the bandwidth between my brain and the laptop no longer matters. The AI is just way too fast.
So listen, Alex Weizer-Gross, who's one of our friends and partners, was on my stage at the Abundance Summit and he was talking about the importance of coupling like if AI is taking doing a real takeoff and humans are linear, can we couple with that? Right? And that coupling is going to need to have this kind of an interface. So here's the question to you. Would you do a BCI coupled to OpenAI?
I would personally do it. I would personally do BCI.
Yeah. So I like when it's safe, I'll do it in a heartbeat.
Yeah. I mean, I just I tend to do experimental things in the first place.
Yeah, I was gonna say, says the man with a RFID chip in his hand. But no, I would totally do it. I think it'll be amazing when you can access the world's information, not by like typing into one of these things, but at the speed that you can think. And then you have like this. I mean, we will be a different species. It'll be super cool.
Yeah. And we are going to speciate. And there'll be those who decide they want to, you know, I like it the way it is. I don't want that in my head. And others that I want to see this, I want to understand quantum physics. I want to have infinite knowledge. I want to be able to be interfaced.
Like, I understand what you're saying completely. Like you got the Amish over here and you got the technophiles over there. That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying that when you surround me by monitors and it's creating things on those monitors at the speed of AI right now. There's no bandwidth increase beyond well I can't absorb any more information than that anyway. I'm at the limit of what I can think about.
But maybe not with your eyes and maybe not when you have to type it in to a thing and then, you know, wait for it all. I mean, it's really hard to beat.
But we've talked about the fact that visually you can look at an image and get whether the data is correct or not, right? Versus if you have a text, you have to read every line. So anyway, we'll see. We're going to find out.
Yeah. Well, I guess you and I will be the AB test and or we'll be the A and he'll be the B.
You'll be the A. If you're still alive, you'll be a baby.
If I'm still alive. Yeah.
Yeah. Peter's having it done tomorrow. I might wait a year and then we'll see how that goes.
Yeah. Well, as long as you can upgrade. You don't want to get version one and then it is true.
So, you know, you've worked at some amazing companies. You know, I love what Planet's doing as well.
Putting a layer of imagery on top of the planet. But I can't imagine that the speed of iteration of products is any place faster than it is here.
Yeah. Nothing in my experience is compared to OpenAI.
I thought Facebook and Instagram when I was there moved quickly and they do.
But nothing compares to OpenAI.
Do you feel like so you're doing what a 10, 20 billion capital raise is at 500 billion something like that? I'm just reading the news. I don't want to.
No, you're just reading the news. You tell me.
Okay. But do you feel like Google's got about 100 billion of free cash flow? You know Amazon's huge and they have massive data centers in advance. Do you feel like there's a vulnerability at the raw compute and budget level?
I mean it's why we are so focused on building out our own capacity. They've got big data centers. They've been doing this for a long time. They've built great technology. They also support a whole host of things. They also, you know, Google builds a lot of products that we all use.
We build one product. We have one mission. Building AGI is existential for us. I think that's an advantage.
