The thing we do that's had the most impact on the world is how we set the ChatGPT personality. What's different with the new model? Smarter, faster, more context.
What's like the most common thought in your head? What are we aiming towards? Like what's your vision here?
Almost unimaginable prosperity.
This is Sam Altman. 3 years ago, he catapulted us into a race to invent superintelligence. But he actually started working on this 20 years ago when everyone thought creating AI was impossible. And against all odds, he and a team of scrappy engineers did it and changed the world. Now, over 900 million people use ChatGPT every week. In today's episode, I'm going to ask Sam questions he's never been asked before.
Okay, I'm probably going to be really bad at this. Let's try it.
And give us a rare look into his vision for the future.
So you got to have robots. So you can get ahead of it and build the next big thing. That was so fun. Thanks for coming on the show.
Yeah, I'm so excited. I've watched like all of your interviews for over the last 20 years. I remember this. It's been cool cuz I think there's been a lot of things that you've stayed very consistent on. Um one of them is your like focus on builders. And I think a lot of people don't know. They see you as like the CEO of OpenAI now, but they don't know that you were obsessed with AI like 20 years ago. Can you tell me about your initial venture to it in college and what made you love artificial intelligence?
One, I think it is just from like a techno perspective the coolest thing ever. Um the it's just such an interesting idea that we could make computers think and do stuff for us and help and that I I have like loved this my understanding of the story of technological progress in human history where we keep inventing tools on top of tools on top of tools and build up this scaffolding that lets us do more and more. And that gets to the So I think it's just like a beautiful idea and very cool technology. But that gets to the second thing, which is in terms of technology and scientific discovery that can make the world better. If we can put this hand this tool in the hands of people and if people can use AI to build and explore and create and new companies and new kinds of art and new kinds of experiences for each other and whatever else they'll do with it, that that is how I believe the world gets better. That's also how I believe people get fulfilled. So um before this, my career was in startups and I used to watch people make startups and I thought it was like awesome for the world, awesome for the people doing it. Uh I now think we're going to be in a world where you can have these one-person startups or three-person startups, whatever. And the amount of human potential that is going to unlock and the amount of good stuff that's going to make for all of us that was just totally impossible without this technology. I think it'll be like quite great to see.
Which historical figure do you think would have benefited the most from having AI?
Um Da Vinci was the first one that came to mind. Someone like very bright thinker, interested in a lot of things that's like, you know, just huge creative energy trying to get as much done as possible.
It's interesting too because I feel like when the transformer initially came out, it's like a predictive text model. Um it's crazy how far that one breakthrough has gotten us in discovery. Do you think about that?
I I all the time. Um Ilya Sutskever once said uh a very simple sentence that as many simple sentences said it really stuck in my mind, which is prediction is very close to intelligence. Mhm. And the idea is that if you can compress all of the information about the world, the state of things, whatever, into its smallest representation, um and then as part of that predict the thing that's going to happen next, um you understand it in a sort of deep way. And this idea at the time, a lot of people in the AI field were quite excited about generative models for a reason they couldn't quite articulate. Um but I think the reason was something to do about this that prediction is very close to intelligence and if we're trying to build systems that really understand all of the data they're trained on, if if we can get them to start predicting what comes next, uh that seems like a great step. Um and certainly when you watch like children begin to understand the world, I think you can observe a a similar phenomenon.
Yeah, I think about it a lot. Like watching AI get smarter makes me hopeful because I'm like, all right, if I just input all of that information to my brain, I would get the same outcome. Um do you think that certain people are just like more destined to be great at like physics or science and math? Or do you kind of believe that if you just gave everyone the same information, they would have the same output?
Um no, I don't think they wouldn't I'm happy they wouldn't. Like I'm happy we get like the rich tapestry of human experience and that people have different interests and talents and sort of uh you know, also different training data. But I think it'd be quite sad if we showed every person the exact same training data and they had all the exact same ideas and the exact same interests and anything else. So I'm grateful that doesn't happen.
It brings me to an interesting thing that you said in a previous interview, which is that there's never been another time in history where this many people have all talked to like one mind. Like there're 900 million ChatGPT users every week. It's extraordinary. Um how does that influence how you shape the personality of ChatGPT?
We've gone through many different approaches to this. Uh it's it's so hard to get this right. People want different personalities. The same person wants different personalities on different days. Um people on different time horizons might prefer a very different personality. Like you might want a model if you're just thinking about how it makes you feel today, you might want a model that tells you how great you are. And if you want if you're thinking about like what's going to maximize your fulfillment and kind of accomplishment over a longer period of time, you might want a model that pushes back on you way more.
Um almost no one wants to go like set sliders about like, here's how I want ChatGPT to behave. I want it to be like this funny and I want it to be like this nice to me and push back on me this much. And we don't do that for friends in our lives either. Um but we do gravitate towards different people or different people at different times or want different um want the people in our lives to support us in different ways in different environments and different days and different contexts and we expect them to understand that.
And right now, ChatGPT doesn't work that way and most people don't expect it to work that way, but that is what I think we should shoot for.
I think it does kind of model a little bit though. Like I feel like my ChatGPT is like very like energized and optimistic in a way that when I use the account logged out, it's not.
It definitely does a little bit of this. Like it definitely kind of gets to know you somewhat. Uh and this is what we've been going for. We're pushing towards this kind of memory and understanding more and more. Um but we used to not have that. We used to have these like sliders and tell us what the personalities want kind of thing.
Yeah. And then you had 40, which was an interesting moment for you because um you for people that don't know the context is that it was very agreeable, but in a good way in some ways. And I remember in an interview you talked about how some people actually emailed you saying like this is the only supportive chat in my life.
I still think about those emails a lot.
Yeah, how do you how do you navigate that? Cuz I think what's really cool is you have this opportunity to like rewire someone's brain for positivity and work ethic if you do it right, but there's a lot of responsibility.
We Yeah, the responsibility on this point is is huge. You know, this idea that there's we talk a lot about the risks with AI and the benefits and you know, we measure the big risk like bio risk or cyber security risk. Um but probably the thing we do that at least historically has had the most impact on the world is how we set the ChatGPT personality.
Yes. Um how encouraging should it be? How uh you know, tough love should it be? How much should it like um customize to you versus me versus not do that? Yep. How understandable should be what it's doing? Like how much do you need to see those sliders after all?
Yeah. And we have historically, not just us, the whole field, not treated this with the same amount of rigor and scientific focus and sort of risk understanding that we have on things like let's not make a new pathogen. Yep. But the impact this has had on the world is huge. I think it's had tremendous positive impact. Obviously with 40, it had some negative impact, too. Um I don't I still have not heard anyone talk about this in a way where I'm like, this is the answer. This is how the world should think about the power of the default personality or the limits of personality in these models. But it is clearly a huge issue and going to get bigger.
How are you thinking about it right now?
Um I have asked a small number of people that I think are really wise in different ways, you know, people from great spiritual traditions like great clinical psychologists, people who I just think really understand how people interact with each other and what motivates someone, what fulfills them, to try to write different uh sort of instruction manuals for ChatGPT.
Okay. About here is how to behave to maximize people's fulfillment and personal growth and sort of uh accomplishment and enjoyment of life.
And I want to get those and I want to try aligning ChatGPT to the combination of those and see what happens.
Would it have to change by culture, too?
I think it largely will, but there are some universal things about people that seem more about biology than culture.
There's this interesting book. I'm going to get the title slightly wrong. Maybe I won't. I think it's called human universals. Um but it was some anthropologists that went through every human culture they could find and looked for and they like made a list of all the traits. And then if something didn't exist in even one culture, they took it out cuz they said it's not that's not really a universal. That's like some sort of cultural thing. Okay. Um and and there were some things that weren't obvious to me that would exist in every culture like valuing travel, but it still did. And there were a lot of things that made sense to me that would, you know, value every in every culture.
Um was talking earlier about kind of how I'm like very excited about AI and what it's you know, what I think it can do for the world. Um but increasingly one of the concerns we're hearing from people is, you know, okay, let's say you're right. Let's say you do give with this technology. You give everybody on Earth a ton of agency and you make and people working with this technology collectively make huge prosperity for the world. Like people will still work because they want to work for fun, but everybody no one will have to and everybody will have this like great life and whatever. Um increasingly people are saying, well, you know, you talk about a right to prosperity, but what about the struggle? What about the like need for adversity? What about the need to kind of overcome challenges and learn and not have everything taken care of and how important that is? And there are a few things like that that seem like important to how we evolve as well.
Agree. I also feel like that's a little bit of a false equivalency that's being made because I don't think like if you look at any big technological revolution, there's never really been overall decrease in jobs. It's just that the jobs have shifted.
Yeah, we you know, we were promised four-hour workweeks or whatever. Yeah. And we were promised like less stress and more happiness and more abundance. And maybe if we were still content with the quality of life from a hundred or five hundred years ago, actually wouldn't have to work that hard. Yeah. We could get that. But is it the most valuable
and more and more. The bar keeps going up. And and and more than that, we want to like we want to accomplish and we want to compete and we want to be useful to each other whatever the new world looks like.
And we want to sort of push on new things and discover new frontiers and invent new products and services and make new stuff, you know?
Totally. Uh I saw something once where some music producer said decades ago that music had gotten so good, he really didn't see why there was ever going to be a need to create any more music.
just don't work that way. Yeah, of course.
So I, you know, fortunately or unfortunately, depends on your take, like people are still going to be working hard. People are still going to be stressed. People are still going to be unhappy. People are still going to be like striving
to create and trying to overcome adversity in whatever way is meaningful to them and and through that find fulfillment and growth and maybe it looks nothing like the kind of struggles that we have today or the kind of work we have today, but I bet the spirit of it will be very similar.
Yeah, I think that's an interesting point because if you look at how AI is polling in general, it is like not polling positively in America. Um and yet I'm so excited about it and like I feel like a kid in a candy store when I used to chat with ChatGPT because it opens up all these new doors to explore. And I think a lot of my founder friends feel similarly. Um but then I look at how it's often covered in the news and it will be like 50% of jobs are going to be wiped out. Um why do you think that narrative has taken off and what do you think is actually going to happen?
Um A lot of a lot of thoughts. I think people do kind of always like like dooms cells. Mm. The news covers Yeah, like it at least covers that kind of thing. And, you know, people people seem to love a lot of people at least seem to love reading about talking about how horrible the future is going to be and the bad stuff seems to travel better than the good stuff. Now, I think with any new technology and this degree of change, there is reason for caution. Um and that speaking of these things that are like deep human evolutionary traits, we seem to evolve something where we do want to think about the bad. We want to talk about the bad. We we want to and that probably helps us defend against it and there's probably a really important societal Yeah. shared caution thing there.
Um I know some AI CEOs are saying things like 50% of the jobs are going to go away.
To say nothing of how tone deaf it is for someone to be saying, my company's going to eliminate 50% of the jobs and my company's going to be the most valuable company in human history and, you know, how wonderful that's going to be and like, but 50% of you are going to lose your jobs. Um to say nothing about the wisdom of not even wisdom, just the sort of like the tone deafness of that. Um I don't think that's the right way to think about it. Uh jobs will go away. Jobs have gone away with every technological revolution. Jobs will change. Um I think someone said to me just yesterday that really stuck with me is I can use the new model GPT-5.5 in Codex to accomplish in an hour what would have taken me weeks two years ago. And I thought I would have been much less busy in that world.
Yeah, and now you're doing more than ever
never been busier in my life. I'm waking up in the middle of the night to do more work. It's like make it stop, please.
It's too much. Um with new tools, I think we will create in new kind of ways. I I have no doubt that the economy is going to change a lot and jobs are going to change a lot.
And I think caution is warranted and I think rigorous debate about new social contracts, new economic systems are warranted as well. But I don't think it's like we're all going to sit around in a life without meaning and without work. It's it's just going to be it's just going to be different.
I also think that scientific breakthroughs are really coming and super exciting. I want to dive into that with you. I have so many questions here. Um but one of the first ones that came to mind um is going back to the idea that it's like a predictive model. Um I think there's like two scenarios that are playing out here. One is like if you gave a human enough time and you gave them all this information, would they develop the same breakthrough? And then two, is it kind of like move 37, which was like in the game of Go when AI came up with a move that humans never would have done. Like which path are we on?
Um Well, they might not be that different. I I was smiling cuz I was remembering when we had the first GPT models, there were all of these really smart-sounding scientists or AI experts that would say, you know, next token prediction will never develop new knowledge. It can't. It's modeled off of the data it's been shown. It can't figure out anything new. And they sounded so smart. They had all of this like fancy explanations these fancy explanations for why this was going to be the case. And then with really with 5.4, a little bit with 5.3, was the first time where models started contributing in small ways new knowledge to humanity's collective knowledge.
Proving unproven mathematical theorems, um some smallish new pieces of physics, things like that. I expect this to keep going. Um in some sense, move 37 was already an example of this. And and so this idea that we can train a model to just predict the next token based off of things it has already seen
and then use that ability to go discover fundamentally new things that didn't exist anywhere is like not so obvious on its on the face of it. In fact, you kind of would say what people turn out to be wrong about, which is it shouldn't do that. Um but really what these models are learning to do through this process of next token prediction is to reason. To understand how to make sense of all of the data they have seen and complete what comes next even if it's something they haven't seen before. Um this reasoning process can be applied to things that you have not seen before. And this is really quite remarkable. Like the fact but people do this too, right? Like people can go study all of the known physics and then keep running their model
their predictive model or whatever and by applying that reasoning ability they have learned through not just the facts, but the the underlying thinking process that they developed during their physics training go discover new physics. And I think that's what these models are doing, too. Now, could people do it uh with more time and more brainpower? Probably yes. I would say yes, actually.
it is much easier to go make a faster, bigger model than it is to figure out how to give people like much bigger brains. So I for one am thrilled we have these new kind of like external tool Yeah. that we can ask to go think really hard about a problem that maybe would be harder like for us to think about ourselves. When when when you see these models read like hundreds of thousands of pages in a few seconds and that synthesizes across all of them, it's like, you know, maybe if we had a bigger brain, we could do that, but we cannot with our current size brains.
Yeah, it is interesting though that it kind of is similar to biological brains um and it made me curious. Are there other things in nature that you think we could copy for tech breakthroughs? Like the airplane is based on the bird. Like are there other examples of that? Um
A great scientist once said that there is no alternative. That that's the only thing that we figured out how to do.
Now, obviously that's not quite true, but uh uh I mean, neural networks, artificial neural networks were clearly inspired by the way neurons in a in a brain connect. Um I I certainly don't think it's literally true that nature is our only source of inspiration for discovering new science, but man, is it a good place to start looking.
Yeah. Is there anything that you're thinking about now that you want to implement? Like this is a big week, obviously, for your new science model. Um how are you thinking about science breakthroughs, what you're focusing on there, what comes next? I saw that there was um an Australian guy that helped his dog's cancer be cured.
Yeah. That is a specific thing I I was just talking to a founder of a company uh I got to visit YC last night.
who was thinking about a similar thing like that, but making that a scaled I mean, I'm sure a lot of people think that.
Like custom mRNA vaccines?
Custom mRNA vaccines for cancer in people. Yeah. Um and that seems tremendously exciting.
Totally. Why haven't we done it yet?
As I understand it, there's many reasons, but one of the big ones is the FDA is not well set up to think about how we're going to do that, although getting better fast.
Yeah, it's interesting cuz I think when I think about personalized or like the next frontiers, personalized medicine has to be it because all of us have such different DNA and risk outcomes.
Certainly the idea that if you get cancer uh a company or a lab can make you a personalized vaccine just for your cancer and it's very likely to be effective or likely to be effective sounds like an obvious thing we should all demand.
Yeah. Do you use um ChatGPT now for your health?
Um I am probably a over user of it. I think they used to call them like cyberchondriacs. I don't know what they call the ChatGPT version of this, but any mild symptom I get, I will go down a ChatGPT rabbit hole. Um you know, like everybody else I or many other people I will put my blood test in there and I kind of wish I I mean, I'm happy I do, but sometimes it'll really like be like, 'Oh, this is slightly off.' And I'm like, 'Oh, should I do something about this?'
It helped you recently? How did it help you a few?
Um I had a stress fracture from running and my doctor went out of town and I had an MRI and I put it in and it read the MRI for me. Obviously, you got to check, but it was accurate.
That's great. It blew my mind. I When we first
When we launched ChatGPT, there was a little bit of this. It was not very good. People said, 'People will never use ChatGPT for medical advice. It's just not nearly good enough. It's never going to be good enough. And even if it were good, everybody would rather talk to a doctor.' People still definitely want to talk to their doctor, but the amount of ChatGPT usage of people asking medical questions and getting, at least how they reported to us, really helpful information is quite extraordinary.
Is it tough for you to constantly have people doubt that the technology is going to be impactful?
Yes. It shouldn't bother me anymore. It still annoys the out of me.
I feel like if you look at any big tech breakthrough, like before we flew planes, the newspaper was like, 'We will never fly. It will be a hundred years.' And then like the next week we're in the sky. That particular example in the early days of OpenAI we used to talk about all the time.
Love that. The Wright brothers New York Times article.
Yeah. We used to talk about it all the time and we said AI is going to be like this. We turned out to be right. But honestly, it annoyed me a lot in the early days, but it was not super clear, so I thought it was at least intellectually honest of the critics to say maybe this isn't going to have a big impact.
Now watching people say there's really no value in this, it's going to have no impact on the world, it shouldn't bother me. I mean, it's obviously ridiculous, but it's so annoying. It's so intellectually dishonest and so annoying. And also, I feel like when you're in the arena every day and you're trying so hard to push the ball forward, you want people to believe in it. I think with our videos, I often try to show people amazing technology and what the future can look like because I think you need to see it to then lock in and build. And ultimately, I feel like people are the most fulfilled when they're working hard on something that they care about.
If you were talking to a 22-year-old today, what types of things would you be curious to know about how they're feeling about the world? And how would that inform what you build?
A thing that I have been trying to do over the last couple of weeks is really sit with people using the latest model and using Codex to understand how it's going to impact their work, what they're excited about, what they're not excited about, what they need from us that we haven't already built. And I've done this mostly with people running companies or senior engineers at companies and I really should go sit down with some young people and say, 'Try this out.'
And watch what they do and listen to their concerns. You have a unique perspective, too, because you advise so many young founders. When you were on Joe Rogan's podcast a few years ago, you talked about how there was a lack of 25-year-old founders. Has that changed since then?
