Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI

I think compute is going to be the currency of the future. I think it'll be maybe the most precious commodity in the world. I expect that by the end of this decade, and possibly somewhat sooner than that, we will have quite capable systems that we look at and say, "Wow, that's really remarkable." The road to AGI should be a giant power struggle. I expect that to be the case. Whoever builds AGI first gets a lot of power. Do you trust yourself with that much power?

Take me through the OpenAI board saga that started on Thursday, November 16th, maybe Friday, November 17th for you. That was definitely the most painful professional experience of my life, and chaotic and shameful and upsetting and a bunch of other negative things. There were great things about it too, and I wish it had not been in such an adrenaline rush that I wasn't able to stop and appreciate them at the time. But I came across this old tweet of mine or this tweet of mine from that time period. It was like going your own eulogy, watching people say all these great things about you, and just unbelievable support from people I love and care about. That was really nice, really nice. That whole weekend, with one big exception, I felt like a great deal of love and very little hate, even though it felt like I have no idea what's happening and what's going to happen here and this feels really bad. And there were definitely times I thought it was going to be one of the worst things to ever happen for AI safety. Well, I also think I'm happy that it happened relatively early. I thought at some point between when OpenAI started and when we created AGI, there was going to be something crazy and explosive that happened, but there may be more crazy and explosive things still to happen. It still, I think, helped us build up some resilience and be ready for more challenges in the future.

No. What about a regular secret facility?

Our mutual friend Elon sued OpenAI. What to you is the essence of what he's criticizing? To what degree does he have a point? To what degree is he wrong? I don't know what it's really about. We started off just thinking we were going to be a research lab and having no idea about how this technology was going to go. Because it was only seven or eight years ago, it's hard to go back and really remember what it was like then, but this is before language models were a big deal. This was before we had any idea about an API or selling access to a chatbot. It was before we had any idea we were going to productize at all. So we're like, "We're just going to try to do research and we don't really know what we're going to do with that." I think with many fundamentally new things, you start fumbling through the dark and you make some assumptions, most of which turned out to be wrong.

So speaking of cool shit, Sora. There's like a million questions I could ask. First of all, it's amazing. It truly is amazing on a product level but also just on a philosophical level. So let me just technical/philosophical ask, what do you think it understands about the world more or less than GPT-4 for example? The world model when you train on these patches versus language tokens. I think all of these models understand something more about the world model than most of us give them credit for. And because they're also very clear things they just don't understand or don't get right, it's easy to look at the weaknesses, see through the veil and say, "Ah, this is all fake." But it's not all fake. It's just some of it works and some of it doesn't work.

Let me ask you about GPT-4. There's so many questions. First of all, also amazing. Looking back, it'll probably be this kind of historic pivotal moment with 3, 5 and 4 which ChatGPT. Maybe five will be the pivotal moment. I don't know. Hard to say that looking forward.

And that's a bigger problem about human civilization I'd love to see-saw. This is where we celebrate a bit more. You've given ChatGPT the ability to have memories. You've been playing with that about previous conversations. And also the ability to turn off memory. I wish I could do that sometimes. Just turn on and off, depending. I guess sometimes alcohol can do that, but not optimally I suppose. What have you seen through that, like playing around with that idea of remembering conversations and not... We're very early in our explorations here, but I think what people want, or at least what I want for myself, is a model that gets to know me and gets more useful to me over time. This is an early exploration. I think there's a lot of other things to do, but that's where we'd like to head. You'd like to use a model, and over the course of your life or use a system, it'd be many models, and over the course of your life it gets better and better.

This does make me think of the mysterious lore behind Q*. What's this mysterious Q* project? Is it also in the same nuclear facility? There is no nuclear facility.

So when is GPT-5 coming out again? I don't know. That's the honest answer.

Speaking of zooming out, let's zoom out to another cheeky thing, but profound thing, perhaps, that you said. You tweeted about needing $7 trillion. I did not tweet about that. I never said, like, "We're raising $7 trillion," blah blah blah.

Yeah, and we can each be the best version of ourselves and strive to do so. Let me ask you, Google, with the help of search, has been dominating the past 20 years. Think it's fair to say, in terms of the world's access to information, how we interact and so on, and one of the nerve-wracking things for Google, but for the entirety of people in the space, is thinking about, how are people going to access information? Like you said, people show up to GPT as a starting point. So is OpenAI going to really take on this thing that Google started 20 years ago, which is how do we get- I find that boring. I mean, if the question is if we can build a better search engine than Google or whatever, then sure, we should go, people should use the better product, but I think that would so understate what this can be. Google shows you 10 blue links, well, 13 ads and then 10 blue links, and that's one way to find information. But the thing that's exciting to me is not that we can go build a better copy of Google search, but that maybe there's just some much better way to help people find and act on and synthesize information. Actually, I think ChatGPT is that for some use cases, and hopefully we'll make it be like that for a lot more use cases.

Boy, what a dangerous space. Sorry to linger on this, even though you can't quite say details yet, but what aspects of the leap from GPT-4 to GPT-5 are you excited about? I'm excited about being smarter. And I know that sounds like a glib answer, but I think the really special thing happening is that it's not like it gets better in this one area and worse at others. It's getting better across the board. That's, I think, super-cool.

Yeah. When do you think we, you and we as humanity will build AGI? I used to love to speculate on that question. I have realized since that I think it's very poorly formed, and that people use extremely different definitions for what AGI is. So I think it makes more sense to talk about when we'll build systems that can do capability X or Y or Z, rather than when we fuzzily cross this one mile marker. AGI is also not an ending. It's closer to a beginning, but it's much more of a mile marker than either of those things. But what I would say, in the interest of not trying to dodge a question, is I expect that by the end of this decade and possibly somewhat sooner than that, we will have quite capable systems that we look at and say, "Wow, that's really remarkable." If we could look at it now. Maybe we've adjusted by the time we get there.

I deeply want to believe that the answer is yes. I find the Fermi paradox very puzzling. I find it scary that intelligence is not good at handling-