Artificial Intelligence was once the realm of science fiction. But over the last several years, advances in machine learning and deep neural networks have moved us closer to a reality where computers can learn and solve problems independently, the way a human does. From art and music to medicine and politics, the potential applications of AI are nearly endless, and the technology just keeps getting better.

This week on How I Built This Lab, Guy talks with one of the leaders in the field of AI development, Sam Altman. Sam talks about his journey from Stanford dropout and teenage entrepreneur to president of the legendary startup incubator Y Combinator and co-founder of the nonprofit OpenAI. Plus, Sam shares his hopes and fears for the future of AI and how his company is working to ensure it ultimately benefits all of humanity. 

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Hey, so you've probably been hearing a lot about this artificial intelligence tool called ChatGPT.

It's basically a really powerful chat bot that can do things like write essays, summarize articles, conduct research, it can even generate computer code.

And while chatGBT is still relatively new and still has a lot of room for improvement, it has sparked a lot of conversation about what this kind of AI technology could mean for the future of work and education.

Some universities and schools have even banned or limited its use, including New York City Public Schools, the largest school district in the country.

Anyway, Back in the fall of 2022, I spoke with Sam Altman, the co-founder of OpenAI.

It's a company behind ChatGPT and other AI tools like the image generator DALI.

We talked about the enormous potential of these tools to transform society, but also the company's approach to preventing some of the more sinister applications of this technology.

With AI back in the news, we thought we'd bring you this conversation once again.

I think you're going to want to hear what Sam has to say about the development and future of artificial intelligence.

Hello and welcome to How I Built This Lab.

So artificial intelligence is getting really good, really fast.

For many years, most of us assumed AI was going to replace jobs in manufacturing and the service sector.

But what's actually happening is that machine learning devices are becoming much more adept at generating things we often associate with human creativity.

You might have seen that piece of digital art that recently won a competition in Colorado.

Artwork completely drawn by a piece of software.

AI software is getting really good at composing original music, even writing newspaper

And it means that in the not too distant future, machines might be able to diagnose diseases or answer any questions we have, or maybe even solve some of the world's biggest problems.

1 of the pioneers in AI technology is a non-profit company called OpenAI.

Sam is the former president of the legendary tech incubator Y Combinator, the accelerator program that helped launch Airbnb, Stripe, Coinbase, StorDash, and so many others.

Today, Sam's on a mission to make artificial intelligence work in a way that has the maximum benefit for the maximum number of people.

OpenAI has made headlines with some pretty impressive AI tools, including GPT-3.

It's a language generator that's written op-eds and scientific research papers.

And also DALI, which is an algorithm that can generate incredibly realistic images from any written description.

But of course, there are lots of open questions about what happens if we can no longer control how this technology is used, which we will hear about.

Louis area, obsessed with computers from a pretty early age.

I was a nerdy kid, that's true, but also just the power of this idea that we were all going to be connected to each other, which I would say was evident by maybe when I was

that I was just like, this is more important and more exciting and more fun than everything else going on And this is just this is what I want to do

From what I gather like a big a big kind of moment for you was getting that your first Mac to

yeah Mac LC to That was a really big moment.

I used AOL, which was sort of what I thought was the internet at the time.

And then a little bit after that, figured out there was an actual internet out there, which was even cooler.

I read most of the encyclopedia on a CD-ROM.

You know, like very little stuff, like print out all the prime numbers, like make a little interactive text game, stuff like that.

It was just like the thrill of getting to make anything.

The excitement of like watching somebody else use something you made was just unbelievably exciting.

Actually still is, but especially as a little kid.

And so you describe yourself as a computer nerd in high school, but was it clear in your mind that this was what you were going to do?

Or were your parents like, hey, you know, you're really good at math and science, you maybe should go to med school or something like that?

They never pushed me to do something I didn't want to do.

There was gentle suggestions of science or whatever else, but it was very clear to me from a very young age and I'm thankful for this because I know it doesn't happen to everybody that like computers were my thing.

What was it about about computers as a teenager that you remember feeling so passionate about?

I mean was it was a community of other people that you connected with locally or even beyond where you lived in St.

And the 1 thing that I noticed across both of them was the fact that you could like, A, there was interesting engineering and science problems and technology to figure out.

There's like the fun of using a computer at all, especially back then when like they didn't work that often.

You had to like upgrade parts of them yourselves.

That's just like a cool puzzle and technology is interesting.

But definitely 1 thing that I felt across both of them is this ability to connect with anyone around the world instantaneously, which was incredibly appealing to me.

The ability to sort of like learn anything, talk to anyone, and still is pretty magical.

I think we've all just now accepted that as standard.

But if you rewind the clock like 30 years, things were very different.

I think the computer revolution is as big of a deal as the other great technological revolutions of the past, as big as the agricultural industrial revolution.

But we've kind of just lived through it so recently that we don't talk about it as historic as it's going to turn out to be.

So when you set out to, I know you studied at Stanford and you studied computer science.

So it was clear you were very focused on entering this field and presumably, you know, when you get to college, your thought is Eventually go work for 1 of these big companies

Yeah, I picked Stanford because it was the best computer science program I mean it turned out to be like a wonderful place in a lot of other ways But that was what I wanted to study and my dream job after school was to work at Google

How you were while you're Stanford you you basically Had a business idea and and you dropped out.

Yeah Presumably with the intention of coming back

Absolutely with the intention of going back 1 thing that's very cool about Stanford is they let you stop out and return sort of no questions asked very easily.

But the idea was, hey, on your cell phone, because people had cell phones at that point, you could see where your friends were all at the same time on a map.

And also, you know, meet new people near you, find like interesting places to go or events to go to.

And so the idea was that like, because I'm trying to go back to 2005 and I know I had, I definitely had a Nokia at that time.

A Palm Trio was like the height of coolness in

Yeah, but most, you know, the great, great majority of the world had like a Nokia something.

But there were all of these like little mobile app stores.

There's something called J2ME at the time where you could like make a little mobile app on a flip phone or whatever.

But It was sort of the idea was like, as people lived more mobile lives, knowing everything in the context of location would be super powerful.

We turned out to be mostly wrong about that, by the way.

I think it didn't really work for a bunch of reasons.

But 1 of them that is still somewhat surprising to me is even as the world has gotten very mobile, most people are sort of still at home or work all the time and there's just like far less spontaneity than it felt like to like a you know 20 year old or whatever I was at the time.

Yeah I mean it's interesting because on the 1 hand I think most people wouldn't want to do that with other people.

But what they do do is they post on social media all the time.

So we do know where people are all the time.

Aaron Powell So it's a different version of that.

I'm not giving away the plot here by saying that Looped ultimately did not sort of become what you envisioned.

But it did bring you into this world that would become a really big part of your life, Y Combinator.

You were in the sort of inaugural class of Y Combinator.

Paul Graham, famously 1 of the main co-founders, I guess you met him and he liked the idea.

So I was like, you know, interested in this idea, playing around with it.

A guy that lives in my freshman dorm named Blake Ross posted something, I believe on Facebook but memory could be wrong there now, that there was this new thing and it was called the Summer Founders Program at the time and you know people should check it out.

The deadline was like the next day or something.

I had followed Paul Graham online, was like a big fanboy.

So I immediately applied with my co-founders and they invited us out to interview.

That was the first meeting the 4YC founders, Paul, Jessica, Trevor, and Robert.

That was the first time I felt like, all right, I have finally found the kind of people I want to be around.

I didn't really know about this startup thing.

I heard about it as a kid during the dot-com boom, but I wasn't really paying attention.

I had met a few VCs on campus, but I could tell I didn't like them.

But I met the I was like, wow, these are my people and everything they say resonates and even the other founders I met they're interviewing that was this immediate click for me of like, this is awesome.

These are the people I want to be around.

Like, were you actually writing the software?

Then I got pretty busy with other things.

I think a lot of people assume they're going to keep coding, but, you know, hiring, managing the team.

My job ended up being like a huge amount of business development I spent a lot of the time on airplanes flying around to the mobile carriers that were partners But I was not able to code for very long.

Yeah So you're basically start this as a 19 year old kid, right?

At 1 point you raised money At a valuation of a hundred 75000000 dollars.

You raised almost 40000000 dollars First of all, how did you learn how to become that person you had to become?

To you know to be in charge of a company with $40 million in capital that was entrusted to you.

Like I think this is something that is still underappreciated about Y Combinator.

People are capable of learning at a very fast rate.

And 1 of the things that PG says that has always really resonated with me is you can get tough really fast.

And that's sort of like 1 of the skills that is important for young founders.

But if you jump into the deep end and you are like surrounded by supportive, thoughtful advisors, it was like interesting to me at the time how quickly I could learn.

And 1 of the most fun things about running YC later was helping other people learn very quickly.

And just to clarify, when you say PG, you mean, of course, Paul Graham, 1 of the founders of Y Combinator.

And I think this is 1 of the things that YC still just like people on the outside don't see it.

There's this assumption that like, oh, if you get into YC, you're gold-plated, you have this like, you know, stamp of approval, that's why the companies do better, like all the VCs are into it.

But YC does so much that no other program as far as I know has figured out about how to get people up the learning curve really quickly.

That it's a very big deal and it was super important to me personally and I think to many of YC's biggest successes it's been super important.

And the difference that you can make there is

So this was your life, Looped was your life, with support from Y Combinator for Several years, but ultimately it just didn't it didn't take off It was acquired for I think for about 43 million dollars

It was acquired for like about what we raised.

So the later investors didn't make much money.

You earned a little bit, actually more than a little bit, you know, I think about 5000000 dollars from that sale.

I earned some, but you know, like this is another thing that is just sort of, I'm trying to think about, I made like orders of magnitude more money from angel investments that I made.

I spent no time on the thing I poured my life into.

But after that happened, you were in 2014, you were named president of Y Combinator.

Already by that point, Y combinator had kind of become this sort of legendary incubator

me a little bit about sort of taking on that role.

Did it feel scary, you know to be because again You were still pretty young Leading this thing that that had gained this kind of massive reputation?

You know, it, it, it, this may be some sort of like weird flaw of mine.

Like it took PG a while to convince me because I really wanted to do another startup.

I was, you know, 28 or something at the time.

I didn't feel ready to go retire and do a career venture, which is really how I thought of it.

I didn't have a ton of respect for the career path.

And so there was some sense in which it was an admission of defeat about, you know, I just I can't run a company so I'm going to go do the easy job or I'm going to go do the retirement job or something.

And it took me a long time to get comfortable with the idea of doing it.

But I can't overstate how much at the time and how much now still I love YC, feel incredible gratitude towards it personally, also think it's just this incredibly good force in the world.

And as I thought about the things that I wanted to do.

I had this list from when I was a college student of what I wanted to work on.

I realized I couldn't start all of those companies.

I also really was interested in pushing more investment in hard tech, deep tech, whatever you want to call it, which I didn't think there was much of happening at the time.

Because at the time, YC was focused mainly on like software, right?

And you wanted them to focus more on things like nuclear energy, self-driving cars, like actual physical things that you use

Not necessarily physical things, but I would just say like hard technology like there's a thing about Silicon Valley, which is it's it had not been that well geared towards the time and capital intensive science projects So I wanted to do that and I kind of was just like thinking about, you know, I had like basically taken a year off.

I had like learned a lot about everything.

I had read like many, many dozens of textbooks.

And it was like all of this stuff that I wanted to do and I was like, you know what?

In some sense, yes, being a VC is like an admission of failure, but in some other sense, what an incredible platform, you know, I could like do whatever I wanted here.

And lots of YC companies have been on How I Built This in the past, as I think you know, including Stripe and Airbnb and Reddit and Coinbase and lots of others.

And I think maybe like a year in to that job, you co-founded this nonprofit called OpenAI, which is mainly what you're focused on now.

So I studied AI as an undergrad, which was like dark times.

And not only did they start to work, it appeared that the more compute you threw at them, the better they got.

Are you talking about like Watson and these kinds of neural networks?

The 1 that really kicked it off, I think for the field, certainly for me personally, was the ImageNet result.

This is the identifying images based on descriptions?

So you would type in the computer, horse eating an apple or whatever and it could find them very quickly.

It was more like you'd showed an image and it would correctly say this is a horse eating an apple.

the time it would just be more like this is a horse.

Yeah, it came out in my kind of like year off when I was just learning about things and I looked at it with like great interest, you know, but kind of like it was 1 of many things that I spent time on that year.

But I kept watching it and kept paying attention.

And certainly like of all of the hard tech dreams, AGI is the top of the list.

And just to clarify, Sam, when you talk about AGI, artificial general intelligence, you're distinguishing that from very narrow specific types of artificial intelligence?

So, you know, we already have made good progress with narrow AI that can categorize images or some 1 task like that.

But for me, AGI is a system that can learn and self-improve and create and reason about new information like a human does.

And I think if we're able to accomplish that, it will be perhaps the most important invention in human history.

It will be the culmination of this phenomenal amount of effort all the way down the stack and like the collective knowledge, accomplishment, moral progress, creativity of humanity into this 1 system that I think will be an even bigger revolution than the computer revolution we talked about earlier.

We're going to take a quick break, but we'll be back with more from Sam Altman, co-founder and CEO of OpenAI.

You're listening to How I Built This Lab.

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I'm Guy Raz, and my guest is Sam Altman, founder of the startup Loopt, former president of Y Combinator, and now co-founder and CEO of the artificial intelligence company OpenAI.

All right, so Sam, in 2015 you and some other pretty well-known people, including Elon Musk and Reid Hoffman and others, formed this thing called OpenAI, which is a nonprofit designed to do research around artificial intelligence.

But beyond that, what was the purpose of open AI?

It was to figure out how to...and still is, to figure out how to build, deploy, and share the benefits of safe, general artificial intelligence.

And it didn't seem like there was enough effort being put into this, given the stakes.

And so, the purpose was looking at this thing saying, This is as important as anything we can imagine.

And we look around the world, and we don't see people taking this seriously.

We don't see really any good safety research.

And so the thought was really like, can we help nudge us in a good direction?

Now, AGI, or at least powerful AI, is like the hottest thing in the world.

But what I can't overstate enough is at the time, we really got started in January of 2016, so it's like, you know, 6 and a half years ago.

At the time, people thought we were crazy.

Like, good researchers say you've totally discredited yourself by talking about AGI.

Most other people were like, this is, you know, a hundred years away or more.

And we just kind of like got cracking on it and had a couple of huge discoveries, some good engineering, and now here we are.

I mean, initially I know that you have a for-profit subsidiary now, but why did you originally make it a non-profit?

I think this technology really does deserve to belong to the world as a whole.

It's going to have such a profound impact on all of us that I think we deserve, like we globally, all the people, all of humanity, deserve a say over how it's used, what happens, what the rules are.

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ICYMI... HIBT Lab! OpenAI: Sam Altman