- Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, believes that computing will be the currency of the future and that the road to AGI will be a power struggle
- He reflects on the chaotic and painful experience of a board saga at OpenAI, but sees it as a learning opportunity for building a more resilient organization
- The new board members were added in a tense and hurried process, with some criticism from the public

- The speaker discusses the criteria for new board members and the importance of diverse expertise.
- They also talk about the challenges they faced over a weekend, including the board appointing a new interim CEO.
- The speaker expresses admiration for a colleague and discusses their relationship with another colleague.
- They clarify that no one has seen AGI and emphasize the importance of safety concerns in AI development.

- The speaker has spent a lot of time talking with Ilya about the future and the need to get things right
- Ilya is a thoughtful person who thinks long-term and worries about getting things right
- The speaker has learned to be more cautious and less trusting of people after a painful experience with OpenAI
- There was a disagreement with Elon Musk, who wanted OpenAI to be acquired by Tesla
- The word "open" in OpenAI means putting powerful technology in the hands of people for free as a public good
- The speaker believes in providing free or low-cost AI tools to fulfill their mission, but also sees the importance of nuance in open sourcing certain technology

- Elon Musk proposed changing the name to avoid a lawsuit
- The lawsuit is not legally serious, but more about the future of AGI
- Open sourcing models is being considered by many companies
- The transition from non-profit to for-profit may set a precedent for startups
- The system is still being developed and concerns about deep fakes and misinformation exist.

- The discussion focuses on the ethical and legal implications of training AI and copyright law
- There is a debate about whether creators of valuable data should be compensated for its use
- The impact of AI on jobs and tasks is discussed, with a focus on the potential for AI to enhance human creativity and problem-solving
- The conversation also touches on the capabilities of GPT-4 and the importance of post-training steps in making AI more effective for users
- Overall, the discussion highlights the need to continually improve AI technology and its integration into products for widespread use.

- The conversation discusses the potential of GPT-4 and GPT-4 turbo to handle larger context windows and the potential for trillions of context length in the future
- The speaker finds it interesting that younger people use GPT-4 as their default start for knowledge work tasks
- Concerns about the accuracy of information generated by GPT-4 and the need for fact-checking are discussed
- The speaker expresses a desire for AI to remember and integrate experiences and data to provide personalized advice, with a focus on user choice and privacy
- The speaker shares personal experiences of overcoming trauma and the importance of trust in relationships

- The speaker discusses the impact of stress and distrust on decision-making
- They raise questions about the capabilities of GPT and the need for slower, more thoughtful thinking in AI
- The discussion touches on the release strategy for GPT-5 and the challenges and bottlenecks in developing it
- The speaker emphasizes the importance of zooming out to see the big picture in problem-solving
- There is a mention of a tweet about needing $7 trillion, which the speaker denies having made

- Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, believes computing will be the currency of the future and the road to AGI will be a power struggle
- Reflects on chaotic board saga at OpenAI as a learning opportunity for building a more resilient organization
- New board members added in a tense and hurried process, with criticism from the public
- Discusses criteria for new board members and importance of diverse expertise
- Admires a colleague and discusses relationship with another colleague
- Emphasizes importance of safety concerns in AI development and the need to get things right
- Disagreement with Elon Musk over OpenAI's future and the importance of open sourcing technology
- Considers transition from non-profit to for-profit as setting a precedent for startups
- Discussion on ethical and legal implications of training AI, copyright law, and compensation for valuable data
- Focus on the potential of GPT-4 and GPT-4 turbo, concerns about accuracy, and desire for personalized advice and user privacy
- Shares personal experiences of overcoming trauma and the impact of stress and distrust on decision-making
- Raises questions about the capabilities of GPT and the release strategy for GPT-5
- Emphasizes the importance of zooming out to see the big picture in problem-solving
- Denies making a tweet about needing $7 trillion.

- The speaker believes that compute will be the currency of the future and that the world will need a tremendous amount of it.
- They discuss the challenges of energy, building data centers, and fabricating enough chips to meet the demand for compute.
- The speaker advocates for nuclear fission and fusion as solutions to the energy puzzle.
- They express concern about the potential politicization of AI and the need for collaboration on AI safety.
- The speaker hopes for collaboration and less competition in the development of AGI, and expresses admiration for Elon Musk.
- They believe that OpenAI should focus on creating a better way for people to find and synthesize information, rather than simply building a better search engine than Google.

- The speaker discusses the challenges of integrating LLMs and search
- They express a dislike for ads and a preference for a business model without them
- The speaker addresses concerns about safety and bias in AI models
- OpenAI's focus on safety and the challenges of preventing hacking and infiltration are discussed
- The speaker is excited about the overall improvement of GPT-5 and its ability to understand deeper questions

- The speaker discusses the excitement of being understood by AI
- Predicts that programming will change in the future, possibly using entirely natural language
- Hopes for the development of humanoid robots in the future
- Believes AGI will be developed within the next decade
- Discusses the potential power and governance of AGI and OpenAI

- The speaker does not want super voting control over OpenAI
- They believe that no one person should be in control of AGI
- They discuss the significance of capitalization in their tweets and its implications
- The ability to generate simulated worlds increases their belief in the idea that we live in a simulation
- They compare this insight to the profound nature of the square root function and its ability to offer new realms of knowledge

- The speaker discusses the profound insights offered by the square root operator
- He talks about the potential of AI as a gateway to new realities
- The speaker expresses excitement and fear about an upcoming trip to the Amazon jungle
- He discusses the possibility of intelligent alien civilizations and the nature of intelligence
- The speaker finds hope in humanity's progress and collective contributions
- He reflects on the idea of death and expresses gratitude for life
- The conversation ends with a quote from Arthur C. Clarke about the role of humans on the planet

- The speaker believes compute will be the future currency and discusses the challenges of energy, data centers, and chip fabrication
- Advocates for nuclear fission and fusion as energy solutions
- Expresses concern about politicization of AI and advocates for collaboration on AI safety
- Hopes for collaboration in AGI development and dislikes ads in business models
- Discusses challenges of integrating LLMs and search and addresses safety and bias concerns in AI models
- Excited about the improvement of GPT-5 and discusses the potential power and governance of AGI
- Believes AGI will be developed within the next decade
- Reflects on the profound insights offered by the square root operator and discusses the potential of AI as a gateway to new realities
- Expresses hope in humanity's progress and collective contributions and reflects on the idea of death
- Ends with a quote from Arthur C. Clarke about the role of humans on the planet.

Sam Altman is the CEO of OpenAI, the company behind GPT-4, ChatGPT, Sora, and many other state-of-the-art AI technologies. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors:
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TRANSCRIPT:
https://lexfridman.com/sam-altman-2-transcript

EPISODE LINKS:
Sam's X: https://x.com/sama
Sam's Blog: https://blog.samaltman.com/
OpenAI's X: https://x.com/OpenAI
OpenAI's Website: https://openai.com
ChatGPT Website: https://chat.openai.com/
Sora Website: https://openai.com/sora
GPT-4 Website: https://openai.com/research/gpt-4

PODCAST INFO:
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Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2lwqZIr
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Full episodes playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrAXtmErZgOdP_8GztsuKi9nrraNbKKp4
Clips playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrAXtmErZgOeciFP3CBCIEElOJeitOr41

OUTLINE:
0:00 - Introduction
1:05 - OpenAI board saga
18:31 - Ilya Sutskever
24:40 - Elon Musk lawsuit
34:32 - Sora
44:23 - GPT-4
55:32 - Memory & privacy
1:02:36 - Q*
1:06:12 - GPT-5
1:09:27 - $7 trillion of compute
1:17:35 - Google and Gemini
1:28:40 - Leap to GPT-5
1:32:24 - AGI
1:50:57 - Aliens

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I think compute is going to be the currency of the future.

I think it will 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.

Whoever builds AGI first gets a lot of power.

Do you trust yourself with that much power?

The following is a conversation with Sam Altman, his second time in the podcast.

He is the CEO of OpenAI, the company behind GPT-4, Chad GPT, Sora, and perhaps 1 day, the very company that will build AGI.

To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description.

And now, dear friends, here's Sam Altman.

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.

I came across this old tweet of mine, or this tweet of mine from that time period, which was like, it was like, you know, kind of going to your own eulogy, watching people say all these great things about you and just like unbelievable support from people I love and care about.

That whole weekend I kind of felt, with 1 big exception, I felt 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.

There were definitely times I thought it was going to be 1 of the worst things to ever happen for AI safety.

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.

But the thing you had a sense that you would experience is some kind of power struggle.

And so you have to go through that, like you said, iterate as often as possible, in figuring out how to have a board structure, how to have organization, how to have the kind of people that you're working with, how to communicate all that, in order to deescalate the power struggle as

But at this point, it feels, you know, like something that was in the past that was really unpleasant and really difficult and painful, but we're back to work and things are so busy and so intense that I don't spend a lot of time thinking about it.

There was a time after, there was like this fugue state for kind of like the month after, maybe 45 days after, that was, I was just sort of like drifting through the days.

And hard to have to keep running open AI in the middle of that.

I just wanted to crawl into a cave and kind of recover for a while.

But now it's like we're just back to working on the mission.

Well, it's still useful to go back there and reflect on board structures, on power dynamics, on how companies are run, the tension between research and product development and money and all this kind of stuff, so that you, who have a very high potential of building AGI, would do so in a slightly more organized, less dramatic way in the future.

So there's value there to go, both the personal psychological aspects of you as a leader and also just the board structure and all this kind of messy stuff.

Definitely learned a lot about structure and incentives and what we need out of a board.

And I think that is, It is valuable that this happened now in some sense.

I think this is probably not like the last high-stress moment of OpenAI, but it was quite a high-stress moment.

We think a lot about many of the other things we've gotta get right for AGI, but thinking about how to build a resilient org and how to build a structure that will stand up to a lot of pressure in the world, which I expect more and more as we get closer, I think that's super important.

Do you have a sense of how deep and rigorous the deliberation process by the board was?

Can you shine some light on just human dynamics involved in situations like this?

Was it just a few conversations and all of a sudden it escalates and why don't we fire Sam kind of thing?

think the board members were, are well-meaning people on the whole.

And I believe that in stressful situations where people feel time pressure or whatever, people understandably make suboptimal decisions.

And I think 1 of the challenges for OpenAI will be we're gonna have to have a board and a team that are good at operating under pressure.

Do you think the board had too much power?

I think boards are supposed to have a lot of power.

But 1 of the things that we did see is in most corporate structures, boards are usually answerable to shareholders.

Sometimes people have like super voting shares or whatever.

In this case, and I think 1 of the things with our structure that we maybe should have thought about more than we did, is that the board of a nonprofit has, unless you put other rules in place, like quite a lot of power.

They don't really answer to anyone but themselves.

And there's ways in which that's good, but what we'd really like is for the Board of Open AI to answer to the world as a whole as much as that's a practical thing.

guess, a new smaller board at first and now there's a new final board.

What is fixed in the new 1 that was perhaps broken in the previous 1.

The old board sort of got smaller over the course of about a year.

And then we couldn't agree on who to add.

And the board also, I think, didn't have a lot of experienced board members.

And a lot of the new board members at OpenAI have just have more experience as board members.

It's been criticized, some of the people that are added to the board.

I heard a lot of people criticizing the addition of Larry Summers, for example.

What's the process of selecting the board like?

So, Brett and Larry were kind of decided in the heat of the moment over this very tense weekend.

That weekend was like a real roller coaster.

We were trying to agree on new board members that both the executive team here and the old board members felt would be reasonable.

Larry was actually 1 of their suggestions, the old board members.

Brett, I think I had even previous to that weekend suggested, but he was busy and didn't want to do it.

We talked about a lot of other people too, but I felt like if I was going to come back, I needed new board members.

I didn't think I could work with the old board again in the same configuration, although we then decided – and I'm grateful that Adam would stay – but we considered various configurations and decided we wanted to get to a board of 3 and had to find 2 new board members over the course of sort of a short period of time.

So those were decided honestly without – That's like you kind of do that on the battlefield.

You don't have time to design a rigorous process then.

For new board members since, new board members will add going forward, we have some criteria that we think are important for the board to have, different expertise that we want the board to have.

Unlike hiring an executive where you need them to do 1 role well, the board needs to do a whole role of governance and thoughtfulness well.

1 thing that Brett says, which I really like, is that we want to hire board members in slates, not as individuals 1 at a time.

And thinking about a group of people that will bring non-profit expertise, expertise in running companies, sort of good legal and governance expertise, that's kind of what we've tried to optimize for.

So it's technical savvy important for the individual board members?

Not for every board member, but for certainly some you need that.

That's part of what the board needs to do.

So, I mean, the interesting thing that people probably don't understand about OpenAI, I certainly don't, is like all the details of running the business.

When they think about the board, given the drama, and think about you, they think about like, if you reach AGI or you reach some of these incredibly impactful products and you build them and deploy them, what's the conversation with the board like?

And they kind of think, all right, what's the right squad to have in that kind of situation to deliberate?

Look, I think you definitely need some technical experts there.

And then you need some people who are like, what can, how can we deploy this in a way that will help people in the world the most and people who have a very different perspective?

You know, I think a mistake that you or I might make is to think that only the technical understanding matters.

And that's definitely part of the conversation you want that board to have.

But there's a lot more about how that's gonna just like impact society and people's lives that you really want represented in there too.

at the track record of people or you're just having conversations?

You of course have a lot of conversations, but I, you know, there's some roles where I kind of totally ignore track record and just look at slope, kind of ignore the Y intercept.

Thank you, thank you for making it mathematical for the audience.

For a board member, like I do care much more about the y-intercept.

Like I think there is something deep to say about track record there.

And experience is sometimes very hard to replace.

Do you try to fit a polynomial function or exponential 1 to the track record?

That's not that, an analogy doesn't carry that far.

All right, you mentioned some of the low points that weekend, what were some of the low points psychologically for you.

Did you consider going to the Amazon jungle and just taking ayahuasca and disappearing forever?

I mean, there's so many low, like it was a very bad period of time.

Like my phone was just like sort of nonstop blowing up with nice messages from people I work with every day, people I hadn't talked to in a decade.

I didn't get to like appreciate that as much as I should have because I was just like in the middle of this firefight, but that was really nice.

But on the whole, it was like a very painful weekend and also just like a very – it was like a battle fought in public to a surprising degree.

That was extremely exhausting to me, much more than I expected.

I think fights are generally exhausting, but this 1 really was.

I really couldn't get much in the way of answers, but I also was just like, well, the board gets to do this.

And so I'm going to think for a little bit about what I want to do, but I'll try to find the blessing in disguise here.

And I was like, well, my current job at OpenAI is or it was to run a decently sized company at this point.

And the thing I had always liked the most was just getting to work on, work with the researchers.

And I was like, yeah, I can just go do a very focused HEI research effort.

Didn't even occur to me at the time to possibly that this was all going to get undone.

Very quickly, like within, you know, I mean I went through like a little period of confusion and rage, but very quickly.

And by Friday night I was like talking to people about what was going to be next.

I think it was Friday night, evening for the first time that I heard from the exec team here, which is like, hey, we're going to fight this and we think whatever.

And then I went to bed just still being like, okay, excited, like onward.

It was 1 of the weird things was this like period of 4 and a half days where sort of didn't sleep much, didn't eat much, and still kinda had like a surprising amount of energy.

It was, you learn like a weird thing about adrenaline and wartime.

So you kind of accepted the death of a, you know, this baby opening eyes.

I was just like, okay, this was crazy, but whatever.

And then Saturday morning, 2 of the board members called and said, hey, we didn't mean to destabilize things.

We don't want to destroy a lot of value here.

And I immediately didn't want to do that, but I thought a little more and I was like, well, I don't really care about the people here, the partners, shareholders, like all of the – I love this company.

So I thought about it and I was like, well, okay, but like here's the stuff I would need.

Then the most painful time of all was over the course of that weekend, I kept thinking and being told and we all kept, not just me, the whole team here kept thinking while we were trying to keep OpenAI stabilized While the whole world was trying to break it apart, people trying to recruit, whatever, we kept being told, like, all right, we're almost done, we're almost done, we just need like a little bit more time.

And it was this like very confusing state.

And then Sunday evening, when again, like every few hours I expected that we were going to be done and we're going to figure out a way for me to return and things to go back to how they were.

The board then appointed a new interim CEO.

And then I was like, I mean, that feels really bad.

That was the low point of the whole thing.

It felt very painful, but I felt a lot of love that whole weekend.

It was not other than that 1 moment, Sunday night, I would not characterize my emotions as anger or hate.

But I really just like, I felt a lot of love from people towards people.

It was like painful, but it would like, the dominant emotion of the weekend was love not hate.

You've spoken highly of Mira Moradi that she helped especially as you put in a tweet in the quiet moments when it counts.

Perhaps we could take a bit of a tangent.

did a great job during that weekend in a lot of chaos, but people often see leaders in the moment in like the crisis moments, good or bad.

But a thing I really value in leaders is how people act on a boring Tuesday at 9.46 in the morning.

And in just sort of the normal drudgery of the day-to-day.

How someone shows up in a meeting, the quality of the decisions they make.

That was what I meant about the quiet moments.

Meaning like most of the work is done on a day by day, in a meeting by meeting, just be present and make great decisions.

Yeah, I mean look, what you have wanted to spend the last 20 minutes about, and I understand, is like this 1 very dramatic weekend.

But that's not really what opening eye is about.

Opening eye is really about the other 7 years.

Well, yeah, human civilization is not about the invasion of the Soviet Union by Nazi Germany, but still that's something people focus on because it gives us an insight into human nature, the extremes of human nature, and perhaps some of the damage and some of the triumphs of human civilization can happen in those moments, so it's like illustrative.

Is he being held hostage in a secret nuclear facility?

What about a nuclear non-secret facility?

I mean, it's becoming a meme at some point.

You've known Ilya for a long time, he was obviously in part of this drama with the board and all that kind of stuff.

I love Ilya, I have tremendous respect for Ilya.

I don't have anything I can say about his plans right now.

But I really hope we work together for, certainly the rest of my career.

You know, There's a meme that he saw something.

He maybe saw AGI and that gave him a lot of worry internally.

I do think 1 of the many things that I really love about Ilya is he takes AGI and the safety concerns, broadly speaking, including things like the impact this is going to have on society very seriously.

As we continue to make significant progress, Ilya is 1 of the people that I've spent the most time over the last couple of years talking about what this is going to mean, what we need to do to ensure we get it right, to ensure that we succeed at the mission.

So Ilya did not see AGI, But Ilya is a credit to humanity in terms of how much he thinks and worries about making sure we get this right.

I had a bunch of conversation with him in the past.

I think when he talks about technology, he's always doing this long-term thinking type of thing.

So he's not thinking about what this is gonna be in a year, he's thinking about it in 10 years.

Just thinking from first principles, like okay, if this scales, what are the fundamentals here, where is this going?

And so that's a foundation for them thinking about like all the other safety concerns and all that kind of stuff, which makes him a really fascinating human to talk with.

Do you have any idea why he's been kind of quiet?

Is it he's just doing some soul searching?

Again, I don't wanna like speak for Elio.

I think I kind of think of Ilya as like always on the soul search in a really good way.

Also, he appreciates the power of silence.

Also I'm told he can be a silly guy, which I've never seen that side

I've never witnessed a silly Ilya, but I look forward to that as well.

I was at a dinner party with him recently, and he was playing with a puppy and he was like in a very silly move, very endearing.

And I was thinking like, oh man, this is like not the side of Ilyo that the world sees the most.

So just to wrap up this whole saga, are you feeling good about the board structure, about all of this and like where it's moving.

In terms of the structure of OpenAI, I, you know, 1 of the board's tasks is to look at that and see where we can make it more robust.

We wanted to get new board members in place first, but you know, we clearly learned a lesson about structure throughout this process.

I don't have, I think, super deep things to say.

I think it was like a perfect storm of weirdness.

It was like a preview for me of what's gonna happen as the stakes get higher and higher and the need that we have like robust governance structures and processes and people.

I am kind of happy it happened when it did, but it was a shockingly painful thing to go through.

Did it make you be more hesitant in trusting people?

Yes, I think I'm like an extremely trusting person.

I have always had a life philosophy of, you know, like, don't worry about all of the paranoia, don't worry about the edge cases.

You know, you get a little bit screwed in exchange for getting to live with your guard down.

And this was so shocking to me, I was so caught off guard, that it has definitely changed, and I really don't like this, It's definitely changed how I think about just like default trust of people and planning for the bad scenarios

Are you worried about becoming a little too cynical?

I'm not worried about becoming too cynical.

I think I'm like the extreme opposite of a cynical person but I'm worried about just becoming like less of a default trusting person.

I'm actually not sure which mode is best to operate in for a person who's developing AGI.

But in terms of structure, see I'm more interested on the human level.

Like how do you surround yourself with humans that are building cool shit, but also are making wise decisions?

Because the more money you start making, the more power the thing has, the weirder people get.

I think you could make all kinds of comments about the board members and the level of trust I should have had there, or how I should have done things differently.

But in terms of the team here, I think you'd have to give me a very good grade on that 1.

And I have just enormous gratitude and trust and respect for the people that I work with every day.

And I think being surrounded with people like that is really important.

What is the essence of what he's criticizing?

We started off just thinking we were gonna be a research lab and having no idea about how this technology was going to go.

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Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI | Lex Fridman Podcast #419