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

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.

I expect that to be the case.

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, ChadGPT, Sora, and perhaps 1 day, the very company that will build AGI.

This is Alex Friedman podcast. 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 was really nice. That whole weekend, I kind of like felt, with 1 big exception, I felt like a great deal of love and very little hate. Even though it felt like I just, 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 like 1 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.

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

The road to AGI should be a giant power struggle. Like the world should, well not should, I expect that to be the case.

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 de-escalate the power struggle as much as possible, pacify it.

But at this point, it feels 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. I was so out of it.