"- I think compute is gonna 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 th..."

"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 chaoti..."

"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 w..."

"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. I was feel..."

"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 ..."

"Was it just a few conversations and all of a sudden it escalates and why don't we fire Sam kind of thing? - I think the board members were far, well-meaning people on the whole. And I believe that in ..."

"- So there's a new board announced. - [Sam] Yeah. - There's, I guess, a new smaller board of first and now there's a new final board. - Not a final board yet. We've added some, we'll add more. - Added..."

"that both sort of the executive team here and the old board members felt would be reasonable. Larry was actually one of their suggestions, the old board members. Bret, previous to that weekend, sugges..."

"- So is technical savvy important for the individual board members? - Not for every board member, but certainly some you need that. That's part of what the board needs to do. - So I mean, the interest..."

"something's very hard to replace. - Do you try to fit a polynomial function or exponential one to track record? - That's not that. An analogy doesn't carry that far. - All right. You mentioned some of..."

"This was like Friday afternoon. - Oh, so you've accepted the death- - Very quickly, very quickly. I mean, I went through like a little period of confusion and rage, but very quickly. And by Friday nig..."

"but I thought a little more and I was like, "Well, I really care about the people here, the partners, shareholders. I love this company." And so I thought about it and I was like, "Well, okay, but her..."

"of the weekend was love, not hate. - You've spoken highly of Mira Murati 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 tange..."

"Let me ask you about Ilya. Is he being held hostage in a secret nuclear facility? - No. - What about a regular secret facility? - No. - What about a nuclear non-secure facility? - Neither, not that ei..."

"We've not built AGII. I do think one 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 gonna have on s..."

"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've had a bunch of conversation with him in the past. I thi..."

"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 speak for Ilya. I think that you should ask him that. He's definitely a thoughtful g..."

"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. - Just on a personal level. - Yes. - I th..."

"- I'm actually not sure which mode is best to operate in for a person who's developing AGI, trusting or untrusting. It's an interesting journey you're on. But in terms of structure, see, I'm more inte..."

"And I think being surrounded with people like that is really important. - Our mutual friend Elon sued OpenAI. What is the essence of what he's criticizing? To what degree does he have a point? To what..."

"But we got here gradually with I think reasonable decisions at each point along the way and doesn't mean I wouldn't do it totally differently if we could go back now with an oracle, but you don't get ..."

"You guys are a bunch of like a small group of researchers crazily talking about AGI when everybody's laughing at that thought. - Wasn't that long ago Elon was crazily talking about launching rockets w..."

"than the partnership with Microsoft. - My memory is the proposal was just like, yeah, like get acquired by Tesla and have Tesla have full control over it. I'm pretty sure that's what it was. - So what..."

"for how we fulfill the mission. Open source or not, yeah, I think we should open source some stuff and not other stuff. It does become this like religious battle line where nuance is hard to have, but..."

"- Well, I don't think the lawsuit maybe, correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think the lawsuit is legally serious. It's more to make a point about the future of AGI and the company that's currently l..."

"But on the question of open source, do you think there's a lot of companies playing with this idea? It's quite interesting. I would say Meta, surprisingly, has led the way on this or like at least too..."

"- Well, like in theory, if you like dance beautifully here, there's like some tax incentives or whatever - But I don't think that's like how most people think about these things. - Just not possible t..."

"- Yeah, I hope you guys have an amicable relationship like this month and just compete and win and explore these ideas together. I do suppose there's competition for talent or whatever, but it should ..."

"like 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 bec..."

"- Well, the thing you just mentioned is kind of with the occlusions is basically modeling the physics of three dimensional physics of the world sufficiently well to capture those kinds of things. - We..."

"- I mentioned LLMs have tokens, text tokens and Sora has visual patches so it converts all visual data, a diverse kinds of visual data videos and images into patches. Is the training to the degree you..."

"a little more details - We have. You mean, for sora specifically? - Sora specifically because it's so interesting. Can the same magic of LLMs now start moving towards visual data and what does that ta..."

"- But the reward might not be monetary, financial. It might be like fame and celebration of other cool- - Maybe financial in some other way. Again, I don't think we've seen like the last evolution of ..."

"by a person thinking about it, putting it together, doing parts of it, sort of directing it and running it. - Yeah, it's so interesting. I mean, it's scary, but it's interesting to think about. I tend..."

"when it's specific people versus generic people. 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..."

"and that's how we make sure the future is better. - What are the most glorious ways that GPT-4 sucks? Meaning- - [Sam] What are the best things it can do? - What are the best things it can do in the l..."

"One of the other things that you can see a very small glimpse of is what I can help on longer horizon tasks. Break down something in multiple steps, maybe execute some of those steps, search the inter..."

"- And how you make the scale work where a lot of people can use it at the same time, all that kind of stuff. - But that was like a known difficult thing. We knew we were gonna have to scale it up. We ..."

"- Yeah, even saying billions 10 years from now might seem dumb because it'll be like trillions upon trillions. - [Sam] Sure. - There'd be some kind of breakthrough that will effectively feel like infi..."

"especially when the books are classic, so it's really well written about and it actually is... I find it often to be significantly better than even like Wikipedia on well-covered topics. It's somehow ..."

"- Well, the scary thing is like as it gets better. You'll start not doing the fact checking more and more, right? - I'm of two minds about that. I think people are like much more sophisticated users o..."

"and headlines that mischaracterize completely. I'm sure you have a lot of people dunking on... Well, all that drama probably got a lot of clicks. - Probably did. - And that's a bigger problem about hu..."

"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. - Yeah. How hard is that problem? 'Cause r..."

"So if we go back and let ourselves imagine that trillions and trillions of contact length, if I can put every conversation I've ever had with anybody in my life in there, if I can have all of my email..."

"'cause sometimes company in the past, companies in the past have been kind of absolutely shady about like, yeah, it's kind of presumed that we're collecting all your data and we're using it for a good..."

"- Well, that's beautifully said, but there could be some lingering stuff in there. What I would be concerned about is that trust thing that you mentioned that being paranoid about people as opposed to..."

"than the question you were getting out, which is do we need a way to do a slower kind of thinking where the answer doesn't have to get like... I guess like spiritually, you could say that you want an ..."

"- But can it look like a basically LLM talking to itself, that kind of thing? - Maybe. I mean, there's a lot of things that you could imagine working what the right or the best way to do that will be...."

"- Can you speak to what Q-Star is? - We are not ready to talk about that. - See, but an answer like that means there's something to talk about. It's very mysterious, Sam. - I mean, we work on all kind..."

"What's the one big unlock? Is it a bigger computer? Is it like a new secret? Is it something else? It's all of these things together. The thing that OpenAI I think does really well, this is actually a..."

"Even if most of the time, you're operating in the weeds in one area, pays off with surprising insights. In fact, one of the things that I used to have and I think was super valuable was I used to have..."

"Compute is... I think it's gonna be an unusual market. People think about the market for like chips for mobile phones or something like that. And you can say that, okay, there's 8 billion people in th..."

"- So to you, part of the puzzle is nuclear fusion, like nuclear reactors as we currently have them and a lot of people are terrified because of Chernobyl and so on. - Well, I think we should make new ..."

"but on a slow burn. - Well, that's why truth matters and hopefully AI can help us see the truth of things to have balance to understand what are the actual risks, what are the actual dangers of things..."

"And the con is that I think if we're not careful, it could lead to an increase in sort of an arms race that I'm nervous about. - Do you feel the pressure of the arms race in some negative co- - Defini..."

"I do hope humanity prevails. - I was thinking, someone just reminded me the other day about how the day that he got surpassed Jeff Bezos for like richest person in the world, he tweeted a silver medal..."

"- 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... Like people should use a better product. But I think that wo..."

"and yet others? But a lot of people have tried to just make a better search engine than Google, and it's a hard technical problem, it's a hard branding problem, it's a hard ecosystem problem. I don't ..."

"And when I go use Twitter, or Facebook, or Google, or any other great product, but ad-supported great product, I don't love that and I think it gets worse, not better in a world with AI. - Yeah. I mea..."

"of image generation if there's great examples. So San Francisco is a bit of an ideological bubble tech in general as well. Do you feel the pressure of that within a company that there's like a lean to..."

"- So what in general is the process for the bigger question of safety? How do you provide that layer that protects the model from doing crazy dangerous things? - I think there will come a point where ..."

"- How hard do you think people, state actors perhaps are trying to hack? First of all, infiltrate OpenAI, but second of all, infiltrate unseen, - They're trying. - What kind of accent do they have? - ..."

"It's getting like better across the board. That's I think super cool. - Yeah, there's this magical moment. I mean, you meet certain people, you hang out with people and you talk to them. You can't qui..."

"On the programming front, looking out into the future, how much programming do you think humans will be doing 5, 10 years from now? - I mean, a lot, but I think it'll be in a very different shape. Lik..."

"- I mean, OpenAI has some history and quite a bit of history working in robotics, but it hasn't quite done in terms of emphasis. - Well, we're like a small company. We have to really focus and also ro..."

"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 quit..."

"- So to you, you're looking for some really major transition in how the world? - For me, that's part of what AGI implies. - Like singularity level transition? - No. Definitely not. - But just a major,..."

"I believe that most real economic growth comes from scientific and technological progress. - I agree with you, hence why I don't like the skepticism about science in the recent years. - Totally. - But..."

"- Hmm. Maybe it can start assigning probabilities. - Maybe we need to go invent more technology and measure more things first. - But if it's any AGI... Oh I see. It just doesn't have enough data. - I ..."

"That was really powerful and that was really insightful that this idea that the board can fire you is legally true. And human beings can manipulate the masses into overriding the board and so on. But ..."

"We could be surprised. - For sure, of course. Saying it's not my top worry doesn't mean I don't think we need to like... I think we need to work on it super hard. We have great people here who do work..."

"- Let me ask you about you tweeting with no capitalization. Does the shift keep broken on your keyboard? - Why does anyone care about that? - I deeply care. - But why? I mean, other people ask me abou..."

"And then slowly, stuff like shorter form, less formal stuff has slowly drifted to like closer and closer to how I would text my friends. If I write, if I pull up a Word document and I'm writing a stra..."

"Does this increase your belief if you ever had one that we live in a simulation, maybe a simulated world generated by an AI system? - Yes, somewhat. I don't think that's like the strongest piece of ev..."

"It makes you appreciate like this thing we have here, this human thing came from somewhere. This evolutionary machine has created that and it's most clearly on display in the jungle. So hopefully, I'l..."

"Well, what gives you hope about the future of humanity? This thing we've got going on, this human civilization. - I think the past is like a lot. I mean, we just look at what humanity has done in a no..."