Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
· Sam Altman
[00:00:00] S1: Yes. And that has not happened. And I think just from an intellectual humility point, anytime you're that wrong, and that confident, which I think we were as a field, you have to update. And there's a bunch of takeaways. One, the boring one, is that AI's just very jagged. It's like superhuman genius in some ways, dumb toddler in others. And people have, so far, extremely complementary skills to AI. Another is that people have a great degree of trust and enjoyment in working with other people. And you can go hire an AI consultant right now or talk to an AI sales rep right now or hire an AI engineer or whatever. And somehow most people seem to still really prefer interacting with a human. And I definitely would much rather engage with a person than engage with an AI for almost everything. I also think that human values have value because they're human. And as society evolves and as the potential space in front of us becomes so enormous, we are deeply hardwired to care about people. We're going to care about what people care about. And there's versions of this you can see today where AI can make incredible images and people only want ones that are created by a human or at least chosen by a human. There's the joke that at this point, the signature on a piece of art is most of the value, but the truth of it is you want to know about the person behind it. You read a novel, you want to know about the person behind it. And then in terms of business, for my job, for example, I think the world wants to know about the person that's going to be responsible for the decisions of a company and who they're going to hold accountable if they make bad ones. And they don't really want an AI CEO.
· Patrick O'Shaughnessy, Sam Altman
[00:00:00] S0: If you think back on the portfolio of risks that you've taken in business or whatever, is it the case that most of the ones that really worked well were, at the start, not popular? [00:00:00] S1: Yes, that's for sure. This was the thing I really learned from Peter Thiel and Paul Graham, both in two different ways, which is that the very best companies, the very best investment opportunities are almost never the ones that look really popular. You can do okay just following the trend and being a little early, but to do spectacularly well, you almost always have to do things that are not what everybody else is doing. You cannot be following the new wave. [00:00:00] S0: If you think about the model cycle that you've been in, which has been accelerating, and this weird fact that the next six months — I don't know what the number is — is going to be more progress than the last X years. Can you bring us into what it's like to live in that model cycle?
· Patrick O'Shaughnessy, Sam Altman
[00:00:00] S0: If you think about the model cycle that you've been in, which has been accelerating, and this weird fact that the next six months — I don't know what the number is — is going to be more progress than the last X years. Can you bring us into what it's like to live in that model cycle? [00:00:00] S1: One of the most interesting, important things that I've learned in the last decade is people in general can get used to almost anything. The world can go from dismissing a pandemic as a joke, to completely locked down, to this is how it's been and it's fine and we've mostly adjusted, in a shockingly short amount of time. And now there's either AGI or close to it and everyone's like, okay, there's AGI. There's all kinds of examples in one's personal life where something incredible happens, like you have a kid or something terrible happens, like you lose a parent, or break up or whatever. And you think you can't ever adapt to what a change it is. And then you can adapt to great things and keep being great. You can adapt to bad things and figure out how to go on with your life. But this is a remarkable thing that people can do. And so living through this feels like another version of that, which is I thought it was going to be weirder to live through the singularity than it turns out to be. And it's not any less exciting to watch the models keep getting better. The first thing I do every morning is look at the model training progress, and it happens faster and I have higher expectations, but it still feels really cool.
· Sam Altman, Patrick O'Shaughnessy
[00:00:00] S1: One of the most interesting, important things that I've learned in the last decade is people in general can get used to almost anything. The world can go from dismissing a pandemic as a joke, to completely locked down, to this is how it's been and it's fine and we've mostly adjusted, in a shockingly short amount of time. And now there's either AGI or close to it and everyone's like, okay, there's AGI. There's all kinds of examples in one's personal life where something incredible happens, like you have a kid or something terrible happens, like you lose a parent, or break up or whatever. And you think you can't ever adapt to what a change it is. And then you can adapt to great things and keep being great. You can adapt to bad things and figure out how to go on with your life. But this is a remarkable thing that people can do. And so living through this feels like another version of that, which is I thought it was going to be weirder to live through the singularity than it turns out to be. And it's not any less exciting to watch the models keep getting better. The first thing I do every morning is look at the model training progress, and it happens faster and I have higher expectations, but it still feels really cool. [00:00:00] S0: When you get a new one, what do you do? How do you celebrate? What's the morning look like? It's happening faster and faster. What's your ritual?
· Patrick O'Shaughnessy, Sam Altman
[00:00:00] S0: When you get a new one, what do you do? How do you celebrate? What's the morning look like? It's happening faster and faster. What's your ritual? [00:00:00] S1: Many teams now work on different parts of it and different teams have some different rituals. There are some teams that always make a sweatshirt with some funny meme on it. There's some teams that always go out to the same bar. But the sense of being in the room for the first time that the frontier of knowledge is pushed back, and getting to see what that's like. There's really nothing that most people would rather do to celebrate than get to use the new model first. [00:00:00] S0: Do you think we have the right measurements of how good these things are? [00:00:00] S1: Definitely not. In some sense, the eval that matters is, is this being useful to people? You can approximate it by revenue or by amount of usage or rate of discovery of new knowledge. We have some teams working on what does the real-world eval look like for these models as they get to superhuman scale? [00:00:00] S0: What is the frontier of your own usage of AI?
· Patrick O'Shaughnessy, Sam Altman
[00:00:00] S0: What is the frontier of your own usage of AI? [00:00:00] S1: I have started just recently to experiment with what it means to let an AI look at everything I'm looking at on my computer. I don't have this built yet, and I'm still trying to feel out where the limits of my comfort and trust should be. But this is definitely the frontier — figuring out how I get value out of that, how I get comfortable with that, what that's going to look like. One takeaway is that my memory is terrible relative to the memory of an AI and the ability to keep in mind what email I read six weeks ago or what happened exactly in a meeting seven and a half weeks ago and have that brought up right at the exact moment and feed into a decision, that feels pretty magical. [00:00:00] S0: Pretty cool. This sounds like personal agent-ish. What are the barriers to everyone having that? I want that. [00:00:00] S1: Compute, man. Let's imagine that we could build this product that could do exactly what I said for all your stuff. [00:00:00] S0: Always on.