Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
· Patrick O'Shaughnessy, Sam Altman
[00:00:00] S0: Do you run the business or teams or lead people in any way that is notably different because of the experience of having them? [00:00:00] S1: The answer must be yes. I feel very different having them. I think there's a bunch of small things that are really different. And then again, this is not a novel insight in any way. I think most people who have had kids say as soon as you have a kid, you realize that you care much more about them and the experience that they're going to have than you do about yourself, and the world that you are going to leave them. And I think I have an unusual vantage point for that. People ask me sometimes like, oh, now that you have kids, do you care more about AI safety and not destroying the world? And the answer is I didn't need kids for that. I really didn't want to destroy the world before. But do I think more about the role of human agency and what it means to have a fulfilling life? Definitely much more, for what we're building, and also the people I work with, I want them to have it too. You obviously have extraordinary empathy for your kids, but the degree to which that extends to all kids, and then maybe to all parents, and maybe then to everybody, that's been a surprise to me too. [00:00:00] S0: In one of the posts, I think it was the one that's things you wish you knew earlier or something, is about incentives and setting them very, very carefully. [00:00:00] S1: Yeah.
· Sam Altman, Patrick O'Shaughnessy
[00:00:00] S1: Yeah. [00:00:00] S0: It's always been one of the most puzzling and interesting things about you that you don't have equity exposure to this company. How should the world think about your incentives? [00:00:00] S1: I don't know what I can say beyond I have a front row seat to the most exciting moment of human history. That is worth more to me than any amount of money. I get to have an extremely interesting life and work with extraordinary people on something that I deeply care about. But somehow that doesn't count. [00:00:00] S0: Just doesn't do it for people or something. I'm curious how you think about robotics. You mentioned earlier, at some point, if we had automated labor in the same way we're going to have automated intelligence, things might get even crazier. The labor market's bigger than the white collar market. [00:00:00] S1: If we don't have it, then things get really crazy. If the role for people in the world is to be like the actuators of AI in the cloud, that'd be bad, very bad. So I think it's much crazier if we don't get it than if we do. [00:00:00] S0: It's an imperative. Help me understand your sense of progress in that, because unlike in AI where everyone is now on the same page that it's going fast, you can find extremely smart people that say it's end of this year, and you can find extremely smart people that say it's 20 years from now or something. [00:00:00] S1: It's not 20 years. I would say we get the ChatGPT moment for robotics in the next two or three years. [00:00:00] S0: What would that be? Do you know what that is?
· Patrick O'Shaughnessy, Sam Altman
[00:00:00] S0: What would that be? Do you know what that is? [00:00:00] S1: Something where most people have a real wow. Not like a, "I saw this video of a robot dog doing something crazy." But I was somehow able to convince myself that a really important thing happened. One of the things about the ChatGPT moment was that you could go use it. Yeah. You didn't have to believe someone who said AI's coming soon. You could go try it. And if you could go type in a command and a robot can do something crazy and you can watch it, even if you're not physically there, I think that would have the same kind of like, whoa, it just did this thing. [00:00:00] S0: Wasn't ChatGPT not this monolithic goal, but a side experiment that you decided to release? That story may be instructive for something similar happening in robotics. Everyone seems to want to fold laundry, but maybe it's something very different.
· Sam Altman
[00:00:00] S1: When we launched GPT-3, we were trying to make money, trying to get people to use this API. The only commercial use case that was really working — the model was just so dumb. If you went back and used it, you'd be astonished. The only commercial use case that was working was copywriting. So you'd pay some marketing firm $20 and they paid us $0.20 for the AI to write you a landing page or whatever. But in addition to that one commercial use case, developers were using this thing we called the Playground, which was like a testing interface to chat with the model. And it was really hard to do because we had not tuned the model to be good to chat with. So you had to give it a few examples of what it means to chat and then do it. And people really liked it. And I'd learned this great lesson from YC — if you notice your users doing something, go down that path. So we decided that we would build a good chatbot, since that's what people were doing. And we started working on that, and we finished GPT-4 and we started using that internally. We were like, this is a big deal. We kind of thought, all right, this is going to be a real update to the world about AI. And there's a bunch of hard questions here, about is this going to create a bunch of fake news? Is this going to say really offensive things and we're going to get in trouble? So we decided we would start with a weaker version. The chat interface and GPT-4 at the same time seemed like a lot. So we would roll out the chat interface and GPT-3.5. In fact, it was originally going to be called Chat with GPT-3.5. We didn't plan for it to be a product. Didn't think it'd be a huge hit, but did think it would get people in the world to catch up with this and realize something was going on. And we mercifully renamed it ChatGPT a few hours before launch and put it out as a research preview. And the thought was we'd put it out as a research preview and then a few months later we would launch a product with GPT-4. And for whatever reason, that model was over the threshold — even though we had gotten used to it internally, people said, okay, this is awesome. There maybe wasn't that much utility yet, but it was an incredible moment for people to feel AI progress and use something that they enjoyed using. And then by the time we put out GPT-4, it was something they really got benefit out of using too.
· Patrick O'Shaughnessy, Sam Altman
[00:00:00] S0: Are you surprised that remains the intuitive interface between us and this alien intelligence, even including coding? Mostly that's me talking to the computer, telling it what to build. [00:00:00] S1: No, because I'm a massive texter. I've been a massive texter my whole life. I think part of my own insight into why that was a good interface is I'm like, I know how to do this. I know what it's like to just start chatting in a text box. [00:00:00] S0: Any thoughts on this notion of diffusion and how to make it faster? If the mission is get intelligence into the hands and more useful for everyone, the key part of that is, I don't know, a marketing campaign or something. How do you get this to diffuse faster than it seems to be doing naturally to me? [00:00:00] S1: I think the key thing is just make it better. I kind of believe that a truly great product markets itself. There was no ChatGPT marketing campaign at the beginning. I think as we get to this next stage of models and we figure out how to make products that are as great as the models themselves, there will be such incredible utility that people will spread it very quickly. We should definitely do more marketing. AI's not too popular. For as much as people use it, they have very understandable anxiety about where it can go. And so that kind of stuff, I think some great marketing would be helpful for. But in terms of the value people are getting out of their products and getting their products to grow faster — better models, more compute, better products. That will do it.
· Sam Altman, Patrick O'Shaughnessy
[00:00:00] S1: I think the key thing is just make it better. I kind of believe that a truly great product markets itself. There was no ChatGPT marketing campaign at the beginning. I think as we get to this next stage of models and we figure out how to make products that are as great as the models themselves, there will be such incredible utility that people will spread it very quickly. We should definitely do more marketing. AI's not too popular. For as much as people use it, they have very understandable anxiety about where it can go. And so that kind of stuff, I think some great marketing would be helpful for. But in terms of the value people are getting out of their products and getting their products to grow faster — better models, more compute, better products. That will do it. [00:00:00] S0: There was this period where the recruiting of researchers, the retention of them, the incentivizing of them was the defining story in the competitive landscape or whatever. I think there's lots of stories about you successfully recruiting great researchers, and there's been many that have come through OpenAI and had huge impacts. Some of which are known, some of which are lesser-known names. I'm just curious about this whole genre of what you learned about how to recruit this class of person, what matters to them, and how you did it. I've never heard you talk about the actual tactical moves you pulled to recruit somebody.