Relentless
00:12:20 · Sam Altman
[00:12:20] S1: as the people inside of OpenAI? Well, companies are amazing vehicles for this to start. The... You know, as a kid, I was, like, very fascinated by the industrial revolution, and I understood it as a bunch of technologies that happened to come around the same time and for some puzzling reason happened to scale at around the same time. And, you know, I would, like, talk to my friends or my parents or whatever about whether it was, like, this technology was the most important invention or this one or that one. And my read of it from my current lens is, like, someone who has now spent more time thinking about business is that the the important invention was the joint stock corporation. And before that was invented and, you know, you had these, like, kind of family businesses that ran on trust and you had to know everyone. And you didn't have the idea of a corporation. You didn't have the idea of, like, stockholders, really. And then all of a sudden, this new thing was invented. Countries, like the sovereigns of the world, granted this sort of a new kind of status, really, a thing that didn't exist before. This very powerful thing that we're going to let these new entities emerge and not give them the power of a state, but give them, like, much more than the power of a person. And fundamentally, this was about, you know, incentive alignment, liability protection, which is another kind of incentive alignment, the ability to, like, amass capital. And all of a sudden, you could do things beyond what a family business could do. And that environment let people raise money to develop technologies, very speculative nature. Pool capital, figure out ways to get different companies to sort of specialize in different ways and interact with each other. Serious financial systems and new kinds of instruments. This was really an incredible thing. And the idea of a company has done a huge amount to align incentives of very large groups of people. Now, you know, millions of people can be shareholders of a company. There's a bunch of other things we do, but I don't want to diminish what has been this incredible invention and, like, the the just ridiculous overperformance of capitalism in human society. Like, a chart that I think people should look at much more than they do is the, like, fall of extreme poverty over the last hundred years.
00:14:49 · Ty Morse, Sam Altman
[00:14:49] S0: Like infant mortality and all the [00:14:51] S1: other things? Any of them that you want. Any of the associated things. You know, if you, like, kind of look back at... That... That's like the most zoomed in view of the last hundred years. But if you look back at kind of economic growth, quality of life improvements, all of these things, and you just, like, drew out all of human history and you put the line when the company was invented, you would see a really quite interesting change in the shape of that curve after it. Beyond that, I think we have a mission that transcends any amount of economic power anything else could ever do, and that's probably more important. [00:15:31] S0: One of the things that I've thought is the most interesting is have you ever seen one of those stats where it's like, I don't know, what percentage of CEOs are sociopaths and psychopaths? It's, like, very, very high. Talk about this. So I I wonder if capitalism is the first system that allowed these people that are, like, super kind of self serving to, like... Their incentives are realigned with societies and just create great products, then suddenly you help society, but you also win.
00:15:31 · Ty Morse, Sam Altman
[00:15:31] S0: One of the things that I've thought is the most interesting is have you ever seen one of those stats where it's like, I don't know, what percentage of CEOs are sociopaths and psychopaths? It's, like, very, very high. Talk about this. So I I wonder if capitalism is the first system that allowed these people that are, like, super kind of self serving to, like... Their incentives are realigned with societies and just create great products, then suddenly you help society, but you also win. [00:15:56] S1: I definitely know a lot of sociopathic CEOs, but I would say the best ones I know, I would not put in that category. There's a lot of very high ego CEOs, people with just, like, incredibly high opinions of themselves on a way that maybe, like, would have been just, like, purely annoying, but now because people can, like, you know, buy their shares, maybe you, like, tolerate their annoyance and antics a little more. So there's definitely some aligning thing there. I don't know. I think there are a lot of CEOs of very large companies that I would not put in the sociopath category at all. [00:16:25] S0: What do you think drives those people? [00:16:27] S1: I mean, it's different for different ones of them. Like, definitely seeing how good they can get at the game or, like, how much they can get better than themselves every year, I think, is a huge part of it. You know, it's, like, intellectually quite stimulating Mhmm. For all of the other problems. Like, you're kind of playing the most interesting strategic game, and that can be fun.
00:16:27 · Sam Altman, Ty Morse
[00:16:27] S1: I mean, it's different for different ones of them. Like, definitely seeing how good they can get at the game or, like, how much they can get better than themselves every year, I think, is a huge part of it. You know, it's, like, intellectually quite stimulating Mhmm. For all of the other problems. Like, you're kind of playing the most interesting strategic game, and that can be fun. [00:16:46] S0: If you had to think about the way that you operate today versus the way that you would have operated ten years ago if placed in the exact same position that you are currently, what are the biggest differences between those two people?
00:16:46 · Ty Morse, Sam Altman
[00:16:46] S0: If you had to think about the way that you operate today versus the way that you would have operated ten years ago if placed in the exact same position that you are currently, what are the biggest differences between those two people? [00:16:56] S1: Well, on the... To the previous question, the thing that drives me the most is, like, this is the most interesting, important thing I can imagine doing, and we are now, like, in the singularity. Like, this is the moment. For the last ten years ago, this was, like, a kind of far off dream at best. It seemed very improbable. And now we're, like, actually in the moment that we used to, like, talk about at the lunch table in a very not serious way. And so the thing that drives me is I've been waiting for this my whole life, and I think it's going to be incredible, hugely positive, awesome for the world. I'm excited to get to work on that. I also think some of the alternative visions painted by other companies are, like, quite terrifying. I'm gonna make sure that gets pushed against and is not what happens. But the main thing of what's different than ten years ago is, like, we're actually in it. Like, this is the real I think it is both true that it is all one crazy exponential and any one moment is not, like, the tipping point. And also, that we are somehow in another one of those decisive periods where the curve can go one way or another like it was when we started ten years ago. [00:18:10] S0: What do think the biggest impacts are on getting this part of the curve right?
00:18:10 · Ty Morse, Sam Altman
[00:18:10] S0: What do think the biggest impacts are on getting this part of the curve right? [00:18:14] S1: I think, like, there are still major AI alignment issues to solve and safety issues, and there are still major economic issues, future of jobs, all that kind of stuff. But I think the fight of the current moment is Are we going to head to a world of AI authoritarianism or liberty? Are we going to decide that because of the very real safety issues and economic issues that we want one single model to be the machine god or the company associated to do that? Or are we going to say like, you know what? It may be a little messy, but every time that humanity has traded off its liberty for safety, it's been a long term net loss. And so we are going to put this in the hands of people. We're going to empower them. We are going to let society express its ideas and use this technology in the way they want. Of course, according to some guardrails... With some guardrails, but, you know, with a lot of power and potential. I really care that we do it that way. [00:19:24] S0: When you were talking with Patrick Halston on stage, must have been, like, a couple of months ago, there was this fascinating thing that you said, which is basically, like, you will talk or text with three to 400 people a day internally. [00:19:36] S1: I text more people than anybody else I know. I don't think this is, like, a good thing. I think this is actually, like, a bad habit. Why? Because it takes up, like, most of my time, and I get, like, into... I have a very short attention span now. Interesting.