Relentless
00:43:12 · Sam Altman, Ty Morse
[00:43:12] S1: Yes. That's a good that's a good meme. The way that somebody explained kind of the marketing challenge for OpenAI and the industry in general is, number one, we are close to creating... Well, we need to explain the world. Number one, we are close to creating a genie that can grant any wish. Number two, we are going to make sure that our first wishes broadly benefit humanity and that we kind of get the world to a place where a lot more people get to have a lot more wishes. And number three, the space of what you can wish for is incredibly big and creative, and it'll be quite exciting to, like, figure that out with real sort of human values and preferences. But I think there's a fourth thing too, which is exactly that. You start making these wishes, the computer grants them, and then you're like, I didn't think that was gonna work. Yeah. What now? It's a weird feeling. [00:44:11] S0: Yeah. It's just like the problem where, I guess, you know, people spent, like, a hundred years trying to disprove some... What was it? Jacobian? Yeah. Yeah. This thing. Then some guy just asked Claude. And it was, like, I don't know, within a few days or something like this.
00:44:11 · Ty Morse, Sam Altman
[00:44:11] S0: Yeah. It's just like the problem where, I guess, you know, people spent, like, a hundred years trying to disprove some... What was it? Jacobian? Yeah. Yeah. This thing. Then some guy just asked Claude. And it was, like, I don't know, within a few days or something like this. [00:44:25] S1: So I'm I'm I'm... I think there's gonna be lots of great jobs in the future. I really do. I think we're gonna have lots of intellectual fulfillment, and I think most jobs are going to adapt more than it seems like they should. But math, I think, is a very important example of something for us to study very closely right now of something that may not go that way. In fact, would say probably won't go that way. [00:44:47] S0: It seems like even as the systems get better and better, the people that I know that... Like, no one is less busy. Everyone is more busy. Everyone's just doing more stuff except for the people that are like, oh, I spent a trillion tokens. And, like, what have... I love this thing that I saw where someone said, like, I spent, you know, ungodly numbers of tokens. And then someone said, why aren't you more successful?
00:45:10 · Sam Altman, Ty Morse
[00:45:10] S1: You know, technology for a long time has been promising people that they're gonna work less, and they're gonna have all this leisure. And it has gone in that direction. I think people do have more time for leisure than they had at many previous points in history and a higher quality of life in many ways. But somehow, we never get the promise of the four hour workweek at mass scale in society, and I don't expect AI to change that. Clearly, society is not working for a lot of people, and more productivity gains that actually accrue to people would be a great thing. And I suspect they will. I suspect that will happen. But I think that I really admire about people is our expectations go up. We always want more. We think of new things to do, to create for each other, to want for ourselves. And we... You know, it's like a relative game. People are very focused on how they're doing relative to other people. And so the competition that drives the economy and the kind of, I think, the the the very wonderful desires about wanting to be useful to other people and create something and be of service and that whole cluster, I expect that to keep going, and I think we're all gonna be much busier than we thought we were supposed to be in a post superintelligence world, and we're still gonna complain about it. But secretly, we're gonna be happy. [00:46:37] S0: How do you think the status games change as less and less of our direct input is correlated with, like, value creation?
00:46:37 · Ty Morse, Sam Altman
[00:46:37] S0: How do you think the status games change as less and less of our direct input is correlated with, like, value creation? [00:46:44] S1: I don't I don't think it will feel at all like our direct... Like, the things that we value, I suspect, will be things that are, like, very human. [00:46:56] S0: Well, like, one thing is, like, cooking for people. You're not, like, creating a much of value in the world, but it, like, shows love. [00:47:03] S1: You are creating value and that it's like those are the experiences that... You're not creating, like, economic value in the maybe traditional sense. Cooking for people is a great example. I suspect that people cooking and eating together will remain important long after robots can do a great job cooking food. [00:47:25] S0: Do you think that a good heuristic would almost be like the greatest works of the... The the longest surviving works? So let's say the Bible, for example. Odds are it's still gonna be impactful, like, a thousand years from now because it's been impactful for the past two thousand years so far. Do you think that if you had to, like, extrapolate out what are the things that humans are still gonna care about? It's like, what is the most primal earliest thing? You know, we love adventure. We love a good quest. We love cooking. [00:47:50] S1: Betting against evolutionary biology is, like, usually a bad bet. Yeah. And so I would I would assume those things continue. [00:47:58] S0: When was the last time that you realized that you weren't, like, being ambitious enough?
00:47:58 · Ty Morse, Sam Altman
[00:47:58] S0: When was the last time that you realized that you weren't, like, being ambitious enough? [00:48:04] S1: I mean, I definitely badly undershot on the compute investments. Could you [00:48:08] S0: have known going in with the right mental model? Yes. But I got, like, [00:48:14] S1: psyched out by the financial markets or something. I don't know. That was clearly a mistake. [00:48:19] S0: How do you correct that in the future? [00:48:22] S1: Well, I mean, hopefully, I'll learn from it, and I'll I'll make some new mistakes, but I won't make that one again. [00:48:26] S0: On the compute side, this is kind of, like, the biggest infrastructure project of maybe all time or is about to be. Yep. Are you gonna try and, like, vertically integrate under OpenAI's hood everything from, like, power generation to, like, token generation to, you know, serving some person in ChatGPT or Codex or something like that? Or are you gonna try and have a bunch of partners?
00:48:26 · Ty Morse, Sam Altman
[00:48:26] S0: On the compute side, this is kind of, like, the biggest infrastructure project of maybe all time or is about to be. Yep. Are you gonna try and, like, vertically integrate under OpenAI's hood everything from, like, power generation to, like, token generation to, you know, serving some person in ChatGPT or Codex or something like that? Or are you gonna try and have a bunch of partners? [00:48:45] S1: We're not literally gonna try to do it all inside of OpenAI, obviously, but we will try to do a better job of a well functioning supply chain than we have done so far. Like, you know, we we have brought chip design and model design together, and that's been good. Don't think we need to bring electron production together in the same way because that's more of a commodity. However, I am... When you really think about the whole supply chain that has to come together to produce intelligence, I would say there is relatively too much focus on algorithms that create better algorithms and not enough focus on data centers that can create more data centers, which in a world of robots and a truly automated supply chain, you can totally imagine doing. You can, like, spend a data center's thinking power to drive a fleet of robots to make more copies of the data center, and that's probably a very wonderful thing to do, relative to other uses of back compute if we're right about what that additional compute will eventually unlock.