00:19:40 · John Collison, Sam Altman
[00:19:40] S0: I think you may be too contrite. I did not interpret that moment as particularly bad for AI, where you had... I think everyone saw the... Mathematicians.... The union up in arms, and I think everyone else says, yeah. I mean... I don't... As I said... Have you paid attention to 2026? [00:19:56] S1: As I said, I don't think it was bad for AI, and I think I think on net, the world deserves to understand Yeah. How the universe works. But I do have empathy for the math... Like, I think we need to do this. I think we should do this. I think, like, if we can go understand how to, you know, a theory of all of physics or how to cure a bunch of diseases Mhmm. Like, clearly, that is knowledge the world should have. But I would like to figure out a way to do this that is as sensitive to the communities that have driven these fields forward for centuries as we can. And it's just a... It's a hard thing. [00:20:31] S0: I wasn't that worried about the math. I thought it was [00:20:33] S1: great. But you agree that mathematicians are not that happy? [00:20:35] S0: Yeah. But it's fine. Like, the longshoremen union weren't happy about the poor automation. Why not? The old crew member. [00:20:44] S1: No. I I do. I... Why do I feel differently about this? There was one weekend when we got a new model, and in... I'm actually probably not supposed to say this, but I will since we're drinking. [00:20:53] S0: Exactly. We're half pint in. Yeah. Perfect time for...
00:20:53 · John Collison, Sam Altman
[00:20:53] S0: Exactly. We're half pint in. Yeah. Perfect time for... [00:20:55] S1: The name of the channel was model name Dash Hold My Beer. And people were just throwing that at the hardest problems they could. And people just, like, didn't think the model was gonna do these things, and and we had this collective experience of people's, like, hardest research problems from their academic career. The model was just knocking down one after the other in many different fields. Was incredible to watch. Kind of two nights in a row, was up most of the night because I was so excited that I couldn't go to bed. It was like... Many of those problems that we published, many other things. And I was tremendously excited and happy, but I also had, like, much more sadness and melancholy and, like, a feeling of, like, something ending than I was expecting. So, again, I agree this is the right thing on behalf of the world. And and also, I agree that this is just, like, the shape of reality and nothing that anyone can stop or should stop. But I do have, like, real... [00:21:57] S0: I mean, so wistfulness and nostalgia you can feel. [00:22:00] S1: It's more than nostalgia. Wistfulness.
00:22:00 · Sam Altman, John Collison
[00:22:00] S1: It's more than nostalgia. Wistfulness. [00:22:02] S0: Yeah. Like, my dad describes how, you know, growing up in Ireland in the nineteen fifties, he observed people around him still using horses productively in industry And... In the fifties. Yeah. And, I mean, not... Obviously, there were also tractors, but, you know, it was being phased out. And... But it still for sure happened. And observing that this was a technology that humans had been using for thousands of years, and he was witnessing the very tail end of it. And, yeah, I think there's always that feeling of witnessing the the closing of a chapter that leads to some wistfulness, but it's okay. [00:22:41] S1: It's like it's people's lives, and it's something that has brought them great joy, and, you know, maybe most most... I mean, certainly, most mathematicians never solve the Millennium prize problem. But the idea that you might be able to, And the idea that there is stuff out there that we don't understand yet, that through great effort and, you know, pushing aside other things in your life and dedicating yourself to, you can still solve and understand. Like, there's something beautiful about that. [00:23:09] S0: What else are excited about from a safety point of view? [00:23:11] S1: We talked about this a little bit earlier, but I I I wanna, like, emphasize it again. [00:23:15] S0: I... I'll just call it
00:23:15 · John Collison, Sam Altman
[00:23:15] S0: I... I'll just call it [00:23:17] S1: swarms since that seems like the term right now. I I do think the properties of swarms match a lot of the properties of the resilience of society or the robustness of society that that I kind of... I think we're just missing from the, like, single roll out, single brained version of the world. Like, for all of the deep flaws of society, it is unbelievably robust. And this would not happen without, like, a lot of people keeping each other in check and collaborating and kind of these values of pluralism and democracy. And I had been sort of sad that that was gonna trend away in AI. And now I I... Like, I'm excited about this as a direction. [00:24:00] S0: You're saying, basically, it shouldn't lead in a centralized direction because you will have many agents and agents pushing against each other in a dynamic equilibrium, and, you know, offense defense is a good example of this. [00:24:13] S1: I would much rather intuitively have a trillion AIs of, like, slightly superhuman intelligence join society than one AI of 1,000,000,000,000 IQ join society. [00:24:27] S0: Yeah. And you think we're headed in that direction of the [00:24:30] S1: multiple? All of these things are things we have to push for. Like, all of these things are like, we have this incredible technology. It can be pointed and deployed in many ways. I think there are a lot of people who may have a different opinion about where it should... How it should be used and what is the best version of the world, but this is the one that I think is right.
00:24:30 · Sam Altman, John Collison
[00:24:30] S1: multiple? All of these things are things we have to push for. Like, all of these things are like, we have this incredible technology. It can be pointed and deployed in many ways. I think there are a lot of people who may have a different opinion about where it should... How it should be used and what is the best version of the world, but this is the one that I think is right. [00:24:51] S0: Let's talk about starting a business. Thanks to coding models, your weekend side hustle can quickly become a serious undertaking. And we've been busy here at Stripe, making that process as simple as possible. Stripe Atlas helps you with everything you need to start a business, like company formation, tax IDs, founder equity, and all the other bits that usually require someone in a suit. So if you've got a company in the making, take a look at stripe.com/atlas. How's compute shortage going?
00:24:51 · John Collison, Sam Altman
[00:24:51] S0: Let's talk about starting a business. Thanks to coding models, your weekend side hustle can quickly become a serious undertaking. And we've been busy here at Stripe, making that process as simple as possible. Stripe Atlas helps you with everything you need to start a business, like company formation, tax IDs, founder equity, and all the other bits that usually require someone in a suit. So if you've got a company in the making, take a look at stripe.com/atlas. How's compute shortage going? [00:25:21] S1: I mean, there are all these ways where I think things at various times along the curve are gonna get somewhat out of hand, and there will be moment... Like with any new thing of this importance, there are going to be moments of irrational exuberance. There are going to be moments of bust. There are to be moments of constraint and glut and up and down. But I think the trend is toward a... We always just want more compute. Like, the demand for sufficiently capable models at a sufficiently low price, I think that trend only goes one way. And we're doing a lot of things to try to be prepared for this. We made a chip that is an incredible performance at units of intelligence per watt. We are learning how to build our own data centers. We have a robotics program that we're going to point at making lots of data centers. People talk a [00:26:18] S0: lot about... The real RSI.