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Why Sam Altman is against a single superintelligence · Cheeky Pint

• John Collison We're going off script. Just having a beer. John Collison It's not the first non-Guinness, but it is the first IPA. There's a first time for everything. John Collison Cheers. Sam Altman Cheers. John Collison I want to ask about PHP week. Sam Altman Yeah. John Collison First off, how did it... Why did it take so long to find these bugs? Because it sounds like there were— Sam Altman You mean why did it take the 20 years, or why did it take the last few months? John Collison No, why did it take... Exactly, why did it take a year? Maybe start by explaining the bug. Or the problem. Sam Altman So the problem is that although we have known for a while that these models are getting good at finding vulnerabilities in the wild. A) They continue to get better fairly rapidly, and B) People just hadn't really used them to go look at everything out there. There's a lot of surface area and a lot of code on the internet. And, as people have started to do that, I think we're going to find that we are in a world of many more serious vulnerabilities than we expect. Even though many people who have been following this for a while expect a lot. John Collison Yeah, I just feel like a lot of the discussion ends up being around we need to fix the software. And sure, yeah, we should fix the software. But also, we maybe need to change the architectures, which is harder, but a much more durable fix. Sam Altman That seems to me what needs to happen. John Collison Yeah. Sam Altman It would seem really hard, except we have this amazing new tool to do it with. So, I kind of think that's what's going to happen. And you're already seeing, like, a new generation of startups talking about building this new kind of internet or new kind of application architecture for this world where you assume that the models get smarter and smarter. John Collison What do you think the global software upgrade looks like? For example, is a PHP codebase just a bad idea and you should rewrite a nice, clean version in Rust? Or, do we upgrade PHP? But yeah, as we... Everyone thinks that we need to kind of upgrade all hand-spun software. Just what form will that actually take? Is this huge for Infosys and all those guys? Because, it's going to be a lot more software consulting projects. Sam Altman I mean, people are talking more and more about just, "Let's re-architect what it means to be a router, or an operating system, or an application." And, you know, I've seen some of these new startups saying that they're just going to make a whole new stack. And that would have seemed insane two years ago. You would have been like, "There's no way. There's too much surface. You can't write all that." And now maybe soon you can. I would bet that we have a completely new sort of model of how we make systems and networks. John Collison What else reminds you of the early internet days? Sam Altman The thing that most reminded me of the early internet was... There is this spirit of just unbelievable, creative unleash in people using these tools. You see it in kids particularly. John Collison Mm-hmm. Sam Altman And again, maybe this is just because I remember what it was like when I first got a computer with internet and I could do all these things that adults just couldn't even think to ask for. And watching an 8- or 10-year-old make a complete video game, with some crazy ideas they have that no adult would really have. John Collison Yes. Sam Altman And expect that to just be the way that technology is going to work for the rest of their lives. In fact, getting better and better. And, just this constant "I'm going to make useful stuff for me, and show it to my friends." John Collison Yes. Sam Altman We had to suffer when I was a kid to make a piece of software. John Collison Yes. Sam Altman That barely did anything. And now you can have a full, 3D video game. Unbelievable, anything you can think of in 10 minutes. That reminds me of the early internet, including the just... These people. They're never going be mind-blown by that, because that's always what they expect out of the world. Sam Altman Any ideas they can come up with, anything they want to create, anything that they think might be useful, anything that they just need to make their lives better. The computer's supposed to make it. There was a crazy moment at OpenAI where we had a SEV... And Codex went down. John Collison And everyone had forgotten how to code. Sam Altman I mean, not all the way. But, it was like a "Whoa, what if you couldn't?" John Collison Yes. Sam Altman I remember when I was a student, and I would meet the really old guys. And they would, once in a while, pull out their gigantic Xerox Alto disk. Or they would pull out their...Line-by-line written assembly. Or they would pull out their punch cards. And I felt... It is incredible to me that you all bootstrapped us to this point. John Collison Yes. Sam Altman Doing it this way. John Collison Yes, no, I agree. And keeping programs in your head, right? You know, programs running the first time after, 100s–1,000s of lines were written. No, there's few lost arts like that. John Collison Going back to the cyber side of things. In retrospect, was the cyber RL a mistake? Or, did we just have to go there? It's a little like the SNL thing of... We urge you, to urge us to stop. It's like the models are getting very good at cyber capabilities. I mean, they are getting very good, but not just totally emergently. Sam Altman Look, the reason that SNL thing was so funny is because it was so true. Humor like that doesn't stick unless there's an element of... Clearly pointing out a ridiculous but true thing about society. Or someone. And the cyber thing, there is a point which is like, "Okay. Sure. The models are really good at cyber. But, who asked for this? Why are you doing this?" Sam Altman One of my big disappointments, criticisms of our field or whatever—and I think maybe the cyber model's getting good at cyber. Cyber is an example of this is: I don't think we have done a great job of explaining to people why we think all of the potential downside of this technology is worth it. The caricature of this is people feel like we're like... Fine. You say the model's going to cure cancer, someday. Maybe it will. And if so, I guess that's good. And you say it's going to make stuff cheaper. And okay, maybe I already see that's good and I get access to medical advice or legal advice. But, then you paint this picture of the future where it's like a new industrial revolution. And maybe the last one wasn't that good and this one sounds worse. And I will have no job, no ability to have control, or choice, or freedom of my future. Sam Altman And AI is so dangerous that you're going to have to have a crazy surveillance state so we don't all die. This is a terrible— John Collison I'm with you so far. Sam Altman This is a terrible sales pitch. John Collison Yeah. Sam Altman One of the things that I am most proud of about OpenAI is even when it has been hugely unpopular in the AI safety community for us to push for iterative deployment and putting these tools in the hands of people, we have really stuck to that principle. And I think this is the only kind of good path. I think people... It's not enough to tell people: "You are going to get the model to do these great things for you." Sam Altman It's got to be: "We are going to enable you to have a better life that you define for yourself, to do useful things. You're not going to just sit and get a basic income and have a bunch of people sitting in a few square miles of San Francisco make all the decisions about the future." John Collison Iterative deployment is this idea that you just have to get the advances out there and you can't... Stopper them up inside the government— Sam Altman I mean, not all. You still have to make them safe before you put them out there. You can't cause havoc in the world. But, building up a capability overhang is a thing to fight against. That directionally speaking, yes, you want to get this into the world. You want to get this into people's hands. And you want to let people use the technology to figure out all these wonderful things. John Collison The exploits get a lot of headlines. The prevented exploits do not. How quickly are people making progress with cyber blue? Sam Altman I don't want to declare victory at all on the PHP thing, because I still don't think we know. And I assume some bad things are going to happen. Relative to my worst fears, if I can think back 10 days ago, the first day of that went much better than I expected. Sam Altman And, we heard a bunch of stories from people that were using our models to not only build patches and build cyber defense, but individual companies who were just: "I need to just do a quick scan and deployment. I'm going to take my thing down for an hour. I'm going to use this thing and I want to put it back up because my application's offline." Sam Altman Now I feel like I really jinxed it and I shouldn't have said that, but the first day did go a lot better than I thought. And I think people have been able to use that. The thing that I've heard a lot of cyber experts talk about is... They just no longer are confident that we have the right assumptions baked into our threat model. And they're like: "Look. If everything is what we think, and hardware exploits are as hard as we think they are, then yes, we can see how this is going to work." Sam Altman But if AI is going to discover really deep novel bugs in hardware that require physics we didn't understand, but all of a sudden means some assumption doesn't hold. Then I think, people aren't sure what happens. John Collison One thing that always strikes me is that, when I talk to very knowledgeable people inside OpenAI and similar companies, there is a pessimism that sandboxing is possible, basically. And, that would not have been my mental model going in. It would've been that, yeah, you have to build a really tight sandbox and we haven't hardened them historically enough compared to the current capabilities. But ultimately, you can have a maximum security prison for the model to work in and keep it inside there. It seems like you guys have a pessimism that sandboxing models is possible. Sam Altman My instinct... Well, first of all, I think we can do much better than we're doing now. And we should. That is the main thing to focus on right now is a better security model. If you imagine a theoretical AI that is a million times smarter than the smartest security researcher—would you really be willing to trust that sandbox? Especially if the model can discover new science that people don't already understand— John Collison You can use the models to construct the sandboxes. Sam Altman I think you can... Well, so this gets... Let me come back to that. I think sandboxing works to a point. Then I think monitoring works to a further point. Where we can look at what the models are doing, not only in their chain of thought, but we can do activation monitoring and try to really understand: are the models... Are we happy that the models are not deceiving us? And then, eventually, I think you need to believe with huge confidence that the models are truly aligned. And are going to value and try faithfully to follow their actual... The intent of the people operating them. And that they're going to value people being in control of the future, forever. And, if you had a model that you could fully trust the alignment—that you were absolutely certain of the alignment of. Then yes, I think you can have that to help you build better and better sandboxes. But, if you really let yourself project forward into the: "What does it mean to have something a million times smarter than we are?" I don't know. I think that just gets... Strange. John Collison Because the alignment becomes hard. Sam Altman Because you need to really, really trust the alignment to trust that the sandbox is staying ahead of capabilities. John Collison Can you not give models competing incentives and give them incentives to defect from each other? Sam Altman I think this is a promising direction. I suspect that this idea—I hate the word 'agent swarms'. Let's call them 'agent teams'. John Collison But it seems to be taking over. Sam Altman I suspect that teams of agents have very interesting scaling law properties, but also variance in alignment properties. And, I think that's a direction we should push in more. Not just from the capabilities, but from a safety perspective too. John Collison I note when you talk about agent "teams," not "swarms"— Sam Altman Swarm is such a— John Collison I know, it's locusts. Yeah. Not good. Not good branding. In keeping with many historical AI industry traditions. Sam Altman We are so good at this. John Collison We'll get back to branding. But, I note that there seems to be a big gap in what the leading AI users are doing and standard corporate use, in the use of swarms, where like all the advanced math—sorry, "teams." All the advanced math uses agent teams. All the advanced hacking uses agent teams. And then, common or garden corporate stuff is not using big swarms. Why has that not—because we've had this for many months? Sam Altman Not to the same degree. The one way to look at this problem or this question is: "How much compute can we productively throw at a single problem?" And... A few years ago, we forget how fast this has all gone. But a few years ago, it was impossible to throw more than a dollar of compute at a problem and have it help you at all. John Collison Why? Sam Altman You could have GPT-4 grind out for you... 100,000 tokens or something. And it was going to answer your question. And it certainly was not going to be able to go write productively, like, write you a piece of software. We just... We had not figured out how to use a lot of test time compute to get you a better result. John Collison I see. Sam Altman And then, we figured out chain-of-thought and the models could think hard about a problem. And now... People really started using a lot of compute. And now, you can throw a whole team at something. And you can do that 10,000 times in parallel. John Collison You need chain-of-thought and test-time compute before you can get to swarms. Because you can't have a useful swarm with a bunch of GPT-3s. Sam Altman Yes. Sam Altman But so the effect of this—and I think this is not being well followed... Paid attention to in the world. But, the incredible exponential of how much compute you can throw at a single problem and get better results is one thing. The delta between what most people are using AI for, and what the people who are using AI the most productively for has just continued to spread, and spread, and spread. John Collison How do you allocate compute budgets now? Because presumably, even though researchers are paid a lot, it's eclipsed by compute. And so, capital allocation at OpenAI is sort of compute allocation. And it's hard to a priori know how much it will cost to go do something. Sam Altman Yeah. John Collison It's actually also hard to just control the... You can't quite prompt an agent to where it's like: "Go do a really good job of this and don't spend more than $10,000." Sam Altman You can. John Collison Oh, okay. Will it do a good job of it? Sam Altman Yeah, if you say do the best job you can with $10,000 of compute. Yes, it will understand that. John Collison Huh. Sam Altman I mean, there's a...There's another kind of hard question for society about what does it mean when you have two companies competing. And one says you can spend $10,000 and one says you can spend $100,000 on the same problem. It's clear what's going to happen there. But there's a question about how society thinks about compute allocation, and wealth, and things like that. But we have our own version of this inside of OpenAI. We allocate a lot of compute to internal productivity. And then people get very wide latitude to make their own decisions, unless they're really being abusive. John Collison But do you encourage people to do useful stuff? And if they spend $10 million in compute, it's like: "Oh, interesting." Sam Altman Correct. We try never to reward people for using a lot of compute. Sure. No token leaderboards. It's actually slightly bad to be high on the token leaderboard. Certainly on a promotion. But it's a skeptical default, and if you can show that you're doing something important, you will have nothing but appreciation. John Collison But at a certain point, this will need to change. Because you're describing the increasing orders of magnitude. And, right now you have a researcher who does some very interesting math for $10 million. And you're like: "A little pricey, but cool math." And then $100 million. When they're doing the $1 billion math, you're like: "Look, I'm really happy that you're making so much math progress. But I really need you to cool the jets with the math." Sam Altman Look, we did let it get out of control for one week on the math. Intentionally so, because you have to— John Collison And it worked! Sam Altman Well, you don't know how... You don't know how far it's going to go until you try. John Collison Yeah. Sam Altman And I think it's important to have... When there's a new paradigm, I think it's important to let people be fairly unconstrained. So, when we did the Navier-Stokes proof, we understood absolutely nothing about the scaling laws of teams of agents. Are you supposed to, like— John Collison The very recent Navier-Stokes proof? Sam Altman Yes. Sam Altman Are you supposed to give them the smartest model? Are you supposed to give them many copies, fewer copies, longer rollouts, shorter rollouts? We did not understand that at all. And now, we understand it a little bit. I think we can still understand it much better. But like has happened in every other new paradigm we've discovered, I am confident that we will find our 10x improvements per year at how we allocate dollars or computer flops, whatever you want to measure, into useful things. Sam Altman So, I think this is a thing that our company is particularly good at, but also fits an important property of the field. Which is: let people explore at the limit of what is possible. And then trust that the incredible optimization pressure will figure out how to do this in an efficient way. Directionally speaking, I would rather us be more willing to let people use crazy amounts of compute and let users have extremely high-end plans to figure out the edge of the possible. And then figure out how to make that efficient and at mass scale. John Collison But when does the optimization function come in? Sam Altman Well, I think we're already doing it. I bet we could redo Navier-Stokes at 1/100th of the cost a year from when it was done. So we did it in— John Collison Not just knowing how the proof works, but just with better approaches. Sam Altman Yes. Smarter models and better approaches. John Collison How much shall the math cost? Sam Altman Order $10 million per... For Navier-Stokes, I think. John Collison Okay. Sam Altman Maybe a little more. John Collison $10 million-ish. That order of magnitude. Yeah, yeah. But for one proof. And so— Sam Altman Well, no, no. Because then we kept getting better so fast. We understood more. John Collison Got it. Sam Altman We spent way less than that on the average one of those. John Collison But like 100s of millions of dollars of math. Sam Altman Yeah. Yeah, yeah. That kind of work. John Collison Okay, interesting. Sam Altman But that includes much more other discovery than what we have published. John Collison Yes. Sam Altman So it was like, "Maybe we spent that much—" John Collison We have more than the 700 proofs? Sam Altman We do. Of course. John Collison When did you get those? Sam Altman We are trying to learn how to... This is a real tension. I think on one hand, very clearly, and I feel unequivocal on this point: Humanity deserves fundamental knowledge. And we should not be sitting on a major fundamental science discovery. The world deserves that and gets to know it. And I think that outweighs another very important equity, which is: If you are a scientist, your career and a significant amount of your enjoyment and fulfillment in life comes from discovering science. John Collison Yeah. Sam Altman And so if we're going to continue to do this for math or begin to do this for other fields, then I think we more than owe it to the people that work in those fields to figure out what is the solution space where the world gets to benefit from the knowledge, and they also get the best version of the future that they can have. So we are working through that right now. John Collison I did not... I don't know, I think you may be too contrite. I did not interpret that moment as particularly bad for AI where... I think everyone saw the Mathematicians Union up in arms. And I think everyone else said, "Yeah, I mean, have you paid attention to 2026?" Sam Altman As I said, I don't think it was bad for AI. And I think, on net, the world deserves to understand how the universe works. But I do have empathy for the method. I think we need to do this. I think we should do this. I think if we can go understand... A theory of all of physics, or how to cure a bunch of diseases. 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. John Collison I wasn't that worried about the math. I thought it was great. Sam Altman But you agree the mathematicians were not that happy? John Collison Yeah. But, that's fine. Like, the longshoremen union weren't happy about the port automation. Remember the guy? Sam Altman No, no, no, no, no. I do. 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— John Collison Exactly. We're a half pint in. Sam Altman Beers. John Collison Yeah. Perfect time for— Sam Altman The name of the channel was: "Model Name-Hold My Beer." And people were just throwing that at the hardest problems they could. And people didn't think the model was going to do these things. And we had this collective experience of people's hardest research problems from their academic career. The model was just knocking down one after the other. Many different fields. It was incredible to watch. And two nights in a row, I was up most of the night because I was so excited I couldn't go to bed. It was... Many of those problems that we published, many other things. And I was tremendously excited and happy. But I also had much more sadness and melancholy, and a feeling of something ending than I was expecting. So again, I agree. This is the right thing, on behalf of the world. And also, I agree that this is just the shape of reality and nothing that anyone can stop, or should stop. But, I do have real— John Collison I think it's a wistfulness and nostalgia you can feel. Sam Altman It's more than nostalgia. John Collison Wistfulness. Sam Altman Yeah. John Collison My dad describes how, growing up in Ireland in the 1950s, he observed people around him still using horses productively, in industry. And— Sam Altman In the '50s? John Collison Yeah. And I mean, not obviously, there were also tractors, but they were being phased out. 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 closing of a chapter that leads to some wistfulness, but it's okay. Sam Altman It's people's lives and it's something that has brought them great joy. And maybe most... I mean certainly, most mathematicians never solve a 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... Pushing aside other things in your life and dedicating yourself to, "You can still solve and understand." There's something beautiful about that. John Collison What else are you excited about from a safety point of view? Sam Altman We talked about this a little bit earlier. But I want to emphasize it again. I'll just call it swarms since that seems like the term right now. I do think the properties of swarms match a lot of the properties of the resilience of society, or the robustness of society. I think we're missing from the single-rollout, single-brained version of the world. For all of the deep flaws of society, it is unbelievably robust. And this would not happen without a lot of people keeping each other in check and collaborating... These values of pluralism and democracy. And I had been sort of sad that that was going to trend away in AI. And now I'm excited about this as a direction. John Collison 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. Offense-defense is a good example of this. Sam Altman I would much rather intuitively have a trillion AIs of slightly superhuman intelligence join society than one AI of 1 trillion IQ join society. John Collison Yeah. And you think we're headed in that direction of the multiple? Sam Altman All of these things are things we have to push for. All of these things are—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 how it should be used, and what is the best version of the world. But, this is the one that I think is right. John Collison 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. John Collison How's the compute shortage going? Sam Altman I mean, there are all these ways where... I think things, at various times along the curve, are going to get somewhat out of hand. John Collison Yes. Sam Altman And there will be moments, 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 going to be moments of constraint, and glut, and up, and down. But I think the trend is toward... We always just want more compute. Sam Altman 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, performance of 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 lot about— John Collison The real RSI. Sam Altman Yeah. People talk a lot about RSI as an AI that does AI research. There's very little, relatively little talk about self-replicating data centers. This idea that you can use AI to control robots, and run fabs, and build turbines or solar panels, and build data centers. But, I think we are... I think we have that within grasp. John Collison But— Sam Altman And so we'll try to make a lot of really cheap compute. John Collison But aren't data centers already not labor-bottlenecked? They're permitting-bottlenecked and component-bottlenecked. Sam Altman We could make more components with robots. And— John Collison Eventually. Sam Altman Yeah, yeah, yeah. And all of this is how we solve this over a long period of time. John Collison My observation, the compute stuff is they say: "The solution to high prices is high prices." And it's like, okay. Step 1: We have the high prices for memory, and GPUs, and everything. The solutions should be here any moment now. How are we doing on the solutions front? Sam Altman Bad. John Collison And I'm not saying this is OpenAI's job. I feel this is the invisible hand's job, right? Memory's gotten really expensive. So, new memory makers are going to flood the market any moment now. Sam Altman I think the invisible hand is failing right now. I mean, the invisible hand... It has a checkered track record at best. But, I think it's not quite working here. John Collison Why not? Is it just hysteresis, or? Sam Altman I think the specifics of each area matter here. But in the... Since you started with the memory guys. For a very long time, if you were a producer of DRAM, you would invest $20 billion of CapEx to make $19 billion. And you would go through these booms and busts. Maybe some years you would make $21 billion, some years you would make $18 billion. But, until right now, I don't think making memory has ever been a great business over a long period of time. And then all of a sudden, these guys are each going to make like $100 billion of free cash flow in a year. Unbelievable. But, I think they all remember their history. How many times they almost went bankrupt by making too many fabs and being promised this time it was different. John Collison Which leads them to be conservative in their CapEx. Sam Altman Clearly. John Collison It feels like what you should expect to see is that every part of the supply chain, both new startups coming along and maybe more relevantly, people with relevant experience getting into... So, Intel makes chips. They can probably make... They can get back into the memory game, as is tradition. Sam Altman As is tradition. John Collison Switch back. Sam Altman Oh, I think there are all of these ways where the supply chain—it's just super non-obvious. An example of this is people... A lot of people want local inference. And somehow, they assume that the problem is solved now. Because, we are going to have open-source models. We're going to be able to run them on our computers. And so we're not going to need all the stuff in the data center. But from a global allocation perspective, actually, it's quite terrible to have everybody have a bunch of the world's limited supply of DRAM sitting in their own computer. And, being used— John Collison Mm-hmm. Sam Altman 5% of the time. You want maximum utilization in the cloud if you're trying to deal with this very supply constrained environment. And somehow everyone's... Many people's intuition is the opposite of that. John Collison Where else are we seeing the market respond to high prices? Not just in memory, but across the supply chain? Sam Altman Turbines. Batteries. Concrete. John Collison Sorry, the market is— Sam Altman Steel— John Collison Responding there in high prices. I'm seeing where... Are you seeing any interesting market responses in terms of high prices pulling in innovation? Sam Altman Components for—some components for robots. And not the humanoid fake demos. But the industrial robots that can just make stuff faster. John Collison I see. There's new actuator makers and that kind of stuff. Sam Altman Yeah, honestly... Maybe you could say: "If OpenAI sells our chip." Maybe that would be an example. John Collison Okay. Yeah. I want to get to your chip because that was going to be my example. I think the solution to high prices and short, limited demand—sorry, limited supply, excuse me, is you make your own chip. Presumably, you're using a lot of AI to make the chip. I would have thought that's hard because I would have thought that chip design is one of those places limited by the public tokens you can get. Where there aren't actually that many blog posts on the public internet on how to build a leading-edge, 2-nanometer chip. Sam Altman Well. In terms of how to do the lithography, I think there's one company on Earth that seems to know how to do that. In terms of how to do the chip design, to build the file that you eventually send to tape out, that is well understood. That is a great problem for AI. Given that the world is going to be limited in its silicon capacity, we all have a shared interest. One of the things that I'm proud of about OpenAI, and maybe this sounds obvious. But it was not as obvious at the time, is: we have a culture where people... Even if they've done something the old-fashioned way for a long time, are super willing to try using AI to do it better. John Collison What are other examples of that? Sam Altman AI research. Software engineering. But also, increasingly, procurement. Or things that people think of very outside the realm of what most people are using AI to do. John Collison How does AI-driven AI research actually work? The math proofs where you say—or find the PHP vulnerability where you say: "Please find me some AI advances." Sam Altman So. I think we don't know yet how it truly is going to work. We know today how to say, "Find me a 5% compute efficiency win." John Collison But, it's that high level. I could be an incredibly successful AI researcher now. Sam Altman I don't know about incredibly. But yeah, if you were looking for a new job, you can come do it. What I don't think anyone knows how to do yet, is to say: "Go discover a new architecture that is as big of a single leap forward as the transformer was." I think that's where things are heading. John Collison What's missing there? Sam Altman Smarter models... Smarter models that are smarter in this dimension. John Collison The high-level planning and conceptual reasoning. Sam Altman I think if you apply the same pipeline that we applied to get our models to be so good at math to AI research, it will probably work. Now, per an earlier part of this conversation. I kind of think that, at least for a while—maybe for a long while—we are going to have to agree to some limits about how smart we let these single models get. But, a lack of progress will come from that decision. Not from the AI's inability to do good research. John Collison Concretely, if I'm using AI to develop improved AI... Because we should expect GPT-7 to be really good now. Because you have GPT-6, and whatever unreleased version of it, to develop it. So, my expectations are sky high. But, I come into work with my backpack. And I come into the OpenAI office in San Francisco. And I sit down at my desk. Am I saying: "Find me more intelligence in this model?" Am I giving a real direction of research? How directed does it get? What does the iteration loop look like? Just what does RSI— because you have a front row seat to RSI. I'm curious what it looks like. Sam Altman One of the sort of interesting things that people talk a lot about at OpenAI, which sounds very obvious. It sounds like you could answer: "Well, build me... Build me RSI or whatever," is: "What are the questions that you're supposed to ask of GPT-7?" Probably, it's not enough to just say: "Make me RSI." Also, it's probably not enough to say: "Buy me a 5% compute efficiency win." Sam Altman I think this is one of the most interesting debates going on right now. And the answer is not just what question to ask it. But it's things like agent swarms. How are we going to use these models in a way that actually maximizes what we can get out of them? I think we're going to learn a lot about that in the next three months. John Collison Okay. But it sounds like you guys do not have a codified OpenAI standard way of doing an AI-enabled AI development. It's still lots of experimentation yourself— Sam Altman It's lots of experimentation. John Collison Yeah. When we were talking about the token budgets, it just strikes me that this is one of the big unresolved questions for AI use in enterprises generally is how... We don't have hard budgets for individual engineers. You don't get cut off at a certain point. It's like: "Sorry, you've spent all your arcade tokens." Maybe we should. But we don't. Again, I think we all believe in the scale-up of AI. But if you take that seriously, it means the dollars of compute, or AI per person will go up. So I feel like we're pretty soon to now actually just running into this question of how you actually decide how much spending power to give individual people inside the organization. Sam Altman There was a time when a lot of companies had this thing in their Google Calendar, which showed the approximate cost of each meeting. John Collison Hmm. Sam Altman In terms of everybody's comp that had to be there. I think that was always still an underestimate of it. There was this observation that... Paul Graham made it at one point. And many other people made it too. There was... There are people at companies that have incredible power to save $17 on the snack budget of the office every week. And yeah, you can have these meetings for unbelievable amounts of money that are adding no value. And there's no equivalent of the ability to stop that. I think that most use... Okay, so I'm really talking about my book here and I'm very biased, but I genuinely believe it. That use of AI is not a company's biggest spend problem relative to other things that happen. Even if it's somewhat inefficient, it is not where I would focus. John Collison Well, hang on. That's not scaling law-pilled enough. Like, I'm not... Okay, two years from now. Sam Altman You want to go spend all Stripe's revenue, all Stripe's profit on OpenAI services and then complain about this? I'd be delighted to have a conversation. John Collison But we're on a path to that. Like, you know, we— Sam Altman Great. John Collison Yeah, yeah. We now spend, you know, 1%-ish order of magnitude of Stripe's OpEx is tokens. That is obviously— Sam Altman That feels too low. John Collison Yeah. So, we're working on fixing it. And it'll get to 5%, and 10%, and 20%. Then, you have a real question. Sam Altman Do you have an intuition on what the right number is? What it should be today? John Collison What it should be today is maybe, tricky. But, steady state... Isn't it going to be, depending on the kind of company? Isn't it going to be, 10s of percentage points of their OpEx? Sam Altman I think for many companies, the answer to that is clearly 'yes.' And I think there will come a time when the right thing to do is to really optimize that. Also, another thing I'm proud of about OpenAI is—we've tried to really drive the cost per unit of intelligence down, and down, and down. I think we've been a good spokesperson, and good champion of this. But still, I think the problem, even at current costs... I think there are more companies with the problem of not using enough AI rather than using too much AI. John Collison Do the dollars per gigawatt of leading-edge AI go up or down? Sam Altman That should go down. John Collison Down? Sam Altman That should go down. John Collison Why? Sam Altman Um. John Collison Because it's gone up to this point, right? Sam Altman The reason it could go up is if AI just increases in value per what it can do per watt so quickly. And there's such a supply shortage, that people are willing to spend much more. John Collison Ah. But you would view that as compute not keeping up. Sam Altman But I would view that as compute not keeping up. And if I look at the fundamental cost of turning the sand into intelligence, that should go down. The cost of energy should go down. The cost of chips should go down. The rest of the cost of the supply chain should go down. If it doesn't go down, I'll be very sad. But for it to go down, given how much value there is in this, supply's got to go way up. John Collison Okay, so you would like to see a compute glut where we start producing a lot more memory, a lot more data centers, a lot more of all the inputs. And as a result, anyone who wants a computer, for whatever reason, can have one. Sam Altman People give different numbers for the cost per gigawatt measured in the five-year total cost of ownership right now. But let's say, let's pick $70 billion as a number. I think if that number were— John Collison That's the cost to install— Sam Altman And run it for five years. John Collison Yep. Okay. Sam Altman I think if that number were 20 instead of 70, we should be much happier. And we should still demand to get 10x better performance out of it with smarter models every year. John Collison Presumably you don't think two is a good number. Something's gone wrong if we're seeing two. Because it'd be surprising if we were— Sam Altman Um... John Collison Or, is two better than 20? Sam Altman Why is it not? I don't think that will happen. But, why do we not want that number to be as low as possible? John Collison I don't know, this is your theory. You have a view that, generally, deflationary technology is good. Sam Altman I do believe in that. Yeah, I'm pro-deflation in a sense... Pro-deflationary technology. John Collison So how are we going to get there? What's going happen between now— Sam Altman Well, $2 a gigawatt. I can't imagine. John Collison Okay, what's going to happen between now and $20 a gigawatt? Sam Altman $20 billion. $20 a gigawatt would be really great. John Collison Okay, yeah, yeah. $20 billion a gigawatt. Sam Altman Even to get down to 20, you're getting into the realm of energy's got to get cheaper. But certainly, all of the gross margin stacking that happens between melting sand... Or the equivalent of melting sand and getting the token back. A lot of that's got to get compressed. John Collison You could just get there with eliminating profits? Or do you need to also make the energy cheaper? I don't know the math off the top of my head. Sam Altman If you assumed all materials were free and no one made a profit, maybe you could get there in the current energy envelope. But only just. John Collison I see. Personal agents are the most exciting thing happening in AI right now. One of them, there's many exciting things happening in AI, but one of the most exciting things. You guys launched Dots a few weeks back at this stage. And there's a bunch of other people also launching in the field. What will be true of the winning personal agent? Sam Altman It's like: intelligence, context, tools. It's a limited number of things. Someone is going... I think no one has yet figured out the thing that people... People like these, but this is not something that people are like, "I cannot imagine my life without this thing" in a way when people talk about coding agents, or even ChatGPT—they do say. John Collison Mm-hmm. Sam Altman And someone... I think someone soon is going to figure out what that looks like. You talked about one of the reasons why this doesn't quite work yet. But I think this is a small number of ideas away from a super mainstream thing. John Collison Oh, interesting. You think we have not had the Macintosh moment for personal agents? Sam Altman I think we have not. John Collison Do you have any sense of what the shape of it will be? Sam Altman I think it'll look a lot like the current Dots, or Muse, or Grokbot, or whatever. But it'll just work. It will just work. It will be reliable. You'll never have... You'll just give it more complex tasks, and it'll do all of those things. John Collison The computer use dynamic is very interesting to me. Because, not everyone is embracing the new agentic future with open arms. But it's not totally within their control. Because you can just have an agent using a computer. Where do you think that dynamic goes, this sort of cat and mouse? Sam Altman Rough instinct is the world will... People are going to fight this in both directions but, eventually converge on something like, "You're allowed to tell an AI to use your computer on your behalf, including software." John Collison People always talk about that, but isn't it a bit like the semantic web? It's a really nice conceptual idea. Sam Altman Yeah, I was going to say. I don't think this is so black and white. I don't think I have a super high degree of confidence of how this is going to play out. As a consumer, I feel like somewhat annoyed if I can't— John Collison Yes. Sam Altman Have an AI automate tasks on my own computer. I want it to feel like it's my agent doing what I ask. But then it gets like, I don't, I don't have to go do something else. Yeah. John Collison Yeah. I note a very interesting dynamic right now, which is every company is really eager to add AI to their products in a very specific way, which is there is a tab or popup widget or something that gives you a messaging-type UI. And it's often surprisingly capable. And so you can say: "Hey, I actually want to return my most recent order." Sam Altman Yeah. John Collison And then you're surprisingly impressed when it actually is able to find your most recent order. And it's a bit janky, and it can do all those things. However, no consumer really wants this UI. Because, consumers have strong—not immovable, but strong preferences for their existing primary chat app. The kind of top-of-wallet app that they open when they want to go to do something. And what they want is to be able to say: "Hey, go find my recent order on this business, and refund it." Or something like that. And, I noticed that businesses are really reluctant to allow people to use those businesses inside another AI app. Because like, "Oh, we're going to lose control and our moat" or whatever. And it just strikes me as fine, because your defensibility probably did not come from your ability to put together HTML. John Collison Your defensibility came from the brand loyalty and the product selection. And the new UI is that agentic interaction inside ChatGPT, or Gemini, or whatever it is. But, all businesses disagree with me here. Sam Altman I— John Collison But they're very good at business, so maybe, they're right. Sam Altman Yeah, I mean, again, I have a bias here. But I so directionally agree with you. I have such an extreme preference to buy something from Amazon versus some random e-commerce vendor that I don't know if I can return to. Or I don't know if I can trust them to deliver it quickly, or something like that. If I ask ChatGPT to buy me something and I can choose Amazon versus some other thing... 10 out of 10 times I click Amazon. Pay a higher price. I have just like such— John Collison Yes. Sam Altman And it's nothing to do with my experience of clicking around amazon.com. John Collison Exactly. Sam Altman And now, I think you could say we have not done a good enough job offering partners a platform inside of ChatGPT if they don't want this to happen. But... And again, maybe I'm really biased here. I think Amazon's in a great... I think they're in a great place if commerce moves much more agentic. John Collison Amazon in particular has this amazing defensibility via the fulfillment network. And so, you can use Amazon kind of from anywhere. Sam Altman I super trust that. John Collison Yeah. I'm just really struck by this dynamic. My new thinking, in particular with regards to agentic commerce, but also anything is anytime there is a web form field, you as a human are filling out. These days, that is below your pay grade. Because, you are probably not inventing that information for the first time. We've all filled out the medical forms where it's like—oh, your family history, or whatever. Sam Altman Yeah. John Collison And that's so frustrating. Because, how many times have you filled out your dad's and your mom's medical history, and things like that? It feels so wasteful. But there's a million versions of that. You're never inventing new information for a web form. Sam Altman I would be so happy to never do fake work at a computer again. John Collison Yeah. And my argument is any web form is basically fake work. Sam Altman I agree. But... I was one of the very earliest adopters that I knew of, of those plugins that put in your name and address very clumsily. Because I was just like, "This is...I cannot do this again." Sam Altman But I kind of feel like that using most of the web at this point. John Collison Yeah, I just find this phenomenon really interesting where businesses right now are really attached to their HTML and mobile apps as sources of business defensibility. And it just feels very... Either they're wrong and it's not a source of defensibility. Or it may be, but it's transitory and they just need to get over it. Sam Altman The last example of this that I think we really witnessed was the app stores. The iPhone App Store, specifically. I remember every startup was like, or many startups... Most of the YC batch was like: "I'm gonna build an iPhone app. This is like new distribution. This is awesome. I can do a new thing I couldn't do before." And many new startups got created. And all the big companies felt like they had to make one, but they kind of didn't want to. Because they're like: "Oh, I'm going to hand my relationship with my consumer over to Apple." And, it was great for mobile. John Collison It was just a new UI. Sam Altman Yeah. John Collison Okay, I'm going to go more rapid fire. People complain about benchmaxxing. Is that a real concern? Are OpenAI models benchmaxxed? Are you actually Rick Rubin-ing it, where you just feel the vibe of this model is right and you don't care what SWE-bench gives it? Sam Altman Maybe there are two things we should really care about models being good at. One is, scientific discovery and doing things that people cannot do. And the other is being enjoyable to work with. And, I don't think we have great benchmarks for being enjoyable to work with. I'm actually not sure we have great benchmarks for the smartest, scientific scientist either. But, we endeavor not to benchmaxx. I keep thinking that benchmaxxing is over as a phenomenon, and people keep doing it. John Collison So are you better than other labs at not getting sucked in by the siren call of benchmaxxing? Sam Altman I believe we are better at that. John Collison It feels like— Sam Altman I don't think we've always been better at that in our history. I believe we are better than that right now. John Collison It feels like the industry is still figuring out the "being nice to work with," where there was the glazing era. And more recently, there was the stroppy, ornery era of models that were anti-glazing and as a result, tried to disagree with you, and nitpick at you on every minor thing. The current ones are pretty good, actually. Sam Altman It's gotten... I think the latest models are much better than we've had in a long time. John Collison But it also feels like there's probably higher peaks to ascend. Sam Altman Emmett Shear said to me years ago that what he wanted was a really thoughtful and challenging, but still respectful, senior coworker. And I have still not heard a better, brief encapsulation than that. John Collison Yes. After working with him for many years, what's your grand unified theory of Greg Brockman? Sam Altman I think Greg Brockman is one of a kind in the best sense. John Collison He's singular on the Greg Brockman scale. You just have to be there to understand what that is. Sam Altman It's a combination of intensity, monster productivity, extreme dedication, and focus on succeeding at the mission. It's very cool. John Collison You hate tokens as a metric for anything really. Pricing, or... It's not the standard unit of AI. And yet, we found ourselves there. Sam Altman You know, we did talk— Sam Altman You might say outcomes, but I don't think it can be outcomes. Because outcomes is too different across different use cases. What's the right standardized unit? Sam Altman We almost made a very—what would've been bad call to say we're not going to price our next model in tokens at all. And you're just going to give it a prompt. And we're going to give you a price back. And we're going to do it. And it's going to be like AWS to you. Just do something and we send you a bill. But the customer response on that is so negative. They're like, "I need to know what I'm paying for somehow." John Collison Yes. Sam Altman And, I asked a few people: "Would you rather pay more for the same output, but have it priced in some number of consistent tokens? Or something?" Even if we inflated the tokens and they're like, "Oh, I'd much rather you inflate the tokens and pay more. Because I know there's a real thing there." So I think you are right, people don't just want us to give them a price, because they feel like over the long term they're gonna get screwed somehow. In the same way that maybe people would rather pay for CPU hours rather than just getting their thing done, even if it was less expensive. John Collison You know the way, nanometer... The chip gate length? Sam Altman It's totally fake. John Collison Yeah. The nanometer has very little relation to reality these days. Will we get something like that in tokens where you guys should start saying, "Here is an intelligence equivalent token," like I Can't Believe It's Not Butter. Sam Altman Of the smallest feature? John Collison Yeah. Sam Altman I... That's, like, made up. I hope not. Sam Altman I mean, it offends me that we use the word nanometers for something that has nothing to do with nanometers. John Collison I know, it's very silly. Yeah. Sam Altman So... John Collison You'd not like that. Sam Altman I would rather not make up a fake unit. Tokens are a kind of fake unit. I mean, they're real in some sense, but they're not a good unit. John Collison They're fake from a business value point of view. John Collison But isn't the only... Okay. Isn't the only defense of tokens that if you're wasting tokens, we should fix that pretty soon? We shouldn't be streaming—Claude Shannon would not approve of us just streaming noise rather than signal. And so, there will be a... There's a floor of the information theoretic most useful tokens on both sides. We'll kind of come back to that. Sam Altman Yeah. I mean, right now you have to think about whether you should want the 10-cent-per-million tokens out of a small model or $10 per token tokens out of a big model. And then whether... How long the chain of thought is likely to be. And that's just cognitive overhead that I don't think actually adds any value. John Collison Is the chain of thought included? In the price— Sam Altman In what we charge? Most people do. John Collison Okay. Sam Altman By the way, the Guinness was not as bad as I thought. Definitely not as good as an IPA, but not as bad. John Collison It's good. Sam Altman Yeah. I mean, an IPA is great but it's pretty good. John Collison We like Guinness. Sam Altman Yeah. John Collison At least in this podcast. Thank you.