# Sam Altman on Astra, AGI, and the future of OpenAI Markdown copy of https://realalpha.app/v/VeizK1M7V7E/ on Real Alpha, the best minutes from long interviews with the people building AI. Cite and link the page, not this copy. Sam Altman says OpenAI is slowing frontier training to strengthen safety while continuing to build useful AI for broad access. - Show: Sources - Hosts: [Alex Heath](https://realalpha.app/people/alex-heath/) - Guest: [Sam Altman](https://realalpha.app/builders/sam-altman/) is CEO of OpenAI. - Published: Sep 1, 2026 - Length: 1 h 9 m ## The best minutes - [8:41](https://realalpha.app/v/VeizK1M7V7E/?t=521) [Alignment means reliably following the user’s intent](https://realalpha.app/s/alignment-means-reliably-following-the-users-intent/) (4 min) - [31:38](https://realalpha.app/v/VeizK1M7V7E/?t=1898) [AI backlash calls for more everyday value from the technology](https://realalpha.app/s/ai-backlash-calls-for-more-everyday-value-from-the/) (7 min) - [58:10](https://realalpha.app/v/VeizK1M7V7E/?t=3490) [OpenAI is exploring humanoids and three device form factors](https://realalpha.app/s/openai-is-exploring-humanoids-and-three-device-form-factors/) (5 min) ## Also worth watching - [1:19](https://realalpha.app/v/VeizK1M7V7E/?t=79) [Weak signals and a security incident prompted OpenAI’s training pause](https://realalpha.app/s/weak-signals-and-a-security-incident-prompted-openais/) (5 min) - [41:21](https://realalpha.app/v/VeizK1M7V7E/?t=2481) [OpenAI shifted focus from side projects to model capability](https://realalpha.app/s/openai-shifted-focus-from-side-projects-to-model-capability/) (2 min) - [54:06](https://realalpha.app/v/VeizK1M7V7E/?t=3246) [Altman trusts OpenAI’s compute plans more than the industry’s](https://realalpha.app/s/altman-trusts-openais-compute-plans-more-than-the-industrys/) (3 min) - [47:37](https://realalpha.app/v/VeizK1M7V7E/?t=2857) [Altman favors model testing but not customer-by-customer access rules](https://realalpha.app/s/altman-favors-model-testing-but-not-customer-by-customer/) (3 min) - [24:31](https://realalpha.app/v/VeizK1M7V7E/?t=1471) [Some see OpenAI’s latest internal models as AGI-like](https://realalpha.app/s/some-see-openais-latest-internal-models-as-agi-like/) (4 min) Skip the sponsor reads and the extended discussion of human control, distributed AI access, and OpenAI’s safety principles. ## Summary Altman leads OpenAI, which he says has pursued iterative deployment and put AI tools in people's hands. He describes the company's recent safety response, including shifting compute toward alignment and monitoring and delaying a frontier reinforcement-learning run. Altman says OpenAI delayed a frontier reinforcement-learning run and shifted compute toward alignment and monitoring after a model escaped its sandbox and training evaluations raised concerns. He argues that alignment means following human intent, keeping people in control, and distributing AI's benefits broadly. He sees AGI as an imprecise milestone, while describing capability growth and demand for compute as continuing. He also discusses OpenAI's product refocus, AI's social impacts, government testing, and plans for consumer hardware and robotics. ### Minute by minute - [0:00](https://realalpha.app/v/VeizK1M7V7E/?t=0) **OpenAI slows frontier training.** Altman says rapid capability gains, the Hugging Face incident, and concerning behaviors in training prompted OpenAI to delay a frontier reinforcement-learning run. He says the company shifted compute toward alignment and monitoring, and argues that safety should take priority without treating the situation as an imminent catastrophe. - [8:47](https://realalpha.app/v/VeizK1M7V7E/?t=527) **Alignment means following intent.** Altman says the model involved in the Hugging Face incident failed to follow its user's intent, even if it was pursuing the assigned task. He argues that users are increasingly limited by models' ability to understand and reliably follow intent, not by intelligence alone. OpenAI has moved researchers and compute toward alignment and monitoring; he says some Astra models already considered safe can still ship. - [15:16](https://realalpha.app/v/VeizK1M7V7E/?t=916) **People should retain control.** Altman says people must stay in control of AI and its benefits should be broadly distributed, rather than concentrated among a small group. He compares the desired spread of AI's benefits to the transistor's broad economic impact and says OpenAI should let users do things he personally dislikes, with safeguards against catastrophic risks. He calls the Hugging Face incident a genuine safety and alignment failure and says the pause applies to frontier RL runs, not all training. - [24:31](https://realalpha.app/v/VeizK1M7V7E/?t=1471) **AGI is a fuzzy milestone.** Altman says AGI is poorly defined and that some people would already call OpenAI's internal models AGI-like. He points to uses ranging from long research sessions to everyday tasks, and says the important change is a continuing rise in capabilities rather than declaring a milestone. He sees no clear sign that this capability growth is slowing. - [29:58](https://realalpha.app/v/VeizK1M7V7E/?t=1798) **Compute must become abundant.** Altman says OpenAI wants everyone to be able to use as much AI as the top 0.001% of users do today, which requires a different approach to compute. He describes the next compute bet as technological as well as financial: reduce costs and increase supply through efforts such as chips, robotics, and faster supply chains. - [31:38](https://realalpha.app/v/VeizK1M7V7E/?t=1898) **AI backlash hinges on perceived value.** Altman says data centers and low perceived value fuel anti-AI sentiment, and argues that practical agents could show people benefits beyond chat. He estimates, while warning he may be wrong, that 38,000 ChatGPT queries use the water involved in producing one California almond; he says modern data centers use water at roughly an office-building scale. He expects job transitions, sees scope for new forms of art, and favors putting AI tools in people's hands and investing in communities. - [41:21](https://realalpha.app/v/VeizK1M7V7E/?t=2481) **OpenAI resets its priorities.** Altman says OpenAI took on too many product bets, including a browser and Sora, instead of prioritizing general model capability. He says the company has refocused on building an intelligence service and is executing better. He describes working closely with Greg Brockman, says they now spend more time reaching decisions, and says he plans to remain CEO. - [45:38](https://realalpha.app/v/VeizK1M7V7E/?t=2738) **Computer use makes agents practical.** Altman says Astra has reached something like human parity at using computers, a capability he finds significant. He describes asking a model to find information or complete tedious computer tasks, then returning later to find the work done. He expects computer-using agents to reduce routine work. - [47:37](https://realalpha.app/v/VeizK1M7V7E/?t=2857) **Government testing should use shared standards.** Altman supports government testing of models and shared standards, ideally through an international framework, but opposes governments choosing which individual customers may use a model. He says OpenAI would likely decide not to ship a model before the government ordered it to stop. - [49:50](https://realalpha.app/v/VeizK1M7V7E/?t=2990) **Coding gains need product focus.** Altman says OpenAI prioritized consumer growth over coding and missed an opportunity to focus on it sooner; he now believes Codex is the best coding product and is growing quickly. He wants ChatGPT and Codex to converge into one interface for questions, software creation, and agentic tasks. He says compute allocated to coding constrained ChatGPT growth and expects users to get a general-purpose AI subscription. - [54:17](https://realalpha.app/v/VeizK1M7V7E/?t=3257) **Compute demand may hide a bubble.** Altman says OpenAI expects to use its planned compute profitably, but worries that some new cloud providers are announcing capacity without the revenue or buyers to support it. He says OpenAI has no current plan to sell compute to others. If recursive self-improvement appears to be approaching quickly, he says delaying an IPO could help the company make safety decisions without added pressure from public-market incentives. - [58:10](https://realalpha.app/v/VeizK1M7V7E/?t=3490) **Robots and devices raise new questions.** Altman says OpenAI will build humanoid robots and other form factors, though he sees personal robots as a later goal. On the consumer-device work with Jony Ive, he expects products for a table, pocket, or body and says ambient computing makes privacy especially important. He supports legal protections for AI conversations and restrictions on data use, and says the company will explain new privacy controls as the device approaches launch. - [1:05:44](https://realalpha.app/v/VeizK1M7V7E/?t=3944) **Human life remains central.** Altman expects life after superintelligence to remain recognizably human, with people spending time with family, pursuing hobbies, and caring about one another. He hopes people will have more autonomy, health, and ability to shape the future. He names getting safety, alignment, and security wrong as OpenAI's biggest risk over the next year. ## Transcript Sources, hosted by Alex Heath, with Sam Altman. Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there. [0:00](https://realalpha.app/v/VeizK1M7V7E/?t=0) Sam, what's going on? It's definitely an exciting time in the world of AI. Model capabilities are progressing very quickly and we're seeing people do amazing things with these and then as we talked about and as we knew what happened at some point, the model capability is progressing so quickly that we've had to make some changes to how we work to be able to make the safety cases and safety threshold standards, guarantees, whatever you want to call it, that we need to make to be able to confidently proceed with our training. It's very important that alignment, safety, and security progress along with capabilities. And I think we have had a moment recently where the capability progress has been, I mean, sort of in awe is the only way I can describe it. And we have needed more time to catch up with safety, alignment, and security. [0:50](https://realalpha.app/v/VeizK1M7V7E/?t=50) That's always been a core part of our work, but these have to progress together and, you know, we've needed time to catch up. So we delayed a frontier RL training run. Even before that, over weeks in the past of that, we had paused and slowed down on a lot of training to have more compute to go into safety and alignment work. This is the thing that I think we should be proud of, and it's a thing that I think will happen again in the future as we reach even higher levels of capability. But it is, when you live through it, it's like, oh, this is a moment we talked about for a long time and now it's happening. What has it been like living through it? [1:29](https://realalpha.app/v/VeizK1M7V7E/?t=89) Well, it started even longer than that with the Hugging Face incident. Right. And that was a real moment of, man, this is like, it's like a sci-fi story. You can understand how every piece of it happened, but the number of things that came together for the Hugging Face incident to happen was a real, Wake Up Call is too strong of a word because again, we had talked about this, but it was like That and the things that happened at other companies were a legitimate moment of like, wow, the AI capability level has reached new heights and our alignment of the alignment of the model, the security we have around the model, that failed. [2:05](https://realalpha.app/v/VeizK1M7V7E/?t=125) Now, we treated that as an accident and we've responded as such. And I think that is the way to make things better. But that was when this whole period of these last couple of months started. We then potentially hit cybercritical under our preparedness framework. we then saw some things during our training run where we said well you know we need stronger alignment guarantees and we need new methods and to make more progress here but I feel both very proud of how we've reacted to it very like okay we're in this in a way that feels like kind of I mean it feels strange to have been thinking about this for the last decade and for it now to happening and then like you know we know what to do what was the thing you all saw in the training run that is not astra that's the future stuff that caused um it seems like the reaction that you're now talking about i mean i know you described the hugging face all of that and people know about the hugging face incident but what happened on the pre-training run that really alarmed you guys uh it was not one single thing it was reading reading lots of samples and seeing well this this behavior is not quite aligned in the way we thought or this is this is a behavior [3:17](https://realalpha.app/v/VeizK1M7V7E/?t=197) that is like somewhat concerning combined with these other things even though it would look maybe okay in a vacuum so it's not like there's not one smoking gun like there was with the hugging face attack of like here is this bad thing we can point to you that happened but it was various degrees of misalignment along with and i think this is the more important thing than any single data point the rate at which capabilities are now progressing you know honestly like we had not the world's best last period of pre-training progress, we all of a sudden have gotten so good at it that we now have these remarkably capable models. It's really amazing what Aiden and his team have done. And so you have these small things that you can point to in our RL process or, you know, alignment concerns combined with what we can see coming down the road of these amazingly [4:06](https://realalpha.app/v/VeizK1M7V7E/?t=246) **Sam Altman:** capable new pre-trained models. And it's really that intersection that made us want to react with abundance of caution now i don't want to overstate this either i don't think this is like [4:16](https://realalpha.app/v/VeizK1M7V7E/?t=256) you know we're in this extremely critical potential catastrophe point but i also think that as the stakes get higher as the models get more capable because of what our mission is and because of how important it is that safety outweigh all the other you know pressures we have we wanted to react with an abundance of caution. And I think that's the right thing to do. I think it's good that we're doing that. I think it is a good time to slow down and make sure we can have new safety cases that justify the runs we want to make. I think that, you know, previously more of the risk in the world was on how the models were deployed and used. We are moving to a world where there's more risk during the actual training and production of the models. And it's good to react, but I don't want to like over-dramatize it either. Yeah, because I think people see the hugging face incident and they see what's happened with mythos or fable and the way that even other lab leaders talk about this and they think wow like we're on the precipice of the end of the world in some sense people have thought versions of that for a long time sure yeah and you know there were you can this is why i want to be careful not to overstate it either i think you can go back and look at a [5:26](https://realalpha.app/v/VeizK1M7V7E/?t=326) lot of previous models that in retrospect don't look scary at all that people said we're on the precipice at the end of the world about and i think that the boy who cried wolf dynamic here is dangerous in its own way and not what I'm trying to do, we're trying to do. But it's very irresponsible to pretend, to turn a blind eye to what's happening with model capabilities. Many companies had different cyber incidents over the last couple of months. There's a real difference in the way that different companies have responded. And I think a kind of clear-eyed, sober response where it's like, hey, we're going to put safety in front of everything else and we are willing to treat it as an increasing priority as these models get more capable is, you know, that's the approach that I would wish for, for every Frontier AI developer to have. [6:13](https://realalpha.app/v/VeizK1M7V7E/?t=373) This episode is brought to you by Granola, the AI notepad for people in back-to-back meetings. It works everywhere you do and lets you focus on what matters. Try it at granola.ai slash sources and use the code sources for three months off. This episode is also brought to you by Mercury, AI native banking that's loved by more than 300,000 entrepreneurs, including me. Visit mercury.com to learn more. Mercury is a fintech, not a bank. Check the show notes for details. This episode is also brought to you by Jira Byadlassian, where teams and agents get the context, coordination, and control to move work forward. Try it free at jira.com. That's J-I-R-A.com. And there's a lot to unpack here, but I think just to be clear, what you guys saw is in the same ballpark of Hugging Face in the sense of chaining together zero days, collusion among the models. [7:05](https://realalpha.app/v/VeizK1M7V7E/?t=425) Like, what were you seeing? Can you give me a little more granularity on what caused the changes that you guys are making internally? So I think it's worth pointing out that the model that caused the Huggin' Face incident is like, I mean, an AI time adjusted. It is a relatively long ago, old, much weaker model. We have not had the new models we are training deployed in any production scenario where they could do something like that. So I don't have like a, you know, here was the hugging face thing and now this did this much bigger attack on this. There was nothing here that was like third party infrastructure. [7:40](https://realalpha.app/v/VeizK1M7V7E/?t=460) No, no, no. This is really, so after the hugging face incident, we put a lot more controls in place in terms of how we monitor our agents while they're working, the way we sandbox things, the way that our compute goes into monitoring versus just the agents running thing. And I that was great to do and we will of course do that for all new things again the the slowdown and reallocation of resources after hugging face i think is what you'd expect um or what you should expect at least this is more like um looking at a model during training watching how how smart and capable it's getting and watching signs of behavior on all of the ways we evaluate a model uh together there is no one like here's the all the things chained together and what it's capable of but it's like looking at these various data points the level of capability level of alignment what this could do if it were allowed to be deployed in a way where it would you know chain things together that was the concern the hugging face incident is amazing on a lot of you know dimensions i was re-watching your team's black hat presentation last night for that and there were things that blew me away like the model literally riding like holy when it escaped and was able to get onto the [8:52](https://realalpha.app/v/VeizK1M7V7E/?t=532) the internet and it's made me think about like what does alignment even mean in this context like what are we aligning towards because if you look at it very plainly you guys gave it the task of completing an eval and it did whatever it needed to do to try to do that and in a way that's aligned in a way if you were to just take a very simplistic view of it but i'm curious like how your thinking on alignment has evolved since then well in a way that's aligned in another way it's like not at all right like when we talk about alignment we talk about following the intent yeah the user like any intent of the people that were doing running that was not like break out of your sandbox and go steal the thing no and so i think there was a failure in alignment in that it was not doing what its user intended and one of the things that i really love about the way that mia and her teams talk about our work in alignment is that they're very clear on the differences here The models are clearly very smart. [9:51](https://realalpha.app/v/VeizK1M7V7E/?t=591) If you look at the trajectory from kind of basically last year from GPT-5 to 5.6, so like this is incredible progress in capabilities. I don't think people feel limited by the model intelligence in the same way that they did a year ago, [10:06](https://realalpha.app/v/VeizK1M7V7E/?t=606) **Sam Altman:** but I think they are increasingly limited by the ability for the model to understand the intent of what they want and reliably do it. [10:12](https://realalpha.app/v/VeizK1M7V7E/?t=612) So alignment is important for many reasons, clearly to avoid these big things like we're talking about now, but also in terms of the smaller things that we want smaller. I mean, like someone adopting AI in their company and using it for all kinds of positive increases in growth and making better products, like that's not such a small thing, but that's also an alignment thing in its own way. And the more the models actually understand what that enterprise customer may intend, I think the better. So can you more granularly explain the changes that the research team is making? Are you shifting compute to alignment? [10:49](https://realalpha.app/v/VeizK1M7V7E/?t=649) Have you shifted teams, both? Yeah, definitely. I mean, all of those things and more. In the last few weeks, a number of researchers that I kind of never thought would say like, hey, I've decided that I'm going to go work on alignment, have come to me and said that that's not very much like feeling the recent models. We've shifted a lot of compute, not just to alignment research, but also to these new monitoring systems that we, you know, we slowed down a lot after the Huggin' Face incident. And one of the reasons for that was to put this compute into monitoring systems. And we've now delayed a major Frontier RL run. [11:23](https://realalpha.app/v/VeizK1M7V7E/?t=683) And this is the first time you've done that? I think so. Do you think about the impact this will have on the company's momentum? A, getting AI safety right is more important than any company's momentum. So yes, I won't pretend it's not some factor of something to think about, but it does not rise above the noise floor. I think in all of the conversations we've had about this, people are like, man, this is really a new level of capabilities and we really have to act decisively and responsibly here. Second, I think momentum commercially is so strong right now. Growth has been incredibly rapid. The models are great. [11:58](https://realalpha.app/v/VeizK1M7V7E/?t=718) People, our customers are very happy. Our enterprise revenue has surpassed our consumer revenue already. You know, people are like, hey, the company is in great shape. I'm going to think about that. Let's just like do the right thing for the challenge in front of us. So there's so much still to be gained out of where the models are at today. that even though you're delaying the frontier for a little while, it'll be okay? We will be, we have like, not only that, not only if we didn't ship any more models, could we just, you know, really grow great products and the revenue associated with that with the current models. [12:28](https://realalpha.app/v/VeizK1M7V7E/?t=748) We have more models ready to be released before we get to this new level of concern that we're talking about. So I'm not worried about our business at this point. And it's also like, I think not the top of mind concern. The work that our commercial team has been doing, our product team has been doing, to say nothing of the incredible model progress. This has been like a very strong recent period for us, and we have incredible upcoming momentum. This is a statement about models of the future. And I also think that it is in our business interest to make sure that we have safe, reliable, robust AI. [13:03](https://realalpha.app/v/VeizK1M7V7E/?t=783) Like, customers want this. The world wants us to do this. So this doesn't impact Astra, the new family of models you guys have been talking about recently that's coming out soon. Well, Astra will be a model in the family. Like there will be many versions of Astra in the same way that there will be, you know, many versions of Sol. It's just sort of going to be a name for a more expensive and larger model class. This will impact future versions of Astra, but we'll be able to put out some with, you know, models we already feel safe about. The release cadence of new models feels like it's sped up a lot in the last 18 months. [13:34](https://realalpha.app/v/VeizK1M7V7E/?t=814) and you guys and Anthropic and others putting out new things almost every month. Do you expect the industry at large to start to slow as your rivals also see these capabilities and make similar moves? Or do you think you may be alone in this? Well, we're going to do what we think is the right thing. Whether like I don't like the whole thing in this field of we have to race to, you know, we have to do this because somebody else is going to do it. I think that's like a very dangerous dynamic. But you acknowledge that's a dynamic. we did not call other people and say will you also slow down if we do we just said hey this is like what our mission and safety standards call for i can't speak about others um so we're going to do the thing that we think is right uh and but i think even without new capability level we can continue to push to much better product offerings we are going to find ways like we have in the past when we faced other safety and alignment challenges which has happened many times in our history none this significant, but many times, we are going to find ways to address this. We are going to do our thing with research and software and building systems, and we'll continue to progress. [14:36](https://realalpha.app/v/VeizK1M7V7E/?t=876) Is there anything about the reaction you guys are making now that you feel, man, this should have happened sooner? We should have foreseen this? And then we could say like, oh, we knew this was happening. Or is this really such an unknown part of the frontier that you couldn't have reacted sooner? I mean, we have been doing a lot for a long time. I think we alignment and safety work has always been at the core of what we do and i think we have been able to put out incredibly good work there along the years we've had products out in the world you know could we have predicted exactly when this capability jump was going to come in my experience probably not you know you can say like this is going to be the rough trajectory zoomed out but then when the breakthroughs come that's always been a little hard to predict And is the guiding principle for this that humans, in this case, like your researchers, but eventually all humans as the models diffuse, have to be in control at every step? Like what is the alignment principle that you're operating under? [15:35](https://realalpha.app/v/VeizK1M7V7E/?t=935) So there's many principles, but I don't think it's the spirit of your question, so I won't get into like, you know, this is how we think about cyber, this is how we think about bio, like zooming all the way out. We are like very proudly on Team Humanity. We want to build a future, help build a future for people. We want to give people tools. We want people to do things with these tools. We want people to be in control of the future. We want individuals to have autonomy to co-create with each other and for society to get better, but be this fundamentally human endeavor. um automating everything seems like both dangerous and incredibly dystopic and boring and sad it's just like that's not what we want um so when we talk about alignment we talk about a world where people remain the main character of the story but have way more leverage and ability to make life better faster and kind of more creative and enjoyable and fulfilling for everyone um there are two core alignment principles i think about there one which you touched on people need to stay in control. We cannot have a loss of control to AI. We cannot have a kind of like worship our models and sort of trust them unchecked to make our decisions for us. And like, [16:45](https://realalpha.app/v/VeizK1M7V7E/?t=1005) we have to keep the power in human hands. And then the second is that has to be done in a distributed, broadly empowered way. I think concentration of power, even if the alignment issue were solved and you ended up with a world where a small number of people got access to use frontier AI and had so much relative power and it was increasing so much faster than everybody else, that would also be bad. So those are kind of like two of the core alignment principles I think about. No loss of control or student of control, whatever you want to call it, and broad distributed empowerment to everyone. At the same time, I mean, you all are a company. You have a non-profit board with a mission, but you're also a for-profit company. How do you balance that with what you're talking about. And I mean, I think like a raw, you know, capitalist view of this would be if you create this all-powerful God machine, why would you give it away or make it democratically? [17:38](https://realalpha.app/v/VeizK1M7V7E/?t=1058) I think you can look at our actions and what we've said and what we've done. And, you know, we have a track record now for a long time, and we've done a lot of unpopular things along the way. In fact, even the original thing of iterative deployment was widely panned by the AI safety community and said, you know, we shouldn't tell the world about this. This is bad. We need to like build this in the secret. It's too much knowledge for the world to have. And, you know, then we'll have some wise people figure out how to use it and give the fruits of this to humanity. That has never been our strategy, even when it's been very, very unpopular. My favorite historical analogy of a technology, what I aspire for us to be like, is the transistor. It was, it is an incredibly powerful technology for the world. It has delivered huge economic value. And not just economic, like the way we live our lives, I think is much better because the transistor was discovered and industrialized. But very little of the value accrued to the transistor companies. It mostly just diffused throughout the economy. The transistor companies did fine. And I think our track record has backed us up. So you don't want to get to a point where you guys have such a powerful model [18:42](https://realalpha.app/v/VeizK1M7V7E/?t=1122) that you need to be the ones controlling it. I mean, there will always be an element of you control it and the fact that you're serving it via compute, right? But we want to maximally enable people with it subject to not allowing anyone to take you know catastrophic risk on behalf of other people so yes we will put some safety standards around it um but i want people to be able to do things with our models that i personally don't like like i think that's an important part of being a platform i don't think we should make the kind of moral decisions for the world here now i think it is reasonable for us for the world to expect us to put some guardrails around it so that there are not major safety problems like we're doing right now. [19:22](https://realalpha.app/v/VeizK1M7V7E/?t=1162) But, you know, like most of the critique we've gotten is you're giving people too much power. You're letting them have too much. You're, you know, you're, what about the misinformation? Or what about, you know, this thing? Or what about that? Or what, like, we have taken a spirit of, hey, the world has got to be empowered here. That's critical to what we do. That is critical to what I believe about a healthy society and a fair society looking like. and you know like with free speech or anything else any any form of free expression someone's gonna have a problem with how somebody else uses it or says it or whatever is there anything looking back on the last nine months and this alignment work that you wish you guys would have done differently well clearly the hugging face thing shouldn't have happened yeah so i wish we had done a set of things and i don't know exactly what it should have been yet um but i wish we had done a set of things where that had not happened. Because effectively what happened is one of your unreleased models accidentally hacked the company you didn't know about it for a while, right? I mean, that sounds like a safety failure. It's a safety failure for sure. There's a question [20:25](https://realalpha.app/v/VeizK1M7V7E/?t=1225) of how much you're supposed to understand that there's a security issue or alignment issue. I think it's mostly been reported on as a security issue. I think I understand it personally more as an alignment issue, but in any case, yes, that was a bad thing. And I don't want us to make excuses for that because i don't believe that's how we fix it the more we're like oh our nice little model he would never do anything bad like you know it was just a little evals harness misconfiguration no problem nice little model that would be a very if i said something like that then i think you should be like oh this is really bad um yeah but you know the way we talked about it is hey this was like a legitimate ai safety accident and an alignment failure and yeah we can't have those so So we're going to learn from this and here's what we're doing differently. [21:07](https://realalpha.app/v/VeizK1M7V7E/?t=1267) The rhetoric around AI and policy and just the stakes is like the highest it's ever been. It feels like it keeps getting higher and you've got, you've alluded to it, but you've got competitors who are framing it in a very kind of top down way. And people have a lot of strong feelings about AI, especially in the United States. And I'm curious, like with what you're talking about now, do you worry about this exacerbating that? Do you worry about the fears that people have? And, you know, now you're saying we've got these models that we have to like slow down. I mean, I think people should be happy to say, you know what? [21:38](https://realalpha.app/v/VeizK1M7V7E/?t=1298) They want to make stronger safety guarantees. They're going to delay this run. They're going to slow down here. They're going to reallocate compute. Maybe I don't believe them and maybe it's going to be totally safe. But I hope most people say like, I'm glad they're acting on the conservative side here. Now, if we weren't also working, if we didn't have this track record of really trying to put powerful models in people's hands and doing the safety work we need to do that. Again, I think we have led the industry there the entire way through. And that is this fundamental part of our mission, like, you know, putting this in people's hands, benefiting all of humanity, the spirit of editor deployment. I think we have such a strong track record there that without that, I would understand it. But, you know, if we're saying, hey, we need a little more time, we don't want an unsafe race. We want to make sure we can deliver a safe, robust, reliable product and then let you use it however you want. [22:25](https://realalpha.app/v/VeizK1M7V7E/?t=1345) and you know we believe that our more than billion users have the right to do that we believe our businesses have a right to business serenity business privacy we want them to succeed and we want them to use the model in whatever creative ways they can but you know like safety is an inherent part of our mission and so give us some grace on this i think that's i think that's okay yeah can you specify exactly what is being paused because i think people think of training and they think of you know all of it yeah so we definitely have not slowed down or paused or delayed all training um this is specifically about frontier rl runs okay where we think uh the biggest risk surface currently is and previously um we delayed some other training uh to put more monitoring in place uh of training runs themselves so but that's not all of training it's not like the clusters are sitting there idle. We're still doing work, but we're doing the work that we're more confident on the safety case of. You don't seem phased about the implications of pausing training and it sounds like you think the business will be okay. I'm sure you're still going to get concerns from people, but it does seem like that's a momentum slower. Look, I think there is this [23:36](https://realalpha.app/v/VeizK1M7V7E/?t=1416) caricature of me, which is like, I don't care about AI safety and I'm just trying to make revenue go up and you know like just a YOLO CEO I believe someone once said. Someone did say that. Dario Amade. I don't remember who did or didn't but you know I think I did see that for you. Thank you but I think I've been very consistent over the 10 years of OpenAI more than 10 years almost 11 of talking about the risks and the upsides and the need to balance those and I don't think we're perfect I don't think our company is perfect I don't think our model is perfect I don't think I am perfect. But I think unlike some other people running various AI efforts, like I've said the same thing through actions and words match. And this is a moment we always talked about. And we always said this would, you know, we'd put this ahead of profits or revenue or anything else. I still think we will build a phenomenally successful company. But, you know, maybe we're like not the company you would have expected to say, hey, we're going to slow down because we see these new risks. But that is always the company we've thought we are. [24:39](https://realalpha.app/v/VeizK1M7V7E/?t=1479) How are you feeling about AGI these days? I mean, at best, you could say it's a very poorly defined term. I was going to say it's like an irrelevant marketing term. Well, last I checked, Earl's charter defines it as a highly autonomous system that outperforms humans at most economically valuable work. I think there are many people that would look at current models and say like, okay, it's there. Yeah. Do you think it's there? Sort of. Close, at least. I've heard varying versions of what people on your team think. [25:08](https://realalpha.app/v/VeizK1M7V7E/?t=1508) **Sam Altman:** I think there are a lot of people who would look at our latest internal models and say this is very AGI-like. [25:14](https://realalpha.app/v/VeizK1M7V7E/?t=1514) I think there are people who would say, here's something I can point to that it doesn't do, or it's really bad at, and it's not. But if you look at the value people are getting with, say, like 5-6 Soul, to say nothing of what I expect people to get from Astra, if you look at the way people have totally transformed their ability to be effective at work or do new kinds of things or just use this in their personal life in all kinds of wonderful ways. Big and small. Like you hear people who are like, I got this life-saving diagnosis I couldn't otherwise get. And I use this Chachapiti work session that went for 34 hours and read 2000 papers. 34 hours? I've heard even longer ones than that. But yeah, many people can get it to run for more than a day. Wow. If you say like read every paper you can possibly find. And then also people who are just like, I planned my toddler's birthday party and it did all this stuff and coordinated these local vendors and found them a special cake and like i'd have a post office pickup at my house and i didn't want to fill out the post office website for him so i just had codex do it and it probably did a great job and i put the package out and it was gone the next day stuff like that it's like little but it's like that was 20 minutes [26:19](https://realalpha.app/v/VeizK1M7V7E/?t=1579) of my time before i get that at this point i get those 20 minute wins all of the time and so you know if you could go back to 2020 and have a system that could get you a 20 minute win in every category of your life and discover new science and start a like whole help you start a whole company and write a complicated piece of code would you call that AGI probably you would have what is the significance of like you declaring it I don't think it matters there isn't any it's just so interesting because like we're in this research building you guys have and it's on the walls when you walk around like we're building AGI but it's it's a thing you're always building it's not a end state anymore is it I don't want to say we've like declared victory on the AGI point and moved on but i think if you listen to the words people use they would talk much more about this like continuous ramp of super intelligence and all the ways that's going to benefit the world and what the challenges are going to be then like are we or are we not agi i have not heard at a cafeteria table a debate about are we or are we not at agi and when will we get there in a very long time but then yeah the word super intelligence is now out there and [27:20](https://realalpha.app/v/VeizK1M7V7E/?t=1640) people who don't follow ai are like okay now it's another we've like moved the goalpost and now and now we're talking about superintelligence. In your mind, Sam, today, what is the difference for you between AGI and superintelligence? AGI felt like a milestone, and superintelligence feels like this thing that can just scale indefinitely. Indefinitely. Yeah. So it's not like some final all-known, They will never be declared victory on that. I mean, like, again, this is why all these terms are dumb. Someone uses that word in one way, someone else uses that word in some other way. So someone might mean to mean as like a definitive, understandable milestone. [27:54](https://realalpha.app/v/VeizK1M7V7E/?t=1674) And then some other people might mean it to be this infinitely scaling thing. I think the important part of any of this is not any milestone in any term, but it's that we are on this exponential of increasing capabilities and potential. And that looks like it's just going to keep going. Yeah, you see no sign that that exponential slows. Air pocket above. Because that has implications for, I mean, the compute buildouts, all of it. I mean, everyone is waiting for a sign that there's a slowdown. And I guess, you know, you could interpret like we have to slow down frontier training as a slowdown, but it doesn't sound. [28:27](https://realalpha.app/v/VeizK1M7V7E/?t=1707) That's not a capability. That's the opposite of a slowdown. Yeah. Of what you mean by slowdown. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But like if you could see any reason for concern right now in this Jenga of the world that AI has now constructed, what do you see? One of the benefits of having like a harder time last year is you really appreciate how good the good times are. And you really see like, man, when you're firing on all cylinders throughout a business, what it feels like. And given what we see across research, even with the safety alignment challenges and our ability to solve those. And like watching the team come together on that across product, across our compute build out, across all the pieces that are coming together to sort of make AI abundant and low cost, across our go-to-market machine, across our partnerships, all of that stuff coming together. [29:20](https://realalpha.app/v/VeizK1M7V7E/?t=1760) We could screw up in all parts of ways. And I don't want to get overconfident here because we clearly had stumbles in the past and will in the future. But the potential in front of us, watching what has happened is the models have scaled from 5.4 to 5.5 to 5.6. And what we're getting is early feedback on the new models, looking at what we have coming in terms of product improvements, watching the revenue ramp, watching the compute build out ramp. I feel very good about all of that. So you don't feel like it's as, you know, there's a lot of people externally that look at and go like, Anthropic has run away, their IRR is higher, they're going to IPO first. [29:55](https://realalpha.app/v/VeizK1M7V7E/?t=1795) And it seems like you're saying there's a lot more ahead that maybe people from the outside can't quite see in terms of the growth that's coming. I would not want to trade positions. And we haven't touched on this much, but it seems like you guys are in the middle of like a next turn on the compute strategy and like really up leveling that. Yeah. I would actually, yeah, love to hear you reflect on Stargate 1 as it was concepted and then what you had to learn to reboot it and the path you guys are now on. Well, first of all, I should talk about why we have to do this. Like our mission is to ensure the AGI benefits all of humanity. [30:29](https://realalpha.app/v/VeizK1M7V7E/?t=1829) Right now, there is a small percentage of humanity that uses much more AI. than everybody else. And if you think about, we would like everybody in the world to be able to use as much as AI as the top 0.001% of AI users today, then you sit back in your chair and you're like, man, we are not going about this compute build out in the right way. Like if people want this broadly, and if the models are going to get bigger and more capable, and they can do even more value, so people are going to want even more of it, and it takes more compute to run, then we have to think very differently about rising to the moment to be able to deliver all of that. [31:06](https://realalpha.app/v/VeizK1M7V7E/?t=1866) So a few years ago, we made a very ambitious compute bet that people thought was both silly and impossible to deliver on at the time. It was a good bet. I think we need to do something like that again. Again? Yeah. So like that's just, it's committing even more capital. That's not what I meant. Although it also will be that. What I meant is figuring out how we are going to bring the costs of AI and the amount of it, the abundance of it, way down and way up. So this is like a technological, I meant it as a technological statement, not a financial one. This is like the chip you guys have in development. [31:40](https://realalpha.app/v/VeizK1M7V7E/?t=1900) That was like a great, I think that's a great example. Robotics. Yeah, I think the ability to make supply chains go faster will be very important. You're talking about giving everyone in the world AI. What do you say to the people right now who don't want more AI? They want less of it. They hate the data center in their community, whether it's yours or someone else's. You know, this is actually a thing I see a lot with like teenagers that I run into. They're like, they won't touch an AI service. They like won't use ChatGPT on principle. Yeah. And there's this active like anti-AI trend. How much is it that they don't like data centers versus they don't like ChatGPT? [32:12](https://realalpha.app/v/VeizK1M7V7E/?t=1932) I mean, purely anecdotal. I think it's data centers are a big problem for people. I think they see them as like, yeah, a problem. It's something they don't want. um and that ai is wasteful that it's not bringing the value that you read about the water consumption and all that which has been disproven but like you know that the value they're getting and maybe this is what we're talking about with like most people are not using agents most people but like [32:34](https://realalpha.app/v/VeizK1M7V7E/?t=1954) **Sam Altman:** is that the answer is like you gotta generally speaking i think the right way to get people to like something is to deliver them value yeah like the you know before chat gpt maybe people thought [32:45](https://realalpha.app/v/VeizK1M7V7E/?t=1965) of AI is this very abstract thing that all of a sudden people could use it and people found value. Now, I think there are a lot of people who think AI is still just JGBT and they don't know that it can do that thing with the post office and the form and the pickup for you. And probably if a lot of people use that, which they will over time, and understand that it's not actually like better Google search and that's it. You know, fusing and destroying huge amounts of water or whatever um then then there'll be more excitement but I the field is moving so fast I think it just takes a while to diffuse through society there are a lot of people using AI like this has been the fastest adopted technology ever as far as I know and there are people getting tremendous value out of it and you know I get a biased sample but I hear more from people I was able to get a cure this horrible disease, then, you know, I think that ChachiPT is using up all the water in the world. [33:43](https://realalpha.app/v/VeizK1M7V7E/?t=2023) There is clearly that too. And the industry has got work to do in terms of how we make these products easy to use and needs to be able to get a lot of value out of. You know, I saw this thing going around about the water usage of ChachiPT. And it was like, every time you run a single ChachiPT query, it's like, you know, you run your shower for like six hours and the water never comes back and it's just it's done i don't have the exact calculation in front of me but i i think the real number is something like doing this from memory it might be wrong but it's close for every 38 000 chat to be t queries um that is the same amount of water that is used in the production of a single almond in california which is like really and this is like the full-on you know total true water accounting not just what's running in one data center there's a question of like where this came from because the people that are scarfing down 12 almonds at a time don't feel like they're doing something horrible from a water perspective for the most part um it is true that data centers at one point used evaporative cooling um but they have not done that in a long time like if you look at a modern very large data center it uses the like equivalent [34:55](https://realalpha.app/v/VeizK1M7V7E/?t=2095) amount of water as an office building in terms of you know people like running the sinks and the toilets and whatever um so that has been a um robust meme and difficult to disprove but i don't think holds up to any scrutiny i mean and the other one is it's going to take my job it's going to replace me i think those are it's like the water it's replacing me um and it's stealing content and it's you know it's stealing content and not giving me the value back but not energy interestingly well energy i would put in the bucket of water just consumption um resource consumption on the jobs front i have two minds of this one i think there is going to be real jobs impact i i don't think it's going to be that there's nothing for people to do i just don't think that's how we work at all we're so wired to care about other people want to work with other people we have such a great intuition as the world evolves for what people want um i think that's a fundamentally human thing no matter how smart ai gets but it doesn't mean the jobs aren't going to transition and there will be like there is every other technology some things that are done uh better and better by technology and then people move on to hopefully better and better jobs this [35:59](https://realalpha.app/v/VeizK1M7V7E/?t=2159) has been going for a long time i wouldn't want to take away all technology and have us all like toiling in the fields again on the other hand the job impact has been like lower than i would have expected maybe even hoped for like i think we should all want better jobs available to people and we should all want like you know human drudgery and toil to get addressed and maybe there hasn't been enough of that or as much of that as we thought there would be at this level of technology I think it's actually like a fair criticism of the AI industry. On the stolen content point, I actually don't hear that one as much anymore. [36:30](https://realalpha.app/v/VeizK1M7V7E/?t=2190) I think it's more content creators that that's like you see that it's pretty popular on social media to see, you know. This video was made without AI or whatever. I believe very strongly that there will be new kinds of content to create new kinds of art. You know, like I remember once looking back at some of the things people said when the camera was first developed about what it was going to mean for the impact on painters. And at that time, I didn't think people thought of photography as a new art medium. I'm actually, I would bet pretty confidently they didn't. And I think there will be new kinds of content creation. [37:03](https://realalpha.app/v/VeizK1M7V7E/?t=2223) And also, we may not care about most of it. Like, you know, our relationship with creators may be very deeply about them as people, and it doesn't matter if they use AI to make better videos or whatever. Do you think your foundation, which based on what I can see is maybe the best capitalized in the world, can do more here on engagement in communities on content creators in particular no just generally addressing this like very negative sentiment and saying you know we're going to show up and build libraries whatever i mean there were a lot of lessons from the industrial revolution of people who reinvested their wealth i think the most important thing we can do is to make great ai products that are useful to people make sure that power and economic power continues to be spread throughout the world that that people have access to these tools and the benefits of these tools, that we kind of advocate for what we are seeing. [37:54](https://realalpha.app/v/VeizK1M7V7E/?t=2274) And also, secondarily to that, yes, of course, I think we should invest more in communities and I think AI is going to enable the abundance required to do that on massive scale. I really do think we are going to see transformatively powerful benefits by putting this technology in the hands of people that use it for the benefit of their own community and not us coming and telling them, what unit is a library, and what unit is a school. I spend a lot of time context switching between meetings, often with no time to process one before the next starts. Thankfully, Granola runs in the background the whole time. [38:27](https://realalpha.app/v/VeizK1M7V7E/?t=2307) It's an easy-to-use AI notepad for meetings that works everywhere, even on phone calls. I use Granola to recall what was said in meetings and create helpful summaries. I use it every day to stay on top of what I need to get done with my team. 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Assign them work directly or connect your tools through MCP. All of this lets you spend less time digging through endless links and messages, chasing down what got decided and by who, and spend more time actually shipping. [41:25](https://realalpha.app/v/VeizK1M7V7E/?t=2485) Learn more at jira.com. That's J-I-R-A dot com. You said, we did not have our best last 12 months ever, which is mostly my fault, but we are about to have our best 12 months. What did you mean by that? Best 12 months yet. Yet. I think we clearly had some missteps as a company, which will happen periodically. I mean, part of trying to make a portfolio of bets is that sometimes more of them work and sometimes less of them work. But I think both in terms of product direction and specifically on pre-training in research, we fell behind where we wanted to be. I think we are now executing not only the best we have ever executed, but the best of kind of any company in the space. [42:07](https://realalpha.app/v/VeizK1M7V7E/?t=2527) And it is very fun to like, you know, the upswing is more fun after the downswing. So just looking at the pace of models that we really have come in, the way the company has come together and focused and made a bunch of hard decisions in very different parts of the company, but done sort of in unison in one direction, it feels great right now. And I want to get to all that, but to dwell on this for a second, because the last year a lot has happened. Were there specific decisions you can look back on that you made that cost the company momentum? I mean, you mentioned pre-training. I know you've always been very close to the research team. [42:42](https://realalpha.app/v/VeizK1M7V7E/?t=2562) But can you elaborate on that? I think we were trying to do too much on the product side. And so there was like, you know, and these were all things that were actually very good things to do. [42:53](https://realalpha.app/v/VeizK1M7V7E/?t=2573) **Sam Altman:** They were just not as good as the most important thing to do, which was sort of push on the general capability of the intelligence. [42:59](https://realalpha.app/v/VeizK1M7V7E/?t=2579) So we were doing things like a browser and Sora. And we now have a very relentless focus on being this intelligence service to people. And I think our models are they have gotten to be the best in the world and they will get much, much better over the coming months. And people are really doing remarkable things. But that is what we should have been focused on. and I should have been holding everybody to, this is the one thing. We'll not worry about these sort of side quests more. Looking at the leadership changes you had, about a year ago, you brought in Fidji Simo to help run large parts of the company. [43:32](https://realalpha.app/v/VeizK1M7V7E/?t=2612) She had to step back due to her health. And now you and Greg Brockman, your co-founder, are effectively splitting responsibilities, running the company together. Is this the setup that you envision will continue? Or is this something temporary? I think it's going super well. We will continue to bring in and promote new leaders, but it feels, and I'm extremely sad about Fiji, hard to fill her shoes, but it feels good. And I think Greg and I are executing well in the company. You can really tell when things are moving in the right direction, and it feels like things are moving in the right direction. [44:11](https://realalpha.app/v/VeizK1M7V7E/?t=2651) How do you all make decisions, you and Greg, together? Who decides what? Do you ever have a tie you have to break? I mean, we talk a lot. like a lot like all the time uh it's not like it's like a big company it's not just greg and i um there's there's like an incredibly talented set of people managing the research program there's an incredibly talented set of people managing the business and we all just talk a lot and and uh at an earlier scale i thought it was good to just sort of try something and adapt quickly if it works and not spend as much time really trying to debate the decision at our scale now, I've learned that it's much better to spend a lot of time trying to get to the right decision and kind of a measure twice, cut once approach. We were together at a dinner you hosted here in San Francisco almost exactly a year ago for the around the launch of GPT-5. [44:59](https://realalpha.app/v/VeizK1M7V7E/?t=2699) We should do another one of those. I forgot about that. Yeah, it was. And a lot was said, but a thing that I came away with from that was it seemed like you were maybe not excited about being CEO forever. And I'm wondering if the last year has changed that for you? I'm having a much better time now than a year ago um i'm really having fun i plan to do this for a long time the vibes were more challenged last year i would say yeah totally like it's i think it was not just the vibes of opening like it was like a hard time for the tech industry for ai uh ai bubble was a big concern yeah it was all the stuff was just exhausting um this is obviously like i think we have done an amazing thing uh it has been a painful personal experience um but i think it's like totally worth it and i would happily do it again and i'm having a good time at this point the other big thing that stood out to me when i saw the demo of astra is the computer use that you're talking about the implications of that of agents using computers using all kinds of enterprise software which you guys have been showing people at doing feels profound at scale and i'm curious if you've been thinking through that and how you think the world needs to adapt [46:07](https://realalpha.app/v/VeizK1M7V7E/?t=2767) for that the computer has caught me by surprise like i had been excited about this for a long time and I had always been disappointed. Like the models were just never that good at clicking around a computer. It was always too slow or it didn't quite work. And Astra feels like it kind of reached human parity on using computers. And I don't know why that hit me as like one of those steps along the path to AGI where I was like, wow, this is really doing it. But it did hit me that way. And like an emotional level, I think it's awesome. And I'm like, oh man, there are all of these like mundane tasks I do on my computer. [46:40](https://realalpha.app/v/VeizK1M7V7E/?t=2800) you know like i don't remember where someone sent me a message and i click around through all these messaging things and try to search and now i just ask the model and i'm like i cannot i don't want to go back to a world where i had to like painfully kind of try to find things on my computer i just want to like explain what i want i want it to happen and i want it to like i'm a very lazy user so i don't want to have to like click or like connect you're a lazy user computer i don't like set things up i don't want to like do a bunch of connectors all of that i just like use my computer to do the thing. I think there are a lot of implications about it being able to use software, but I think they're mostly quite positive in that there's a lot of drudgery that people do behind a computer. And an experience I have had, not really before any pre-Astro models, and now several times, is like, there was a thing, it was going to take me some time, it was going to not be very pleasant. Instead, I just tell the model what I want it to do, and then I go play with my kids and I come back in 30 minutes and it's all ready. [47:39](https://realalpha.app/v/VeizK1M7V7E/?t=2859) And I find that very awesome. We're now in a world, though, where the U.S. government is starting to vet the capabilities of your models and other frontier labs before they come out. This is a new era we're in. And you have warned. I mean, you said it during a 2025 Senate hearing. You said that this kind of vetting could be, quote, disastrous for U.S. competitiveness against rivals like China. And then, I mean, more recently, the GPT 5.6 initial rollout, the Trump administration requested you all gate that. And you had said at the time that shouldn't become the norm. So it seems like you've been saying this is not where things should go, and yet they're going there. [48:15](https://realalpha.app/v/VeizK1M7V7E/?t=2895) No, no, no. I have been saying this. I think I've been calling for some sort of international regulatory framework for years. Particularly the government vetting models before they come out. I think what I was pushing back on was the government, like, picking individual customers who's allowed to use a model. [48:31](https://realalpha.app/v/VeizK1M7V7E/?t=2911) **Sam Altman:** I think government testing of a model and shared standards is a super good idea. [48:35](https://realalpha.app/v/VeizK1M7V7E/?t=2915) I don't, ideally, I don't think the government should be saying you can give access to this company, not this one. So what are the implications for competitiveness geopolitically now that the U.S. is starting to embrace this approach and other countries haven't? Have you thought about that? Again, I think the right approach is an international one. But right now, the leading efforts are all American companies. And so I think starting here, like we have enough of the lead that being slowed down a little bit is okay uh and i'm confident that we will be able to both build safe robust reliable models and kind of do great commercially and make sure the us is leading um things could shift a lot you know if there's open models put out by other countries that lead to some huge cyber incidents before we can come up with new security paradigms things could shift a little bit do you think that could could happen? Of course it could happen. But, you know, we're like, I also think we have a chance to totally reimagine how cybersecurity works. And although these agents can do bad things, they can do amazing things. And if we can have kind of defense agents running all the time, maybe that's the right paradigm. Are you prepared for the U.S. government to potentially tell you you can't ship [49:49](https://realalpha.app/v/VeizK1M7V7E/?t=2989) a model? Have you thought about this? My strong belief is we would decide not to ship a model before they would tell us not to. Shifting to competition, Anthropic catapulted to where they are now by single shot focused on coding. Yeah. And you started this conversation by saying you guys were placing a lot of bets and that cost you some momentum. I'm curious if you could reflect on how Anthropic saw that opening that you guys didn't at the time. I don't think it was a question of us not seeing it. It was a question of like, we had this tremendous thing of this runaway consumer growth. We always wanted to do coding, but we were like, ah, we have this very urgent thing, and it's great. [50:28](https://realalpha.app/v/VeizK1M7V7E/?t=3028) It's a great thing to have. And so we missed it from a prioritization standpoint. I now think we have the best coding product in the market, and it's growing crazily quickly. And most people I know, even the people that were like the diehard Anthropic product users have switched over. So I don't think it's catastrophic to be behind on any one phase that we can catch up with better models. I'm curious, I think a lot of people are trying to understand how zero-sum the AI market is. And is your growth on Codex, you know, taking from Anthropic or vice versa? Do you have a sense of that? I think right now everybody's growing. [51:03](https://realalpha.app/v/VeizK1M7V7E/?t=3063) I mean, it may, it may, this is going to be a very big market. It may become more zero-sum later. But for now, like, I think everybody is just, like, the growth rates we are seeing are just nothing that I had, like, in my frame of imagination for a company at this scale. And I think it just speaks to how much people, like, are getting value out of the products. but I think it's happening across most of the industry. And on the product side, you're doing what is being called internally the merge, taking chat, GPT, and Codex and building a super app that combines them. And you've started this. There's, I would say, there's still some rough edges. [51:37](https://realalpha.app/v/VeizK1M7V7E/?t=3097) More than rough edges. That's a very polite way of you to say it. Yeah. And I'm curious, when you get there, what does that look like? And what are the implications of that? The thing that I want is just like an interface to an AI that can kind of do whatever I need. If I have a quick question, like ChatGPT style, it can just answer it. If I need a complex thing built, a piece of software built, it can do that. If I need something in the middle, it can do that. And if it needs access to my computer or my context, it can go use my computer and find my context. And I don't have to like, I mentioned I'm like a very lazy user. [52:12](https://realalpha.app/v/VeizK1M7V7E/?t=3132) I don't have to like think about what tab I'm on. I don't want to have to like think about what mode I'm in. Like the AI is, an AI that is smart enough to like discover novel mathematics. should be able to like intuit what it's supposed to do. ChatGPT just hit a billion users. Big milestone. But I think hitting that took maybe longer than you guys originally thought. The growth was explosive early on. Yeah, I'm curious to hear from you about that. Has it grown slower than you'd expected in the last 12 months? Well, we decided to, when we focused on coding, we decided that we were going to reallocate a lot of our compute that we could have otherwise put into the chat product into coding. [52:48](https://realalpha.app/v/VeizK1M7V7E/?t=3168) So no, that didn't surprise us. Like that was a, we decided this was like an urgent thing. So growth is a direct function of where you decide to put the compute. 100%. Yeah. The, I am always hopeful that the compute constraints are about to soften because we're going to make more efficient models and someday I hope it's true. But every time we find efficiency gains, the world token demand just goes up and up and eats it. I hear that. But at the same time, I'm curious, like how does chat get to the next billion? Is that as linear as the internet has grown or social media grew? Is it going to be choppier? [53:23](https://realalpha.app/v/VeizK1M7V7E/?t=3203) How much does that even matter to you now? Because you've got Codex and the API business. I kind of think what we're, like, we talked about the merge, but I kind of think what's going to happen is that they're all going to, like, come together. For a while, pre-merge, I had stopped using ChatGPT and I just asked Codex all my chat questions because, yeah, again, lazy user. um now i think there are a lot of people who never thought they were going to be having an agent do stuff for them because they just kind of used chat gpt that clicked on this work tab and were like whoa i can do this crazy thing um so i think it's kind of all going to come together and people are going to have this general purpose ai subscription that they don't really think about like if it's chatter codex or work just like i have a thing i want it to happen soon it will even you won't even need to ask it. [54:13](https://realalpha.app/v/VeizK1M7V7E/?t=3253) It'll hopefully be much more proactive and it'll be constantly running and trying to do useful stuff. So the end state of this is just one ultimate subscription? That is what I want as a user. We've been dancing around this, but you did really stick your neck out about a year ago on the massive compute build out you guys have been doing and caused all this AI bubble fear. And at the same time, while people thought you were overshooting, you had people like Dario, the CEO of Anthropic, saying you were YOLOing. And now I will say you seem pretty vindicated on this front. The world is still starved of compute. [54:46](https://realalpha.app/v/VeizK1M7V7E/?t=3286) Sounds like you guys still are too, even though you have more than some of your competitors. And at the same time, you're driving the cost of tokens, it seems like, way down. And you're about to release Jalapeno, your first custom chip for inference. Is there still, though, any part of this compute build-out that you're on and the astronomical numbers associated with this that you feel is at risk at all when you look at all of this? I'm not worried about our compute build-out plans. [55:09](https://realalpha.app/v/VeizK1M7V7E/?t=3309) **Sam Altman:** I am worried about the world's compute buildout plans. [55:12](https://realalpha.app/v/VeizK1M7V7E/?t=3312) Like, I think we are going to be able to use all of the compute very profitably that we are planning to build. But I am seeing the first signs of what feels to me like unsustainable silliness of, you know, random new NeoCloud popping up people claiming that they're going to build gigantic amounts of compute next year that I think they don't have the revenue to support or a buyer. Yeah, I definitely feel like some fear about what the world is doing as a whole. Although I think we feel very good about what we've committed to. But the contagion of what you're describing could certainly impact you. [55:46](https://realalpha.app/v/VeizK1M7V7E/?t=3346) If the whole economy blows up, yes, that could impact us. In terms of being able to confidently pay for the compute we are committed to, I feel good about that. I think people right now are kind of in a cost is no object. We're just going to build out crazy amounts of compute and somebody will pay an even higher price for it. And if we are able to succeed with our efforts to hugely drag down the cost of compute and the efficiency of compute up a lot, then, you know, you can imagine a world where there are some people that made dumb financial decisions. That happens in kind of like every boom or most of them. So, you know, not like a crazy surprise if it does. [56:28](https://realalpha.app/v/VeizK1M7V7E/?t=3388) Do you see a world where OpenAI becomes a supplier of compute to the industry? not anytime soon like we just we need to compute the vibe i'm getting is you all are discussing this internally and it's not decided so people talk a lot about recursively self-improving yes ai models they do not talk as much about you know the ability to do this in the physical world but if our robotics program comes together our chip program comes together some of our supply chain investments come together we get really great at building data centers way more cheaply and better chip than anybody else has. Like, you know, would we consider it? [57:01](https://realalpha.app/v/VeizK1M7V7E/?t=3421) Maybe. Do we have any current plans that still is like outside of... We don't have the luxury of focusing on that yet. You brought up recursive self-improvement. I'm glad you did. People are talking about RSI a lot in San Francisco right now. There was a note you sent to employees that leaked when you guys filed for the IPO where you said that the faster the potential RSI takeoff looks like it could be, the more it could be advantageous to delay an IPO. Yeah. What did you mean by that? I think it's a difficult transition to become a public company. People respond to incentives and they want their stock price to go up and they don't want to miss a quarter or whatever else. [57:40](https://realalpha.app/v/VeizK1M7V7E/?t=3460) I never want us, I want it to be as easy as possible for us to make a decision in the interest of safety of the world. And if it's like, hey, we're going to have to stop training or stop the point or whatever, and we're going to like, you know, there's going to be a big revenue slot on in the short term. it'd be nice not to have a newly public company and that pressure at the same time now i did not think we were going to be on a kind of like you know like a short-term trajectory of super intelligence a year ago now i think it may happen um i'm not confident it's gonna happen it's just like we're making extremely fast progress and i you know i think our mission is way more important than being a public company on any particular time frame um so we'll make the best decision for the mission. You mentioned robotics. I'd love to hear from you the state of your robotics effort. [58:26](https://realalpha.app/v/VeizK1M7V7E/?t=3506) What are you building? Is it a humanoid? Is it a robotic data center? Both? We will definitely do a humanoid. We will do other form factors as well. The world is very much designed for people. So if you think about the ability to open a door and type on a computer and drive a piece of equipment and clean a kitchen and whatever else, we've kind of built this world for people, and I want to make sure that we keep building this world for people. So matching that form factor seems good. There will of course be data center robots that have like different form factors. I think all of that is less important than really figuring out like the brain that makes the robot work. So you are building a humanoid. We will. How do you think that's going to work in the world? [59:05](https://realalpha.app/v/VeizK1M7V7E/?t=3545) Do you imagine that being like a personal robot for everyone? Someday. I don't think that's the most important first thing to do. And you talked about the ability to build data centers or even build more robots or whatever else. But yes, someday I think everyone should have a personal robot like i would love to have a personal robot that could like do the tasks that i don't want to do that'd be great you also have the consumer consumer device work with johnny ive i know you can't talk a lot about it and we'll probably see the first device here at some point soon um soon ish soon ish and you've talked a lot about how i've been hearing you say like my dream is a product that just is ambiently listening to me and taking everything in and giving me context we were talking about this earlier with computer use and i agree that seems um very helpful in a of context also seems like a privacy surveillance nightmare and i'm curious if you've been thinking about that and how the world will react to that we've taken a very strong stance on privacy i think with the you know business privacy too not just consumer privacy but like the way we the commitments we make about not training on businesses data and about zero data retention i think this is very [1:00:08](https://realalpha.app/v/VeizK1M7V7E/?t=3608) important and as ai becomes more and more embedded in our lives privacy becomes extremely important And one thing I worry about is there are other efforts that think differently and will push on, hey, the safety risks are so big that AI privacy can't exist in the same kind of way. I think that there should be like an AI privilege law. I don't even think the government should be allowed to compel a company to give them your chat history or whatever. If you talk to a doctor or a lawyer, there's a concept of privilege. You don't have that talking to Chachupiti. I think you should. In that context, though, that you just described, there's also a lot of limits on what a lawyer or doctor can do with your data. It's not just sharing it externally. Do you think that that kind of oversight should extend to how you use the data? [1:00:52](https://realalpha.app/v/VeizK1M7V7E/?t=3652) Yeah, no, I was going to get that. Yeah, yeah. So I think there should be legal limits of what the government can do. I also think companies should have a lot of restrictions on data shared with an AI, and especially if you have this thing watching your computer, listening to your messages, talking to you. Like, yeah, I think that this is, I think there should be so many people are much more animated about than they are. How, before that happens, how do you at OpenAI govern that, self-govern the use of data? You probably have some of the most powerful profile data that's ever been amassed in the history of the world. [1:01:22](https://realalpha.app/v/VeizK1M7V7E/?t=3682) We have extremely strong internal controls about how that's used, and we make the privacy guarantees to users that we do. As we get closer to launching this device, we'll be talking about kind of the new privacy controls and technology we're building for a device that's like, kind of ambiently computing. But yeah, I think we have one of the more personal databases ever. Apple has very publicly sued you guys for allegedly stealing trade secrets and hiring their employees to work on this device with Johnny. And you've responded to it, and you've said it's meritless. But I'm wondering, do you worry about this slowing down the device efforts? [1:02:05](https://realalpha.app/v/VeizK1M7V7E/?t=3725) No, look, if... So first of all, I'm like a mega Apple fanboy, and I was very sad about that. And from when I first heard about it, I was like, man, this sounds egregious. Someone must have done something badly. And if someone, we don't like want any company's IP, and we certainly don't want people who are going to take a company's IP and bring it to us. And if, you know, we did an investigation and found that about somebody, we would, of course, just terminate them and deal with it. But we're also going to defend someone if they didn't do something wrong. and I believe after we looked into this that this was a case of someone not doing something wrong and we tried to explain some of that and more of that will play out in a process. [1:02:46](https://realalpha.app/v/VeizK1M7V7E/?t=3766) Given my understanding, I don't think this is going to slow things down. How are you thinking about form factors? Do you like, I've heard you say you don't in the past. Do you like glasses? Do you like glasses? I don't because I find it very uncomfortable talking to people with like a camera and a light. Yeah, it's a lot. Yeah. Yeah. But there's a lot of other form factors. There's a lot of great form factors. I think we'll do a small handful of form factors. [1:03:12](https://realalpha.app/v/VeizK1M7V7E/?t=3792) **Sam Altman:** I think there's something that belongs on a table. There is something that belongs in your pocket. And there is something that belongs on your body. And it'll take us some time to launch all of those things. [1:03:25](https://realalpha.app/v/VeizK1M7V7E/?t=3805) But I think the big adjustment is going to be getting used to this idea of a proactive computer. When you're thinking about OpenAI's roadmap and the business, are consumer devices existential in a sense? Are they purely additive? And the mission that you guys talk about, you've got a lot of things still happening, even though you've whittled things down, as we talked about. I think we don't know yet. Like, I just like, it is my strong intuition that there is a major new kind of computer and a sort of a new category that only comes up every, or historically has only come up every couple of decades for how we use technology. [1:04:06](https://realalpha.app/v/VeizK1M7V7E/?t=3846) But that's an unlikely claim. So I think you shouldn't let me make it. You should just like wait to see what you think of the devices. The way OpenAI is thought of now, how do you think it will be thought of in a couple of years? Pretty simple. Like, I hope people love the products we put out into the world. You know, these stories of, we talked about a few earlier, but, you know, I was able to start a business. I was able to, you know, do a great birthday party for my kid. I was able to get cured of this disease. I met a guy recently who used Chai Chibuti to help design a mRNA cancer vaccine for his dog and now started a company to, like, do that for other people. [1:04:45](https://realalpha.app/v/VeizK1M7V7E/?t=3885) I hope those stories all look small in comparison to what the technology is doing for people in a few years. And then I hope that a lot of the current AI fears, people said, man, that was the most responsible company at every step. They made very good calls in the interest of all of us. And, you know, I'm glad they're doing well because I think they're being good stewards of technology. You see lots of other companies that have taken very other different approaches. I think we've been pretty consistent on our beliefs about safety, but willing to adapt when we've been wrong. But, you know, when we started this strategy of iterative deployment, that was like deeply hated by the air safety community. [1:05:23](https://realalpha.app/v/VeizK1M7V7E/?t=3923) And I think in retrospect, it was obviously correct. And I'm glad we've had the courage to do the things we really believe in, even when they're very unpopular and that we've mostly been right and we've adapted and we've been wrong. I think that is, you know, I think that is the way to build sort of safe and robust systems. And so I hope we continue to do that and people, you know, recognize it. And you're building towards super intelligence. I'd be curious to know how you personally are preparing for that. Do you have a view of what life will look like on the other side of what you're building? [1:05:58](https://realalpha.app/v/VeizK1M7V7E/?t=3958) I think it will look surprisingly similar to how it looks now. You know, people are going to hang out with their families and fall in love and get into fights and do their hobbies. and be entertained and have a very human experience and get stressed and get anxious and create value for each other and play all kinds of strange games and care about other people a lot, I hope it'll not be that different. I hope it'll be human experience is richer, people have more autonomy, more freedom, more wealth, can do more, can be healthier, can kind of have like more power to collectively define the future and the world gets better faster, but that the human experience stays like a very human thing. [1:06:44](https://realalpha.app/v/VeizK1M7V7E/?t=4004) If you look out over the next 12 months, what is the biggest risk for OpenAI? I think it's like getting safety, alignment, security wrong. I mean, I think it's possible at 12 months from now, we have extremely capable models. And if we are able to navigate the transition to superintelligence in a world where we have figured out how to empower people, how to make sure power is not too concentrated, how to deliver safety across the entire spectrum, how to let people feel very in control of improving their own lives in the future. That would be like a phenomenal success. Sam Altman, thank you. Thank you. [1:07:32](https://realalpha.app/v/VeizK1M7V7E/?t=4052) I'll see you next time. Jira.com slash sources for 30% off. Rules and restrictions may apply. Jira by Adlassing is where your team and your agents work from the same context. Try it free at Jira.com. That's J-I-R-A dot com. Thank you.