The way that OpenAI is framing Astra is basically an early step toward AGI, but
I thought we could start a conversation just with basically what's fundamentally
different with Astra relative to prior generations of model.
It feels, first of all, thank you for having me.
It feels like a new step in this process towards models that can really help us
create value, do work, uh, discover new science, help us create help, start new
companies or create new products. Using it subjectively feels to me very
different than any model before. What's the kind of principal use case
that's different this time around? You know, I think we can get into the
generations of model that we're very coding focused.
I know a lot of the development was very cybersecurity focused, but taking it
away from the software engineer, what is the everyday person unlocking AI that
they weren't able to do previously? One thing that I think people will
immediately notice is if you have an idea and you want to work interactively
with an AI to get, uh, you know, a complex piece of a whole piece of
software built. This is the first model to me where I
could sort of tell someone, like, just give it a try.
There's. There's a good chance it'll work.
And, you know, I've watched people make computer games.
I watch people do sort of like home sort of DIY electrical engineering projects.
Uh, I've watched people do very complex simulations for some piece of science
they're working on. Uh, certainly a lot of the work where
you would sort of normally sit down and have to, you know, build a financial
model here and then a PowerPoint presentation around it and then figure
out how to, like, make a little interactive piece of code to sort of try
different simulations. That stuff is it's all so doable now.
Um, what I hope will happen is people I think people will be surprised at the
beginning, but then as they build up more trust in the model and more like,
wow, I can really do this. Just start throwing harder and harder
tasks and more creative ideas at it. And uh, they will find out what the
model can really do for them. So the specifics of how Astra's being
released. I think it's important so that a version
of it with specific guardrails. Um, what was the thinking behind that
and what are those specific guardrails, uh, in this early release of it?
Yeah. So the the challenge of our industry is
that we have these models that are getting incredibly capable and
incredibly useful and that people want to use to everything from, you know,
make their lives a little easier to starting new companies.
And then, on the other hand, as these models get more capable, um, the risks
that we have to mitigate, uh, also become more serious.
The models could do more damage if we don't, um, if we don't do a good job at
that. And so we have spent, uh, you know,
obviously this model took us a little longer to release than we were hoping.
I think it'll be worth the wait, but we really wanted to spend the time on the
safety and security alignment of this model.
Yes. Um, and I think as people understand the
power and impact and capabilities, they will be, they will be happy that we did.
Um, we will, uh, we'll have different tiers of cyber access for this model,
for cyber in particular. Today we're rolling it out, uh, to
Trusted Access Partners. And then in the coming days, assuming
everything goes well, we'll roll it out more broadly.
Um, you couldn't say.
Well, you know, if this model is, you know, has a cyber problem, why let
anyone use it for cyber? And I think it's very important to note,
to note that the world is very close to a complete change in the landscape of
cyber attacks, and the only way that we see for society to collectively defend
itself against this coming wave of models, um, from around the world and
from other companies, is to use tools like Astra to rapidly defend against
these new kind of cyber threats. Um, so we will have multiple programs,
uh, for people with sort of different levels of verification and trust.
But we do think it's quite important that the world use these models to, uh,
collectively defend ourselves. What happened prior to release is
important, right? You determined that Astra can find and
develop zero day exploits without any human intervention, essentially.
And so you paused some of the work to strengthen the safeguards.
What specifically was it that you saw that made you hit pause the behavior, I
suppose, of the model. So it's worth pointing out that, um, the
model that we're launching today is GPT six.
Astra has been done training for a while.
Um, the model that we recently talked about pausing, uh, as a future model.
Um, but with Astra, we we did hit cyber critical.
And there that required, under our preparedness framework, a new set of
safeguards just to be able to release Astra, um, because of those cyber
capabilities you talked about. I got a lot of questions for you, Sam,
about Astra and chain of thought. Um, I don't know if that comes as a
surprise to you or not, but as Astra becomes more autonomous for future
generations of the model, become more autonomous, can open.
I sort of say with confidence that you see and understand what the model is
planning before it acts. In other words, you have visibility into
the reasoning that basically uses of the model can't see open.
I can for obvious reasons. Could you go into that a little bit?
Yeah. So we have talked for a long time about
the importance of monitor ability of models.
We've also said that we believe in defense in depth and this is only one
part of it. There is sandboxing.
Uh, maybe most importantly there is alignment.
There are a number of things that come together to be able to make the safety
guarantees that we want to be able to make with a model.
But monitor ability is an important thing.
And we've been talking, I think, for well over a year now about the
importance of chain of thought monitoring and how we have made various
decisions there that help us preserve chain of thought vulnerability.
Um, even if it means we don't maximize the capabilities we could otherwise get.
And we think that is important. Um, it's an important component.
We also, uh, we want to be clear. We don't think it's the only component
that matters. We live on Bloomberg Television and on
Bloomberg Radio, and we're speaking to Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI.
Um, you know, there's a lot of bad PR in the world around AI at the moment, every
day citizen sort of worry about the impact.
One way I kind of wanted to put that to you.
Is it whether you can say sort of unequivocally there, if Astra or any
future generation of all behaved in a way that was dangerous, that you would
be able to detect it and then shut it down.
The obvious hard part of that, uh, question is that people have different
opinions about what model should be able to do and shouldn't be able to do.
Yes, we think there are some things that very clearly model should not be able to
do. Uh, there are some clear red lines, and
we talk a lot about being able to detect those.
But people also have strong opinions about things within the broad bounds of
what is possible about how they use AI and or how they want to be able to use
AI. And this is going to be a difficult
question for society, because there is not going to be agreement on, you know,
what is and isn't acceptable use of I. I think it's very important in the same
way that, you know, people do things electricity that I may not always like,
but I think everybody has a right to electricity that we say, you know, there
going to be some rules for society. You can't go like electrocute somebody
else on the street. But this is an important platform that
belongs to all of us and that we need to be able to, to use.
So there will be, uh, ongoing conversation, negotiation in society.
There will, of course, be some things that we agree on that people just should
not do with. I.
But there's a lot of edges that we're now going to have to feel our way
through. And giving people autonomy and freedom
to use AI is important to our mission. Sam at the G20 this week, um, Treasury
Secretary Scott Besson said that the eye industry had done a terrible job of
explaining how AI benefits ordinary Americans.
What's your view of that and whether you would, on reflection, consider OpenAI to
be in that bucket? Uh, I think the industry has done a
terrible job of this on the whole, um, I think we have done
a bad job ourselves, uh, you know, maybe better than some others.
Worse than some others. Um, it is difficult, of course, to
explain, but this is, uh, we eat the world, in my opinion, should want us to
worry a lot about this technology. The world should want us to think about
all the ways that could go wrong. To talk about what we see coming, but
not to sort of, like, stir up doom or concentrate power for ourselves.
Just because in the history of technology, the way you solve the hard
problems is to look at them, talk clearly about them, have scientists
debate them, uh, work really hard to prevent and mitigate them.
And that has been our intention. But clearly, sometimes it ends up
scaring people. Now, there's another thing that I think
has gone really bad. Besides talking about the ways this has
got could go wrong, which is, um, I don't think we've done a great job as an
industry of really talking about how to empower people with
this technology. Um, right.
You know, you hear some people talk about, well, we're going to give you a
cure for cancer. And that's so great.
So we're going to, you know, take these risks and you're going to have to have
less power and autonomy. We want people to have more power and
autonomy. You know, I don't think a cure for
cancer is enough. I mean, wonderful thing to have,
obviously, but we should set our sights higher.
We want these tool tools to enable a boom in creativity and entrepreneurship,
in people figuring out new ways to be useful to each other, and wonderful
products and services to enable each other with.
And I think that has been lost in the messaging.
And I also think there's some companies that, um, have a different opinion
there. But, but it's very, very important to us
that this technology is something where people get more power and more autonomy,
not less. And I think people rightly get afraid
when they feel like I leaders might not quite want that for them.
So that's in part where I wanted to ask you about pricing on Astra, but also
just generally. Right.
I think the direction of travel has been that you've cut prices.
There is competition, of course, with the other Frontier labs.
Um, anthropic. But you know, how much is that the
balance of access to the technology. You need to move quickly in releasing
the technology and also still trying to sort of find fair market value of how
you price the technology we want to create incredibly capable,
incredibly low cost, incredibly abundant intelligence.
And I think Aster is a great step forward there.
The token efficiency of Aster is so impressive to me.
Um, the amount of work you can get done with a relatively small amount of
tokens, and the kind of the price per dollar of a task that you might like, I
think is just remarkable. Um, only a few weeks ago, we cut the
price of Luna, our small model, by 80%. Um, uh, and our goal is to have the best
price performance at every level of intelligence all the way along the
curve. Um, we will continue to keep dropping
prices dramatically. Um, I'm confident in the shape of the
technology and the work we're doing to enable that to happen.
And, um, you know, of course, like, we'll make some money along the way, but
I think the opportunity in front of us is so huge, we will be able to continue
to bring prices down and still have huge revenue.
Let's end our conversation here. Sam with
Aster is a big step towards I actually doing work autonomously, right?
I've come to sort of see the emphasis on that.
If you staying ahead in the race that you've just outlined requires OpenAI to
just keep investing more heavily, maybe than expected, to keep pushing out the
boundaries of what the model is capable of doing, the cadence of release.
Where do you do you sit right now on your considerations of doing that as a
private company versus doing that as a public company, where the sort of
financial incentive and fiduciary duty of being a public company isn't
necessarily the same as being committed to developing the technology, getting
the technology released out into the world.
Um, if we do go public someday, which I assume we will.
I plan to spend a lot of time reminding people who might want to buy or might
not want to buy our our stock that we are mission first and that we're also
extremely long term oriented. So we are going to make decisions for,
um, what we think is best for society as a whole with this technology.
And we're going to make decisions on a multi-decade timeframe.
Um, and we think we'll do really great as a company.
Uh, but we're gonna put those things first.