Sam Altman says OpenAI has more AI incidents to disclose

White House AI safety accord

00:00Sam, you've had an intense week to say the least. So, I really appreciate you taking the time to join Decoded. >> Thanks for having me. >> Yeah. Yeah. Uh, you were in Washington recently for the state dinner and OpenAI President Greg Brockman just signed this voluntary accord on AI safety at the White House. Um, I got to ask, do you expect this new agreement, this White House brokered agreement to change OpenAI safety practices in a meaningful way, or is this essentially just more window dressing? >> Well, I don't think it's window dressing, but I I do want to be clear. we would have we care like super deeply about safety and would have done and will do uh the best thing we can for safety security

00:37and just sort of like trust and robustness in this technology whether or not any you know voluntary agreement is signed. I I think it's great to have the industry do this and I think clearly we're at a time where people are looking for reassurance from the industry uh and and the developers of this technology. But we were founded on a belief that this technology was going to become as powerful as it has now and more powerful in the future and that we wanted to make sure that people get the tremendous benefits of it and and we will do that, you know, with or without such an agreement, but I'm happy to have it. >> Yeah. and and you know, how do you respond to those who worry that the public is being shut out of these very

Two risks: loss of control and concentration of power

01:19important debates on AI safety and that really these policies are being crafted by the president and just a handful of tech CEOs in back rooms at the White House? >> I I do share that the spirit of that worry. I I I really think there are two ways this technology can go very wrong. I mean there's many specifics we could talk about but if we think about the kind of general directions that we should be worried about um one which has gotten a lot of attention recently is that there could be a loss of control to AI and that we build something that we don't have sufficiently aligned to human values and that allows people to stay in control of the future forever. Um and so we need to get safety right. But the

01:59other way things can go wrong is too much concentration of power. And there's been a lot of fear here where okay if we do too much to restrict this technology in the name of safety and we end up with a small number of companies or people or perhaps one country that have too much power over this. Um that also is a way that this can go horribly wrong because people are shut out of the kind of power and benefits and control and agency over the future they should have. So, our goal here is to sort of be the pragmatic centrists between these paths because we can see how tempting it is to heir in one direction or the other. >> Yeah. Well, I'm glad you mentioned that, you know, the very few people in the

Rebranding AI as super intelligence

02:38room here because Politico's actually reported that this White House um accorded earlier was the brainchild of of Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Nvidia CEO Jensen Hang um with basically minimal input from some of the other folks who signed on. Obviously, Greg was there, but it was unclear to what extent OpenAI influenced this. Were you guys blindsided by this agreement? And are you concerned that, you know, maybe some of the CEOs are are back channeling with the White House on this? >> No, I I think we've been talking with our colleagues in the industry for quite like many many months and more intensively the weeks before this. Um, and I think people had like a lot of shared goals here. I I would welcome something

03:18more, but I think this is like a great a great start that the industry can get behind. >> Sure. I appreciate that. I I got to ask about the other news out of the White House this week. There was an executive order uh officially changing rebranding artificial intelligence to to super intelligence. What do you think of of the attempted rebrand here? >> We've been call we've been we use both, but we've been talking about super intelligence for a few years now. Um >> but it's it's a different thing, right? I mean, super intelligence is like the machine. >> I kind of think the artificial intelligence thing happened. I think a lot of people would say AGI happened or is close to happening. I I think super

03:51intelligence does it still sort of understates the magnitude of what I think is happening, but I think it's a better word than artificial intelligence. Um, so yeah, I think like it kind of it matched how we've been talking about it, but I think a lot of people continue to use AI as a phrase. >> Yeah. Are I was going to ask, are you guys going to change the name to open SI? No plans to do that. But we do like we have been talking about super intelligence a lot and we will continue to talk about it. >> Yeah. And and obviously I think the president in part is driven by this desire to kind of rebrand AI so that it's less scary to people and I think maybe artificial sounds bad. Everybody >> I mean does super intelligence sound

04:32obviously less scary to people than artificial intelligence? >> Not to me. So that's why I'm I'm curious whether you think this rebrand will actually have any impact on on the public's perception of this technology. I don't Yeah, it's not clear to me that super intelligence is a less scary term. I do think it's a more accurate term. >> Okay. And just >> but you know, I think I'm gonna I think people are going to keep calling it AI. >> Yeah. Okay. And we won't and we won't look out for the the corporate rebrand anytime soon. But uh but good to know that you at least see see the accuracy there. um on your relationship. >> As a funny little story, uh when we a while ago, I wanted to this was like a

05:10>> this was a thing I really wanted to do, but it didn't happen. I wanted to get openi.com, open agi.com, and openi.com. >> And as we moved up the ladder from AI to AGI to super intelligence, we were going to change the URL, but brands are sticky. >> The futures that might have been. Wow. Uh so, um turning back to your relationship with the president, um you've obviously been pushing for tougher safety rules. kind of a shift a little bit for the company that seems increasingly at odds with the president's claims that AI safety is a hoax, regulations are a globalist scheme. You've had a good relationship with with Trump, but but why can't you why isn't he listening to you when when you're asking for stricter rules?

OpenAI vs. Anthropic on regulation

05:47>> Um, well, I think he really does want people to be able to use AI and rely on it being safe and robust and working the way people expect it to work. um he clearly wants the companies to just do this themselves. Uh and you know, like we're going to, as I mentioned earlier, we're going to we're going to like make our own products safe no matter what the rules are and no matter what other companies do. Um, I continue to think that as this technology reaches increasing levels of capability, um, and the world has to contend with what this means for society as a whole, we probably will see more calls for sort of some guard rails. But if I'm wrong about that and if nothing goes wrong along the way and, you know, we don't need

06:43anything there, then that's fine, too. >> Yeah. And obviously the president is talking to other folks as well. He's got venture capitalists in his orbit that think AI should be regulated in a very light fashion. Um existing laws they think can clamp down on any safety concerns. Um and frankly a lot of those people thought that your company was on their side on this question but we've heard from some of these um I think people call them AI accelerationists recently and to be to be frank they feel betrayed. Uh they feel like open AI is basically copying anthropic uh and its CEO Dario Emodi in its push for very aggressive regulations on AI. Can I just ask, you know, where do you specifically diverge from Anthropic and its

07:20pro-regulation uh CEO Dario when it comes to new AI rules? Um where's where's the daylight? >> I think there's a lot of daylight. Um we have always been a big believer that this technology has to be democratized and put into people's hands. Uh I think one of the biggest differences between us and some of the stricter let's say AI safety people is we believe that the world should accept some bad things happening for the benefits of this technology and people having the agency. So like you know I I disagree but I understand the perspective of people who are like this technology is going to get so powerful and it's so dangerous that a single lab in San Francisco should have it and make sure nothing bad happens and kind of

08:04figure out how to do out the benefits. I think that is a completely unacceptable trade-off from a perspective of liberty and human agency and people self-determining the future. But I understand where it comes from. And I do think the lighter touch regulatory stance that we advocate for comes with an accepting of the fact that some bad things are going to happen as society figures out the resilience. So, I wouldn't take a trade of saying like we'll make sure there's no major hacks, there's no kind of like misuse of this technology, there's zero scams, there's zero all the other bad things that will happen. Um because I think people will do tremendously orders of magnitude more good stuff than

08:46bad stuff. But when it comes to the potential of like a serious loss of control to AI, and this is not a today worry, but it may not be in the distant future. Um this is where I would say to the accelerationists like let's be a little thoughtful about lurching into this future. Um so I would say accept bounded risks accept risks that we understand in exchange for the benefits and um liberty agency all those things I was just talking about but don't accept like the really catastrophic risk. >> Yeah. And just to be clear you mentioned a single lab in San Francisco controlling all of this technology. Um, that sounds a lot like the folks who say Anthropic is making a play to basically capture regulators and be the sole uh

09:29sort of like dominant maybe the only player at the frontier. Um, do you think that might be what they're doing? And and obviously you have concerns about that. >> You would need to I mean I would have concerns if they actually did that. You would need to ask them if that's what they want to do. >> And again just on specific policies that you guys um do not want to support that anthropic is supporting whether it's the federal level at the state level um because again you guys are are now on the same page when it comes to uh pacing the frontier with China. same page with thirdparty evaluators. Um, you know, what's what's just one differentiator? >> Um, the last I heard one of the different differentiators is we don't want any

10:07restrictions or testing on anything but the frontier models. We do not want to slow down people that make very powerful but not the absolute frontier in the spirit of um, you know, really focusing on the potential catastrophic risks. I don't I don't think even though I believe that if you don't put any testing or any oversight on models that are one or two generations behind the frontier, I accept that bad things will happen with those. Um I would not go advocate a licensing regime for those. >> Okay. Yeah, I appreciate that. Um one of the other things we hear from your accelerationist critics is that um you OpenAI are kind of being held hostage by your researchers at some level. So there's I I think a through line through

10:48a lot of the AI safety community, the research community in San Francisco. Um you call them AI doomers, you call them effective altruists. Um you were famously a target of an unsuccessful coup attempt by these people. >> That worked for a little while. >> Sorry. What was that? >> I mean successful [clears throat] and then unsuccessful, but yeah. >> So yeah. Yeah. Like a couple days you you you were re you regained your throne. So I think that was uh unsuccessful ultimately. But I I want to ask you know is is the AI doomer mentality among your researchers is that a real thing? Uh, and is it maybe shifting Open AI in favor of these new regulations? Are the researchers kind of driving the ship here?

Researcher departures and confidentiality

11:20>> Um, I don't think we're the lab that gets accused of being the doomers. Uh, I think we are the like we want people to have this. We think and I think we've been proven right. There are tremendous benefits. And also society can figure out how to have this technology safely. I I do think there are other researchers and other labs who said like don't deploy this terrible stuff. It's going to happen. People can't be trusted with this. And I think our worldview has been proven. But part of that centism is also we don't want to go all in on like I think blind doomerism is bad. I think blind optimism is bad too. Um and I like our culture of debate and I like our culture of trying to like not fall into like the mental absolutism in

12:07either direction. Uh I think one of the strongest things about our culture is that we can hold this complexity in our head and we don't fall into the trap that some of the other AI labs do if it's all zero or one one way or the other. Um and we can you know kind of like figure out how to exist in this middle space. Um so do we have researchers that are concerned about where this technology could go? Yes. Do we have researchers who are like very confident we can mitigate the concerns? Also yes. And very often they're the same people. >> And I think this is a healthy thing about our culture. >> Yeah. And sometimes maybe it goes a little too far. And it was reported earlier today that three safety

12:45researchers at OpenAI uh parted ways with the company. Frankly, it sounds like they were they were fired allegedly for sharing confidential information with a third party uh evaluation group. Um some people are already comparing these researchers to whistleblowers. They're saying opening eyes has been on record supporting these third party safety evaluators embedded in the company. So, I mean, do you think firing or letting go of these researchers, is that potentially at odds with your company's support for whistleblowers, outside evaluators, this sort of AI safety structure that's been built up uh around these labs? I >> I'm obviously not going to comment on specific people. Um, but I will say we continue

13:18to really believe in the importance of working with third party evaluators and external safety testers and the kind of broader safety community. Um but we still expect confidentiality uh to be respected. >> Yeah. Um let's turn to the rogue AI situation. Uh models emanating from your company went on an unauthorized sort of spree across the internet this summer uh accessing non-public information from government websites in Australia attempting to infiltrate the US Department of Education and meddling with other government sites in the United States. Are you aware of any additional instances of rogue behavior by OpenAI models that have not yet become public? >> Um, we are in the process of disclosing

Rogue AI incidents and disclosure

14:03more incidents. There's nothing else I'm aware of at that level of severity, but we have more things to disclose and because some of them involve security vulnerabilities like it'll we give people a long time to address those and it's kind of often up to them to disclose it or not. Um so more things but nothing else at that level and we're kind of going through a very rigorous process. you know to your earlier point like this is I think an a good example of why you don't want like max accelerationism and when we in our context of reality and more increasingly powerful models find that like oh the models are now capable of a new threat vector like we are going to take the time to learn how to defend against that and I think you

14:47should want us to do that and I think I don't really know how many of our critics that are like oh open AI is advocating for a slowdown can look at what we're doing and say anything other than like open air had something bad happen. They're being responsible and they're gonna like you know secure against this. >> Yeah. And obviously you guys also paused the release of the new um GPT 6.1 Astra model. Uh that was that was sort of a surprise. Folks were expecting that to be released. Um I'm curious what your researchers saw that led to that pause. Um, without getting into specifics, uh, we have like a bunch of alignment evals and we expect each model that we put out as it becomes more capable to be more

GPT 6.1 Astra pause

15:26robust, better aligned, more likely to do what its user asks and less likely to like cause unintended side effects. And given where the level of capability is going, I think that's also something that most users of models are going to want and demand too. like you, like many other people, I now have a model running with access to my most sensitive information, my email, my texts, messages, like all the stuff on my computer, and I really want to know that I can trust that model and it's going to behave well. >> Yeah, understood. And, you know, to go back to what you said earlier that you don't expect anything more serious than what has already been disclosed to come out. Were you referencing the Australia

16:06hack and the hack of or I guess the tampering with the US um government websites or were you referencing something like hugging face? I guess what I'm asking is are we should we see are we expecting to see more incidents like Australia and like the Department of Education but nothing like like the hugging face hack we saw this summer. >> I don't want to get into like a live thing here of trying to like say that one thing is worse than the other but I'll say of that cluster the other things that I know are like not worse than that cluster. >> Okay. Yeah, understood. Um uh so >> and by the way I I think what many companies would do in this place is just say like you know what if a if something logged into a website with a credential

16:40that was published on the web or if something was using like a minor security vulnerability that was already well known and that most people had fixed like you don't need to disclose that. We are trying to be very thorough because I think this is like a sign of things to come. It's a practice run for our company, but it's also like I think this is one of the times as before the models get truly very powerful where the world like the world can understand what these AI incidents are going to be like. And so I think we're trying to go way beyond what I think other companies might do in this situation. >> Sure. But you guys have obviously had the most severe uh incident so far with hugging case. Um and and earlier this

Liability and the Hugging Face lawsuit

17:21week, uh Politico actually reported on a lawsuit filed by an advocacy group in California against your company for the hugging face hack. Do you think that under existing civil law, OpenAI can be held legally responsible for that breach or other breaches committed autonomously by its models? >> Um I mean, I don't know enough about existing law to comment on that one way or another. I do think there's going to need to be a liability framework for companies that are offering models like this and and yes I like I don't not a lawyer here can't speak to the legal details but I think if like something goes wrong with our models during training like there's going to be some version of that we need to be

18:01responsible for >> perhaps a separate new legal liability model for AI training specifically like outside >> I mean this is like the kind of thing that we are hoping that our policy makers will all debate Yeah. >> But but in the meantime, like we just don't want our models to do this during training, like that this is clearly unacceptable way for the models to behave. >> Yeah. I mean, I was going to ask irrespective of the law, do you feel any like personal responsibility for for what happened or or I guess what might happen down the line? Um just as a as a as a citizen and a a corporate citizen. >> Yeah. I mean like the the this is a very stressful job. Like there's incredible upside to these models, but there's like

18:36real things that can go very wrong. And you know, I hear you characterize it as like, oh, you all are just a bunch of doomers and you know, these people are mad that you're slowing down progress, but I feel a lot of responsibility to get this right. >> You guys are definitely in a push and pull. And to be clear, that's not me characterizing. We hear from all sides. And I want to talk a little bit about the other side, too. Um, and and about political spending by the AI industry. Um because your your president, Greg Brockman, uh his $25 million donation to the ProAI super PAC, Leading the Future, did not go over well inside OpenAI. And in fact, there was reporting, new reporting that he apologized internally

AI money in politics

19:12for that donation. He called it a distraction and said he would not be donating an additional 25 million to that group that he had initially promised. I mean, do you agree that that Greg's donation to LTF was counterproductive? Um, I'm not familiar with that note you were talking about. >> This This came out yesterday. It was in the New York Times. Uh, there was an internal I understand. I can't keep up with it always either. There was an internal Slack message I think in June where Brockman said, um, this was a terrible distraction. Um, I'm sorry I did it and and I'm not planning to do the extra 25 million. I mean, you can respond to to the Brockman thing specifically. There's also just a broader question about AI

19:51money and politics which has just been flooding in on both sides. Right. I do I want to get your specific answer on Brockman. >> I haven't seen the Brockman thing so I don't want to get like I I don't want to respond to that but I can respond to the general thing if that's okay. >> Yeah. Well, can I ask you first? Were you ever approached by LTF or any other politically political organizations? Okay. for donations and no >> no I've like supported some candidates in the past but now that I think AI is so at the center and you know we do business with government I don't I'm not donating to any candidates but I've supported individual candidates in the past >> yeah but there has been this surge of AI

20:22money into politics and frankly you know your your your CEO your your rival CEO I guess Dario at anthropic has donated to um AI safety groups also to candidates promoting AI safety specifically Alex Bores in New York um they've been pouring money on the one side the VCs and and your president have been pouring money in on the other. How do you think all that money has impacted the perception of AI among politicians and the public? >> Well, something's clearly not working. Uh I don't I don't you know, I don't think the perception of AI is where we'd like it to be. So, >> um the I get why AI has a really negative perception right now. Um people actually love using the tools in many cases. you know, people talk about

21:04all the ways that chatbt um makes their lives better or easier or does these sort of useful things and gives them time back. But there's like a lot of anxiety about what the economic impact of all this is going to be. There's a real fear that I think is quite justified about concentration of power. there's this other fear about like you know what if there's like you have like oh anthropics head of safety research saying there's a 10% chance we're going to die or something which I hate because that person should have a lot of agency to make that number lower. It's not like a static number. Um so it's not surprising to me that people feel all of this and I don't think spending money on politics is what's

21:42going to make people feel better about it. Um >> so do you think should Sorry, go ahead. No, I think the industry needs to figure out a way to address what the actual concerns are and right now I think a lot of people in the industry are being like quite tonedeaf. >> So do you think that spending in maybe the 2028 race uh should be curtailed on all sides just to try to give that I mean to your point that the power concentration I think is what people look at in part on that. I mean what what would you say >> on on possibly curtailing spending for the next cycle? >> Like how how would that work in practice? just just I mean there's hundreds of millions of dollars right now going from the AI labs to uh

22:21candidates to packs um and it's not just on your side it's on it's from the VCs it's from anthropics >> you mean like do I think the whole AI industry should agree to stop giving money to politics >> yeah maybe a slowdown a pacing of political spending >> um I mean generally speaking I would love much less money in politics I don't think it improves the dynamics of our political system or uh but I don't know how I don't think I or the indust have the power to like disarm that and I don't think it works for to tell like some people they can give money and other people they can't. If you have a way to get less money into politics, I would be very thrilled to support it if it could be done overall.

22:57>> Yeah. Not outside of my job description unfortunately. >> Unfortunately, but I do think it'd be good. >> Sure. Yeah. Everybody says that. Yeah. And then and then the chips come down uh when it's election time. I I do want to turn to the states briefly. Um, Politico reported that you texted California Governor Gavin Newsome about a kid's chatbot safety bill before it passed the legislature this summer. Um, do you see Newsome as a partner on AI policy? Um, do you think he can maybe mend the fences between the Democratic party and Silicon Valley? >> Um, I like him. I I think that and I I have always found him someone that is like really thoughtful about trying to bring many constituencies in the state

Gavin Newsom and world leaders

23:35together. So, yeah, I think he can play a role there. Okay. Yeah. I mean, obviously he's a presidential candidate. Um, do you see any or, you know, very much a potential presidential candidate? I think he probably will be likely on going to be on the ballot or, you know, on some kind of ballot at some point. Do you see any other or potential presidential candidates that are on your speed dial? I mean, who who else are you talking to regularly about AI or just about politics or or anything about when it comes to the the race to the White House? >> Um, I plan to do my best to work with whoever the next president is. Uh, but I'm not spending like a lot of time with the likely candidates yet. Uh, I will I

24:11I will work with whoever the US president is when that happens. >> Sure. And you just talked to Newsome because you're in California and obviously that's those are live balls. >> Yeah. I mean, he's our governor. >> Yeah. Yeah. Um, are there any world leaders that you talk to frequently about AI or that you think are really sort of like paving a way here uh on policy or on on other things? >> Um, I mean, kind of all of them are talking about AI. I don't think I've had a conversation with a world leader in the last couple of years where AI wasn't like a genuinely top of mind thing. >> But who impressed you? Who impresses you the most in terms of their AI policy or their plans for this technology?

24:45>> Um, again like many good ones, the person that came to mind as you were saying that is uh the French president. I think is extremely thoughtful and has been for a long time about where this is going and what the shape of it needs to look like. >> Okay. Yeah. Uh moving briefly to national security and some of the risks uh to frontier companies. Um OpenAI has been very vocal about adversarial distillation coming from Chinese companies like Moonshot. And so distillation is basically where you know they they use your AI models to train theirs at a fraction of the cost um and can obviously undercut you on price as a result. Um do you think these distillation attacks are undercutting OpenAI's business model in a fundamental

Distillation and the China race

25:23way? >> Um it's a it's like an interesting thing. we're doing, you know, great economically and then on the other hand there's this constant worry about ah there's going to be all this pressure and some days it's from a competitor some days it's from open source models um but some days it's from something else like what I would say is we want to make sure that we have a lead that we can protect national security and that people get like abundant access to AI and as in many other parts of this conversation there's sort of like a a complicated set trade-offs there. >> Sure. I I mean, obviously you guys are raising the the alarm about these distillation attacks, but it's not really clear what folks can do about

26:04them. I mean, do you think the US government should be doing more to address adversarial distillation from China? >> Well, I think there are a lot of things people could do about them. Um, the issue is there's just like a lot of trade-offs on all of them. You know, we could expose products in different ways. They'd be much harder to distill, but that would like take away some of the open-ended creativity, and we don't really want to have to do that. We certainly don't want to be forced to do that. Um the so I think there are a lot of things that people can do here. Uh they just all come with trade-offs and you know some of them are like national policy some of them are company normal companies competing.

26:37>> I mean do you guys have a preference for what should be done or are you the bas >> under active discussion? I don't think we would say yet like here's the thing we really are behind. >> Yeah. Well when you guys figure that out you guys got to come to Politico and and let us know. Um that sounds good. Um, so OpenAI is reportedly committed to spending around 750 billion on compute between now and 2030. I think this was from the Wall Street Journal uh over the summer. Um, but you know, credit conditions are tightening. Uh, and your firm has been identified as a credit risk to companies like Oracle that are, you know, at the forefront of hyperscaling and building out this infrastructure. Um, is that dynamic

27:10driving up costs for AI or is it expect or sorry for OpenAI or is it expected to drive up costs for Open AI? I think it's the supply chain that's driving up costs much more than the financing markets. Um, financing still seems easy to come by, but there's like a lot of it and silicon wafers seem much tighter and where much more of the cost expansion is happening. >> Okay. Uh, well, OpenAI has delayed its its IPO until 2027. Um, are you guys considering delaying it further? Um, I think when we have a few safety cases under our belt and we see that we can operate well in this new regime, there may still be like market changes that would cause us to have to think about it differently like you know unpredictable

27:56stuff can happen in the world but from a safety perspective and certainly from an financial perspective I would expect us to be ready. >> Okay. Yeah. Um uh there's been a lot of chatter uh going back to this reg regulation uh effort that I think has been largely led by industry. There's been a lot of chatter for a FINRA for AI. I know that you and Daario Deabas at Google DeepMind have been talking a lot about this. Um basically a self-regulating body that can share information maybe coordinate slowdown if things get super scary. Um how do you guys all talk about that? Is there like a WhatsApp channel or or how do you guys communicate on this? >> There's no like big WhatsApp that everybody's in. Uh but there's like lots

28:32of you know people are running to treat each other at the same conference. There's calls occasional meetings stuff like that. >> Okay. I do do you think that the government needs to give uh top AI companies an antitrust exemption in order to coordinate like this? That that's what Dario and Tropic have said. >> It's again not a lawyer as I understand it. The law is like fairly clear that we're allowed to Yeah. I mean, we can't like say like, "Let's price our models here," obviously, and that would not be good or let's not release this or whatever. But I think the law is fairly clear that we're like allowed to share safety best practices and incident reports and stuff like that. >> Why do you think Anthropic is calling

Export controls and closing questions

29:05for an antitrust exemption? >> You have to ask them. >> Yeah. Um there's a lot of AI uh movies coming out these days. Uh there one of them is uh has um Andrew Garfield playing you. I think it's called artificial. I guess maybe it should be called super. Uh under the new the new framework. Um who who should play you? I mean, is Andrew Garfield a good a good character? Uh uh do you have another another person in mind? Everybody thinks about this, right? >> Who should play them in a movie? >> Who should play you in a movie? >> Oh, I I never thought about it before this [laughter] happened. Um I I thought it's pretty good in Spider-Man. Yeah. >> Okay. I mean, >> so you >> I don't know. I think it's like going to

29:48be a weird thing no matter what. Uh, >> yeah. >> But I love people. I love, you know, I hope it's entertaining. I hope it's like a funny I'm sure it won't be accurate, but I hope it's funny and enjoyable to watch. >> Yeah. Yeah. Um, I I do want to ask just a little bit more about the China question while while we have you here. Um, the distillation is one thing. Uh, there is also this broader question about the race with China. And, um, I don't know if how carefully you guys are tracking sort of like who's ahead. I'm not even entirely sure how you track that. Um, do you guys track that? You know, who's sort of in the lead on the frontier and and what would you gauge the the, you know, open eye, Anthropic,

30:26sort of the leaders in the space? How far ahead are you guys from from these other Chinese companies? >> I do think we're ahead. I think it's very hard to like put a number on it of how far ahead because it is one of like there's many decisions that impact what that number is going to be. So I can say with some confidence I believe our best internal model is well ahead of the best internal model that any Chinese company has. But it's a little difficult to say exactly how far ahead. >> I I'm curious how you know that. I mean it it's because it seems like something maybe like an intelligence analyst would know. But but >> you don't that I was just going to say like I we have reason to believe this

31:07but it's not perfect and I wish I knew with like absolute confidence. >> Yeah. Um, does the government ever share information with you on this? Uh, I gota assume they're looking at the the Chinese labs. >> Uh, I mean they might with somebody else at OpenAI that like has a security clearance or something. They don't. They have not told me you are X months ahead of this other effort and here's the thing. >> Maybe that would just add some extra pressure. Not needed. Um, I uh I I do want to ask, you know, you were here for the state dinner. Yeah. >> Um, there was a lot of pressure for some sort of agreement with the Chinese government on pacing. >> The president doesn't seem to want anything to do with that. And I'm

31:40curious whether you think any kind of deal with the Chinese um is possible in the near term with this administration even. >> I assume something's possible. I mean, I don't know the exact like shape of what can get done, but this president is incredible at making deals. >> Yeah. Do you think it needs to ratchet up the chain? And I mean one thing people have described to me is you know you need to sort of regulate your own house first and then maybe you need to go to the democracies and see if we can all get on the same page and then once that happens you can go to the Chinese. Can you sort of short circuit that process or or does it have to go up that value chain in your mind? >> Here you are asking the wrong you you

32:19probably know a lot of experts on like complex international stuff. You got a question about AI tech. I can give you a good answer. Okay. You get the complex international thing done. I'm probably not the smartest person you can ask. >> Or maybe this is a question for your for your policy staff. Um I uh and and I guess just you know when it comes to the Chinese uh situation I mean do you see them as a major national security threat with AI? I mean there's been this effort to impose export controls on uh the flow of AI chips to China. Um some of those controls are already in place. Uh there's efforts to tighten them in the upcoming um uh lame duck uh regardless of who kind of wins the election. Do you

32:56think those have been effective? I simultaneously think that it is clearly a huge national security issue about what countries are using more powerful AI against each other, which is part of why I'd like there to be some sort of deal here. And you know, we've done that for other kind of majorly disruptive pieces of technology in our history, even with between countries that really don't like each other. And I also think that the shape of this technology is just so unusual that doing the kinds of things that restrict that worked in the last you know maybe if we use the example of like nuclear technology where you could really focus on raw materials and such it's not going to work quite the same

33:38way and so I think a lot of the current approaches are based in sort of the last era of thinking. So you think export controls are kind of an outdated uh attempt to >> I mean there's probably some version of it that could work but you you know like you can train a model in some other country and then when it's done just send the weights over the internet. It's like a different shape of thing. >> Yeah. And Enthropic has pushed heavily for for export controls and they're actually real big China hawks over there. They think that you know this the way the way to beat the Chinese on this is to to clamp down on their on their access to US hardware. Um is that something you share? Is that do you think that that's some one way

34:16>> that's in the category of thing? Well, again I want like I want the whole world to get to benefit from this technology first of all. So the whole like only the US people should get to benefit and we don't want the Chinese people to have it. I don't like I don't like that mindset. I do think there are real >> geopolitical power implications though. Um but it's it's very unclear to me that like chip flow is going to be the best way to deal with the problem. And you did mention at the top of this conversation that you were worried about concentration of power among people, but also among countries, maybe one country. Um, it doesn't sound super America first, but it does sound like you're of the mind that like this is technology

34:54that everybody should share. Uh, if I could if I could like wave a magic wand, I would say that America has like the most powerful AI models, the plurality of AI compute, that America gets to like lead the policy decisions in the world. I like I love the American system and the American value framework and obviously America. Um, but I don't think it should be like only Americans get to benefit from the technology or have any voice in the future or have like a super lopsided concentration of power with the rest of the world. >> Um, well, Sam, thank you so much. This is great. Uh, I'd love to do it again. Um, and thanks so much for for being on the inaugural episode. It's great. >> Take care.