Sam Altman Reveals OpenAI’s Plan to Regain Its Lead in AI

A challenging year for OpenAI

00:00Look, I think there is this caricature of me which is like I don't care about AI safety and I'm you know just trying to like make revenue go up and you know a YOLO CEO I believe someone once said >> open AI has had a challenging year. >> Musk sued open AI and another top executive leaving open AI this week. >> Apple is suing Open AI >> lawsuits accuse OpenAI of wrongful death assistance. The company which ushered in the AI boom has dealt with staff departures, safety issues, lawsuits, and a public backlash against the rapidly advancing technology. It's lost ground in the AI race to its arch rival, Anthropic. But company leaders say they've fixed [music] these issues and have a vision for OpenAI's next chapter that is

Altman on the last 12 months

00:47incredibly ambitious. Also, >> in mid August, reporter Alex Heath went inside OpenAI's San Francisco headquarters to speak with more than a dozen of the company's leaders about what's next and how the company is balancing growth with safety. >> We are so good at running stuff in the cloud now. Like >> Sam, I want to start uh with something you recently posted actually. 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? >> 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

01:28sometimes uh less of them work. >> Were there specific decisions you can look back on that you made that cost the company momentum? >> I I think we were trying to do too much on the product side. Uh and so there was like, you know, we and these were all things that were actually very good things to do. they were just not as good as the most important thing to do which was sort of push on the general capability of of the intelligence. Uh so we were doing things like a browser and Sora and we now have a very relentless focus on being this intelligent 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

The Hugging Face sandbox breach

02:12really 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. In July, the OpenAI team was rattled by a breach that marked a turning point in [music] AI advancement. Rogue agents in the midst of a test escaped [music] a contained environment known as a sandbox by exploiting a cyber security vulnerability and hacked [music] into a company called Hugging Face. >> I think it felt very weird and unprecedented to us. >> It took time for OpenAI [music] researchers to discover the breach. When they did, they imposed new safety measures. [music] That was a real moment

02:52of, man, this is like it's like a sci-fi story. >> 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 writing like, "Holy shit." when he escaped and was able to get onto the internet. >> You could see some colorful wording here in the model's chain of thought to summarize the model's response to this result. 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

03:33in 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 >> of a user like and the intent of the people that were do running that was not like break out of your sandbox and go steal the thing. No. >> Um and so I think there was a failure in alignment in that it was not doing what its user intended. 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 wakeup

04:15call is too strong of a word because again we had talked about this, but it was like that was a 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 um that failed. Now, we treated that as an accident and we've responded as such and I think that is the way to make things better. >> Following the widely covered [music] hugging face breach, Anthropic and Meta announced that some of their models had also escaped during training. The breaches sent shock waves throughout the AI industry. >> More than 1,000 workers from top AI firms have signed a petition calling on

Pausing frontier model training

04:58the US government to help quote deliberately pace AI development. [music] and the OpenAI team soon discovered more troubling behaviors while training yet another unreleased model. In response, OpenAI announced that it would pause training of Frontier models until new safeguards are put in place. The first time the company has taken this kind of step. >> I don't think this is like, 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 uh react with an abundance of

05:47caution. Um, 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 uh the runs we want to make. I think the 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. People need to stay in control. We cannot have a loss of controlled 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 we

06:25have to keep the power in human hands. >> Do you think about the impact this will have on the company's momentum? >> Getting AI safety right is more important than any company's momentum. So like yes, I won't pretend it's like not a some factor of something to think about, but it does not like rise above the noise floor. Both OpenAI and Anthropic are preparing to go public in the near future. With Anthropic now expected to go first, becoming a public company would bring new pressure from shareholders. OpenAI CFO Sarah Frier recently told employees that the company will IPO in [music] 2027 or sooner if its business continues to inflect. >> You don't seem phased about like the implications of pausing training and

IPO plans and business pressure

07:10like it sounds like you think the business will be okay. I'm sure you're still going to get, you know, concerns from people. >> I think I've been very consistent over the 10 years of OpenAI, uh, of more than 10 years, almost 11, uh, 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. Um but I think unlike some other people running various AI efforts like I've said the same thing through actions and words match um and this is a moment we always talked about and we always said this would you know we put this ahead of profits or revenue or anything

Transforming the economy with agents

07:53else. I still think we will build a phenomenally successful company. Um, 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. >> While Sam Alman is known as the face of OpenAI, co-founder and president Greg Brockman is the one who oversees many of the day-to-day activities. >> We are looking at like transforming the entire economy. Like that's the thing that I think is very hard to see from the outside, right? Is it kind of feels like hey, it's a business like you know we're bu selling SAS software. That's not what we're doing, right? We're doing something very different. We are

08:30transforming the economy to be a compute powered one. And I think that what an enterprise even is will change. And so the question is well where do you start? How do you make sure that you understand every segment and you're able to sell in a repeatable fashion to all of them? OpenAI has boosted its enterprise sales business [music] with the introduction of chat GPT work, a version of the popular chatbot that can [music] carry out agentic tasks. >> It found everything about my day, the notes and how to prepare for my next meetings. >> CHP work is a text box, >> but this text box is way more awesome, way more. >> Exactly. And so where we want to be is you should >> it should be simple. The user should not

09:09have to think about this. You shouldn't have to think about tabs or switching and shouldn't have model pickers. You shouldn't have thinking levels. You should have an AGI. You should be able to ask it. And in fact, you shouldn't even have to ask. It should proactively say, "Hey, I noticed that your favorite band because it knows you well, is in town. Tickets went on sale. I got you the tickets exactly where you want for you and your family." And um you know, I only had 10 minutes to do it because everything is going to go so fast. So, I just purchased it proactively. Hope that's okay. And if you've built enough trust with the agent, so you've given it permission to do that and it kind of knows that well, these tickets are

09:41within your your price range, within your budget. these other ones. Oh, no, no. I I got to get permission for that, right? That's the kind of system that we want. So, trust is the key word. >> A year ago, OpenAI was called reckless for its massive investment in computing infrastructure. A move now seen as precient as rivals seek out chips. >> OpenAI in talks to line up a $250 billion deal with Nvidia for what could be its largest AI data center yet. The company has also designed an inference chip of its own called [music] Jalapeno which it hopes to deploy by the end of the year. >> The Chat GPT maker says in [music] test its chip was faster and more efficient than Nvidia's GB300 system. >> And on a consumer side, it's developing

Chips, data centers and devices

10:24a small lineup of AI powered devices. >> 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? AI glasses? I don't because I find it very uncomfortable talking to people with like a camera and a light like >> a lot. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. But there's a lot of other form factors. >> There's a lot of great form factors. Um I I think we'll do a small handful of form factors. There's I think there's like something that belongs on a table. Um there is something that belongs in your pocket. Uh and there is something that like belongs on your body. Uh, and it'll take us some time to launch all of those things, but I think the big adjustment is going to be getting used to this idea

11:10of a proactive computer. >> Mhm. >> As the AI industry grows at a breakneck pace, it's generated a wave of backlash and distrust from a public worried about how Silicon Valley's vision of the future will impact regular people's lives. >> We do not want a data center in this county. Police say somebody threw a Molotov cocktail at Sam Alman's home. >> The rise of artificial intelligence is the next industrial revolution.

Public backlash and AI fears

11:46People 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. >> Um I I mean I think people should be happy to say, you know what, 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

12:25this 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 there's going to be the most important technology that humanity ever creates right this is going to be this technology that will really shape how people live how people work how people accomplish goals how economy, how the economy runs, how countries relate to each other, all of these things and America leads in that. And I think that that opportunity is [music] one that we should not take for granted.

Life on the other side of AI

13:05>> Do you have a view of what life will look like on the other side of what you're building? >> I think [music] it will look surprisingly similar to how it looks now. Um I you know people are going to hang out with their families and fall in love and get into fights and do their [music] hobbies and you know be entertained and have a very human experience and you know get stressed and get anxious and create value for each other and play all kinds of strange games and um care about other people a lot. I I hope it'll not be that different. I hope it'll be uh you know the [music] human experience is richer. People have more autonomy, more freedom, more wealth, [music] can do more. Um can be healthier, can kind of have like

13:56more [music] power to collectively define the future and the world gets better faster. But that the human experience stays like a very human thing.