#367 – Sam Altman: OpenAI CEO on GPT-4, ChatGPT, and the Future of AI

**Lex Fridman** (0:00)
The following is a conversation with Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, the company behind Gpt-4, ChatGPT, Dall-E, Codex and many other AI technologies, which both individually and together constitute some of the greatest breakthroughs in the history of artificial intelligence, computing and humanity in general. Please allow me to say a few words about the possibilities and the dangers of AI in this current moment in the history of human civilization. I believe it is a critical moment. We stand on the precipice of fundamental societal transformation, where soon, nobody knows when, but many including me, believe it's within our lifetime. The collective intelligence of the human species begins to pale in comparison by many orders of magnitude to the general super intelligence in the AI systems we build and deploy. At scale, this is both exciting and terrifying. It is exciting because of the innumerable applications we know and don't yet know that will empower humans to create, to flourish, to escape the widespread poverty and suffering that exists in the world today, and to succeed in that old, all too human pursuit of happiness. It is terrifying because of the power that super-intelligent AGI wields to destroy human civilization, intentionally or unintentionally, the power to suffocate the human spirit in the totalitarian way of George Orwell's 1984, or the pleasure-fueled mass hysteria of Brave New World, where, as Huxley saw it, people come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think. That is why these conversations with the leaders, engineers, and philosophers, both optimists and cynics, is important now. These are not merely technical conversations about AI. These are conversations about power, about companies, institutions, and political systems that deploy, check, and balance this power. About distributed economic systems that incentivize the safety and human alignment of this power. About the psychology of the engineers and leaders that deploy AGI. And about the history of human nature, our capacity for good and evil at scale. I'm deeply honored to have gotten to know and to have spoken with on and off the mic with many folks who now work at OpenAI, including Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, Ilya Tsitskever, Wojciech Zaremba, Andrej Karpathy, Jakub Pachaki and many others. It means the world that Sam has been totally open with me, willing to have multiple conversations, including challenging ones, on and off the mic. I will continue to have these conversations, to both celebrate the incredible accomplishments of the AI community, and to steel man the critical perspective on major decisions various companies and leaders make. Always with the goal of trying to help in my small way. If I fail, I will work hard to improve. I love you all. And now, a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast. We got NetSuite for business management software, SimpliSafe for home security and ExpressVPN for digital security. Choose wisely, my friends. Also, if you want to work with our team, we're always hiring, go to lexfridman.com/hiring.
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