Greg Brockman on Astra and the Future of OpenAI

**John Coogan** (0:00)
We have Greg Brockman, the co-founder and president of OpenAI with us. Welcome to the show, Greg. How are you doing?

**Greg Brockman** (0:06)
Doing great. Thank you for having me.

**John Coogan** (0:07)
Thanks for hopping on. Huge day. Can we start with the math advances?
What is happening? Why is this important? There's a lot of back and forth in the timeline, but I'd love for you to just set the table for us on what actually happened with Navier Stokes today.

**Greg Brockman** (0:24)
Well, it's always a huge day in AI and modern scientific progress, I would say. Today, we announced that our model had solved the Navier Stokes problem that we found a counter example or a proof that these theoretical equations do have a singularity or break down under certain circumstances. This is a problem that has been open for a very long time. It's one of the seven millennium problems, which are some of the deepest, most important problems of mathematics. I think that the problem itself is important. This is new knowledge for humanity, that the proof itself is actually very elegant and beautiful, and I think that there's a lot to learn from it.
The equations have lots of application in fluid dynamics and other areas. But to me, what's even more important is about what this represents, about where we are in terms of model capabilities, and the fact that we can actually generate new knowledge, we can learn from these models to have them help us solve problems that are otherwise outside of reach or would take us very long to solve.

**John Coogan** (1:30)
Yeah.
Where should I actually go with this? Is this going to help me book a flight? Is this going to help me cure cancer? Is this just going to help you recruit researchers who are fascinated by this stuff? Because I think that this is taken over the technology world, but I imagine that this will not be something that gets talked about at backyard barbecues with friends and family that are three clicks removed from something else.

**Jordi Hays** (1:54)
Outside of SF. Yeah.

**Greg Brockman** (1:55)
Well, look, I think that there's, first of all, the applications of this specific result or the equations themselves, which are things that let us better understand phenomena from ocean currents to airflow around aircraft, around turbulence and things like that. But it's really about the broader insights and methods that can help scientists and mathematicians further accelerate their research. And I think that, again, representative of, if we have models that can help solve this kind of problem, then what happens from here? What other problems that are immediately applicable? And I think that talking about curing diseases and new medicines we're going to be able to develop, all of that starts to become much more real when you have models that are at this level of assistance and capability. And I do think that there are going to be real changes to think about in terms of, we can have so much more ambition with the kinds of challenges that we can hope to tackle now.

**John Coogan** (2:50)
Yeah. I mean, I think even if this doesn't break through to the broader world, the weekend definitely will because it seemed like everyone was talking about Blender, talking about Astra, building stuff. Take us through the launch of Astra, what the feedback has been, what you've learned. It seemed like there were a couple of resets, the model scaled very well.
How was this launch different than previous launches?

**Greg Brockman** (3:19)
Well, first of all, I've just been blown away by the community reaction to Astra. It's been really amazing and very humbling, honestly, to see all the creativity and the different ways that people have been applying the model.
I think that it's very clear that we've reached a new threshold of computer use, so this model is able to really work with different kinds of applications in a way that was not previously possible. And people are taking full advantage of that fact and really thinking about how to create. Lots of people showing off 3D creations and mapping out physical locations and turning them into these 3D models and thinking about, can you use this for design of physical parts? Someone talked about how they were designing some mechanic for catching hair in a shower drain and that they were able to... It was super cool, right? That they're now able to actually manufacture that.

**Jordi Hays** (4:10)
Shower hair super intelligence.

**John Coogan** (4:12)
Yeah, no, that's not so mundane, but it's so important. I feel like a lot of this stuff gets lost, right?