Sam Altman on God, Elon Musk and the Mysterious Death of His Former Employee

**Tucker Carlson** (0:00)
Thanks for doing this.

**Sam Altman** (0:00)
Of course. Thank you.

**Tucker Carlson** (0:01)
So, ChatGPT, other AIs can reason. Seems like they can reason. They can make independent judgments. They produce results that were not programmed in. They kind of come to conclusions. They seem like they're alive. Are they alive? Is it alive?

**Sam Altman** (0:17)
No, and I don't think they seem alive, but I understand where that comes from.
They don't do anything unless you ask, right? Like they're just sitting there kind of waiting. They don't have like a sense of agency or autonomy. It's the more you use them, I think, the more the kind of illusion breaks. But they're incredibly useful. Like they can do things that maybe don't seem alive, but seem like they do seem smart.

**Tucker Carlson** (0:44)
I spoke to someone who's involved at scale of the development of the technology, who said they lie. Have you ever seen that?

**Sam Altman** (0:52)
They hallucinate all the time. Yeah, or not all the time. They used to hallucinate all the time. They now hallucinate a little bit.

**Tucker Carlson** (0:57)
What does that mean? What's the distinction between hallucinating and lying?

**Sam Altman** (1:00)
If you ask, again, this has gotten much better, but in the early days, if you asked, you know, what, in what year was president, the made up name, President Tucker Carlson of the United States born, what it should say is, I don't think Tucker Carlson was ever president of the United States.

**Tucker Carlson** (1:20)
Right.

**Sam Altman** (1:20)
But because of the way they were trained, that was not the most likely response in the training data. So, it assumed like, oh, I don't know that there wasn't, the user has told me that it was president Tucker Carlson. So, I'll make my best guess at a number. We figured out how to mostly train that out. There are still examples of this problem, but I think it is something we will get fully solved, and we've already made in the GPT-5 era, a huge amount of progress towards that.

**Tucker Carlson** (1:49)
But even what you just described seems like an act of will, or certainly an act of creativity. And so, I just watched a demonstration of it, and it doesn't seem quite like a machine, it seems like it has the spark of life to it.
Do you dissect that at all?

**Sam Altman** (2:09)
So, in that example, the mathematically most likely answer, as it's calculating through its weights, was not, there was never this precedent, it was the user must know what they're talking about, it must be here, and so mathematically, the most likely answer is a number. Now, again, we figured out how to overcome that, but in what you saw there, I think it's like, I feel like I have to kind of like hold these two simultaneous ideas in my head. One is, all of this stuff is happening because a big computer very quickly is multiplying large numbers in these big huge matrices together, and those are correlated with words that are being put out one or the other. On the other hand, the subjective experience of using that feels like it's beyond just a really fancy calculator, and it is useful to me. It is surprising to me in ways that are beyond what that mathematical reality would seem to suggest.

**Tucker Carlson** (3:02)
Yeah, and so the obvious conclusion is it has a kind of autonomy or a spirit within it. And I know that a lot of people in their experience of it reach that conclusion. This is, there's something divine about this. There's something that's bigger than the sum total of the human inputs.
And so they worship it. There's a spiritual component to it. Do you detect that? Have you ever felt that?

**Sam Altman** (3:28)
No, there's nothing to me at all that feels divine about it, or spiritual in any way. But I'm also a tech nerd, and I kind of look at everything through that lens.

**Tucker Carlson** (3:37)
So what are your spiritual views?

**Sam Altman** (3:40)
I'm Jewish, and I would say I have a fairly traditional view of the world that way.

**Tucker Carlson** (3:46)
So you're religious, you believe in God?

**Sam Altman** (3:50)
I'm not like a literalist on the Bible, but I'm not someone who says I'm culturally Jewish. If you ask me, I would just say I'm Jewish.

**Tucker Carlson** (3:58)
But do you believe in God? Do you believe that there is a force larger than people that created people, created the earth, set down a specific order for living, that there's an absolute morality attached that comes from that God?