Sam Altman on Sora, Energy, and Building an AI Empire

**Sam Altman** (0:00)
Sort of thought we had stumbled on this one giant secret that we had these scaling laws for language models, and that felt like such an incredible triumph. I was like, we're probably never going to get that lucky again. And deep learning has been this miracle that keeps on giving, and we have kept finding breakthrough after breakthrough. Again, when we got the reasoning model breakthrough, I also thought that was like, we're never going to get another one like that. It just seems so improbable that this one technology works so well. But maybe this is always what it feels like when you discover one of the big scientific breakthroughs, if it's really big, it's pretty fundamental, and it just keeps working.

**Erik Torenberg** (0:38)
OpenAI isn't just building an app. It's building the biggest data center in human history. Yesterday, I sat down with Ben Horowitz and Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI. We talk about OpenAI's vision to become the people's personal AI, the massive infrastructure behind it, and how the company's research is pushing toward AGI, including AI that can do real science. We also talk about how his views have changed on open source, regulation, and why AI and energy are now deeply linked. Let's get to it.

**Erik Torenberg** (1:11)
Sam, welcome to A16z Podcast.

**Sam Altman** (1:12)
Thanks for having me.

**Erik Torenberg** (1:14)
You've described in another interview, you described OpenAI as a combination of four companies, consumer technology business, a mega scale infrastructure operation, a research lab, and all the new stuff, including planned hardware devices. From hardware to app integrations, to job marketplaces to commerce, what do all these bets add up to? What's OpenAI's vision?

**Sam Altman** (1:31)
Yeah, I mean, maybe you should count it as three, maybe as four for kind of our own version of what traditionally would have been the research lab at this scale, but three core ones. We want to be people's personal AI subscription. I think most people have one, some people have several, and you'll use it in some first-party consumer stuff with us, but you'll also log in a bunch of other services and you'll just use it from dedicated devices at some point. And you'll have this AI that gets to know you and be really useful to you. And that's what we want to do. It turns out that to support that, we also have to build out this massive amount of infrastructure. But the goal there, the mission is really like, build this AGI and make it very useful to people.

**Ben Horowitz** (2:06)
And does the infrastructure, do you think it will end up, yeah, it's necessary for the main goal. Will it also separately end up being another business, or is it just really going to be in service to the personal AI or unknown?

**Sam Altman** (2:20)
You mean like, would we sell it to other companies as well infrastructure?

**Ben Horowitz** (2:22)
Yeah, would you sell to other companies? You know, it's such a massive thing, would it do something else?

**Sam Altman** (2:27)
It feels to me like there will emerge some other thing to do like that. But I don't know, we don't have a current plan. It's currently just meant to like support the service we want to deliver and the research.

**Ben Horowitz** (2:39)
Yeah, no, that makes sense.

**Erik Torenberg** (2:40)
Yeah.

**Sam Altman** (2:41)
The scale is sort of like terrifying enough that you've got to be open to doing something else.

**Ben Horowitz** (2:47)
Yeah, if you're building the biggest data center in the history of humankind.

**Sam Altman** (2:50)
The biggest infrastructure project in the history, yeah.

**Erik Torenberg** (2:52)
There was a great interview you did many years ago in StrictlyVC, early OpenAI, well before Tri-GBT, and they're asking, what's the business model? And you said, oh, we'll ask the AI, it'll figure it out for us. Everybody laughs.

**Sam Altman** (3:02)
There have been multiple times, and there was just another one recently where we have asked a then current model for what should we do, and it has had an insightful answer we missed. So I think when we say stuff like that, people don't take us seriously or literally. But maybe the answer is you should take us both.

**Ben Horowitz** (3:18)
Yeah. Well, no, as somebody runs an organization, I ask the AI a lot of questions about what I should do. It comes up with some pretty interesting answers.

**Sam Altman** (3:27)
Sometimes, sometimes it does.

**Ben Horowitz** (3:28)
You have to give it enough context, but.

**Erik Torenberg** (3:30)
What is the thesis that connects these bets beyond more distribution, more compute?

**Sam Altman** (3:35)