SOTS 2nd Hour: Breaking News at UnitedHealth, and A Deep Dive with OpenAI’s Sam Altman 12/4/24

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Carl Quintanilla (1:00)

Let's get to a deal book where we're beginning to hear from OpenAI CEO, Sam Altman.

Andrew Ross Sorkin (1:07)

Work, communicate, innovate, and now think about what our future is even going to be like. His company is now worth about $157 billion. And I should say, OpenAI didn't just spark an arms race. It really redefined the possibilities of technology. And as he pushes towards general or AI, I should say, artificial general intelligence, we're forced to grapple with some very big questions about the future of work, about the balance of power, about ethical questions and so many other things. And we're going to delve in to all of that with Sam. So thank you, the man at the center of it all.

Sam Altman (1:41)

Thanks for having me.

Andrew Ross Sorkin (1:41)

So here's where we're going to start. Two years ago, almost to this week, basically, you launched ChatGPT. And I think it's fair to say that when you press the button, since then, all hell has broken loose.

Sam Altman (1:58)

It does feel like that.

Andrew Ross Sorkin (1:59)

It has changed the global conversation. It has changed fundraising priorities, the move of resources. Other technology companies have shifted the way they're doing things. There have been lawsuits, all of it. And so I'm very curious if you could just take us back two years ago, literally, almost, as I said, to the day or to the week, and what you thought was going to happen when you pressed the button.

Sam Altman (2:23)

So in the abstract, we always knew there would be some moment where, for whatever reason, the world would go from not getting it to getting it, and that all of a sudden it would be clear that this technology was working. Internally, at that point, seemed very obvious to us that language models were gonna keep scaling, that they were gonna do all these useful things. And why it happened at the launch of Chatch BT, I mean, I have some theories, but why it happened then and not when we launched the GPT-3 in the API earlier, or why it didn't happen until GPT-4 launched several months later, like why that exact moment? I think there is some, like, chance-iness to when it actually catches fire.

We had observed, though, with the API and GPT-3 that, you know, GPT-3 was a little bit early, and it didn't work for that many things, but in some sense one of the killer use cases of it was developers in the playground, which is where you could, like, test ideas quickly before you implement the API. They loved just talking to the model. They would just sit there and, like, talk to GPT-3 conversationally about whatever, and that was kind of the main thing people were using it for. So we said, well, if that's what people want, we can make it much easier to use. You don't have to sign up for a developer account and do all these other things, and we can sort of tune it to be good at conversations. And so we said, okay, let's make this as a product. Now, we'd actually been planning to launch it with GPT-4. We finished GPT-4 in like August of 2022, but we held it for a while.

Andrew Ross Sorkin (3:53)

But did you expect all of this to happen?

Sam Altman (3:56)

Again, at some point, we thought there would be a big moment in the world. Did we know it was going to be right then with the launch of ChatGPT? Certainly not.

Andrew Ross Sorkin (4:03)

So here we are now, two years later, and the next big question that we're all asking, I can't believe we're just asking it two years later, and you actually just wrote about it.

You said that it is possible that we will have superintelligence in a few thousand days from now. Two years ago, did you think that? And when you say a few thousand days, I can do various versions of math on what that means.