Special Edition: OpeanAI CEO Sam Altman Talks GPT-6 Astra Debut, Going Public

**SPEAKER_1** (0:02)
Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio, news.

**Ed Ludlow** (0:07)
We're live on Bloomberg Television and on Bloomberg Radio with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. And Sam, the way that OpenAI is framing Astra is basically an early step toward AGI, but I thought we could start a conversation just with basically what's fundamentally different with Astra relative to prior generations of model.

**Sam Altman** (0:26)
It feels, first of all, thank you for having me. It feels like a new step in this process towards models that can really help us create value, do work, discover new science, help us create, help start new companies or create new products.
Using it subjectively feels to me very different than any model before.

**Ed Ludlow** (0:48)
What's the kind of principal use case that's different this time around? You know, I think we can get into the generations of model that were very coding focused. You know, a lot of the development was very cyber security focused. But taking it away from the software engineer, what is the everyday person unlocking AI that they weren't able to do previously?

**Sam Altman** (1:08)
One thing that I think people will immediately notice is if you have an idea and you want to work interactively with an AI to get a complex piece of, a whole piece of software built, this is the first model to me where I could sort of tell someone like, just give it a try, there's a good chance it'll work. And, you know, I've watched people make computer games, I've watched people do sort of like home, sort of DIY electrical engineering projects, I've watched people do very complex simulations for some piece of science they're working on. Certainly a lot of the work where you would sort of normally sit down and have to, you know, build a financial model here and then a PowerPoint presentation around it and then figure out how to like, make a little interactive piece of code to sort of try different simulations. That stuff is, it's all so doable now.
What I hope will happen is people, I think people will be surprised at the beginning, but then as they build up more trust in the model and more like, wow, it can really do this, just start throwing harder and harder tasks and more creative ideas at it. And they will find out what the model can really do for them.

**Ed Ludlow** (2:16)
Sam, the specifics of how Astra is being released, I think it's important. So, a version of it with specific guard rails, what was the thinking behind that and what are those specific guard rails in this early release of it?

**Sam Altman** (2:30)
Yeah. So, the challenge of our industry is that we have these models that are getting incredibly capable and incredibly useful, and that people want to use to everything from make their lives a little easier to starting new companies. And then on the other hand, as these models get more capable, the risks that we have to mitigate also become more serious. The models could do more damage if we don't do a good job at that. And so, we have spent, obviously this model took us a little longer to release than we were hoping. I think it'll be worth the wait, but we really wanted to spend the time on the safety and security alignment of this model. Yes. And I think as people understand the power and impact and capabilities, they will be happy that we did.
We will have different tiers of cyber access for this model for cyber in particular. Today, we're rolling it out to trusted access partners, and then in the coming days, assuming everything goes well, we'll roll it out more broadly.
You could say, well, if this model has a cyber problem, why let anyone use it for cyber? And I think it's very important to note that the world is very close to a complete change in the landscape of cyber attacks. And the only way that we see for society to collectively defend itself against this coming wave of models from around the world and from other companies, is to use tools like Astra to rapidly defend against these new cyber threats. So we will have multiple programs for people at different levels of verification and trust, but we do think it's quite important that the world use models to collectively defend ourselves.

**Ed Ludlow** (4:15)
What happened prior to release is important, right? You determined that Astra can find and develop zero-day exploits without any human intervention, essentially. And so you paused some of the work to strengthen the safeguards. What specifically was it that you saw that made you hit pause? The behavior, I suppose, of the model.