Transcript of OpenAI’s Sam Altman on the Future of AI, Safety and Power — Live at TED2025

Again, I think in the world of AI, there will be a new model that we figure out.

CHRIS ANDERSON: I mean, the world’s full of creative people, are some of the angriest people right now or the most scared people about AI. The difference between feeling your work’s being stolen from you and your future is being stolen from you, and feeling your work is being amplified and can be amplified. Those are such different feelings. And if we could shift to the other one, to the second one, I think that really changes how much humanity as a whole embraces all this.

SAM ALTMAN: Well, again, I would say some creative people are very upset. Some creatives are like, “This is the most amazing tool ever. I’m doing incredible new work.” But, you know, it’s definitely a change. And I have a lot of empathy for people who are just like, “I wish this change weren’t happening. I liked the way things were before.”

CHRIS ANDERSON: But in principle, you can calculate from any given prompt how much… There should be some way of being able to calculate what percentage of subscription revenue or whatever goes towards each answer. In principle, it should be possible if one could get the rest of the rules figured out, and it’s obviously complicated, you could calculate some kind of revenue share.

SAM ALTMAN: Now, if you’re a musician and you spend your whole life, your whole childhood, whatever, listening to music, and then you get an idea and you go compose a song that is inspired by what you’ve heard before, but a new direction. It’d be very hard for you to say, like, “This much was from this song I heard when I was 11. This much from when I saw…”

CHRIS ANDERSON: That’s right. But we’re talking here about the situation where someone specifically in a prompt, names someone.

SAM ALTMAN: Yeah. Well, again, right now, if you try to go generate an image in a named style, we just say that for living artists, we don’t do it. But I think it would be cool to figure out a new model where if you say, “I want to do it in the name of this artist” and they opt in, there’s a revenue model there. I think that’s a good thing to explore.

OpenAI vs. Open Source

CHRIS ANDERSON: So I think the world should help you figure out that model quickly. And I think it will make a huge difference. Actually, I want to switch topics quickly. The battle between your model and Open source. How much were you shaken up by the arrival of Deepseek?

SAM ALTMAN: I think Open Source has an important place. We actually just last night hosted our first community session to kind of decide the parameters of our open source model and how we want to shape it. We’re going to do a very powerful open source model. I think this is important. We’re going to do something near the frontier, I think better than any current open source model out there. This will not be all – there will be people who use this in ways that some people in this room, maybe you or I don’t like. But there is going to be an important place for open source models as part of the constellation here. And you know, I think we were late to act on that, but we’re going to do it really well now.

CHRIS ANDERSON: I mean you’re spending it seems like an order or even orders of magnitude more than Deepseek allegedly spent, although I know there’s controversy around that. Are you confident that the actual better model is going to be recognized? Or is this in some ways life-threatening to the notion that by going to massive scale, tens of billions of dollars investment, we can maintain an incredible lead all day long?

SAM ALTMAN: I call people and beg them to give us their GPUs. We are so incredibly constrained. Our growth is going like this. Deepseek launched and it didn’t seem to impact it. There’s other stuff that’s happening.

ChatGPT’s Explosive Growth

CHRIS ANDERSON: Tell us about the growth. Actually you gave me a shocking number backstage there.

SAM ALTMAN: I have never seen growth in any company, one that I’ve been involved with or not like this, like the growth of ChatGPT. It’s really fun. I feel deeply honored. But it is crazy to live through and our teams are exhausted and stressed and we’re trying to keep things up.

CHRIS ANDERSON: How many users do you have now?

SAM ALTMAN: I think the last time we said was 500 million weekly actives and it is growing very rapidly.

CHRIS ANDERSON: I mean you told me that we doubled in just a few weeks in terms of computer.

SAM ALTMAN: I said that privately, but I guess.

CHRIS ANDERSON: Oh, I misremembered. Sam. I’m sorry.

SAM ALTMAN: That’s all right.

CHRIS ANDERSON: I’m sorry. We can edit that out.

SAM ALTMAN: That’s okay, that’s okay. No problem. No one here would… growing very fast.

The Future of AI Models

CHRIS ANDERSON: So you’re confident you’re seeing it grow. Take off like a rocket ship. You’re releasing incredible new models all the time. What are you seeing in your best internal models right now that you haven’t yet shared with the world, but you would love to hear on this stage?

SAM ALTMAN: So first of all, you asked about are we worried about this model or that model? There will be a lot of intelligent models in the world. Very smart models will be commoditized to some degree. I think we’ll have the best and for some use you’ll want that. But honestly, the models are now so smart that for most of the things most people want to do, they’re good enough.

I hope that will change over time because people will raise their expectations. But if you’re kind of using ChatGPT as a standard user, the model capability is very smart. But we have to build a great product, not just a great model. And so there will be a lot of people with great models and we will try to build the best product.

People want their image generation, some Sora examples for video earlier. They want to integrate it with all their stuff. We just launched a new feature called memory, but it’s way better than the memory before, where this model will get to know you over the course of your lifetime. And we have a lot more stuff to come to build this great integrated product. And I think people will stick with that. So there will be many models, but I think we will, I hope, continue to focus on building the best defining product in the space.

AI as a Personal Companion

CHRIS ANDERSON: I mean, after I saw your announcement yesterday that ChatGPT will now know all of your query history, I entered “tell me about me ChatGPT, from what you know.” And my jaw dropped. It was shocking. It knew who I was and all these sort of interests that hopefully mostly were pretty much appropriate and shareable. But it was astonishing and I felt the sense of real excitement, a little bit queasy, but mainly excitement, actually, at how much more that would allow it to be useful to me.

SAM ALTMAN: One of our researchers tweeted, kind of like yesterday, this morning, that the upload happens bit by bit. It’s not that you plug your brain in one day, but you will talk to ChatGPT over the course of your life. At some day, maybe if you want, it’ll be listening to you throughout the day and sort of observing what you’re doing. And it’ll get to know you and it’ll become this extension of yourself, this companion, this thing that just tries to help you be the best, do the best you can.

CHRIS ANDERSON: In the movie “Her,” the AI basically announces that she’s read all of his emails and decided he’s a great writer and persuades a publisher to publish him. Is that something that might be coming sooner than we think?

SAM ALTMAN: I don’t think it’ll happen exactly like that, but yeah, I think something in the direction where AI, you don’t have to just go to ChatGPT or whatever and say “I have a question, give me an answer.” But you’re getting proactively pushed things that help you, that make you better, whatever. That does seem like it’s soon.

CHRIS ANDERSON: So what have you seen that’s coming up internally that you think is going to blow people’s minds? Give us at least a hint of what the next big jaw dropper is.

AI for Science and Software Development

SAM ALTMAN: The thing that I’m personally most excited about is AI for science. At this point I think I am a big believer that the most important driver of the world and people’s lives getting better and better is new scientific discovery. We can do more things with less. We sort of push back the frontier of what’s possible. We’re starting to hear a lot from scientists with our latest models that they’re actually just more productive than they were before. That’s actually mattering to what they can discover.

CHRIS ANDERSON: What’s the plausible near term discovery like room temperature superconductors? That would be a great way to… Is that possible?

SAM ALTMAN: Yeah, I don’t think that’s prevented by the laws of physics. So it should be possible, but we don’t know for sure. I think you’ll start to see some meaningful progress against disease with AI assisted tools. Physics maybe takes a little bit longer, but I hope for it.

So that’s like one direction. Another that I think is big is starting pretty soon, like in the coming months. Software development has already been pretty transformed. Like it’s quite amazing how different the process of creating software is now than it was two years ago. But I expect like another move that big in the coming months as Agentic software engineering really starts to happen.

CHRIS ANDERSON: I’ve heard engineers say that they’ve had almost like religious moments with some of the new models where suddenly they can do in an afternoon what would have taken them two years.

SAM ALTMAN: Yeah, yeah, it’s… It really is like that’s been one of my big “feel the AGI” moments.

Risks and Safety Concerns

CHRIS ANDERSON: But talk about what is the scariest thing that you’ve seen because it… A lot of people picture you as, you know, you have access to this stuff and we hear all these rumors coming out of AI and it’s like, “Oh my God, they’ve seen consciousness or they’ve seen AGI. Or they’ve seen some kind of apocalypse coming.” Have you seen, has there been a scary moment when you’ve seen something internally and thought, “Uh oh, we need to pay attention to this.”

SAM ALTMAN: There have been like moments of awe. And I think with that is always like, how far is this going to go? What is this going to be? But there’s no, like we don’t secretly have, you know, we’re not secretly sitting on a conscious model or something that’s capable of self improvement or anything like that.

You know, people have very different views of what the big AI risks are going to be. And I myself have evolved on thinking about where we’re going to see those. But I continue to believe there will come very powerful models that people can misuse in big ways. People talk a lot about the potential for new kinds of bioterror models that can present like a real cybersecurity challenge. Models that are capable of self improvement in a way that leads to some sort of loss of control. So I think there are big risks there. And then there’s a lot of other stuff, which honestly is kind of what I think many people mean, where people talk about disinformation or models saying things that they don’t like or things like that.

CHRIS ANDERSON: Sticking with the first of those. Do you check for that internally before?

SAM ALTMAN: Of course, yeah. So we have this preparedness framework that outlines how we do that.

CHRIS ANDERSON: I mean, you’ve had some departures from your safety team. How many people have departed? Why have they left?

SAM ALTMAN: We have, I don’t know the exact number, but they’re clearly different views about AI safety systems. I would really point to our track record. There are people who will say all sorts of things. You know, something like 10% of the world uses our systems now a lot. And we are very proud of the safety track record.

CHRIS ANDERSON: But track record isn’t the issue in a way, because, no, it doesn’t. We’re talking about an exponentially growing power where we fear that we may wake up one day and the world is ending. So it’s really not about track record. It’s about plausibly saying that the pieces are in place to shut things down quickly if we see a danger.

SAM ALTMAN: Oh yeah, yeah, no, of course, of course that’s important. You don’t like wake up one day and say, “Hey, we didn’t have any safety process in place. Now we think the model is really smart. So now we have to care about safety.” You have to care about it all along this exponential curve, of course the stakes increase and there are big challenges. But the way we learn how to build safe systems is this iterative process of deploying them to the world. Getting feedback while the stakes are relatively low, learning about like, “Hey, this is something we have to address.” And I think as we move into these agentic systems, there’s a whole big category of new things we have to learn to address.

Defining AGI

CHRIS ANDERSON: So let’s talk about agentic systems and the relationship between that and AGI. I think there’s confusion out there. I’m confused. So artificial general intelligence. It feels like ChatGPT is already a general intelligence. I can ask about anything and it comes back with an intelligent answer. Why isn’t that AGI?

SAM ALTMAN: It doesn’t. First of all, you can’t ask it anything. That’s very nice of you to say, but there’s a lot of things it’s still embarrassingly bad at. But even if we fix those, which hopefully we will, it doesn’t continuously learn and improve. It can’t go get better at something that it’s currently weak at. It can’t go discover new science and update its understanding and do that.

And it also kind of can’t… Even if we lower the bar, it can’t just sort of do any knowledge work you could do in front of a computer. I actually, even without the sort of ability to get better at something it doesn’t know yet, I might accept that as a definition of AGI, but the current systems, you can’t say like, “Hey, go do this task for my job.” And it goes off and clicks around the Internet and calls someone and looks at your files and does it. And without that, it feels definitely short of it.

CHRIS ANDERSON: Do you guys have internally a clear definition of what AGI is and when do you think that we may be there?

SAM ALTMAN: It’s one of these… It’s like the joke. If you’ve got 10 OpenAI researchers in a room and asked to define AGI, you’d get 14 definitions.

CHRIS ANDERSON: That’s worrying though, isn’t it? Because that has been the mission initially. We’re going to be the first to get to AGI. We’ll do so safely, but we don’t have a clear definition of what it is.

SAM ALTMAN: I was going to finish the answer. What I think matters, though, and what people want to know is not where is this one magic moment of “we finish,” but given that what looks like is going to happen is that the models are just going to get smarter and more capable and smarter and more capable and smarter and more capable on this long exponential, different people will call it AGI at different points.

But we all agree it’s going to go way, way past that to whatever you want to call these systems that get much more capable than we are. The thing that matters is how do we talk about a system that is safe through all of these steps and beyond as the system gets more capable than we are, as the system can do things that we don’t totally understand.

And I think more important than a “when is AGI coming” and “what’s the definition of it?” it’s recognizing that we are in this unbelievable exponential curve. And you can say, this is what I think AGI is. You can say, you think this is what you think AGI is. Someone else can say, superintelligence is out here. But we’re going to have to contend and get wonderful benefits from this incredible system. And so I think we should shift the conversation away from what’s the AGI moment to a recognition that, like, this thing is not going to stop. It’s going to go way beyond what any of us would call AGI, and we have to build a society to get the tremendous benefits of this and figure out how to make it safe.

Agentic AI and Safety Challenges

CHRIS ANDERSON: Well, one of the conversations this week has been that the real change moment is… I mean, AGI is a fuzzy thing, but what is clear is agentic AI. When AI is set free to pursue projects on its own and to put the pieces together, you’ve actually, you’ve got a thing called Operator, which starts to do this. And I tried it out. You know, I wanted to book a restaurant, and it’s kind of incredible. It kind of can go ahead and do it, but this is what it… There’s a, you know, it was an intriguing process and, you know, “give me your credit card” and everything else. And I declined in this case to go forward.

But I think this is… This is the challenge that people are going to have. It’s kind of like… It’s an incredible superpower. It’s a little bit scary. And Yoshua Bengio, when he spoke here, said that agentic AI is the thing to pay attention to. This is when everything could go wrong as we give power to AI to go out onto the Internet to do stuff. I mean, going out onto the Internet was always in the sci-fi stories, the moment where, you know, escape happened and potential things could go horribly wrong. How do you both release agentic AI and have guardrails in place that it doesn’t go too far?

SAM ALTMAN: First of all, obviously, you can choose not to do this and say, “I don’t want this. I’m going to call the restaurant and read them my credit card over the phone.”

CHRIS ANDERSON: I could choose, but someone else might say, “Oh, go out ChatGPT onto the Internet at large and rewrite the Internet to make it better for humans” or whatever.

SAM ALTMAN: Yeah, I mean the point I was going to make is just with any new technology it takes a while for people to get comfortable. I remember like when I wouldn’t put my credit card on the Internet because my parents had convinced me, like someone was going to read the number and you had to fill out the form and then call them. And then we kind of all said, okay, we’ll like build anti-fraud systems and we can get comfortable with this. I think people are going to be slow to get comfortable with agentic AI in many ways.

But I also really agree with what you said, which is that even if some people are comfortable with it and some aren’t, we are going to have AI systems clicking around the Internet. And this is I think the most interesting and consequential safety challenge we have yet faced. Because AI that you give access to your systems, your information, the ability to click around on your computer, now those… when the AI makes a mistake, it’s much higher stakes.

It is the gate on… So we talked earlier about safety and capability. I kind of think they’re increasingly becoming one dimensional. Like a good product is a safe product. You will not use our agents if you do not trust that they’re not going to like empty your bank account or delete your data or who knows what else. And so people want to use agents that they can really trust that are really safe. And I think we are gated on our ability to make progress, on our ability to do that. But it’s a fundamental part of the product.

CHRIS ANDERSON: In a world where agency is out there and say that maybe open models are widely distributed and someone says, “Okay, AGI, I want you to go out onto the Internet and spread a meme however you can, that X people are evil” or whatever it is. It doesn’t have to be an individual choice. A single person could let that agent out there and the agent could decide, “Well, in order to execute on that function, I got to copy myself everywhere.” And are there red lines that you have clearly drawn internally where you know what the danger moments are and that we cannot put out something that could go beyond this?

SAM ALTMAN: Yeah. So this is the purpose of our preparedness framework and we’ll update that over time. But we’ve tried to outline where we think the most important danger moments are or what the categories are, how we measure that and how we would mitigate something before releasing it. I can tell from the conversation you’re not a big AI fan.

CHRIS ANDERSON: On the contrary, I use it every day. I’m bored by it. I think this is an incredible time to be alive. I wouldn’t be alive any other time and I cannot wait to see where it goes. But we’ve been holding, I think it’s essential to hold. You can’t divide people into those camps. You have to hold a passionate belief in the possibility but not be over seduced because things could go horribly wrong.

SAM ALTMAN: What I was going to say is I totally understand that. I totally understand looking at this and saying this is an unbelievable change coming to the world and maybe I don’t want this or maybe I love parts of it, maybe I love talking to ChatGPT, but I worry about what’s going to happen to Art and I worry about the pace of change and I worry about these agents clicking here, clicking around the Internet. And maybe on balance I wish this weren’t happening or maybe I wish it were happening a little slower or maybe I wish it were happening in a way where like I could pick and choose what parts of progress were going to happen.

And I think the fear is totally rational. The sort of anxiety is totally rational. We all have a lot of it too. But A, there will be tremendous upside, obviously, you know, you use it every day, you like it. B, I really believe that society figures out over time with some big mistakes along the way how to get technology right. And C, this is going to happen. This is like a discovery of fundamental physics that the world now knows about and it’s going to be part of our world. And I think this conversation is really important. I think talking about these areas of danger are really important. Talking about new economic models are really important. But we have to embrace this with caution but not fear or we will get run by with other people that use AI to do better.

AI Safety and Regulation

CHRIS ANDERSON: You’ve actually been one of the most eloquent proponents of safety. You testified in the Senate, I think you said basically that we should form a new safety agency that licenses any effort that is it will refuse to license certain efforts. Do you still believe in that policy proposal?

SAM ALTMAN: I have learned more about how the government works. I don’t think this is quite the right policy proposal.

CHRIS ANDERSON: What is the right policy proposal?

SAM ALTMAN: I do think the idea that as these systems get more advanced and have legitimate global impact, we need some way, maybe the companies themselves put together the right framework or the right model for this, but we need some way that very advanced models have external safety testing and we understand when we get close to some of these danger zones, I very much still believe in that.

CHRIS ANDERSON: It struck me as ironic that a safety agency might be what we want, and yet agency is the very thing that is unsafe. There’s something odd about the language there, but any click on the slide and it’s not going. So I asked.

SAM ALTMAN: Can I say one more thing?

CHRIS ANDERSON: Yes, please.

SAM ALTMAN: I do think this concept of we need to define rigorous testing for models, understand what the threats that we collectively society most want to focus on, and make sure that as models are getting more capable, we have a system where we all get to understand what’s being released in the world. I think this is really important, and I think we’re not far away from models that are going to be of great public interest in that sense.

CHRIS ANDERSON: So, Sam, I asked your 01 Pro Reasoning model, which is incredibly.

SAM ALTMAN: Thank you. For $200.

CHRIS ANDERSON: $200 a month. It’s a bargain at the price. What is the single most penetrating question I could ask you? It thought about it for two minutes. Two minutes. You want to see the question? I do. “Sam, given that you’re helping create technology that could reshape the destiny of our entire species, who granted you or anyone the moral authority to do that? And how are you personally responsible, accountable if you’re wrong?” It was good. That was impressive.

SAM ALTMAN: You’ve been asking me versions of this for the last half hour. What do you think?

Moral Authority and Responsibility

CHRIS ANDERSON: But what I would say is this. Here’s my version of that question, but no answer. What was your question to me?

SAM ALTMAN: How would you answer that one in your shoes?

CHRIS ANDERSON: I don’t know. I am puzzled by you. I’m kind of awed by you, because you built one of the most astonishing things out there. There are two narratives about you out there. One is you are this incredible visionary who’s done the impossible and you shocked the world with far fewer people than Google. You came out with something that was much more powerful than anything you’ve done. I mean, it is amazing what you’ve built.

But the other narrative is that you have shifted ground, that you’ve shifted from being open AI, this open thing, to the allure of building something super powerful. And, you know, you’ve lost some of your key people. There’s a narrative out there. Some people believe that you’re not to be trusted in this space. I would love to know who you are. What is your narrative about yourself? What are your core values, Sam, that can give us the world confidence that someone with so much power here is entitled to it.

SAM ALTMAN: Look, I think like anyone else, I’m a nuanced character that doesn’t reduce well to one dimension here. So, you know, probably some of the good things are true and probably some of the criticism is true.

In terms of OpenAI, our goal is to make AGI and distribute it, make it safe for the broad benefit of humanity. I think by all accounts we have done a lot in that direction. Clearly our tactics had shifted over time. I think we didn’t really know what we were going to be when we grew up. We didn’t think we would have to build a company around this. We learned a lot about how it goes and the realities of what these systems were going to take from capital.

But I think we’ve been in terms of putting incredibly capable AI with a high degree of safety in the hands of a lot of people and giving them tools to sort of do whatever amazing things they’re going to do. I think it’d be hard to give us a bad grade on that. I do think it’s fair that we should be open sourcing more. I think it was reasonable for all of the reasons that you asked earlier as we weren’t sure about the impact these systems were going to have and how to make them safe, that we acted with precaution.

A lot of your questions earlier would suggest at least some sympathy to the fact that we’ve operated that way. But now I think we have a better understanding as a world and it is time for us to put very capable open systems out into the world. If you invite me back next year, you will probably yell at me for somebody who’s misused these open source systems and say why did you do that? That was bad. You should have not gone back to your open roots.

But you know, there are trade-offs in everything we do and we are one player in this, one voice in this AI revolution trying to do the best we can and kind of steward this technology into the world in a responsible way. We’ve definitely made mistakes. We’ll definitely make more in the future on the whole. I think we have over the last almost decade, it’s been a long time now. You know, we have mostly done the thing we’ve set out to do. We have a long way to go in front of us. Our tactics will shift more in the future. But adherence to this sort of mission and what we’re trying to do, I think very strong.

Power and Responsibility

CHRIS ANDERSON: You posted this. Well, okay, so here’s the Ring of Power from Lord of the Rings, your rival, I will say, not your best friend at the moment, Elon Musk claimed that, you know, he thought that you’d been corrupted by the Ring of Power. An allegation that, by the way. An allegation. An allegation that could be applied to Elon as well, you know, to be fair. But I’m curious now, people, you have.

SAM ALTMAN: I might respond. I’m thinking about it. I might say something.

CHRIS ANDERSON: What is in everyone’s mind as we see technology CEOs get more powerful, get richer, is can they handle it or does it become irresistible? Does the power and the wealth make it impossible to sometimes do the right thing? And you just have to cling tightly to that ring? What do you think? Do you feel that ring sometimes?

SAM ALTMAN: How do you think I’m doing relative to other CEOs that have gotten a lot of power and changed how they act or done a bunch of stuff in the world? How do you think.

CHRIS ANDERSON: You have a beautiful. You are not a rude, angry person who comes out and says aggressive things to other people. You do not do that.

SAM ALTMAN: That’s my single vice.

CHRIS ANDERSON: No, I think in the way that you personally conduct yourself, it’s impressive. I mean, the question some people ask is, is that the real you or is there something else going on? But I just hope you have seen.

SAM ALTMAN: You put up the Sauron Ring of power or whatever that thing is. So I’ll take the feedback. What is like something I have done where you think I’ve been corrupted by power?

CHRIS ANDERSON: I think the fear is that just the transition of OpenAI to a for profit model is, you know, some people say, well, there you go. You got corrupted by the desire for wealth. You know, at one point there was going to be no equity in it. It’ll make you fabulously wealthy, by the way. I don’t think that is your motivation, personally. I think you want to build stuff that is insanely cool. And what I worry about is that your is the competitive feeling that you see other people doing it and it makes it impossible to develop at the right pace. But you tell me if you don’t feel that so few people in the world have the kind of capability and potential you have. We don’t know what it feels like. What does it feel like?

SAM ALTMAN: Shockingly the same as before. I think you can get used to anything step by step. I think if I were transported from 10 years ago to right now, all at once, it would feel very disorienting. But anything does become sort of the new normal. So it doesn’t feel any different. And it’s strange to be sitting here talking about this, but like, you know, the monotony of day to day life, which I mean in the best possible way, feels exactly the same.

CHRIS ANDERSON: You’re the same person.

SAM ALTMAN: I mean, I’m sure I’m not in all sorts of ways, but I don’t feel any different.

Parenthood and Perspective

CHRIS ANDERSON: This was a beautiful thing you posted. Your son, I mean, that last thing you said, that I’ve never felt love like this. I think any parent in the room so knows that feeling, that wild biological feeling that humans have and AIs never will of your whole day, your kid. And I’m wondering whether that’s changed how you think about things. Like if, you know, say here’s a red box, here’s a black box with a red button on it, you can press that button and you give your son likely the most unbelievable life, but also you inject a 10% chance that he gets destroyed. Do you press that button?

SAM ALTMAN: In the literal case, no. If the question is, do I feel like I’m doing that with my work? The answer is I also don’t feel like that. Having a kid changed a lot of things and by far the most amazing thing that has ever happened to me. Like everything everybody says is true. The thing my co-founder Ilya said once is, I don’t know, this is a paraphrase, something like, “I don’t know what the meaning of life is, but for sure it has something to do with babies” and it’s like unbelievably accurate.

Changed how much I’m willing to spend time on certain things and the kind of cost of not being with my kid is just crazily high. But you know, I really cared about not destroying the world before, I really care about it now. I didn’t need a kid for that part. I mean, I definitely think more about what the future will be like for him in particular. But I feel like responsibility to do the best thing I can for the future, for everybody.

The Inevitability of AI Development

CHRIS ANDERSON: Tristan Harris gave a very powerful talk here this week in which he said that the key problem in his view was that you and your peers in these other models all feel basically that the development of advanced AI is inevitable, that the race is on, and that there is no choice but to try and win that race. And to do so as responsibly as you can. And maybe there’s a scenario where your super intelligent AI can act as a brake on everyone else’s or something like that. But the very fact that everyone believes it is inevitable means that that is a pathway to serious risk and instability. Do you think that you and your peers do feel that it’s inevitable? And can you see any pathway out of that where we could collectively agree to just slow things down a bit, have society as a whole weigh in a bit and say, no, we don’t want this to happen quite as fast. It’s too disruptive.

SAM ALTMAN: First of all, I think people slow things down all the time because the technology is not ready, because something’s not safe enough, because something doesn’t work. There are, I think, all of the efforts hold on things, pause on things, delay on things, don’t release certain capabilities. So I think this happens. And again, this is where I think the track record does matter. If we were rushing things out and there were all sorts of problems, either the product didn’t work as people wanted it to, or there were real safety issues or other things there. And I will come back to a change we made.

I think you could do that. There is communication between most of the efforts, with one exception. I think all of the efforts care a lot about AI safety. And I think that there’s really deep care to get this right. I think the caricature of this is just like this crazy race or sprint or whatever misses the nuance of people are trying to put out models quickly and make great products for people. But people feel the impact of this so incredibly that, you know, I think if you could go sit in a meeting in OpenAI or other companies, you’d be like, “Oh, these people are really kind of caring about this now.”

We did make a change recently to how we think about one part of what’s traditionally been understood as safety, which is with our new image model, we’ve given users much more freedom on what we would traditionally think about as speech harms. If you try to get offended by the model, will the model let you be offended? In the past, we’ve had much tighter guardrails on this. But I think part of model alignment is following what the user of a model wants it to do within the very broad bounds of what society decides.

So if you ask the model to depict a bunch of violence or something like that, or to sort of reinforce some stereotype, there’s a question of whether or not it should do that. And we’re taking a much more permissive stance. Now there’s a place where that starts to interact with real world harms that we have to figure out how to draw the line for. But I think there will be cases where a company says, okay, we’ve heard the feedback from society. People really don’t want models to censor them in ways that they don’t think make sense. That’s a fair safety negotiation.

Collective Decision Making

CHRIS ANDERSON: But to the extent that this is a problem of collective belief, the solution to those kinds of problems is to bring people together and meet at one point and make a different agreement. If there was a group of people, say here or out there in the world, who were willing to host a summit of the best ethicists, technologists, but not too many people. Small but. And you and your peers to try to crack what agreed safety lines could be across the world, would you be willing to attend? Would you urge your colleagues to.

SAM ALTMAN: But I’m much more interested in what our hundreds of millions of users want as a whole. I think a lot of the room has historically been decided in small elite summits. One of the cool new things about AI is our AI can talk to everybody on earth and we can learn the collective value preference of what everybody wants rather than have a bunch of people who are blessed by society to sit in a room and make these decisions.

I think that’s very cool and I think you will see us do more in that direction. And when we have gotten things wrong, because the elites in the room had a different opinion about what people wanted for the guardrails on ImageGen than what people actually wanted. And we couldn’t point to real world harm. So we made that change. I’m proud of that.

CHRIS ANDERSON: I mean, there is a long track record of unintended consequences coming out of the actions of hundreds of millions of people.

SAM ALTMAN: And there are also a hundred people in a room, right?

CHRIS ANDERSON: And the hundreds of millions of people don’t have control over, they don’t necessarily see what the next step could lead to.

SAM ALTMAN: I am hopeful that that is totally accurate and totally right. I am hopeful that AI can help us be wiser, make better decisions, can talk to us. And if we say, hey, I want thing X, you know, rather than like the crowd spin that up, AI can say, “Hey, totally understand that’s what you want. If that’s what you want at the end of this conversation, you’re in control. You pick. But have you considered it from this person’s perspective or the impact it will have on us people?” I think AI can help us be wiser and make better collective governance decisions than we could before.

The Future Generation

CHRIS ANDERSON: Well, we’re well out of time, Sam. I’ll give you the last word. What kind of world do you believe, all things considered, your son will grow up into?

SAM ALTMAN: I remember it’s so long ago now. I don’t know when the first iPad came out. Is it like 15 years? Something like that. I remember watching a YouTube video at the time of a little toddler sitting in a doctor’s office waiting room or something. There was a magazine, like one of those old glossy cover magazines, and the toddler had his hand on it and was going like this and kind of angry. And to that toddler, it was like a broken iPad. She never thought of a world that didn’t have, you know, touch screens in them. And to all the adults watching this, it was this amazing thing because it was like, it’s so new. It’s so amazing. It’s a miracle. Like, of course, you know, magazines are the way the world works.

My kids hopefully will never be smarter than AI. They will never grow up in a world where products and services are not incredibly smart, incredibly capable. They will never grow up in a world where computers don’t just kind of understand you. And do, you know, for some definition of whatever you can imagine, whatever you can imagine, It’ll be a world of incredible material abundance. It’ll be a world where the rate of change is incredibly fast and amazing new things are happening. And it’ll be a world where, like, individual ability, impact, whatever is just so far beyond what a person can do today.

I hope that my kids and all of your kids will look back at us with some pity and nostalgia and be like, “They lived such horrible lives. They were so limited. The world sucked so much.” I think that’s great.

CHRIS ANDERSON: It’s incredible what you’ve built. It really is. It’s unbelievable. I think over the next few years, you’re going to have some of the biggest opportunities, the biggest moral challenges, the biggest decisions to make of perhaps any human in history, pretty much. You should know that everyone here will be cheering you on to do the right thing.

SAM ALTMAN: We will do our best. Thank you very much.

CHRIS ANDERSON: Thank you for coming to TED. Thank you.

SAM ALTMAN: Thank you very much.

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