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Home » Transcript: OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s Interview on Huge Conversations Podcast

Transcript: OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s Interview on Huge Conversations Podcast

Read the full transcript of CEO of OpenAI Sam Altman’s interview on Huge Conversations Podcast with Cleo Abram titled “Sam Altman Shows Me GPT 5… And What’s Next”, August 8, 2025.

Welcome to Huge Conversations

CLEO ABRAM: Welcome to Huge Conversations. Great to meet you. Thanks for doing this.

SAM ALTMAN: Absolutely.

CLEO ABRAM: So, before we dive in, I’d love to tell you my goal here.

SAM ALTMAN: Okay.

CLEO ABRAM: I’m not going to ask you about valuation or AI talent wars or fundraising or anything like that. I think that’s all very well covered elsewhere.

SAM ALTMAN: It does seem like it.

CLEO ABRAM: Our big goal on this show is to cover how we can use science and tech to make the future better. And the reason that we do all of that is because we really believe that if people see those better futures, they can then help build them. So my goal here is to try my best to time travel with you into different moments in the future that you’re trying to build and see what it looks like.

SAM ALTMAN: Fantastic.

GPT-5: Beyond the Test Scores

CLEO ABRAM: Awesome. Starting with what you just announced. You recently said, surprisingly recently, that “GPT-4 was the dumbest model any of us will ever have to use again.” But GPT-4 can already perform better than 90% of humans at the SAT and the LSAT and the GRE. And it can pass coding exams and sommelier exams and medical licensing. And now you just launched GPT-5. What can GPT-5 do that GPT-4 can’t?

SAM ALTMAN: First of all, one important takeaway is you can have an AI system that can do all those amazing things you just said and it clearly does not replicate a lot of what humans are good at doing, which I think says something about the value of SAT tests or whatever else.

But I think had you gone back to if we were having this conversation the day of GPT-4 launch and we told you how GPT-4 did at those things, you were like, “Oh man, this is going to have huge impacts and some negative impacts on what it means for a bunch of jobs or what people are going to do and this is a bunch of positive impacts” that you might have predicted that haven’t yet come true.

And so there’s something about the way that these models are good that does not capture a lot of other things that we need people to do or care about people doing. And I suspect that same thing is going to happen again with GPT-5. People are going to be blown away by what it does. It’s really good at a lot of things and then they will find that they want it to do even more.

People will use it for all sorts of incredible things. It will transform a lot of knowledge work, a lot of the way we learn, a lot of the way we create. But we people, society will co-evolve with it to expect more with better tools.

So yeah, I think this model is quite remarkable in many ways, quite limited in others. But the fact that for 3-minute, 5-minute, 1-hour tasks that an expert in a field could maybe do or maybe struggle with, the fact that you have in your pocket one piece of software that can do all of these things is really amazing.

I think this is unprecedented at any point in human history that a technology has improved this much this fast. And the fact that we have this tool now, we’re living through it and we’re kind of adjusting step by step. But if we could go back in time five or 10 years and say this thing was coming, we would be like, “Probably not.”

What Makes GPT-5 Special

CLEO ABRAM: Let’s assume that people haven’t seen the headlines. What are the top line specific things that you’re excited about and also the things that you seem to be caveating, the things that maybe you won’t expect it to do?

SAM ALTMAN: The thing that I am most excited about is this is a model for the first time where I feel like I can ask kind of any hard scientific or technical question and get a pretty good answer.

And I’ll give a fun example: actually when I was in junior high, or maybe it was ninth grade, I got a TI-83, this old graphing calculator. And I spent so long making this game called Snake. It was a very popular game with kids in my school. And I was proud when it was done. But programming on a TI-83 was extremely painful. It took a long time. It was really hard to debug and whatever.

And on a whim, with an early copy of GPT-5, I was like, “I wonder if it can make a TI-83 style game of Snake.” And of course it did that perfectly in seven seconds. And then I was like, “Okay, am I supposed to be… Would my 11-year-old self think this was cool or miss something from the process?” And I had three seconds of wondering like, “Oh, is this good or bad?”

And then I immediately said, “Actually now I’m missing this game. I have this idea for a crazy new feature. Let me type it in,” it implements it and the game live updates. And I’m like, “Actually I’d like it to look this way. Actually I’d like to do this thing.”

And I had this experience that reminded me of being 11 and programming again where I was just like, “I can now… I want to try this. Now I have this idea,” but I could do it so fast and I could express ideas and try things and play with things in such real time. I was like, “Oh man.”

I was worried for a second about kids missing the struggle of learning to program in this sort of stone age way. And now I’m just thrilled for them because the way that people will be able to create with these new tools, the speed with which you can sort of bring ideas to life, that’s pretty amazing.

So this idea that GPT-5 can just not only answer all these hard questions for you, but really create on-demand, almost instantaneous software that’s, I think that’s going to be one of the defining elements of the GPT-5 era in a way that did not exist with GPT-4.

The Time Under Tension Question

CLEO ABRAM: As you’re talking about that, I find myself thinking about a concept in weightlifting of “time under tension.” And for those who don’t know, you can squat 100 pounds in three seconds or you can squat 100 pounds in 30, you gain a lot more by squatting it in 30.

And when I think about our creative process and when I’ve felt most like I’ve done my best work, it has required an enormous amount of time you have to sit there and struggle – time under tension.