Speaker 1: Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio news.
Speaker 2: It's the rarest of product launches, when a company debuts
Speaker 2: something most of the general public couldn't have imagined, and
Speaker 2: then all of a sudden, it seems like no one
Speaker 2: can talk about anything else.
Speaker 3: Techi's everywhere short circuiting with excitement. This is the closest
Speaker 3: thing I've saying to like the star Trek computer.
Speaker 2: Are we going to have this thing filling out like
Speaker 2: dating profiles?
Speaker 3: Now?
Speaker 2: Am I going to fall in love with chat gpt?
Speaker 2: Open Ai released chat GPT in twenty twenty two, and
Speaker 2: as enthusiasm for the chatbot surged, so did the company's ambitions,
Speaker 2: along with interest from investors, which made another round of
Speaker 2: headline grabbing news from open Ai.
Speaker 1: So surprising the company that gave us chat GPT fired
Speaker 1: it's CEO, Sam Altman, who has drawn comparisons to tech
Speaker 1: giants like Steve Jobs, was dismissed by the open Ai
Speaker 1: board Friday. We're reporting their efforts to get Sam Altman back.
Speaker 2: Open Ai rein stinty Sam Altman is CEO and hitting
Speaker 2: go on a bold shake out tapping Altman was fired
Speaker 2: and rehired over the course of a long Weekend. Well,
Speaker 2: it has been and continues to be a wild ride
Speaker 2: for open Ai, a company that's not even ten. A
Speaker 2: famous Altman quotation is the days are long, but the
Speaker 2: decades are short. He recently amended that to the days
Speaker 2: are long and the decades are also being very long.
Speaker 2: At least that's what he told journalist Josh Tieringal recently.
Speaker 2: Josh got an invite from open Ai to spend a
Speaker 2: few days with Altman, someone he's interviewed before, for a
Speaker 2: piece that's the cover story of the latest issue of
Speaker 2: Bloomberg Business Week.
Speaker 3: Two years after the launch of check GPT and a
Speaker 3: year after the board firing, you know, they had some
Speaker 3: stuff that kind of wanted to straighten out for the record.
Speaker 2: Josh went to San Francisco and conducted what is the
Speaker 2: most wide ranging interview Altman has done as open AI's
Speaker 2: chief executive. They talked about the past and looked ahead
Speaker 2: to the future, acknowledging that there is only so much
Speaker 2: faith you can put in predictions about what's next for
Speaker 2: a company like open Ai. I'm David Gera, and this
Speaker 2: is the big take from Bloomberg News Today. On the show,
Speaker 2: Josh Tieringel unpacks his interview with open AI's Sam Altman.
Speaker 2: New details about the launch of chat gpt and that
Speaker 2: weekend in twenty twenty three when Altman lost his job
Speaker 2: and fought to get it back. Plus what Josh expects
Speaker 2: AI regulation will look like during Donald Trump's second term,
Speaker 2: and what motivated Altman to donate one million dollars to
Speaker 2: Trump's inauguration committee. I'd love to start with some history
Speaker 2: and a bit of biography here. What was Sam Waltman's
Speaker 2: life like before he founded this company.
Speaker 3: Before open ai took off. Sam Altman was a Silicon
Speaker 3: Valley famous guy. He was known as a venture capitalist.
Speaker 3: He was known as a sort of CEO and startup whisperer.
Speaker 3: He had very rigorous standards as far as the kin
Speaker 3: of people he would invest in. But he ran y Combinator,
Speaker 3: which is a really famous fund that took an active
Speaker 3: role in kind of curating leadership. He was also known
Speaker 3: on the kind of circuit of you know, Ted talks
Speaker 3: and conferences like he was that kind of famous. As
Speaker 3: soon as chat gpt launched, I would say within weeks
Speaker 3: he was world famous. And that's what happens when you
Speaker 3: make something that one hundred million people use within six
Speaker 3: eight weeks.
Speaker 2: Can you walk us through what the launch of chat
Speaker 2: gpt was like for him, how he experienced that moment people.
Speaker 3: Knew that there were chatbots. Chatbots were a thing, they
Speaker 3: were generally pretty clunky, and so chat GPT three point
Speaker 3: five shows up, and people inside open Ai were really
Speaker 3: skeptical of why they were launching it. They thought it
Speaker 3: wasn't ready. Basically, they thought it was going to fail.
Speaker 3: And Sam, as he details in the interview, said that,
Speaker 3: you know, he doesn't make a whole lot of I
Speaker 3: say we're doing it, we're doing it kinds of decisions,
Speaker 3: but in this instance, you know, he kind of put
Speaker 3: his finger in the wind. He read the zeitgeist. He
Speaker 3: thought the product was more than good enough, and so
Speaker 3: they launched it. And so for the first handful of
Speaker 3: days it was doing okay, and there was a lot
Speaker 3: of skepticism still within the company, well, well, look, this
Speaker 3: is ridiculous. Why did we do it. It's not taking off.
Speaker 3: Because he'd been at y Combinator, he was familiar with
Speaker 3: the sort of pattern of a launch, and so what
Speaker 3: he was seeing was in the first five six days
Speaker 3: that you know, there would be a peak of usage
Speaker 3: during the day and it would go down at night,
Speaker 3: a peak of usage during the day and go down
Speaker 3: at night. But what made it different and where he says,
Speaker 3: I think that people didn't quite realize inside the company
Speaker 3: what they had was that the trough was always higher
Speaker 3: and the peak was always higher. And so after about
Speaker 3: a week he was like, folks, we are failing to
Speaker 3: understand what we have on our hands.
Speaker 2: Central to this story is how this company is structured.
Speaker 2: It's organized at the beginning as a nonprofit. Why was
Speaker 2: that the case?
Speaker 3: You know, the structure of the company is almost as
Speaker 3: complicated explaining artificial general intelligence. It's weird, And I think
Speaker 3: it started from this very sincere place, which was we're
Speaker 3: going to make artificial intelligence that will benefit the world.
Speaker 3: And so what we shouldn't do is have this incredible
Speaker 3: profit motive looming over us at all times. Let's not
Speaker 3: make short term quarterly decisions. Let's make decisions in decade
Speaker 3: long increments. And that was the thing that all of
Speaker 3: the founders agreed to, and among those founders or co
Speaker 3: founders was Elon Musk Right. What they found out along
Speaker 3: the way is not only that that was a sort
Speaker 3: of doomed structure for a lot of just human reasons,
Speaker 3: but that the power of compute, which is the noun
Speaker 3: that we sort of use to talk about what it
Speaker 3: costs to generate an artificial intelligence model. Just the cost
Speaker 3: of GPUs, the cost of energy is so huge that
Speaker 3: a nonprofit couldn't compete. And so at some point they
Speaker 3: were confronted with the decision, which is remain this sort
Speaker 3: of pure nonprofit in which you're kind of a sleepy
Speaker 3: research arm but all the real computing work is happening
Speaker 3: within the big three or four companies in the world,
Speaker 3: or start to compete. And I think the founding origins
Speaker 3: of that were sincere and that they really believed initially
Speaker 3: when we're just going to do this for humanity, and
Speaker 3: then had to confront reality.
Speaker 2: You mentioned the sleepiness of research. It clearly is the
Speaker 2: thing that animates him. He has this obsessiveness with research,
Speaker 2: obsessiveness with artificial general intelligence. What is AGI?
Speaker 3: David, Are you kidding me? You call me and you
Speaker 3: go back and forth, you go back and well, I'll
Speaker 3: tell you. I mean, well, yeah, one of the most
Speaker 3: interesting things and confounding things if you're just a normal person.
Speaker 3: Tuning into this debate is that even the people pursuing
Speaker 3: artificial general intelligence cannot tell you what artificial general intelligence is.
Speaker 3: And so even in the interview, at some point, you know,
Speaker 3: Sam says, if it we were to create a model
Speaker 3: that could do the work of multiple humans, that you
Speaker 3: could assign it a task and it can complete it,
Speaker 3: that would be AGI ish. So the guy, the most
Speaker 3: famous guy pursuing AGI uses ish. Now that is confounding.
Speaker 3: That said, a lot of great scientific discoveries and a
Speaker 3: lot of you know, the things that propel us forward
Speaker 3: in civilization are a little bit ish, but it's very
Speaker 3: hard for me to tell you what AGI is if
Speaker 3: Sam Altman can't do it.
Speaker 2: Let me ask you one more question along these lines,
Speaker 2: which is you mentioned you've spoken with him a number
Speaker 2: of times. How has your sense of him, your understanding
Speaker 2: of him evolved through those interviews.
Speaker 3: I think that the one thing that continues to resonate
Speaker 3: is he is one hundred percent held on getting to
Speaker 3: AGI before anybody else, and he is running the company
Speaker 3: with that singular goal in mind. And so when they're
Speaker 3: doing all these raises, when they're staying focused on the
Speaker 3: latest model, tried to stay out in front of everybody
Speaker 3: I think it's because he's animated by this sense of
Speaker 3: purpose around the science and a belief as a business
Speaker 3: person that getting there first is the only thing that matters.
Speaker 2: There's this crucial moment in the Open Eye story that
Speaker 2: plays out over a weekend. Sam Alton is fired. In
Speaker 2: a few days later, he's rehired. We're now more than
Speaker 2: a year away from that, and I wonder if anyone
Speaker 2: if he has a clear understanding of why things transpired
Speaker 2: the way they did.
Speaker 3: I think he has the clearest understanding of anyone who
Speaker 3: is not on that board. I tried to get at
Speaker 3: it in a number of ways, right. I even offered
Speaker 3: my own theory, which is that basically the board was
Speaker 3: a bunch of purists and they were formed at a
Speaker 3: moment when a nonprofit pursuit of artificial intelligence seemed like
Speaker 3: the right thing, and that they were struggling to adapt
Speaker 3: to the reality that basically being a nonprofit in this
Speaker 3: space was going to doom the company to failure, and
Speaker 3: that Sam was determined to let it fail. I think
Speaker 3: that is actually the crux of the tension. My hunch,
Speaker 3: honestly is that this was something that was doomed to
Speaker 3: happen from the moment they decided to be founded as
Speaker 3: a nonprofit without getting all the parties together in front
Speaker 3: of microphonts. I think we have enough information to know
Speaker 3: that this was a conflict around the purpose of the work,
Speaker 3: and the original board really felt like it was consistent
Speaker 3: with the mission of open Ai to kill the company
Speaker 3: if it couldn't make AI with a sort of rigorous, safe,
Speaker 3: nonprofit standard, and he was not going to let the
Speaker 3: company die.
Speaker 2: You asked Sam what the fallout has been from that moment,
Speaker 2: from that hectic weekend, if he felt like afterward he
Speaker 2: needed to convince his colleagues that he's good, I think
Speaker 2: is how you put it. How did his firing, his
Speaker 2: rehiring effect his ability to sort of work with people
Speaker 2: in open ai and more broadly in the kind of
Speaker 2: nascent AI industry.
Speaker 3: Yeah, look, I'm super fascinated by the human elements behind
Speaker 3: all of this stuff. You know, he said that the
Speaker 3: first couple of days and probably the first couple of
Speaker 3: weeks were super weird. People looked at him funny. People
Speaker 3: didn't know exactly what this was all about. I think
Speaker 3: within the industry itself, you know, it was the classic
Speaker 3: everybody at a competing company, you know, had a bowl
Speaker 3: of popcorn and was like, let's see how this goes, right.
Speaker 3: But I also think that there was an understanding in
Speaker 3: the industry writ large, in the companies that they partner
Speaker 3: with and the companies that they compete with, that Sam
Speaker 3: is a force, and that they didn't question his credibility
Speaker 3: or his credentials to run the company. They were probably
Speaker 3: hoping he would get fired and be forced to start
Speaker 3: all over again somewhere else that they could catch up
Speaker 3: and then as far as it, you know, to return
Speaker 3: to what happens inside the company, I think it's one
Speaker 3: of those things where if you're there day in and
Speaker 3: day out and there is the kind of attrition and
Speaker 3: turnover that you would normally expect in a startup, you know,
Speaker 3: within a couple of months, it was a blip. So
Speaker 3: I think that's how you reckoned with it.
Speaker 2: After the break, we turned from open AI's past to
Speaker 2: its future. When Sam Alton returned as the CEO of
Speaker 2: open Ai, he retook the helm of a rapidly evolving
Speaker 2: and closely watched company. He told journalist Josh Tirerngeal that
Speaker 2: after Altman was reinstated. His attitude was, as he put it,
Speaker 2: we got a complicated job to do. I'm going to
Speaker 2: keep doing this, basically resolved to put his head down
Speaker 2: and get back to work. I asked Josh how that
Speaker 2: played out and what altman's life is like day to day.
Speaker 2: There's a moment where he shows you his calendar, and
Speaker 2: I wonder if you could just describe sort of what
Speaker 2: that's like.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so, Sam, when I asked about how he runs
Speaker 3: the company, just sort of day to day where he's
Speaker 3: spending his time, you know, he just flipped his laptop
Speaker 3: around and pulled up his Google calendar and it's a mess.
Speaker 3: I mean, it's just an absolute mess of colors, conflicts
Speaker 3: starting from about seven am going to about nine fifteen,
Speaker 3: with some dinners after even that, and lots of overlapping meetings,
Speaker 3: lots of small meetings, lots of one on ones with engineers.
Speaker 3: I'm sure many of your listeners have calendars that look similar.
Speaker 3: What I would say is that it was just day
Speaker 3: after day after day prescheduled. There's not a lot of
Speaker 3: walking around time. It's indicative of a company that is
Speaker 3: in a full competitive sprint to get someplace. So yeah,
Speaker 3: it was pretty daunting.
Speaker 2: Let me ask you a bit about the future of
Speaker 2: the company and his plans for it. Opening Eye has
Speaker 2: already changed the history the trajectory of the AI industry.
Speaker 2: What did Sam tell you about his plans for the
Speaker 2: future of the company, sort of where he sees things going.
Speaker 3: He used the word protect, that the company is structured
Speaker 3: to protect research, and so I think those are the
Speaker 3: words I would look to as I monitor the company
Speaker 3: over the next few years. He is hell bent on
Speaker 3: protecting the research and getting to AGI. I think he
Speaker 3: believes everything else will take care of itself if they
Speaker 3: can do that. And in that way, you know, even
Speaker 3: though the tech is wildly new and unconventional, the business
Speaker 3: approach is fairly conventional, right. It's not that different to
Speaker 3: a late nineties, you know, web startup, which is we
Speaker 3: got to get audience, right, We got to get as
Speaker 3: big as possible, as quickly as possible, and then the
Speaker 3: finances will sort themselves out. It's Amazon's strategy, It's Facebook strategy.
Speaker 3: So that's how I would project with the next few
Speaker 3: years old protect the research, productize effectively. See where we
Speaker 3: are in eighteen months to two years.
Speaker 2: Josh, what are the biggest challenges that he and OpenAI
Speaker 2: face sort of seeking that objective. Is it bandwidth? Is
Speaker 2: it getting compute?
Speaker 3: The three challenges that the industry as a whole phases
Speaker 3: are just getting the compute right, getting access to the
Speaker 3: GPUs that you need the energy to power those GPUs.
Speaker 3: And then the biggest question and most unknowable is are
Speaker 3: the models plateau Are you continuing to see artificial intelligence
Speaker 3: gain steam in training the models right? He's extremely confident
Speaker 3: that their models are not plateauing. There's some debate within
Speaker 3: the industry whether that's bluster or not. On energy, you know,
Speaker 3: I'd like to be a fairly prepared, smooth interviewer. I
Speaker 3: will admit I was rendered a momentarily mute when I
Speaker 3: asked him about energy. He's like, Fusion's gonna work. I'm sorry,
Speaker 3: what now? Which fusion? When? Huh? But you know, he
Speaker 3: is a co founder of a company called Helion with
Speaker 3: reied Hoffman and some others and believes in fusion is
Speaker 3: coming and fusion will be a sort of silver bullet
Speaker 3: for our energy issues. And then on chips, you know, look,
Speaker 3: they like everybody else, they are finding and buying as
Speaker 3: many chips as they possibly can they have their own
Speaker 3: fab effort going to make sure that they're never beholding
Speaker 3: to one supplier. So those are the three things. He
Speaker 3: feels very confident that their position to address all three.
Speaker 3: And then the fourth, which is unique to open AI,
Speaker 3: which I asked about, is like, right, let's talk about
Speaker 3: governance because we now are in a place where the
Speaker 3: man who really is calling himself a kind of co
Speaker 3: president has a competing AI company was once Sam Altman's
Speaker 3: co founder and is currently suing the company. That is
Speaker 3: a level of volatility. You know, I can't predict, he
Speaker 3: can't predict, but Elon Musk's existence is a factor in
Speaker 3: how companies will do in developing AI.
Speaker 2: You mentioned governance, Let me ask you about his relationship
Speaker 2: with Washington and policymakers and politicians there. He donated a
Speaker 2: million dollars to Donald Trump's inauguration fund. He told you
Speaker 2: he supports any president. How authentic did that sound to
Speaker 2: you when he said that that he, you know, would
Speaker 2: support a Democrat or Republican, whoever's in.
Speaker 3: The White House. You know, it's hard for me to
Speaker 3: speculate about his authenticity. What I can say is that
Speaker 3: taking a step back strategy whether I'm Sam Waltman or
Speaker 3: anyone else who is competing with Elon Musk, I think
Speaker 3: the smartest approach is to lavish praise on the President
Speaker 3: and to try and create any sort of friction I
Speaker 3: possibly could between Elon Musk and the President. And so
Speaker 3: by saying oh, I support of course, I support the
Speaker 3: American President. I may not agree with everything, but he's
Speaker 3: the president. I wish for his great success, and then
Speaker 3: saying oh, you know Elon, you know he's going to
Speaker 3: do what he's going to do. He's the co president.
Speaker 3: I think anything that creates that friction is probably beneficial
Speaker 3: to people competing with Elon. It will not surprise me
Speaker 3: if that's a tactic taken by others as well. But
Speaker 3: I you know, as I said, I can't speak to
Speaker 3: the authenticity of it. I just think there's not the
Speaker 3: worst strategy.
Speaker 2: How does he see the role of Washington in regulating
Speaker 2: this new technology? Does he see a role for Washington here?
Speaker 2: And what does that role look like under this new administration?
Speaker 3: Yeah? Famously, Look, Sam is a he thought this should
Speaker 3: be a nationalized technology similar to nuclear power. He thought
Speaker 3: it was that powerful, that dangerous, and that important to
Speaker 3: the national interest and he got no buyers, no bites,
Speaker 3: no interest, and he needed the money, I mean, the
Speaker 3: open AI needed the money in the investment. Under the
Speaker 3: Biden administration, he was very close with Secretary of Commerce
Speaker 3: Jeania Romando. He was very close to the commission that
Speaker 3: worked on the executive order around AI. He wants regulation.
Speaker 3: I think some of that is ideological. I think some
Speaker 3: of it's competitive when you're out in front, Hey, let's
Speaker 3: tap the brakes on everybody else, right, But in the
Speaker 3: last four years he has been an active participant and
Speaker 3: collaborator with the federal government in figuring out what to
Speaker 3: do with artificial intelligence. But he's no dummy. I think
Speaker 3: he's going to take the temperature of the Trump administration
Speaker 3: see where it is, react accordingly. But yeah, historically he's
Speaker 3: been very much in favor of regulation of these models.
Speaker 2: This is the Big Take from Bloomberg News. I'm David Gura.
Speaker 2: This episode was produced by Alex Tie and it was
Speaker 2: edited by our senior producer, Naomi Shavin. It was mixed
Speaker 2: and sound designed by Alex Segura and fact checked by
Speaker 2: Adriana Tapia. Our senior editor is Elizabeth Ponso. Our executive
Speaker 2: producer is Nicole Beamster Boor Sage Bauman is Bloomberg's head
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