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