Hard Fork Live, Part 1: Sam Altman and Brad Lightcap of OpenAI

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Speaker 13 Hard Fork Live, the podcast's inaugural event, was sponsored by Premier sponsor IBM, associate sponsor Invesco QQQ, and supporting sponsor Intuit QuickBooks.

Speaker 12 Little behind the scenes, so we're getting ready to go on. And, you know, if you were at the live show, you know that the show started with a marching band coming in that Kevin and I were leading.

Speaker 12 Kevin and I were marching down different staircases, trailed by a band of marching musicians. And so Kevin was sort of, you know, loaded into his position.

Speaker 12 And I went down to the next door with my three musicians. And I go to open the door.
And then, of course, it's locked. And they're already playing the cold open for the show.

Speaker 12 And we have a few seconds left. And I'm like frantically trying to wave someone from the SFJS center and he runs up with his keys.
But fortunately, everything worked out. The music started on time.

Speaker 12 And yeah, that was that. I'm so glad.
That was a near miss. I would have had to go out and march the band in myself.
Yeah.

Speaker 12 It's always interesting. to me when they lock the audience, you know, into the theater.
I wasn't sure exactly what was happening there. Release the bees.

Speaker 12 That's what I mean. Look, when you do a two-hour podcast taping, some people are going to try to leave, and you're going to want to have a plan for that.
It's true.

Speaker 12 And we had a plan, and the plan was you can't leave. The best audience is a captive audience.
Absolutely.

Speaker 12 I'm Kevin Roos at Tech Columnist at the New York Times. I'm Casey Newt from Platformer.
And this is Hard Fork. This week, it's Hard Fork Live.

Speaker 12 You'll hear our first ever podcast taping in front of a live audience in San Francisco.

Speaker 12 We've got a special appearance from San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie and the conversation that had everyone talking this week, it's our extended interview with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and COO Brad Lightcap.

Speaker 12 Got a little spicy.

Speaker 12 Well, Casey, Hard Fork Live is in the books. How are you feeling? Are you recovered? I am floating.

Speaker 12 I think everyone should have the experience of starting a podcast and then having 700 people come to watch it. It really is a, it really makes you feel good.
Yeah, we had such a great time.

Speaker 12 Thank you to everyone who came out. We had a packed house and I got to say, it was so much fun.
It was so much fun.

Speaker 12 And, you know, we had a cocktail hour after where we got to meet everybody and take selfies. And I was meeting folks who had flown down from Seattle, who had flown in from New York.

Speaker 12 We had one guest who came in from Switzerland. So, I mean, the resources that people put into coming to hanging out with us, it just meant so much to us.

Speaker 12 Yeah, it was like people would tell me that they flew in from some other place. And I would think like, really? They're like,

Speaker 12 do you have like a conference here this week? Or what's, what, what actually, brother? Is it like a restaurant you wanted to go to?

Speaker 12 No, but people were so lovely. And we got to meet and talk with so many of our wonderful listeners after the show.
And really fun experience.

Speaker 12 And we also got to have some really great conversations on stage. Yes.

Speaker 12 So for those people who couldn't make it, the great news is that we recorded the entire show and we're going to be bringing it to you on the podcast in two parts.

Speaker 12 Half of it we're going to post in this week's episode and the other half we'll post in next week's episode.

Speaker 12 And if you can't wait and you want to watch the full thing right now, you can go over to our YouTube channel, youtube.com/slash hard fork, and find the full show there.

Speaker 12 And let's say there's probably never been a better hard fork episode to watch on YouTube than this one because it was visual as heck. Yes, yes, it was visual.

Speaker 12 There were costume changes, there were props.

Speaker 12 We took our pants off more than once.

Speaker 12 Yes.

Speaker 12 So we can't wait to bring you snippets from the show this week and next. And in the meantime, we're going to take a little vacation.

Speaker 12 Yeah, Kevin, it's been a great six months, but you know, a couple times a year, we like to shut down the operation and give everybody a chance to rest. And now is that moment.
So thanks again.

Speaker 12 We hope you enjoy excerpts from Hard Fork Live this week and next. And we will have a special episode of a different show coming the week after that.

Speaker 12 We'll be back to our normal programming on July 18th. See you then.
Have a great summer. Well, have a good few weeks and then we'll be back for most of the summer.
That's true. Yeah.
Early summer.

Speaker 12 Early summer. Enjoy stone fruit season.

Speaker 12 I'm Kevin Roos, a tech columnist at the New York Times. I'm Casey Newton from Platform.
And this is Hard Fork Live.

Speaker 12 Oh my goodness!

Speaker 12 Wow.

Speaker 12 Should we take off our band leader jackets? Let's take off the jackets. Okay.

Speaker 12 Give us a second. They've served their purpose.
It's very hot. These are not, these are Amazon's finest.
Yeah. Can I?

Speaker 12 Here, can I leave this with you? Thank you. Thank you.
Will you guard this? Yeah, for your life. Yes.
Maybe just

Speaker 12 a little bit of that for our interviews. Tripping hazard.

Speaker 12 There you go. Thank you.

Speaker 12 Wow. Thank you to Brass Animals.
That's the band you just heard there. We love Brass Animals.

Speaker 12 They will be back later. And thank you all for coming.
What a surreal thing

Speaker 12 this is.

Speaker 12 I mean, we record this podcast in a booth that's about two feet by two feet.

Speaker 12 And we just send it out there. And we think people listen.
And we hope that people listen, but it's really surreal to see it all in person.

Speaker 12 Yeah, it's so much fun to have all the energy in this building. We've been talking as the hours have been counting down to this.
In 2021, Kevin and I just started texting each other all the time.

Speaker 12 We felt like there was one era of tech that was ending and another that was about to begin. And we just wanted to talk about it to a bunch of people.

Speaker 12 And it's a really long way from there to this moment right now. Yeah, and one of the questions I get asked most frequently is, what is a hard fork? Casey, what is a hard fork?

Speaker 12 Okay, so something a little embarrassing about Kevin and I is that we had a crypto phase. It happens.

Speaker 12 It happens. Some people go golf.
Yeah.

Speaker 12 Talk to your teens

Speaker 12 about crypto.

Speaker 12 And at the time, we thought, well, you know, it's 2021. Our show will probably be about crypto for the rest of time.
Hard fork is a really important concept in crypto. Let's build a show around it.

Speaker 12 Yes.

Speaker 12 But we're so excited for tonight. And Casey, you look great, by the way.
Thank you. Doesn't you look great?

Speaker 12 Kevin!

Speaker 12 Very nice you.

Speaker 12 Now, a couple weeks ago, you told me you were getting a new outfit for this show, and I thought, shit, I have to get a new outfit too.

Speaker 12 So I went on a little bit of an adventure trying to figure out what to wear tonight.

Speaker 12 And as I do, when I'm in times of crisis, I turn to AI.

Speaker 12 So

Speaker 12 I made a little slideshow about my adventure. I hope it's okay if I show you.

Speaker 12 Okay, great, yes. Yeah, I love a slideshow.
You know that. So I started with ChatGPT,

Speaker 12 where I put in the prompt, give me some ideas. For a glow I said, do not change my face.

Speaker 12 Just give me a glow-up. Make me look a little better.
Chat GPT, with its infinite wisdom, came back with this.

Speaker 12 Okay.

Speaker 12 Very stylish, but as you'll notice if you look closely, not me.

Speaker 12 Can I just ask, why did you choose the angle of like the floor looking up at you? I don't know. It was in the office.
Okay, then I asked, I got another example, and it said that, okay,

Speaker 12 great hoodie, still not me. Very cool hoodie.
One more example I asked for. It put me in a nicer room, but again, if you zoom in, not my face.

Speaker 12 So ChatGPT really asked for, or saw my request for a glow up and said, I can't help you there. We're going to need to involve plastic surgery.
Yeah, the tech is only so powerful at this point.

Speaker 12 So then I thought, okay, maybe it's just ChatGPT. Maybe Gemini will do a better job.
So I said to Gemini, the same prompt.

Speaker 12 Don't change my face.

Speaker 12 Gemini said, what if you looked like David Beckham? That would be good.

Speaker 12 But I didn't give up there because there's an app out there called Doji.

Speaker 12 It's sort of like a high fashion thing where you can sort of scan your body and your face and you'll kind of render this 3D image of you and then tell you what to wear. So I put my photos into Doji

Speaker 12 and gave it these photos and I said, create my likeness and tell me what to wear. And so it came back with a suggestion that looked like this.

Speaker 12 Thanks, Doji. What do you think? Like, I would have worn that.
Yeah, I mean, you could pull that off. I'm not sure I could.

Speaker 12 Okay, so

Speaker 12 having failed at having AI dress me for tonight, I did what every straight man does in times of distress. I went to Uniqlo.
So that's

Speaker 12 a good job. Smart man.
Smart man. Well, I think it turned out great, Kevin.
Thank you. And we have a really great show for you.

Speaker 12 I wanted to say, you guys sold out this building before we announced a guest. So I want to say thank you for that.
Thank you for trusting us.

Speaker 12 And we wanted to reward your trust in us with a really special show.

Speaker 12 And before we get started in Grand Hard Fork Tradition, we should do our disclosures, because we're going to be talking a little bit about AI tonight. So, Casey, you want to take it away?

Speaker 12 I'm excited to hear the disclosures.

Speaker 12 Amazing. Well, I'm proud to say my boyfriend works at Anthropic.

Speaker 12 He may even be here tonight. Love you, sweetheart.

Speaker 12 And I work at the New York Times Company, which is suing Open AI and Microsoft for copyright violations, alleged to the training of large language models. Did I get that right? Yeah, period.

Speaker 12 Ah, well, you know, the last thing I would say before we get started, Kevin, is it's also just a dream to be doing the show here in San Francisco. San Francisco is my home.

Speaker 12 It's where we make the show every week. It's where so many of the changes we talk about every week are happening.

Speaker 12 You know, if I have any regrets, it's just I feel like San Francisco has been changing a lot all around us, and we've been so heads down, it's kind of hard to keep track of all the changes.

Speaker 12 Yeah, it's a really good point.

Speaker 12 And if I could change one thing about tonight, I think we should have invited someone with a little bit of relevant expertise here, someone who really understands San Francisco politics.

Speaker 12 Who would that be?

Speaker 12 Kevin, I told you to put the door on, do not disturb. Let's see who it is.
Who's at the door? It's the mayor of San Francisco, Daniel Laurie.

Speaker 12 Hi, how are you? Nice to meet you. Thanks for coming.
Oh, my goodness. Please have a seat.

Speaker 12 What a fun surprise. Thanks for stopping by, Mr.

Speaker 15 Mayor. Thanks for having me.
Thanks for bringing everybody to San Francisco.

Speaker 12 Absolutely. I think they're happy to be here.
Are you happy to be here?

Speaker 12 Well, you know, since you're here, let's toss a couple of questions at you.

Speaker 12 You've been in office for just about six months now, and the tech community, I would say, has generally been very supportive of what you're doing.

Speaker 12 And you've even formed a council of tech advisors that includes our guest from Later Tonight, Sam Altman. So what kind of advice are they giving you, and are you taking it? Well, we

Speaker 15 Sam was on our transition committee, and now we have something that we started called the Partnership for San Francisco, where we have leaders from across business and arts and culture giving us advice and helping to cheerlead for our city.

Speaker 15 You all are seeing the revolution happening.

Speaker 15 There is no better place in the world in terms of an ecosystem than San Francisco. And there was a lot of talk for a number of years about how San Francisco was done.

Speaker 15 That was a bad bet.

Speaker 15 As everybody knows, I mean, the guests that you have tonight, you'd have to fly them in, but they're living right here in San Francisco. It's all happening right here.

Speaker 15 Like you talked about Anthropic. You got Dario, you got OpenAI, you got Salesforce, you got Databricks.

Speaker 15 I mean, cities across the globe would die to have one of those companies, and they're all home-based right here in San Francisco. So I'm talking to them.
I'm talking to arts and culture leaders.

Speaker 15 And we're doing everything in our power to create the conditions for success, and we're off to a good start.

Speaker 12 Now, we're going to be talking a lot about AI tonight. I'm curious, is AI helping you in your job at City Hall?

Speaker 15 We are absolutely talking to all the companies, saying, how can we get their help on synthesizing all the data that comes in?

Speaker 15 We have 58 different departments at City Hall, and they don't always talk to each other. And so, we have great intellectual horsepower here.
We got great universities.

Speaker 15 We got these great companies and we are engaging with them and they are already starting to help and you'll see more in the coming years.

Speaker 12 I feel like governments don't have a reputation always for having state-of-the-art technology.

Speaker 12 Is there anything you wish that you had that you don't have or that the sort of tech could do for citizens here that it can't yet? Well, I think

Speaker 15 just making sure that we're crunching the data. We have over 34,000 city employees and getting them to talk to each other, understand what they're going through.

Speaker 15 i'll i'll tell you a quick story um there were not uh staff meetings uh going on between our large agencies and i instituted something every tuesday morning so this morning 9 a.m we had the 20 large agencies they get around the table this is not tech this is old school but it starts with old school yeah this technology is called the table yes that is right and everybody snap but by the way Tech doesn't work if you don't communicate with each other.

Speaker 15 That's why I think everybody's got to be back in the office. A lot of these AI companies, they're in the office five, six days a week.
I went to OpenAI's new office by chase.

Speaker 15 They are in the office because they know it doesn't work unless you're communicating.

Speaker 15 And so our department heads are meeting with each other once a week, gaining knowledge from each other, seeing how they can help each other.

Speaker 15 And the tech then follows that. And so we're hoping to lean in with all these great companies.

Speaker 12 Now, I have to ask you, Mayor, about your social media presence.

Speaker 12 You are very active on short-form video apps such as Instagram Reels and TikTok. You post more Instagram Reels than a Gen Z clout chaser.

Speaker 12 And honestly, they're pretty good.

Speaker 12 I would say, grading on the curve of politicians, they're great.

Speaker 12 And I'm curious, like, who does your social media? What's the strategy there? Is it working?

Speaker 15 I was told, there was a review of my Instagram in the Chronicle, and it said that I had not yet made the camera my lover

Speaker 12 so so I have work to do that's that's not only fans

Speaker 15 so so I listen I'm having fun with it we know there's there's so much noise out there and to break through and to communicate with people like you you all do so well with your show we felt like we had to reach people directly.

Speaker 15 And it is taking off. You all can check it out and you can learn what it's like to be mayor and to see all the small businesses that are amazing in San Francisco, the restaurants, the bars.

Speaker 15 I just went in honor of Pride. I just stopped by before to a bar that I've passed so many times.

Speaker 12 It's called the Cinch Gay Bar on

Speaker 15 with Pride Week. We went by there just now and it's been there for years and it is amazing.
And like I want to highlight what is so special about San Francisco and that's what we're trying to do.

Speaker 15 And I usually usually just give the mic over to the restaurant owner or the arts leader and say what do you do and the city gets to see it and that's what it's all about.

Speaker 12 It's awesome. Well we've got to let you go but before we go I wanted to ask could we make a reel with you? Would you make one with us? Yeah absolutely.
So right now? Okay let's stand up.

Speaker 12 Let's do that. Oh but I don't have my phone.
Oh you got it. I got it.
I got it. Yeah.

Speaker 16 Okay.

Speaker 12 Oh boy. I'll do it.
So we can just turn it into selfie mode right here and we can just go. So you are the maestro here.
So you got to direct it. Okay.

Speaker 15 All right. I'm on hard Fork right now.
Hey, you two, tell us what's going on here. This is your first live audience.

Speaker 12 First live audience. We're here for Hard Fork Live at SF Jazz.
Having a great time here with Mayor Lurie.

Speaker 12 Let's go.

Speaker 15 What I got to tell everybody, got to tell your audience that San Francisco, we are on the rise. When we are at our best, there is no better city on the planet than San Francisco.
Let's go.

Speaker 12 Let's go, San Francisco. And that's all, period.
Thank you very much, Mayor Mayor Lurie. Thank you for stopping by.
Thank Thank you.

Speaker 12 Oh,

Speaker 12 my goodness.

Speaker 12 Kevin, we've already had so much show, and it's literally just beginning. I didn't even tell him that the most relevant thing was that you didn't get your permit for your hot tub.
That's right.

Speaker 12 Bear Lurie.

Speaker 12 You need to raise revenue. I know a guy.

Speaker 12 When we come back, we'll bring you our Hard Fork Live interview with Sam Aldman and Brad Lightkap from OpenAI.

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Speaker 12 So, Casey, that was a really fun short interview with Mayor Daniel Lurie of San Francisco. Very grateful that he stopped by.
And now we are going to bring you something different. Yeah.

Speaker 12 And we want to give you the behind the scenes because whether you were there at the show or you're just about to listen, a lot kind of happened backstage that you're going to want to know before you hear this.

Speaker 12 Yeah. So this was our interview with Sam Altman and Brad Lightcap from Open AI.
We had invited them to come and talk with us about AI and the futures, topics we talk about in this show all the time.

Speaker 12 Yeah. And so, you know, the way that this show works is we don't see these folks before the show.
The show just sort of starts and they show up. Kevin and I are backstage.

Speaker 12 The most recent thing that has happened is that we did this amazing demo wearing these exoskeleton pants that help people who have mobility issues. And we need to remove the pants.

Speaker 12 And so we go backstage and we do remove our pants in front of Sam Altman and Brad Lightcap. And they were very cool about that, I would say.
You know, they didn't make any comments.

Speaker 12 Yes, they were pointing and laughing. Yes.
Yes, as we feared that they might.

Speaker 12 And so we're getting ready to go out on stage. And the thing that is supposed to happen is we're going to have five or six minutes where two things happen.

Speaker 12 One is we shout out our families to thank them for being there. And then we kind of want to set up the story of Open AI in this moment.
The company has had a lot going on.

Speaker 12 And you and I just want to banter back and forth a little bit to kind of set up what was going to happen before Sam and Brad come on stage.

Speaker 12 So I go up to Sam and Brad right before this happens and I say to Brad, hey, thanks for being here. Shake his hand.
Go up to Sam, say, thanks for doing this. Shake his hand.

Speaker 12 And then Sam says something like,

Speaker 12 you know, hey, only ask interesting questions tonight. Like basically like, come at me a little bit.
And I say, okay, yeah, sure.

Speaker 12 And I say, you know, if you want to troll me a little bit, like make fun of me, go for it. And what Sam says is, well, I don't strike first, but I do strike back.

Speaker 12 And I was kind of like, okay, well, I don't think a lot of striking is going to be coming from me during the show, but like, okay, sure, whatever. And so then you and I head out on stage.

Speaker 12 And we had just started the bit that we had planned, sort of saying, okay, you know, how's everybody doing? Did you enjoy the first half of the show?

Speaker 12 And I turn to my right and I see walking out on stage, Brad and Sam. Yes, before like minutes before they were supposed to arrive on stage, they had a whole intro music.
We were going to tee it up.

Speaker 12 They just kind of barged onto stage. Yeah.
And so when this happened, my thought was, this is probably just a production mistake.

Speaker 12 Someone backstage told them, this is your moment and pushed them on stage. It's a live show.
These things happen. I think my first impulse was to say, hey, you guys want to give us a minute?

Speaker 12 But they just kind of advanced on us and sat down and were basically like, okay, cool. Like, what do you guys want to talk about? And we were like, well, we kind of want to set up your segment.

Speaker 12 And in hindsight, though, Kevin, I think we realized that actually no one backstage had told them to come.

Speaker 12 This was kind of a power move that they were trying to do to get us flustered heading into what would happen next. Yes, they were trolling us.

Speaker 12 And specifically they were trolling us about the lawsuit between the New York Times and Open AI, which they know that you and I are not involved in, right?

Speaker 12 They are not under any impression that we are part of the litigation team at the New York Times, but it is clear that they had something they wanted to get off their chest about that lawsuit.

Speaker 12 And I think just have a little fun with us. Yeah.
And so they came at us pretty hard. You will hear it in the interview.

Speaker 12 And you and I are trying to steer the conversation to stuff we can actually talk about.

Speaker 12 In fact, one of the things that was going to happen in the bit that we didn't do was you saying, hey, by the way, about this whole lawsuit thing, I'm not involved in it and I can't talk about it.

Speaker 12 And by walking out on stage, you know, they sort of prevented that moment from happening. Yeah.
I will say, I learned a lot about this interview, only some of it from the questions we asked.

Speaker 12 I learned a lot more about Sam Altman from this brief interaction before the segment actually was supposed to start.

Speaker 12 Yeah, I mean, look, I think we got a lot out of just kind of the questions that we asked and we got into so many things that we wanted to talk to him about the business, about the risks of job loss, about the risks of people using Chat GPT and having mental health breaks.

Speaker 12 But I do think you're right, Kevin. You just learn something about people by observing them in public settings, how they behave, how they engage.

Speaker 12 And so I think there's just kind of a lot for everyone to chew on. You know, I was reflecting last night that the first time we had Sam Altman on the show, two days later, he gets fired.

Speaker 12 And it sort of in many ways kicks off the moment that we're living in now. And that was extremely surreal.

Speaker 12 The evening that we had at Hard Fork Live was kind of a perfect sequel to that because now you have a person who is fully in control, who wants to bend reality to his will.

Speaker 12 And if there's a couple of journalists he can just kind of kick in the shins on his way toward building God, he's going to be happy to do it. Yeah.

Speaker 12 And we should also say Sam did send us an email after the show apologizing for his behavior. He said he was, quote, such an asshole and that he felt bad about it.

Speaker 12 So that tells you something.

Speaker 12 But yeah, what you'll hear in this segment is the two of us being somewhat flustered that our planned introduction is just being interrupted by these two guys wandering on the stage.

Speaker 12 And we'll take it from there. And I will also say I have no idea what's going to happen in Sam Altman's third appearance on Hard Fork, but the bar has been set really high.
Yes.

Speaker 12 All right. When we come back, we'll have the interview with Sam Altman and Brad Lightcap from OpenAI.

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Speaker 12 We're about halfway through the show. I thought I would just kind of check in.
Are you guys having a good time? Okay, I'm gonna go.

Speaker 12 we're having a lot of fun

Speaker 12 oh boy they told us to come out wait they just pushed us out

Speaker 12 there's no way okay great do you want us to go back um

Speaker 12 well no come on out

Speaker 12 yeah

Speaker 12 i love it we're doing it live today family You guys are learning a very important thing about our show, which is that it's edited.

Speaker 12 Kevin, do you have maybe one more thing you want to say before we get an interview? Yes. So we're here with Sam Altman and Brad Lightkappe.
We'll just hang out. Do your thing.

Speaker 12 You can check your email.

Speaker 12 Well, what we were going to do is tee up your appearance a little bit by just giving a little lay of the land of what's been going on at OpenAI, which is a very busy company. Casey, that's...

Speaker 12 This is more fun that we're out here for this, though. Yeah.

Speaker 12 No, jump in. Like, you guys can be Statler and Walter.
We'll get the color commentary.

Speaker 12 Here, I had a list of headlines from the past couple of weeks, and if there's anything that just makes you want to roll your eyes, you can roll your eyes. Okay.
So,

Speaker 12 you...

Speaker 12 Are you going to talk about where you sue us because you don't like user privacy? Okay. Woo!

Speaker 12 The last thing Sam said to me before he came on stage was, I don't strike. I did say that.
That's true.

Speaker 12 Well, I teeted it up with the headlines. Do you want to say something, Kevin, about the New York Times? Oh, yes, we should also give our disclosures, which is that we are just journalists.

Speaker 12 We are not involved in the lawsuit. And

Speaker 12 I don't know. We don't represent the company's views on the matter.
What do you think of the company's views? What do I think of the company's views?

Speaker 12 Are you trying to get me fired? No, I just want to.

Speaker 12 Kevin needs this job, so I'm not sure. I don't have any other skills.
It seems like you're on a podcast. I mean, a lot of things.

Speaker 12 Yeah. Well, okay, great.
So, you know, you said that. I'm going to just pretend I didn't hear that.
You're pro the lawsuit. What's that? You're pro the lawsuit.

Speaker 12 I I think people should read the relevant filings and make up their own mind. Yes, democracy! Democracy!

Speaker 12 We love it! We love it! We love it. And what about your mind?

Speaker 12 It seems like you have something you want to say about the lawsuit. Well, look, I do think

Speaker 12 like user, I like user privacy. I don't think you want to explain what you're talking what you're talking about.

Speaker 12 Oh.

Speaker 12 Well, you guys are suing us.

Speaker 12 I'm an independent contractor. I write a newsletter.
It's called Platformer. Yeah, don't drag him into this.

Speaker 12 And one of the things that's happening is

Speaker 12 you all are, sorry, your employer is,

Speaker 12 or I don't know what you call it, an independent contractor. The New York Times, let's just say the New York Times.

Speaker 12 One of the great institutions, truly,

Speaker 12 for a long time, is

Speaker 12 taking a position that we should have to preserve our users' logs, even if they're chatting in private mode, even if they've asked us to delete them.

Speaker 12 And, you know, the lawsuit we're happy to fight out, but that thing we really think that privacy and AI is just this like extremely important concept to get right for the future, and we care a lot about the precedent.

Speaker 12 Still love you guys, still love the New York Times, but that one we feel strongly about.

Speaker 12 Well, thank you for your views, and I'll just say it must be really hard when someone does something with your data that you don't really want them to.

Speaker 12 I don't know what that's like personally, but maybe someone else does. Okay, let's get started.
I just wasn't, I don't, that's all right.

Speaker 12 I was recently told by a guest on stage that the singularity would be gentle, So I just wanted to point that out to you.

Speaker 12 Casey, read your headlines. Speaking of, do we still want that? Like, let's go into the question.

Speaker 12 These people know what's been happening with OpenAI. Okay.

Speaker 12 But I think it's important to give a sense of

Speaker 12 just sheer volume of stuff you all are doing. Like we've been covering tech for a long time.

Speaker 12 I don't think either of us have ever seen a company that makes this much news this regularly on this many areas. I mean, you've got hardware stuff going on with Johnny Ive.

Speaker 12 You've got, obviously, ChatGPT continues to grow. You're doing this defense contract, this $200 million defense contract, a deal with Mattel to make toys.

Speaker 12 I think you were the first company to sign a deal with Mattel and the military in the same week.

Speaker 12 I like that.

Speaker 12 Stargate, your big data center project, your attempted conversion to a for-profit company. So there's just a lot going on in your worlds.

Speaker 12 Casey? Well, but we wanted to start with something I don't know that I thought you might have fun talking about, which is that rascal Mark Zuckerberg keeps coming after your employees.

Speaker 12 And I'm sure this is happening to you guys on some level all of the time, but I wondered if there's been any particularly funny or crazy moment over the past few weeks as they've really stepped this up.

Speaker 12 Any that you think have been particularly funny?

Speaker 16 Many.

Speaker 12 Many. Good.
Yeah.

Speaker 16 I don't know. I haven't slept in four years, so it's like at this point

Speaker 16 nothing phases me.

Speaker 12 One of the strangest things of the job is the amount of things that can go wrong by like 11 o'clock on a Monday morning is just an astonishing diversity of stuff.

Speaker 12 And so it's like, okay, Zuckerberg is doing some new insane thing. What's next?

Speaker 12 Okay, I want to gossip for just one minute more.

Speaker 12 Only one? Do you think

Speaker 12 we're here for a lot of that? We can do more gossip.

Speaker 12 Do you think Mark Zuckerberg actually believes in super intelligence, or do you just think he's saying that as a recruiting tactic?

Speaker 16 I think he believes he's super intelligent.

Speaker 12 Light cab off the ropes!

Speaker 12 Very good.

Speaker 12 All right, but it sounds like your...

Speaker 12 Your confidence has not been shaken by the recent raid

Speaker 12 on your employees. We're feeling good.
Yeah. All right.
All right.

Speaker 12 So you recently wrote this essay I just mentioned, The Gentle Singularity, and you wrote, We're past the event horizon, the takeoff has started.

Speaker 12 And

Speaker 12 people,

Speaker 12 I think, read that and thought, Do these guys have a super intelligence that they're keeping it in the basement?

Speaker 12 I assume that that's not true, but tell us a little bit about why you wrote that essay and when, in your mind, we hit this point of no return.

Speaker 12 We don't have a super intelligence in the basement, but we have shipped a model that any of you can use, and I hope many of you do, that is

Speaker 12 quite smart relative to what you might have expected five years ago where the world would be with AI.

Speaker 12 And we have all adjusted to this. We've all just sort of said, oh, you know, this is, you know, this is the new world.
We have like PhD-level intelligence in our pocket. We can use it.

Speaker 12 We can talk to it all day. We can do all the stuff for us.

Speaker 12 But it is kind of remarkable that this has happened and this is the world now. And when you are like living through moving history, you adapt so quickly that

Speaker 12 I think it's hard to get the perspective of like, man,

Speaker 12 you know, five years ago,

Speaker 12 most of the experts made fun of anyone who said AI, AGI might be even a plausible thing to work towards. And now here we are with this like

Speaker 12 this thing that has come quite a long way that we can use in all these ways. And

Speaker 12 we have always so we used to try to just say like, hey, this AGI thing is coming. It might be a really big deal.
It might be really important. You all should pay attention.
No one cared.

Speaker 12 And we shipped the product, and then people cared.

Speaker 12 And I think we've learned again and again is, you know, talking about it doesn't seem to break through, but if people can use it and feel it and, you know, see where it's good and where it's bad and integrate it with their lives, then they do.

Speaker 12 And so now we see many years ahead of us of extreme progress that we feel is like pretty pretty much on lock and models that will get to the point where they are capable of doing meaningful science, meaningful AI research.

Speaker 12 And

Speaker 12 we continue to feel a responsibility to tell the world about that. Most people won't listen.
Maybe some more people will listen this time. But

Speaker 12 we'll ship products that expose these higher levels of intelligence that we'll build. And that is how I think people will really get their hands around what's happening.

Speaker 12 Now, Brad, it's your job to manage the business of OpenAI. What is being past the event horizon towards towards super intelligence mean for OpenAI as a company?

Speaker 12 I imagine it makes lots of different kinds of decisions different, but like how do you plan for a world like the one that Sam is describing as a person who runs a business?

Speaker 16 Yeah, it's the fun part of what we do.

Speaker 16 We debate this internally a lot. Like we will kind of wake up one day with this incredibly powerful thing.
And will the world be different that day?

Speaker 16 And I think what we've all kind of agreed now is it probably won't. Kind of to Sam's point, I think like these things really have to be kind of integrated into people's lives.

Speaker 16 They have to be felt and that change is more gradual. And so we work really closely with companies and as much as we do with users to figure out what that process will look like.

Speaker 16 I do think businesses will look very different in the future.

Speaker 16 So my kind of personal metric for what kind of business in the super intelligence age means is you've been, you know, you've got one person who has a lot of agency and a lot of willpower who has the capacity to start a company that can do billions of dollars in revenue.

Speaker 16 And it's hard to imagine now. Like you think, okay, I need salespeople salespeople, and I need product people, and engineers, and accountants, and so on.

Speaker 16 But all of that stuff now can kind of just be managed, right?

Speaker 16 It can be kind of built into the system. And that just gives incredible agency to individual people.

Speaker 12 So I want to get into the nitty-gritty of building this future. Right now, the agents that you all have built for coding are really extremely good.
People can build a lot of amazing stuff with them.

Speaker 12 Outside that domain, we've seen less progress. Talk to me about what's going to happen the next year that makes you feel like you can start knocking off one or more of these other domains.

Speaker 12 Aaron Ross Powell, well, first of all, coding is pretty general purpose.

Speaker 12 If you can write code, you can do a system that can write code, just like a person that can write code, can make a lot of other things happen.

Speaker 12 But

Speaker 12 we are beginning to see scientists be much more productive with this. We're seeing companies really change a lot of their workflows.

Speaker 12 The thing, though, that I am excited for,

Speaker 12 most of the way people use AI today is sort of like send a request, get a response. You send tragic to your request, it might think for a second, it might not, it sends you something back.

Speaker 12 You are in one of those like vibe coding things, and you do something, and you get something back.

Speaker 12 I think I'm very excited for a world where each of us has

Speaker 12 a copy of O3 or many copies of O3 that are just constantly running, constantly trying to like say, oh, I see this happening, now this, and I'm reading Slack, and I'm reading an email, and I see this and this and this, and you asked about this yesterday, here's a new idea, and starts to just, we have this like team of

Speaker 12 agents, assistants, companions, whatever you want to call them, that are doing stuff in the background all of the time.

Speaker 12 And that, I think, will really transform what people can do and how we work and kind of maybe to some extent how we just sort of like

Speaker 12 live our lives. So I use O3 all the time.
It is helpful to me as a journalist. It can fact-check stuff for me.
It can edit stuff for me.

Speaker 12 When is the moment when like it just kind of knows what I do and in the morning it actually just kind of starts doing that stuff without me telling it?

Speaker 12 Well, that's kind of what I'm talking about, except I don't think it should be without you telling it. But I would love if I woke up every morning and there was

Speaker 12 you know, a drafted response to every email that had come in overnight and I could click and I could say, I want to send this one. I want to edit this one.
I want to send that one.

Speaker 12 If I could open ChatGPT and say, hey, here was the stuff you were working on yesterday that you didn't finish on your to-do list. Here's my attempts at that.

Speaker 12 Do you want me to take this action, that one, that one? And by the way, here are these other things that happened overnight

Speaker 12 with a customer or in the world or whatever. And here's a set of stuff I could do for you.
And I have all of this ready to go.

Speaker 12 And I could just sort of go through and say, okay, do that, don't do that. Here's what should have been different here.
That I'm very excited about.

Speaker 12 But I don't want to go to sleep and have O3 just start. taking actions for me.
I use O3 a lot too, and I find it very useful. The thing I will say is that it lies.

Speaker 12 More than previous models, I feel like it is a crafty, shifty assistant that will just once in a while make stuff up. And actually,

Speaker 12 it seems like

Speaker 12 the hallucination rates on these newer models are staying about the same or maybe even getting worse. So do you have a theory on why that might be? I think it did get a little bit worse from 01 to 03

Speaker 12 and we'll make it much better in the next version.

Speaker 12 I think

Speaker 12 we're earlier in learning how to align reasoning models and also how people are using them in different ways, but I think we've now learned a lot.

Speaker 12 And I would suspect you'll be very happy with the next generation there.

Speaker 12 So you made

Speaker 12 your largest acquisition to date this year with Johnny Ives.io. The first crop of AI hardware that we've seen has not been particularly successful.

Speaker 12 Brad and Sam, what do you guys feel like you're seeing that makes you feel like you can do something different here?

Speaker 16 Well, every time you kind of re-platform technology, there tends to be kind of a corresponding set of things that get built that change how we interface with that technology.

Speaker 16 So I think the question here is, is that going to happen again?

Speaker 16 You know, all of a sudden,

Speaker 16 you kind of miniaturize the PC and you have the mobile phone. You know, the PC itself was a miniaturization of the mainframe and so on and so forth.
I think this one has a different direction.

Speaker 16 I think this one is really going to be about this very kind of aware, very contextual, almost companion-like system that is going to be less about kind of like a dependency on a screen.

Speaker 16 I think there's a place for a screen in in that world, but it's going to be really about an awareness of kind of the ambient environment, what's going on.

Speaker 16 Sam mentioned the kind of trivial example of something that is looking at your email.

Speaker 16 You can build something that's really bad that does that today, but to get to the version of that that's like transcendently good, there's a ton of context and a ton of awareness that you have to have of like

Speaker 16 what each situational thing is that helps you craft exactly the right response.

Speaker 16 And imagine that now in kind of any arbitrary situation and wanting to have that with you all the time. And so I think that's a very compelling direction for this type of hardware.

Speaker 12 It sounds a lot like Alexa. Is it going to feel a lot different than Alexa?

Speaker 12 Don't you just want to wait and be surprised and get some joy? Like, it's been a long time since the world has gotten a fundamentally new kind of computer. Like, let us try.

Speaker 12 If it's Alexa, we're going to be really mad. I'm just saying that right now.

Speaker 12 So will I. And these people will remember this.

Speaker 12 Sam. No, I think we can do.
I think we have a chance to do something truly great, but hardware is really hard and it takes a while. And

Speaker 12 I've always wanted to try to do a new kind of computer, but that hasn't worked most of the time. So we're really going to take our time and try to get it right.

Speaker 12 Sam, a few years ago, you described your relationship with Microsoft and its CEO, Satya Nadella, as, quote, the best bromance in tech.

Speaker 12 The bromance has been feeling a little wobbly recently.

Speaker 12 OpenAI needs Microsoft's blessing for this for-profit conversion, and Microsoft is reportedly peeved at you about a bunch of things, including the terms of a planned acquisition.

Speaker 12 Last week, the Wall Street Journal reported that things had gotten so tense that OpenAI executives were considering reporting Microsoft to the government for anti-competitive behavior.

Speaker 12 Do you believe that? When you read those things and say, Do you think are you saying it's not? Do you always think when I read that? I hope I get to ask Sam Altman about it.

Speaker 12 So, what is going on, and are you caught in a bad romance?

Speaker 12 I had a super nice call with Satya yesterday about many topics, including our hopefully very long and productive future working together.

Speaker 12 And obviously, in any deep partnership, there are points of tension, and we've certainly had those. But on the whole, it's been like really wonderfully good for both companies.

Speaker 12 We're both ambitious companies, so we do find some flashpoints, but I would expect that it is something that we find like deep value in for both sides for a very long time to come.

Speaker 12 And

Speaker 12 in a world where I do read these articles sometimes, like, OpenAI and Microsoft about to collapse and this, you know, that end.

Speaker 12 And then my calls are like, how do we figure out what the next decade together looks like? It's just, it doesn't,

Speaker 12 yeah. Again, not to pretend like there's no tension.
There is, but there's like so much good stuff there. And I think there's like such a long horizon.

Speaker 12 That's what we in the business call a non-denial denial. I don't know.
Just kidding.

Speaker 12 Let's move on into some policy stuff.

Speaker 12 You've talked to President Trump. What does he think about AI? What were those conversations like?

Speaker 12 That was not intended to be a laugh line.

Speaker 12 You want to take it first?

Speaker 12 I'll do it. No, that's fine.
That was not intended to be a laugh line either.

Speaker 12 I think he really gets it. I think he gets the technology.

Speaker 12 I couldn't say that about all presidents.

Speaker 12 I think he really understands the importance of

Speaker 12 the leadership in this technology, the potential for economic transformation, the sort of geopolitical importance, the need to build out a lot of infrastructure.

Speaker 12 They're like very productive conversations. And he has done stuff that has really helped the whole industry.

Speaker 12 You know,

Speaker 12 it is easier to permit data centers and new energy to run those data centers than it has, I think, ever been before. And

Speaker 12 that could have gone the other way.

Speaker 12 Dario Amade of Anthropic recently said that he thinks 50% of entry-level white-collar jobs could disappear due to AI in the next one to five years. Do you agree?

Speaker 12 No, no, I don't. I just.

Speaker 16 No.

Speaker 12 Why not, Brad?

Speaker 16 We have no evidence of this. And Dario's a scientist.

Speaker 16 And I would hope he takes an evidence-based approach to these types of things. But like we work with every business under the sun.

Speaker 16 We look at the problem and an opportunity of deploying AI into every company on Earth.

Speaker 16 We

Speaker 16 have yet to see any evidence that people are kind of wholesale replacing entry-level jobs.

Speaker 16 I think that there is going to be some sort of change in the job market. I think it's inevitable.
I think every time you get a platform shift, you get a change in the job market.

Speaker 16 I mean, in 1900, 40% of people worked in agriculture. It's 2% today.

Speaker 16 You know, Microsoft Excel has probably been the greatest job displacer of the 20th century. And if we knew a priori that Microsoft Excel was coming

Speaker 16 and everyone was kind of like fretting about it, I think in retrospect, we would have thought that was dumb.

Speaker 16 So I think there will be change, of course. But I think

Speaker 16 there's A, there's no evidence of it today, and B, I think we will manage through it.

Speaker 16 We have a lot of empathy for the problem.

Speaker 16 I think we work with businesses every day to try and enable people to be able to use the tools at the level of like the 20-year-olds that come into companies and use them with a level of fluency that far transcends anyone else at those organizations.

Speaker 16 But we see it as our mission to make sure that people know how to use these tools and to drive people forward.

Speaker 12 You know, I have to say, we've had some listeners write into the show and say, hey, I'm a junior coder. I just got laid off.
I'm not feeling really good about my prospects here.

Speaker 12 So that's a pretty small sliver of the economy. But I hear you talk about what you want to do with O3.

Speaker 12 I think if it gets as good as you're saying, it's not just going to be the junior coders who who are going to be affected by that, right?

Speaker 12 So, I guess what I'm saying is, I feel like I'm seeing like slivers of it now, and I'm curious what you make of those.

Speaker 12 I do think there will be

Speaker 12 areas where

Speaker 12 some jobs go away, or maybe there will be some whole categories of jobs that go away.

Speaker 12 And any job that goes away, even if it's like good for society and the economy as a whole, is painful, very painful, extremely painful in that moment.

Speaker 12 And so, I do totally get not just the anxiety, but that there is

Speaker 12 going to be real pain here

Speaker 12 in many cases. In many more cases, though, I think we will find that

Speaker 12 the world is significantly underemployed. The world wants way more code than can get written right now.

Speaker 12 I think we are already seeing companies who said, oh, I'm going to need less coders to now saying paradoxically, I need more coders.

Speaker 12 They're going to work differently, but I'm just going to make 100 times as much code, 100 times as much product with 10 times as much people, and we'll still make 30 times as much money, even if the price comes down.

Speaker 12 I think all of human history suggests that if you give people better tools, if technology keeps going, although there are always people who say,

Speaker 12 you know, we're going to be working three hours a day and sitting on the beach and we're going to have run out of things to do, like human...

Speaker 12 demand seems limitless. Our ability to imagine new things to do for each other seems limitless.
We always seem to want more stuff, to play, you know, increasingly silly status games.

Speaker 12 Our jobs would not have seemed like real jobs to people in the not very distant past.

Speaker 12 You're sitting around talking on stage and you're trying to make a piece of software and you're trying to do a podcast and you're trying to make people laugh.

Speaker 12 That's great, but that's like play. That's not a job.
You have plenty of food to eat. You have all this stuff to do.
You have this unimaginable luxury. And

Speaker 12 because I think human imagination and

Speaker 12 desire, demand, whatever you want to call it, is limitless, we will find incredible new things to do. Society will get way richer.

Speaker 12 I think generally, as society gets richer,

Speaker 12 unemployment goes down, not up. And I'd expect to keep seeing that, even though people, I think, don't talk about that very much.
And

Speaker 12 the entry-level people,

Speaker 12 I think, will be the people that do the best here. They're the most fluent with the tools.
They're the most

Speaker 12 able to think of things in very new ways. They have this sort of

Speaker 12 largest canvas.

Speaker 12 So

Speaker 12 we,

Speaker 12 there's going to be real downside here. There's going to be real negative impact.
And again, like any single job lost really matters to that person.

Speaker 12 And the hard part about this is I think it will happen faster than previous technological changes.

Speaker 12 But I think the new jobs will be better and people will have better stuff.

Speaker 12 And

Speaker 12 the kind of like

Speaker 12 take that half the jobs are going to be gone in a year or two years or five years or whatever. I think that just, I think that's not how society really works.

Speaker 12 Even if the technology were ready for that, the inertia of society, which would be helpful in this case, is like,

Speaker 12 there's a lot of mass there.

Speaker 16 The thing we actually see empirically, if we want to talk about kind of what we observe, is somewhat what Sam's describing. It's actually there's a class of

Speaker 16 worker that I think is more tenured, is more oriented toward a routine and a certain way of doing things in a certain role

Speaker 16 that is not actually sophisticated in use of these tools. They're not adopting them.
They tend to think that it's not worth their time or whatever it may be. And I think there's a lot of fear there.

Speaker 16 And a lot of what's driving that fear are like 20-some things that are actually coming into the workforce who have been using these tools for years and years and who've mastered them in a way that they kind of look at these other jobs and they're like, why would you waste your time doing that thing?

Speaker 16 I can do that much faster.

Speaker 16 And so the thing that companies actually worry about deeply is not the entry-level job.

Speaker 16 It's really the job of the person that has been at the company for 30 years, who's done something in a very kind of rote and routine way, where there's an urge on the side of management of wanting to really kind of modernize the tool set.

Speaker 16 And what do you do with that, right? And that's, I think, actually the kind of addressable problem for us.

Speaker 12 Sam, two years ago you testified to Congress about the need for more AI regulation. More recently you went back to Washington and testified again that you supported a light touch regulatory regime.

Speaker 12 And earlier this year you said you supported a federal preemption preemption on state-level AI regulations, a version of which is now part of the Republican budget bill. What changed?

Speaker 12 Did you see the regulations that people were writing and thought we wanted regulation, but not like that?

Speaker 12 No, I still think we need some regulation, but I would say I have,

Speaker 12 I think like a patchwork across the states would probably be a real mess and very difficult to offer services under. And I also think that I have become

Speaker 12 more,

Speaker 12 I don't know, jaded's quite the right word, but something in that direction about the ability of policymakers to grapple with the speed of technology. And I worry that if people write,

Speaker 12 you know, if we kick off like a three-year process to write something that's like very detailed and,

Speaker 12 you know, covers a lot of cases, the technology will just move very quickly. On the other hand, as these systems get quite powerful, I think we clearly need something.

Speaker 12 And

Speaker 12 I think something around the sort of like

Speaker 12 the really risky capabilities And ideally, something that can sort of be quite

Speaker 12 adaptive and not like a law that survives 100 years and sort of says, here's exactly the things you can do and not do, would be good. But

Speaker 12 yeah, it's like impossible for me to imagine a world where society doesn't decide we need some framework here.

Speaker 12 Earlier this year, you adjusted GPT4.0 after it inadvertently became more sycophantic than you intended.

Speaker 12 Since then, we've read more stories about how ChatGPT and other chatbots can destabilize people by sending them down conspiratorial rabbit holes, making them feel like they're having mystical experiences.

Speaker 12 Can that be stopped? Do you want it to stop? Of course we want it to stop.

Speaker 12 I mean,

Speaker 12 we do a lot of things to try to mitigate that.

Speaker 12 If people are having a crisis, which they talk to ChatGPT about, we try to convince them to

Speaker 12 suggest that they get help from a professional, that they talk to their family. If conversations are going down a sort sort of

Speaker 12 rabbit hole in this direction, we try to cut them off or suggest to the user to, you know, maybe think about something differently. But there are,

Speaker 12 I think, the broader topic of mental health and the way that that interacts with over-reliance on AI models is

Speaker 12 something we're trying to take extremely seriously and rapidly. We don't want to

Speaker 12 slide into the mistakes that I think previous generation of tech companies made by not reacting quickly enough as a new thing sort of like

Speaker 12 had a psychological interaction. Aaron Ross Powell, have you ever thought about just like literally putting a warning on that says, this is Chat GPT.
You are not talking to God.

Speaker 12 You are not having a religious experience.

Speaker 12 I mean the model will tell you things like that and then users will write us and say like

Speaker 12 you're you modified this, you know, and they change their like custom instructions.

Speaker 12 But yes, there need to be a lot of warnings like that.

Speaker 12 However, to the users that are in a fragile enough mental place that are on the edge of a psychotic break, we haven't yet figured out how a warning gets through there.

Speaker 16 We also have to be careful because there are an incredible number of use cases that I think probably

Speaker 16 by

Speaker 16 sheer volume outweigh some of the use cases you're describing where people are really relying on these systems for pretty critical parts of their life.

Speaker 16 These are things like, you know, almost kind of borderline therapeutic or, I mean, you know, I get stories of people who have rehabilitated marriages, have rehabilitated relationships with estranged loved ones, things like that, where

Speaker 16 it's highly net positive and there's not a dependency, but

Speaker 16 it's the first time in their life that they've had something that they feel like they can confide in. And it doesn't cost them $1,000 an hour, right?

Speaker 16 And I was surfing in Costa Rica the other day and someone paddled up to me and

Speaker 16 was chatting with him, a local Costa Rican guy. And he's like, where do you work? I said, Open AI.
He's like, oh, you make ChatGPT. And he started crying.
He was like, ChatGPT saved my marriage.

Speaker 16 I didn't know how to talk to my wife. And it gave me tips to talk to my wife.
And I've learned that. And

Speaker 16 we're on a much better path. And it sounds like a dumb and stupid story, but it's not.
I mean, I was there.

Speaker 12 That's great. We're back to even because the chatbot tried to break up my marriage.

Speaker 16 Well,

Speaker 12 not our chatbot, though. Well, it was your chatbot, but it was inside Bing.

Speaker 12 Well,

Speaker 12 spread the blame around there.

Speaker 12 Now,

Speaker 12 Sam, you just had a kid. Congratulations.
Thank you.

Speaker 12 Thank you.

Speaker 12 Do you think over the course of their lifetime your kid will have more human friends or more AI friends?

Speaker 12 More human friends, but AI will be,

Speaker 12 if not a friend, at least an important kind of companion of some sort.

Speaker 12 Is that okay with you? Like, would you, if your... Your kid at one point when they're a little older came home and said, I've got an AI friend, how would that make you feel?

Speaker 12 my kid felt like that was playing, that was like replacing human friends,

Speaker 12 I would have concerns about that, at least with what, again, there are edge cases. You know, any person who talks to hundreds of millions of people a day is going to meet a lot of edge cases.

Speaker 12 And in the sense that ChatGPT is talking to hundreds of millions of people a day, there are going to be some real edge cases in there. But most people,

Speaker 12 much more than I was concerned, seem to really understand the difference between talking to a person and talking to ChatGPT.

Speaker 12 And I still do have a lot of concerns about the impact on mental health and the social impacts from the deep relationships that people are going to have with AI.

Speaker 12 But I think, at least so far, it has surprised me on the upside of how much people really differentiate between, like, that's an AI and I talk to an AI in some way and I get something out of it, and that's a friend, and I talk to a friend, a person, and this other way, and get a very different thing out of that.

Speaker 12 All right. Here's something I've always wanted to ask you.

Speaker 12 AI Twitter is still really active, even though Twitter doesn't exist anymore.

Speaker 12 You actively post there, share a lot of news there, and that's extremely helpful and good for Elon Musk, a man who is trying to destroy your company.

Speaker 12 Have you ever thought of just moving your posts somewhere else?

Speaker 12 Where should I move them? Well, you could create your own social app.

Speaker 12 Don't go to Blue Sky. They don't like AI there.

Speaker 12 They're not going to be nice to you. It's a rough neighborhood.

Speaker 12 Maybe it's the last thing. We wanted to know this, too.
We'd invite you both to answer this. Is there any part of your life that you feel like, I want to wall this off from AI a little bit?

Speaker 12 It's fun to talk about AI. We think it's all very useful.
We're excited to keep building it. But this particular thing, we're going analog.

Speaker 12 You got to think about that one.

Speaker 12 Surfing, presumably.

Speaker 12 Although, maybe you asked for tips.

Speaker 16 We're roboticizing that now, too, is unfortunate. But

Speaker 16 let me think about it.

Speaker 12 I'm big on the analog stuff.

Speaker 12 I put my phone away and go for hikes every weekend. And

Speaker 12 hanging out with my family, I put my phone away.

Speaker 12 And I'm very happy not to have technology delay for that.

Speaker 12 Thanks.

Speaker 12 All right. Brad and Sam, thank you so much for joining us.
Thank you.

Speaker 12 Thank you. Thank you, Brad.
Thank you.

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Speaker 12 Hard Fork is produced by Rachel Cohn and Whitney Jones. We're edited by Jen Poyant.
We're fact-checked by Caitlin Love. Today's show was engineered by Katie McMurrin.

Speaker 12 Original music by Alicia Bittytoupe, Marion Lozano, Rowan Nemisto, and Dan Powell. Video production by Sawyer Roquet, Pat Gunther, and Chris Schott.

Speaker 12 You can watch this full episode on YouTube at youtube.com/slash hard fork. Special thanks to the New York Times live event team who helped us put together Hard Fork Live.

Speaker 12 Hilary Kuhn, Beth Weinstein, Caitlin Roper, Kate Carrington, Chantal Renier, Melissa Tripoli, Natalie Green, Angela Austin, Kirsten Birmingham, Marissa Farinia, Jennifer Feeney, and Morgan Singer.

Speaker 12 Thanks to everyone at SF Jazz, the venue for our live show, as well as the band Brass Animals that played with us live on stage.

Speaker 12 Special thanks also to Matt Collette, Paula Schuman, Pui Wing Tam, Dahlia Haddad, and Jeffrey Miranda. You can email us as always at hardfork at nytimes.com.

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