Since kicking off the artificial intelligence boom with the launch of ChatGPT in 2022, OpenAI has amassed more than 300 million weekly users and a $157 billion valuation. Its C.E.O., Sam Altman, addressed whether that staggering pace of growth can continue at the DealBook Summit last week.
Altman pushed back on assertions that progress in A.I. is becoming slower and more expensive; on reports that the company’s relationship with its biggest investor, Microsoft, is fraying; and on concerns that Elon Musk, who founded an A.I. company last year, may use his relationship with President-elect Donald Trump to hurt competitors.
Altman said that artificial general intelligence, the point at which artificial intelligence can do almost anything that a human brain can do, will arrive “sooner than most people in the world think.” Here are five highlights from the conversation.
On Elon Musk
Musk, who co-founded OpenAI, has become one of its major antagonists. He has sued the company, accusing it of departing from its founding mission as a nonprofit, and started a competing startup called xAI. On Friday, OpenAI said Musk had wanted to turn OpenAI into a for-profit company in 2017 and walked away when he didn’t get majority equity.
Altman called the change in the relationship “tremendously sad.” He continued:
I grew up with Elon as like a mega hero. I thought what Elon was doing was absolutely incredible for the world, and I’m still, of course, I mean, I have different feelings about him now, but I’m still glad he exists. I mean that genuinely. Not just because I think his companies are awesome, which I do think, but because I think at a time when most of the world was not thinking very ambitiously, he pushed a lot of people, me included, to think much more ambitiously. And grateful is the wrong kind of word. But I’m like thankful.
You know, we started OpenAI together, and then at some point he totally lost faith in OpenAI and decided to go his own way. And that’s fine, too. But I think of Elon as a builder and someone who — a known thing about Elon is that he really cares about being ‘the guy.’ But I think of him as someone who, if he’s not, that just competes in the market and in the technology, and whatever else. And doesn’t resort to lawfare. And, you know, whatever the stated complaint is, what I believe is he’s a competitor and we’re doing well. And that’s sad to see.
Altman said of Musk’s close relationship with Trump:
I may turn out to be wrong, but I believe pretty strongly that Elon will do the right thing and that it would be profoundly un-American to use political power to the degree that Elon has it to hurt your competitors and advantage your own businesses. And I don’t think people would tolerate that. I don’t think Elon would do it.
On OpenAI’s relationship with Microsoft
Microsoft, OpenAI’s largest investor, has put more than $13 billion into the company and has an exclusive license to its raw technologies. Altman once called the relationship “the best bromance in tech,” but The Times and others have reported that the partnership has become strained as OpenAI seeks more and cheaper access to computing power and Microsoft has made moves to diversify its access to A.I. technology. OpenAI expects to lose $5 billion this year because of the steep costs of developing A.I.
At the DealBook Summit, Altman said of the relationship with Microsoft, “I don’t think we’re disentangling. I will not pretend that there are no misalignments or challenges.” He added:
We need lots of compute, more than we projected. And that has just been an unusual thing in the history of business, to scale that quickly. And there’s been tension on that.
Some of OpenAI’s own products compete with those of partners that depend on its technologies. On whether that presents a conflict of interest, Altman said:
We have a big platform business. We have a big first party business. Many other companies manage both of those things. And we have things that we’re really good at. Microsoft has things they’re really good at. Again, there’s not no tension, but on the whole, our incentives are pretty aligned.
On whether making progress in A.I. development was becoming more expensive and slower, as some experts have suggested, he doubled down on a message he’d previously posted on social media: “There is no wall.” Andrew asked the same question of Sundar Pichai, the Google C.E.O., which we’ll recap in tomorrow’s newsletter.
On A.G.I. and A.I. safety
Altman has a business interest in suggesting that A.G.I. is near: When OpenAI decides that it has reached the milestone, Microsoft’s exclusive license to use OpenAI’s raw A.I. technologies ends. That would be a big bargaining chip in its negotiations with Microsoft. At the DealBook Summit, Altman suggested that A.G.I. was closer than most people expect, but he downplayed safety concerns, some of which he has raised himself or have come from his own former employees:
A lot of the safety concerns that we and others expressed actually don’t come at the A.G.I. moment. It’s like, A.G.I. can get built, the world goes on mostly the same way. The economy moves faster, things grow faster.
Altman said that he did expect there would be quick disruption of jobs in the relatively near term, but that the major upheaval would come with what he called “superintelligence.”
True superintelligence — the system that is not just smarter than you and smarter than me, but smarter than all of us put together, just unbelievable capability — even if we can make that technically safe, which I assume we’ll figure out, we are going to have some faith in our governments. There are going to have to be some policy issues around that. There is going to have to be global coordination to a degree that I assume will rise to the occasion, but seems challenging.
On not having equity in OpenAI
OpenAI operates as a nonprofit with a for-profit arm, but plans to restructure as a for-profit company (an effort that Musk has asked a court to block). The plan has reportedly sparked discussions about giving Altman his first equity in the company. Altman currently makes a $76,000 salary as C.E.O. and has previously told employees that he has no plans to take a large equity stake. At the DealBook Summit, he insisted he is not interested in equity. “If I could go back in time, I would have taken it just some little bit just to never answer this question,” he said, adding:
No matter how many times I try to explain to people I have the most interesting, coolest job in the world — this is like my retirement dream way to spend my time after what was a pretty good career, and people can work on art projects and not get paid for that, and no one thinks it’s weird or whatever — it just does not come across.
So I wish I had taken some. I don’t imagine I would work any harder or less hard. There would be, I think, something clearer about the alignment I would have had with investors. It definitely would have been easier to raise money.
There are plenty of investors who have not invested because I didn’t take equity.
On using copyrighted material to train A.I.
Several news organizations, including The New York Times, are suing OpenAI and Microsoft over the use of articles to train A.I. models. Others, like The Associated Press and News Corp, have struck deals with OpenAI to license copyrighted material to use as training data for its chatbots. When Andrew asked Altman about the use of books, articles, movies and other copyrighted material to train A.I., Altman said:
I think we do need a new deal, standard protocol, whatever you want to call it, for how creators are going to get rewarded. I very much believe in the right to learn or whatever you want to call it, and if an A.I. reads a physics textbook and learns physics, it can use that for other things, like a human can. I think those parts of copyright law and fair use really need to keep applying, but I think there’s additional things that we’re starting to explore, and others are, where — a particular passion of mine has always been, can we figure out to do micro-payments where if you generate, story in the style of Andrew Ross Sorkin, you can opt into that for your name and likeness and style to be used and get paid for it.
Later in the day, Pichai, the Google C.E.O., responded to a similar question. We’ll share his response in tomorrow’s newsletter.
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