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

Summary

Hard Fork Live, Part 1: Sam Altman and Brad Lightcap of OpenAI
Released June 27, 2025
Hosts: Kevin Roos and Casey Newton
Guests: Sam Altman (CEO, OpenAI), Brad Lightcap (COO, OpenAI), Daniel Lurie (Mayor of San Francisco)

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1. Introduction and Live Show Setup

The episode kicks off with Kevin Roos and Casey Newton reflecting on the behind-the-scenes moments of their first-ever live podcast taping at SF Jazz in San Francisco. They recount a near-miss with the show's cold open and the marching band, emphasizing the excitement and slight chaos of hosting a live audience.

Kevin Roos [00:33]:
"We have a few seconds left and I'm like frantically trying to wave someone from the SF Jazz energy runs up with his keys. But fortunately, everything worked out."

Casey Newton [02:10]:
"I am floating. I think everyone should have the experience of starting a podcast and then having 700 people come to watch it. It really makes you feel good."

2. Welcome to Hard Fork Live

Kevin and Casey express their gratitude to the audience, highlighting the international turnout and the vibrant interactions during the post-show cocktail hour. They announce that the recorded episode will be split into two parts for podcast listeners who couldn't attend live and offer the full visual experience on their YouTube channel.

Casey Newton [03:06]:
"We recorded the entire show and we're gonna be bringing it to you on the podcast in two parts."

3. Unexpected Appearance of Mayor Daniel Lurie

As the hosts prepare to introduce their special guests from OpenAI, Mayor Daniel Lurie unexpectedly joins them on stage. This surprise sets the stage for a dynamic and somewhat tense interaction, especially concerning the ongoing lawsuit between The New York Times and OpenAI.

Mayor Daniel Lurie [10:31]:
"We'll just hang out, do your thing."

4. Interview with Sam Altman and Brad Lightcap

The core of the episode features an extended interview with Sam Altman and Brad Lightcap, delving into various facets of OpenAI's operations, AI advancements, and societal impacts.

a. OpenAI's Role in San Francisco's Tech Ecosystem

Mayor Lurie discusses the collaborative efforts between San Francisco's city hall and tech companies, including OpenAI, to foster innovation and manage the city's evolving tech landscape.

Mayor Daniel Lurie [12:28]:
"We're engaging with them and they are already starting to help and you'll see more in the coming years."

b. AI Integration in Government Operations

Sam Altman elaborates on how AI tools are being utilized to streamline data synthesis across San Francisco's 58 departments, enhancing interdepartmental communication and efficiency.

Sam Altman [12:53]:
"We have great intellectual horsepower here. We got great universities, we got these great companies and we are engaging with them."

c. The Concept of a Hard Fork in Cryptocurrency

Brad Lightcap explains the origin of the podcast's name, stemming from a phase where both he and Kevin were heavily involved in cryptocurrency, leading to the term "hard fork" in the crypto world.

Brad Lightcap [06:15]:
"Hard fork is a really important concept in crypto. Let's build a show around it."

d. AI's Impact on the Job Market

The conversation shifts to the potential displacement of jobs due to AI advancements. Brad Lightcap addresses listener concerns about layoffs in junior coding positions, while Mayor Lurie provides a broader perspective on historical job shifts due to technological progress.

Brad Lightcap [42:56]:
"So that's a pretty small sliver of the economy. But I hear you talk about what you want to do with O3."

Mayor Daniel Lurie [43:00]:
"We have no evidence of this today and B, I think we will manage through it."

e. OpenAI's Regulatory Stance

The discussion touches on OpenAI's evolving stance on AI regulation, particularly the preference for federal preemption over a patchwork of state-level regulations to ensure consistency and adaptability.

Sam Altman [49:17]:
"I have become more jaded...something in that direction about the ability of policymakers to grapple with the speed of technology."

5. Behind the Scenes: Tensions and Apologies

Post-interview, the hosts reveal backstage tensions where Sam Altman and Brad Lightcap unexpectedly joined the stage earlier than planned, disrupting the intended flow of the show. This led to an intense exchange addressing the ongoing lawsuit between The New York Times and OpenAI.

Casey Newton [21:31]:
"They know that you and I are not involved in 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."

Sam Altman [23:26]:
"I'm having fun with it. We know there's so much noise out there...we felt like we had to reach people directly."

Sam Altman later sends an apology email to the hosts for his behavior during the live show.

6. Concluding Remarks and Future Episodes

Kevin and Casey wrap up the episode by acknowledging the unpredictability of live shows and hinting at future episodes, including another show with a special guest. They also mention taking a short vacation before resuming normal programming.

Kevin Roos [03:35]:
"There was visual as heck. Costume changes, there were props. We took our pants off more than once."

---

Notable Quotes

• Kevin Roos [00:33]:
  "We're getting ready to go on... the music started on time and, yeah, that was that."

• Casey Newton [02:10]:
  "Everyone should have the experience of starting a podcast and then having 700 people come to watch it."

• Sam Altman [12:53]:
  "We have great intellectual horsepower here... we are engaging with them."

• Daniel Lurie [43:00]:
  "We have no evidence of this today and B, I think we will manage through it."

• Brad Lightcap [49:03]:
  "The agents that you all have built for coding are really extremely good people."

• Casey Newton [53:57]:
  "A chatbot tried to break up my marriage."

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Key Insights and Conclusions

1. AI Integration in Daily Operations: OpenAI is actively collaborating with city governments to incorporate AI tools for enhanced operational efficiency, demonstrating AI's expanding role beyond commercial applications.

2. AI and Employment: While concerns about AI-induced job displacement exist, leaders like Brad Lightcap and Mayor Lurie believe historical precedents suggest AI will transform rather than eliminate jobs, emphasizing the creation of new roles and increased productivity.

3. Regulatory Challenges: OpenAI advocates for adaptable, federal-level AI regulations over fragmented state laws, highlighting the need for policies that can keep pace with rapid technological advancements.

4. Public Perception and Interaction: The live format of the podcast underscores the real-time challenges of managing live interviews, especially when unexpected topics like lawsuits emerge, revealing the complexities of tech journalism.

5. Ethical Considerations: Discussions around AI's impact on mental health and the need for responsible AI usage indicate a growing awareness of the societal responsibilities that come with advanced AI technologies.

6. Future of AI Companionship: Conversations about AI companions for personal use reflect the deepening integration of AI into social and emotional aspects of human life, raising questions about the boundaries between human and AI interactions.

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This episode of Hard Fork Live provides a comprehensive look into OpenAI's current initiatives, leadership perspectives on AI's societal impact, and the nuanced challenges of live tech journalism. Through candid discussions and unexpected interactions, listeners gain a multifaceted understanding of where AI stands today and its trajectory into the future.

Transcript

[Kevin Roos]

This podcast is supported by IBM.

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[Kevin Roos]

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. 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 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 and we have a few seconds left and I'm like frantically trying to wave someone from the SF Jazz energy runs up with his keys. But fortunately, everything worked out. The music started on time and, yeah, that was that.

[Casey Newton]

I'm so glad. That was a near miss. I would have had to go out and march the band in myself.

[Kevin Roos]

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

[Brad Lightcap]

Look, when you do a two hour.

[Kevin Roos]

Podcast taping, some people are going to try to leave and you're going to want to have a plan for that.

[Daniel Lurie]

It's true.

[Brad Lightcap]

And we had a plan. And the plan was you can't leave.

[Casey Newton]

The best audience is a captive audience.

[Brad Lightcap]

Absolutely.

[Casey Newton]

I'm Kevin Roos, a tech columnist at the New York Times. I'm Casey Noot from Platformer, and this is Hard Fork.

[Brad Lightcap]

This week it's Hard Fork Live.

[Kevin Roos]

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

[Casey Newton]

Got a little spicy. Well, Casey, Hard Fork Live is in the books. How are you feeling? Are you recovered?

[Kevin Roos]

I am floating. 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.

[Casey Newton]

Yeah, we had such a great time thank you to everyone who came out. We had a packed house, and I gotta say, it was so much fun.

[Kevin Roos]

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

[Casey Newton]

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

[Brad Lightcap]

You have.

[Kevin Roos]

You have like a conference here this week or what's.

[Brad Lightcap]

What.

[Kevin Roos]

What actually brought you here?

[Casey Newton]

Like a restaurant you wanted to go to? 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.

[Kevin Roos]

And we also got to have some really great conversations on St.

[Brad Lightcap]

Yes.

[Casey Newton]

So for those people who couldn't make it, the great news is that we recorded the entire show and we're gonna be bringing it to you on the podcast in two parts. Half of it we're gonna post in this week's episode, and the other half we'll post in next week's episode. And if you can't wait and you wanna watch the full thing right now, you can go over to our YouTube channel, YouTube.com hardfork and find the full show there.

[Kevin Roos]

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.

[Casey Newton]

Yes. Yes, it was visual. Costume changes, There were props. We took our pants off more than once. Yes. So we can't wait to bring you snippets from the show this week and next. And in the meantime, we're gonna take a little vacation.

[Kevin Roos]

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.

[Casey Newton]

So thanks again. 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. We'll be back to our normal programming on July 18th.

[Kevin Roos]

See you then.

[Casey Newton]

Have a great summer.

[Kevin Roos]

Well, have a good few weeks and then we'll be back for most of the summer.

[Casey Newton]

That's true.

[Kevin Roos]

Yeah.

[Casey Newton]

Early summer.

[Kevin Roos]

Early summer.

[Sam Altman]

Enjoy.

[Kevin Roos]

Stone fruit season.

[Casey Newton]

I'm Kevin Roos, a tech columnist at the New York Times.

[Brad Lightcap]

I'm Casey Noon from Platformer.

[Casey Newton]

And this Is Hard Fork live?

[Brad Lightcap]

Oh, my goodness.

[Casey Newton]

Wow. Should we take off our bandwider jackets?

[Brad Lightcap]

Let's take off the jackets.

[Casey Newton]

Okay. Give us a second.

[Brad Lightcap]

They've served their purpose.

[Casey Newton]

It's very hot. These are not. These are Amazon's finest.

[Brad Lightcap]

Yeah. Can I.

[Kevin Roos]

Can I.

[Brad Lightcap]

Here. Can I leave this with you? Thank you.

[Kevin Roos]

Thank you.

[Casey Newton]

Will you guard this? Yes.

[Brad Lightcap]

Maybe just.

[Casey Newton]

Oh, the baton, too.

[Brad Lightcap]

Ribbon.

[Casey Newton]

I'll do that for our interviews.

[Brad Lightcap]

Tripping Hazard. There you go. Thank you.

[Casey Newton]

Wow. Thank you to Brass Animals. That's the band you just heard.

[Brad Lightcap]

We love Brass Animals.

[Casey Newton]

They will be back later, and thank you all for coming. What a surreal thing this is. I mean, we record this podcast in a BOOTH that's about 2ft by 2ft, 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.

[Brad Lightcap]

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. 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 a bunch of people. And it's a really long way from there to this moment right now.

[Casey Newton]

Yeah. And one of the questions I get asked most frequently is, what is a hard fork? Casey, what is a hard fork?

[Brad Lightcap]

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

[Casey Newton]

It happens.

[Brad Lightcap]

It happens.

[Casey Newton]

Some people go golf.

[Brad Lightcap]

Yeah. Talk to your teens about crypto. And at the time, we thought, well, you know, it's 20, 20, 21. 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.

[Casey Newton]

Yes. But we're so excited for tonight. And, Casey, you look great, by the way.

[Brad Lightcap]

Thank you. Doesn't you look great, Kevin? Very nice of you.

[Casey Newton]

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. So I went on a little bit of an adventure trying to figure out what to wear tonight. And as I do, and I'm in Times Crisis, I turned to AI. So I made a little slideshow about my adventure. I hope it's okay if I share it.

[Brad Lightcap]

Okay, great. Yes. Yeah.

[Casey Newton]

I love a slideshow. You know that. So I started with ChatGPT, where I put in the prompt, give me Some ideas for a glow up. I said, do not change my face. Just give me a glow up. Make me look a little better. ChatGPT, with its infinite wisdom, came back with this.

[Brad Lightcap]

Okay.

[Casey Newton]

Very stylish, but as you'll notice, if you look closely. Not me.

[Brad Lightcap]

Can I just ask, why did you choose the angle of, like, the floor looking up at you?

[Casey Newton]

I don't know. It was in the office.

[Brad Lightcap]

Okay.

[Casey Newton]

Then I asked, I got another example, and it said that, okay, great hoodie. Still not me.

[Brad Lightcap]

Very cool hoodie.

[Casey Newton]

One more example. I asked for it, put me in a nicer room. But again, if you zoom in, not my face. 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.

[Brad Lightcap]

Yeah, the tech is only so powerful at this point.

[Casey Newton]

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, don't change my face. Gemini said, what if you looked like David Beckham? That would be good. But I didn't give up there because there's an app out there called Doji. It's sort of like a high fashion thing where you can scan your body and your face, and it'll kind of render this 3D image of you and then tell you what to wear. So I put my photos into Doji 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. Thanks, Doji.

[Sam Altman]

What do you think?

[Brad Lightcap]

Like, I would have worn that?

[Casey Newton]

Yeah, I mean, you could pull that off. I'm not sure I could. Okay. So 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 what I'm doing.

[Brad Lightcap]

That's. Good job. Smart man. Smart man. Well, I think it turned out great, Kevin.

[Casey Newton]

Thank you.

[Brad Lightcap]

And we have a really great show for you. I want 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. And we wanted to reward your trust, trust in us with a really special show.

[Casey Newton]

And before we get started, in Grand Hard Fork tradition, we should do our disclosures because we're gonna be talking a little bit about AI tonight, so in case you wanna take it away.

[Brad Lightcap]

I'm excited to hear the disclosure. Amazing. Well, I'm proud to say my boyfriend works in anthropic he may even be here tonight. Love you, sweetheart.

[Casey Newton]

And I work with the New York Times Company, which is suing OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright violations alleged to the training of large language models. Did I get that right?

[Brad Lightcap]

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

[Casey Newton]

Yeah, it's a really good point. And if I could change one thing about. I think we should have invited someone with a little bit of relevant expertise here, someone who really understands San Francisco politics. Who would that be?

[Brad Lightcap]

Kevin, I told you to put the door on do not disturb.

[Casey Newton]

Let's see who it is.

[Brad Lightcap]

Who's at the door? It's the mayor of San Francisco, Daniel Lurie. Hi, how are you? Nice to meet you.

[Casey Newton]

Thanks for coming.

[Brad Lightcap]

Oh, my goodness. Please have a seat. What a fun surprise. Thanks for stopping by, Mr. Mayor.

[Sam Altman]

Thanks for having me. Thanks for bringing everybody to San Francisco.

[Brad Lightcap]

Absolutely. I think they're happy to be here. Are you happy to be here? Well, since you're here, let's toss a couple of questions at you. 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. 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?

[Casey Newton]

Well, we.

[Sam Altman]

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. You all are seeing the revolution happening. If 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. That was a bad bet, 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. They were all happening right here. Like, you know, you talked about anthropic. You got Dario, you got OpenAI. You Got Salesforce, you got databricks. 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 and we're doing everything in our power to create the conditions for success. And we're off to a good start now.

[Casey Newton]

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

[Sam Altman]

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

[Brad Lightcap]

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

[Sam Altman]

Well, I think 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. I'll tell you a quick story. There were not staff meetings going on between our large agencies. And I instituted something every Tuesday morning. So this morning, 9am 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.

[Casey Newton]

This technology is called the table.

[Sam Altman]

Yes, that is right. But by the way, tech doesn't work if you don't communicate with each other. 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. They are in the office because they know it doesn't work unless you're communicating. 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 and the tech then follows that. And so we're hoping to lean in with all these great companies.

[Casey Newton]

Now I have to ask you, Mayor, about your social media presence. You are, 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. And honestly, they're pretty good. I would say grading on the curve of politicians. They're great. And I'm curious, who does your social media? What's the strategy there? Is it working?

[Sam Altman]

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. So I have work to do that's not only fans. So listen, I'm having fun with it. We know there's so much noise out there, and to break through and to communicate with people, like, you all do so well with your show. We felt like we had to reach people directly. 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. I just went in honor of Pride. I just stopped by before to a bar that I've passed so many times. It's called the Cinch Gay Bar. On Shout out with Pride Week, we went by there just now, and it's been there for years, and it's amazing. And I want to highlight what is so special about San Francisco. And that's what we're trying to do. And I usually just give the mic over to the restaurant owner, the arts leader, and say, what do you do? And the city gets to see it. And that's what it's all about.

[Casey Newton]

It's awesome. Well, we've gotta 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. Right now. Okay, let's stand up. Let's do that.

[Sam Altman]

Oh, but I don't have my phone.

[Kevin Roos]

Oh, you got it?

[Brad Lightcap]

I got a phone.

[Casey Newton]

I got it.

[Brad Lightcap]

Yeah.

[Sam Altman]

Okay. Oh, boy.

[Casey Newton]

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 gotta direct it. Okay.

[Sam Altman]

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.

[Casey Newton]

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

[Sam Altman]

Let's go. What I gotta tell everybody? Gotta 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.

[Brad Lightcap]

San Francisco.

[Sam Altman]

San Francisco.

[Brad Lightcap]

And that's all period. Thank you very much, Mary.

[Casey Newton]

Thank you.

[Brad Lightcap]

Mayor Lori stopping by.

[Casey Newton]

Thank you.

[Brad Lightcap]

Oh, my goodness, Kevin, we've already had so much show, and it's literally just begun.

[Casey Newton]

I didn't even tell him that. The most relevant thing was that you didn't get your permit for your hot tub.

[Brad Lightcap]

That's right.

[Casey Newton]

Mayor Lurie, you need to raise revenue. I know a guy. When we come back, we'll bring you our hard fork. Live interview with Sam Altman and Brad Lightcap from OpenAI.

[Kevin Roos]

This podcast is supported by IBM.

[IBM Ad]

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[Casey Newton]

So, Kasey, 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.

[Kevin Roos]

Yeah. 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.

[Casey Newton]

Yes. So this was our interview with Sam Altman and Brad Lightcap from OpenAI. 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. Yeah.

[Kevin Roos]

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. 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. 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. Yes.

[Casey Newton]

They were pointing and laughing.

[Brad Lightcap]

Yes. As. As we fear that they might.

[Kevin Roos]

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. One is we shout out our families to thank them for. For being there. And then we. We kind of want to set up the story of OpenAI in this moment. The company has had a lot going on, and you and I just wanted 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. 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 sh. And then Sam says something like, you know, hey, only ask interesting questions tonight. Like, basically, like, come at me a little bit. And I say, okay, yeah, sure. And I say, you know, if you wanna 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. And I was kind of like, okay, well, I don't think a lot of striking is gonna be coming from me during the show, but, like, okay, sure, whatever. And so then you and I head out on stage, 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. And I turn to my right, and I see walking out on stage, Brad and Sam.

[Casey Newton]

Yes. Before, like, minutes before they were supposed to arrive on stage, they had her whole intro music. We were gonna tee it up. They just kind of barged onto stage.

[Kevin Roos]

Yeah. And so when this happened, my thought was, this is probably just a production mistake. 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 wanna give us a minute? But they just kind of advanced on us and sat down and were basically like, okay, cool. Like, you guys want to talk about? And we were like, well, we kind of want to set up your segment. And in hindsight, though, Kevin, I think we realized that actually no one backstage had told them to come. This was kind of a power move that they were trying to do to get us flustered heading into what would happen next.

[Casey Newton]

Yes, they were trolling us, and specifically they were trolling us about the lawsuit between the New York Times and OpenAI, which they know that you and I are not involved in. Right. 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. And I think just have a little fun with us.

[Kevin Roos]

Yeah. And so they came at us pretty hard. You will hear it in the interview. And you and I are trying to steer the conversation to stuff we can actually talk about. 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. And by walking out on stage, you know, they sort of prevented that moment from happening.

[Casey Newton]

Yeah. I will say I learned a lot about this interview, only some of it from the questions we asked. I learned a lot more about Sam Altman from this brief interaction before the segment actually was supposed to start.

[Kevin Roos]

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've wanted to talk to him about the business, about the risks of job loss, about the risks of people using ChatGPT and, you know, having mental health breaks. 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. 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. And it sort of in. In many ways kicks off the moment that we're living in now. And that was extremely surreal. 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 real to his will. And if there is a couple 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.

[Casey Newton]

Yeah. 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. So that tells you something. 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 a stage. And we'll take it from there. There.

[Kevin Roos]

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.

[Casey Newton]

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

[Kevin Roos]

This podcast is supported by IBM.

[IBM Ad]

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[Brad Lightcap]

We're about halfway through the show. I thought I would just kind of check in. You guys have a good time. Okay? Okay, good. Okay, good. We are having a lot of fun.

[Casey Newton]

Oh, boy.

[Daniel Lurie]

They told us to come out.

[Mayor of San Francisco]

They just pushed us out.

[Kevin Roos]

There's no way.

[Brad Lightcap]

Okay, great.

[Daniel Lurie]

Do you want us to go back?

[Brad Lightcap]

Well, no.

[Casey Newton]

Come on out.

[Brad Lightcap]

Yeah. Hi, Brad.

[Casey Newton]

Hey.

[Brad Lightcap]

Wow.

[Daniel Lurie]

Good to see you.

[Brad Lightcap]

I love it. We're doing it live today. Family, you guys are learning a very.

[Casey Newton]

Important thing about our show, which is that it's edited.

[Brad Lightcap]

Yeah. I'm Kevin. Do you have maybe one more thing you want to say before we get into the interview?

[Casey Newton]

Yes. So we're here with Sam Altman and Brad Lightcap from Bradford.

[Daniel Lurie]

We'll just hang out, do your thing.

[Casey Newton]

You can check your email. 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 and I.

[Daniel Lurie]

This is more fun than. We're out here for this then.

[Casey Newton]

Yeah. No jump in. You guys can be Statler and Walmart.

[Daniel Lurie]

We'll do the color commentary.

[Brad Lightcap]

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. Okay, so you.

[Daniel Lurie]

Are you gonna talk about where you sue us because you don't like user privacy?

[Brad Lightcap]

Okay.

[Casey Newton]

Woo.

[Brad Lightcap]

The last thing Sam said to me before he came on stage was, I don't stress out.

[Daniel Lurie]

I did say that. That's true. Well, I teed it up with the headlines.

[Brad Lightcap]

Yeah. Do you want to say something, Kevin, about the New York Times?

[Casey Newton]

Oh, yes. We should also give our disclosures, which is that we are just journalists. We are not involved in the lawsuit. And I don't. We don't represent the company's views on the matter.

[Daniel Lurie]

What do you think of the company's views?

[Casey Newton]

What do I think of the company's views? Are you trying to get me fired?

[Daniel Lurie]

No, I try not.

[Brad Lightcap]

Kevin needs this job.

[Casey Newton]

I don't have any other skills.

[Daniel Lurie]

It seems like you got a podcast. I mean, a lot of things.

[Brad Lightcap]

Yeah. Well, okay, great. So, you know, you said that.

[Casey Newton]

I'm going to just pretend I didn't hear.

[Daniel Lurie]

You're pro the loss lawsuit.

[Casey Newton]

What's that?

[Daniel Lurie]

You're pro the lawsuit.

[Casey Newton]

I think people should read the relevant filings and make up their own Mind.

[Brad Lightcap]

Yes. Democracy. Democracy. We love it. We love it, we love it.

[Daniel Lurie]

And what about your mind? After reading.

[Brad Lightcap]

You have something you want to say about.

[Casey Newton]

Well, I.

[Daniel Lurie]

Look, I do think like user. I like user privacy. I don't, I don't think you want.

[Brad Lightcap]

To explain what you're, what you're talking about here.

[Daniel Lurie]

Oh, well, you guys are suing us.

[Brad Lightcap]

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

[Daniel Lurie]

And one of the things that's happening is you all are. Sorry, your employer is, I don't know what you call it for an independent contractor. The New York Times. Let's just say the New York Times, one of the great institutions, truly for a long time is 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. And you know, the lawsuit, we're happy to fight out, but that thing, we really, we 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. Still love you guys. Still love the New York Times, but that one we feel strongly about.

[Casey Newton]

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. I don't know what that's like personally, but. But maybe someone else does. Okay, let's get started with the question.

[Daniel Lurie]

That's all right.

[Brad Lightcap]

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

[Casey Newton]

Casey, read your headlines.

[Brad Lightcap]

Speaking of, do we still want the headline? Let's go into the question. These people know it's been happening with OpenAI.

[Casey Newton]

Okay. But I think it's important to give a sense of like the just sheer volume of stuff you all are doing. Like, we've been covering tech for a long time. I don't think either of us have ever seen a company that makes this much news this regularly on this many areas. You've got hardware stuff going on with Jony. I've. 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.

[Brad Lightcap]

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

[Mayor of San Francisco]

I like that.

[Casey Newton]

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

[Brad Lightcap]

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

[Daniel Lurie]

Any that you think have been particularly funny?

[Mayor of San Francisco]

Many, many.

[Casey Newton]

Yeah.

[Mayor of San Francisco]

I don't know. I haven't slept in four years, so it's like, at this point, nothing phases me.

[Daniel Lurie]

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

[Casey Newton]

I want to gossip for just one minute more.

[Daniel Lurie]

Only one. Do you think we're here for a lot of that?

[Casey Newton]

We can do more gossip. Do you think Mark Zuckerberg actually believes in super intelligence, or do you just think he's saying that as a recruiting tactic?

[Mayor of San Francisco]

I think he believes he's super intelligent.

[Brad Lightcap]

Light cap, off the ropes. There you go. All right. But it sounds like your confidence has not been shaken by the recent raid on your employees.

[Daniel Lurie]

We're feeling good.

[Brad Lightcap]

Yeah. All right. All right. 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. And people, I think, read that and thought, do these guys have a super intelligence? That they're keeping it in the basement. 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.

[Daniel Lurie]

We don't have a superintelligence in the basement, but we have shipped a model that any of you can use, and I hope many of you do, that is quite smart relative to what you might have expected five years ago, where the world would be with AI. And we have all adjusted to this. We've all just sort of said, oh, you know, this is the new world. We have, like, PhD level intelligence in our pocket. We can use it, we can talk to it all day. We can do all this stuff for us. 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 I think it's hard to get the perspective of like, man, you know, five years ago, 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, this thing that has come quite a long way that we can use in all these ways. And 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. And we shipped the product and then people cared. And I think we've learned again and again is talking about it doesn't seem to break through. But if people can use it and feel it and see where it it's good and where it's bad and integrated with their lives than they do. And so now we see many years ahead of us of extreme progress that we feel is like, pretty much on lock and models that will get to the point where they are capable of doing meaningful science, meaningful AI research. And 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 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 now.

[Casey Newton]

Brad, it's your job to manage the business of OpenAI. What is being past the event horizon towards superintelligence mean for OpenAI as a company? I imagine it makes lots of different kinds of decisions. Different. But how do you plan for a world like the one that Sam is describing as a person who runs a business?

[Mayor of San Francisco]

Yeah, it's the fun part of what we do. 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? 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. They have to be felt, and that change is more gradual. And so we work really closely with companies as much as we do with users to figure out what that process will look like. I do think businesses will look very different in the future. So my kind of personal metric for what kind of business in the superintelligence age means is 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. And it's hard to imagine now you think, okay, I need salespeople and I need product people and engineers and accountants and so on. But all of that stuff now can kind of just be. Can be managed. It can be built into the system and that just gives incredible agency to individual people.

[Brad Lightcap]

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. 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.

[Daniel Lurie]

Well, first of all, coding is pretty general purpose. 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. But we are beginning to see scientists be much more productive with this. We're seeing companies really change a lot of their workflows. The thing though that I am excited for most of the way people use AI today is sort of like send a request, get a response. You send ChatGPT a request. It might think for a second it might not. It sends you something back. You are in one of those vibe coding things and you do something and you get something back. I think I'm very excited for a world where each of us has a copy of O3 or many copies of O3 that are just constantly running, constantly trying to 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, this. And you asked about this yesterday. Here's a new idea and starts to just. We have this like team of agents, assistants, companions, whatever you want to call them, that are doing stuff in the background all of the time. 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 live our lives.

[Brad Lightcap]

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. 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.

[Daniel Lurie]

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, 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. 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. You here's my attempts at that. Do you want me to take this action? That one, that one. And by the way, here are these other things that happened overnight 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 and I could just 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, but I don't want to go to sleep and have O3, just start taking actions for me.

[Casey Newton]

I use O3 a lot too and I find it very useful. The thing I will say is that it lies 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 it seems like 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?

[Daniel Lurie]

I think it did get a little bit worse from 01 to 03 and we'll make it much better in the next version. I think 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 and I would suspect you'll be very happy with the next generation there.

[Brad Lightcap]

So you made your largest acquisition to date this year with Jony Ives IO. The first crop of AI hardware that we've seen has not been particularly successful. Brad and Sam, what do you guys feel like you're seeing that makes you feel like you can do something different here? Here?

[Mayor of San Francisco]

Well, every time you kind of replatform technology, there tends to be kind of a corresponding set of things that get built that change how we interface with that technology. So I think the question here is, is that going to happen again? All of a sudden you kind of miniaturize the PC and you have the mobile phone. The PC itself was a miniaturization of the mainframe and so on and so forth. I think this one has a different direction. 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. I think there's a place for a screen in that world. But it's going to be really about an awareness of the ambient environment, what's going on. Sam mentioned the kind of trivial example of something that is looking at your email. You can build something that's really bad that does that today, but to get to the version of that that's transcendently good, there's a ton of context and a ton of awareness that you have to have of like what each situational thing is that helps you craft exactly the right response. 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.

[Brad Lightcap]

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

[Daniel Lurie]

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 of computer. Like, let us try, okay?

[Casey Newton]

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

[Daniel Lurie]

So will I.

[Casey Newton]

And these people will remember this.

[Daniel Lurie]

Sam, no, I think, 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 you know, 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 like really going to take our time and try to get it right.

[Casey Newton]

Sam, a few years ago you described your relationship with Microsoft and its CEO Satya Nadella as, quote, the best bromance in tech. The bromance has been feeling a little wobbly recently. OpenAI needs Microsoft's blessing for this for profit conversion. And Microsoft has reportedly peeved at you about a bunch of things, including the terms of a planned acquisition. 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.

[Daniel Lurie]

Do you believe that when you read those things and say like, do you.

[Casey Newton]

Think, are you saying it's not true? I always think when I read that.

[Brad Lightcap]

I hope I get to ask Sam Altman about it.

[Casey Newton]

So what is going on and are you caught in a bad bromance?

[Daniel Lurie]

I had a super nice call with Satya yesterday about many topics, including our hopefully very long and productive future working together. And obviously in any deep partnership there are points of tension and we've certainly had those. But on the whole, it's been really wonderfully good for both companies. We're both ambitious companies, so we do find some flashpoints. But I would expect that it is something that we find deep value and for both sides for a very long time to come. And in a world where I do read these articles Sometimes it's like OpenAI and Microsoft about to collapse and this, that. And then my calls are like, how do we figure out what the next decade together looks like? And it just, it doesn't. 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.

[Casey Newton]

That's what we in the business call a non denial denial.

[Kevin Roos]

I don't know.

[Brad Lightcap]

Let's move into some policy stuff. You've talked to President Trump. What does he think about AI? What were those conversations like? That was not intended to be a laugh line.

[Daniel Lurie]

You want to take it first? I'll do it. No, that's fine. That was not intended to be a laugh line either. I think he really gets it. I think he gets what's the technology. I couldn't say that about all presidents. I think he really understands the importance of leadership in this technology, the potential for economic transformation, the sort of geopolitical importance, the need to build out a lot of infrastructure. They're like very productive conversations. And he has done stuff that has really helped the whole industry. It is easier to permit data centers and new energy to run those data centers than it has, I think ever been before. And that could have gone the other way.

[Casey Newton]

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?

[Daniel Lurie]

No. No, I don't. I just.

[Mayor of San Francisco]

No.

[Brad Lightcap]

Why not? Brad?

[Mayor of San Francisco]

We have no evidence of this and Dario is a scientist and I would hope he takes an evidence based approach to these types of things. But we work with every business under the sun. We look at the problem and an opportunity of deploying AI into every company on earth. We have yet to see any evidence that people are wholesale replacing entry level jobs. 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. I mean in 1900, 40% of people worked in agriculture. It's 2% today. Microsoft Excel has probably been the greatest job displacer of the 20th century. And if we knew a priori that Microsoft Excel was coming and everyone was kind of fretting about it. I think in retrospect we would have thought that was dumb, but. So I think there will be change, of course, but I think A, there's no evidence of it today and B, I think we will manage through it. We have a lot of empathy for the problem. I think we work with businesses every day to try and enable people to be able to use the tools at the level of the 20 year olds that come into companies and use them with a level of fluency that far transcends anyone else at those organizations. But we see it as our mission to make sure that people know how to use these tools and, and to drive people forward.

[Brad Lightcap]

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. So that's a pretty small sliver of the economy. But I hear you talk about what you want to do with 03. I think if it gets as good as you're saying, it's not just going to be the junior coders who are going to be affected by that. I guess what I'm saying is I feel like I'm seeing slivers of it now and I'm curious what you make of those.

[Daniel Lurie]

I do think there will be areas where some jobs go away or maybe there will be some whole categories of jobs that go away. And any job that goes away, even if it's good for society and the economy as a whole, is very painful, extremely painful in that moment. And so I do totally get not just the anxiety, but that there is going to be real pain here. In many cases, in many more cases though, I think we will find that the world is significantly underemployed. The world wants way more code than can get written right now. 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, 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, make 30 times as much money even if the price comes down. 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 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. Human demand seems limitless. Our ability to imagine new things to do for each other seems limitless. We always seem to want more stuff. Stuff to play increasingly silly status games. Our jobs would not have seemed like real jobs to people in the not very distant past. 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. That's great, but that's 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 because I think human imagination and desire, demand, whatever you want to call it, is limitless, we will find incredible new things to do. Society will get way richer. I think generally society gets richer, 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 the entry level people, I think will be the people that do the best here. They're the most fluent with the tools. They're the most like, able to think of things in very new ways. They have this sort of largest canvas. So 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. And the hard part about this is I think it will happen faster than previous technological changes, but. But I think the new jobs will be better and people will have better stuff. And the kind of like, take that, half the jobs are going to be gone in a year or two years or five years or whatever. I think that's not how society really works. Even if the technology were ready for that, the inertia of society, which will be helpful in this case is like there's a lot of mass there.

[Mayor of San Francisco]

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 worker that I think is more tenured, is more oriented toward a routine and a certain way of doing things in a certain role 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. And a lot of what's driving that fear are like 20 somethings that are actually coming out of 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? I can do that much faster. The thing that companies actually worry about deeply is not the entry level job. 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, modernize the tool set. And what do you do with that?

[Casey Newton]

Right.

[Mayor of San Francisco]

And that's I think, actually the kind of addressable problem for us.

[Casey Newton]

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. And earlier this year you said you supported a federal preemption on state level AI regulations, a version of which is now part of the Republican budget bill. What changed? Did you see the regulations that people were writing and thought we wanted regulation, but not like that?

[Daniel Lurie]

No, I still think we need some regulation, but I would say I have for, 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 more jaded is 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, you know, if we kick off like a three year process to write something that's like very detailed and 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 and I think something around the sort of like the really risky capabilities and ideally something that can sort of be quite 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 yeah, it's like impossible for me to imagine a world where society doesn't decide. We need some framework here.

[Brad Lightcap]

Earlier this year you adjusted GPT 4.0 after it inadvertently became more sycophantic than you intended. 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. Can that be stopped? Do you want it to stop?

[Daniel Lurie]

Of course we want it to stop. I mean we do a lot of things to try to mitigate that. We, you know, if people are having like a crisis, which they talk to ChatGPT about, we try to convince them to, we try to, to suggest that they get help from a professional, that they talk to their family. If conversations are going down a sort of rabbit hole in this direction, we try to cut them off or suggest to the user to maybe think about something differently. But there are, I think the broader topic of mental health and the way that that interacts with over reliance on AI models is something we're trying to take extremely seriously and rapidly. We don't want to 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 had a psychological interaction.

[Brad Lightcap]

Have you ever thought about just like literally putting a warning on that says, this is ChatGPT. You are not talking to God, you are not having a religious experience.

[Daniel Lurie]

I mean, the model will tell you things like that and then users will write us and say like, you modified this. And they change their custom instructions. But yes, there need to be a lot of warnings like that. 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.

[Mayor of San Francisco]

We also have to be careful because. Because there are an incredible number of use cases that I think probably by 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. These are things like almost kind of borderline therapeutic or. I mean, I get stories of people who have rehabilitated marriages, have rehabilitated relationships with estranged loved ones, things like that, where, where it's highly net positive and there's not a dependency, but 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. I was surfing in Costa Rica the other day and someone paddled up to me and was chatting with him, a local Costa Rican guy, and he's like, where do you work? I said, OpenAI. He's like, oh, you make chatgpt. And he started crying. He's like, chatgpt saved my marriage. I didn't know how to talk to my wife, and it gave me two tips to talk to my wife. And I've learned that and 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.

[Casey Newton]

That's great. We're back to even. Because a chatbot tried to break up my marriage.

[Daniel Lurie]

Well, not our chatbot, though.

[Casey Newton]

Well, it was your chatbot, but it was inside Bing, so. Well, spread the blame around there now, Sam, you just had a kid. Congratulations. Thank you, thank you, thank you. Do you think over the course of their lifetime, your kid will have more human friends or more AI friends?

[Daniel Lurie]

More human friends. But AI will be, if not a friend, at least an important kind of companion of some sort.

[Casey Newton]

Is that okay with you? If 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?

[Daniel Lurie]

If my kid felt like that was playing, that was like replacing human friends, 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. And in the sense ChatGPT is talking to hundreds of millions of people a day, there are going to be some real edge cases in there.

[Brad Lightcap]

There.

[Daniel Lurie]

But most people, much more than I was concerned, seem to really understand the difference between talking to a person and talking to ChatGPT. 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 But I think, at least so far, it has surprised me on the upside of how much people really differentiate between 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, in this other way and get a very different thing out of that.

[Brad Lightcap]

All right, here's something I've always wanted to ask you. AI Twitter is still really active. Even though Twitter doesn't exist anymore, 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. Have you ever thought of just moving your post somewhere else?

[Daniel Lurie]

Where should I move them?

[Brad Lightcap]

Well, you could create your own social app.

[Casey Newton]

Don't go to Blue Sky. They don't like AI there. They're not going to be nice to you.

[Brad Lightcap]

It's a rough neighborhood. Maybe as a last thing, we wanted.

[Kevin Roos]

To know this, too.

[Brad Lightcap]

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

[Mayor of San Francisco]

I gotta think about that one.

[Brad Lightcap]

Surfing, presumably. Although maybe you ask me tips.

[Mayor of San Francisco]

We're roboticizing that now too. It's unfortunate, but let me think about it.

[Daniel Lurie]

I'm big on the analog stuff. I, you know, I put my phone away and go for hikes every weekend and I, you know, hanging out with my family, I put my phone away. I. And I'm like very happy not to have technology in the way for that.

[Brad Lightcap]

All right, Brad and Sam, thank you.

[Casey Newton]

So much for joining us.

[Daniel Lurie]

Thank you. Thank you.

[Brad Lightcap]

Thank you, Brad.

[Daniel Lurie]

Thank you.

[Kevin Roos]

This podcast is supported by IBM test.

[IBM Ad]

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[Casey Newton]

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 McMurran. Original music by Alicia Ba Itup, Marion Lozano, Rowan Nimisto and Dan Powell. Video production by Sawyer Roquet, Pat Gunther and Chris Schott. You can watch this full episode on [e-mail] hardfork Special thanks to the New York Times Live event team who helped us put together Hard Fork Live. Hillary Kuhn, Beth Weinstein, Caitlin Roper, Kate Carrington, Chantal Regnier, Melissa Tripoli, Natalie Green, Angela Austin, Kirsten Birmingham, Marissa Farina, Jennifer Feeney and Morgan Singer. 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. Special thanks also to Matt Collette, Paula Schumann, Pui Wing Tam, Dahlia Haddad and Jeffrey Miranda. You can email us as always@hardforkytime games.com.