The Sam Altman Interview 8/8/25

Summary

Squawk Pod – "The Sam Altman Interview 8/8/25"

CNBC | August 8, 2025
Host: Andrew Ross Sorkin, with Joe Kernan
Guest: Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI

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Overview

This episode centers on an in-depth interview with Sam Altman, CEO and co-founder of OpenAI, the day after the landmark release of ChatGPT-5. The hosts dissect Altman's insights on AI's most critical advancements, the rapidly evolving impact of generative AI, OpenAI’s strategy, and what these shifts mean for business, healthcare, privacy, innovation, and human agency. Key themes include the technical leaps of GPT-5, the future of AGI (Artificial General Intelligence), the fierce competition for AI talent, and OpenAI’s approach to business growth and profitability.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. ChatGPT-5 Launch: What’s New?

[20:22] – [21:22]

• GPT-5 offers a smarter, faster, and more intuitive user experience, unifying previous capabilities into an integrated tool.
• Coding skills have improved drastically, addressing a major user demand and challenging leading competitors like Anthropic.

  “One of the biggest things... is it’s an integrated, single experience... there’s just one thing called GPT5 now instead of the long list of models we used to have.”
  — Sam Altman [20:28]

2. AI in Healthcare: Early Transformations

[21:22] – [23:08]

• Healthcare is the area with the strongest improvement in GPT-5; people already rely on it for medical advice and record analysis.

• Sam Altman sees the need for legal/data privacy protections akin to doctor-patient privilege as AI becomes deeply embedded in personal decisions.

  “Healthcare is maybe the area where there’s the strongest improvement of any category... It's become really important to people as a sort of, you know, a way to get help with their entire health care journey.”
  — Sam Altman [21:46]

  "Society is likely to, and I think should come to the conclusion at some point that we... need something... like medical privilege or legal privilege [for AI advice]..."
  — Sam Altman [23:08]

3. Hallucinations & Reasoning Transparency

[07:16] – [09:38]

• GPT-5 significantly reduces hallucinations (made-up facts), but the phenomenon is openly discussed as ongoing. The hosts share real-world examples.
• New “reasoning” models show step-by-step thought processes (when not too fast!), boosting user trust and transparency.

  "Actually, all the reasoning models though... now does it so fast, is you actually sometimes can see the reasoning...”
  — Andrew Ross Sorkin [08:18]

4. Safety, Ethics, & Societal Impact

[24:09] – [25:12]

• GPT-5 is smarter about partial compliance with "risky" requests—helping with benign parts, refusing harm-linked tasks.
• Altman acknowledges these entail tough edge cases requiring ongoing societal debate:

  "As AI becomes very capable, society is really going to have to wrestle with these questions..."
  — Sam Altman [25:12]

5. Technical Innovations: Synthetic Data and Model Training

[25:54] – [26:17]

• Notable leap: Use of synthetic data—training GPT-5 with outputs from previous generations, enabling models to “teach themselves” and accelerate improvement.

  “We really started using synthetic data. So the previous generation of model is teaching the next generation of model.”
  — Sam Altman [25:54]

6. Path Toward AGI and What It Means

[26:17] – [27:28]

• GPT-5 marks a clear step towards AGI (Artificial General Intelligence); models now self-teach to some extent.
• The hosts probe Altman for an AGI definition; he says the term is fuzzy but expects ground-breaking discoveries—like new math theorems or self-initiated research—from AI in as little as 2 years.

  "Maybe another one that people like is when it discovers an important new mathematical theorem... I would expect that we’re maybe like 2ish years away from something like that."
  — Sam Altman [27:08]

7. Practical Applications and AI Integration

[27:28] – [28:27]

• Rapid movement toward AI agents fully managing email, calendar, and other personal tasks is only six months away.

  “One of the things I’ve always wanted ChatGPT to do is... every email that came in overnight, I’d like a drafted response... only maybe another, maybe six months away from being able to do that really well.”
  — Sam Altman [27:57]

8. Growth, Monetization, and Public Markets

[28:27] – [37:56]

• Explosive user growth—from 500M to 700M active users; GPT-5 launches see a surge, especially in enterprise.

• OpenAI emphasizes consumer-first growth and plans accelerated enterprise targeting.

• Altman sees no urgency to profitability; he prefers continuous heavy R&D spending so long as model improvements are steep, citing being private as an advantage:

  "As long as we're on this very steep curve... I think the rational thing to do is to just be willing to run at a loss for quite a while..."
  — Sam Altman [37:37]

• On public investors and secondary shares:

  “I hate that people get pushed to like various degrees of sketchy ways to try to get exposure...”
  — Sam Altman [37:06]

9. The Human Element: Agency & Decision-Making

[31:58] – [33:51]

• Hosts and Altman debate whether dependence on GPT’s advice erodes or simply redefines agency.
• Altman expresses concern that something important is lost if people cease to deliberate and blindly accept AI suggestions—though he predicts agency will “subjectively” remain.

  "I do worry about this general case of people that just make their decisions based off of what the advice ChatGPT gives them. Like, it does feel to me like something gets important, gets lost in that process, even if the advice is always really good."
  — Sam Altman [32:55]

10. Race for AI Talent

[34:20] – [35:37]

• Intense, escalating competition for a tiny cohort of “superstars” who can push AI’s algorithmic boundaries.

  "Definitely this is the most intense talent market I have seen in my career."
  — Sam Altman [34:20]

• While big tech may fight over a few dozen names, Altman believes thousands globally are capable of breakthrough work.

11. OpenAI’s Relationship with Microsoft and Elon Musk’s Taunt

[38:21] – [39:09]

• On Elon Musk’s claim that “OpenAI will eat Microsoft alive,” Altman is nonplussed, noting conflicting signals from Musk and little concern for Twitter spats.

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Notable Quotes and Memorable Moments

• On GPT-5’s Unified Experience:
  “It’s an integrated, single experience... there’s just one thing called GPT5 now.”
  — Sam Altman [20:28]

• On the Future of AGI:
  “I think the point of all of this is it doesn’t really matter and it’s just this continuing exponential of model capability...”
  — Sam Altman [26:48]

• On Decision Agency:
  “I do worry about this general case of people that just make their decisions based off of what the advice ChatGPT gives them... something gets important, gets lost...”
  — Sam Altman [32:55]

• On Talent Competition:
  “Definitely this is the most intense talent market I have seen in my career... for a very small number of people right now.”
  — Sam Altman [34:20]

• On Profitability vs. Innovation:
  “As long as we’re on this very steep curve... I think the rational thing to do is to just be willing to run at a loss for quite a while and continue to do that.”
  — Sam Altman [37:37]

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Important Timestamps

| Timestamp | Segment | |-----------|----------------------------------------------------------| | 20:22 | Altman on what makes GPT-5 different | | 21:46 | AI’s expansion and privacy implications in healthcare | | 23:08 | Altman’s call for ‘AI privilege’ for sensitive data | | 24:09 | Safety, refusal boundaries, and partial compliance | | 25:54 | Synthetic data and model self-improvement | | 27:08 | AGI definitions and predictions | | 27:57 | Email/calendar integration, AI-powered daily agents | | 28:46 | User/business growth post-GPT-5 release | | 32:55 | Discussion on agency and decision-making | | 34:20 | Race for talent in AI | | 37:37 | Path to profitability and public market stance | | 38:21 | Microsoft partnership, Musk's public taunt |

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Tone and Style Notes

The conversation maintains a lively, curious, and sometimes philosophical tone, particularly as Altman and Sorkin muse about the ramifications of having AI deeply integrated into daily decisions. There’s an open acknowledgment of challenges—technical, ethical, and business—delivered with Altman’s characteristic humility and cautious optimism, and the hosts’ blend of irreverence and seriousness.

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Conclusion

This episode offers rare, up-to-the-minute insight from Sam Altman in the immediate aftermath of ChatGPT-5’s release. For listeners seeking a nuanced understanding of where generative AI is headed, how it will intersect with their work, privacy, and everyday life, and what keeps the field’s key leaders up at night, this conversation is essential. From technology breakthroughs to legal, ethical, and business quandaries, the episode distills the exhilarating—and daunting—frontiers of artificial intelligence as of 2025.

Transcript

[Podcast Announcer]

This episode is brought to you by Schwab Market Update, an original podcast from Charles Schwab. Join host Keith Lansford for this information packed daily market Preview delivered in 10 minutes or less, including projected stock updates, monetary policy decisions, and key results and statistics that may impact your trading. Download the latest episode and [e-mail] MarketUpdatePodcast or find Schwab Market Update wherever you.

[AT&T Business Advertiser]

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[Andrew Ross Sorkin]

Bring in show music please.

[Podcast Narrator]

Hi, I'm CNBC producer Katie Kramer. Today on Squawk Pod OpenAI CEO Sam Altman the day after ChatGPT5 hit the.

[Sam Altman]

Public healthcare is maybe the area where there's the strongest improvement of any category.

[Podcast Narrator]

A key founder in artificial intelligence on the impact his digital project has on on humanity.

[Sam Altman]

I do worry about this general case of people that just make their decisions based off of what the advice ChatGPT gives them. Like it does feel to me like something gets important, gets lost in that process, even if the advice is always really good.

[Podcast Narrator]

Why he's luring Silicon Valley's hottest talent.

[Sam Altman]

The bet the hope is they know how to like discover the remaining ideas to get to super intelligence, that there are going to be a handful of algorithmic ideas and a, you know, medium sized handful of people who can figure.

[Podcast Narrator]

Them out and how he's thinking about returns for investors. Spoiler. He's focused on innovation.

[Sam Altman]

As long as we're on this very steep curve of the model's getting better and better, I think the rational thing to do is to just be willing to run at a loss for quite a while and continue to do that. Which is also part of why I think it's nice not to be public.

[Podcast Narrator]

Plus the other stories that got us squawking, including President Trump's calls for Intel's CEO to resign.

[Joe Kernan]

This is clearly industrial policy, which nobody likes, brought on by the original industrial policy intel got in debt with the federal government.

[Podcast Narrator]

It's Friday, August 8th, 2025. Squawkpod begins right now.

[Andrew Ross Sorkin]

Stand Andrew PI in 3, 2, 1, up. And Andrew Q. Good morning and welcome to Squawkbox right here on CNBC. We're live at the NASDAQ market site in Times Square. I'm Andrew Oz Sorkin. By the skin of my teeth, I'm Andrew Oz Sorkin. Well, Becky's off. Joe is here.

[Joe Kernan]

I was here.

[Andrew Ross Sorkin]

Nice to see you.

[Joe Kernan]

Ready.

[Andrew Ross Sorkin]

You were ready to cook.

[Joe Kernan]

See you.

[Andrew Ross Sorkin]

Broadway decided that there's a crane right on Broadway. So I've been running down the street.

[Joe Kernan]

I know you had to do that.

[Andrew Ross Sorkin]

Panting.

[Joe Kernan]

You were really only about a minute later than normal. Really. Right.

[Andrew Ross Sorkin]

You know, there's very little room to spare. But it's nice to see you, sir.

[Joe Kernan]

It's good to see you as well. You're finally back after globetrotting country.

[Andrew Ross Sorkin]

Country more than globe country trotting. Is that what they would say?

[Joe Kernan]

I don't even think that's a phrase now.

[Andrew Ross Sorkin]

President Trump is back, sir. Yep.

[Joe Kernan]

And he's looks temporary. That's what they're saying. So far he's picked Council of Economic Advisors chair Steven Mirren as a temporary replacement for Adriana Coogler on the Federal Reserve Board of Governors. If confirmed by the Senate, it would serve out Coogler's term, which expires just at the end of January. Coogler is stepping down from the Fed today. And then reportedly Judy Shelton was under consideration.

[Andrew Ross Sorkin]

Yeah.

[Joe Kernan]

What it says in the front page of the Journey. What do you think Journal didn't have, I mean, under consideration for this.

[Andrew Ross Sorkin]

No, I know, but temporarily. But, but by the way, someone's got to fill this, this position long term. Right.

[Joe Kernan]

And is it the same person that ascends to. I don't know it, I don't know what the, the, I don't know what is in the president's mind and I don't know what the machinations are for. You know how it worked. Is it like a trial run or something for Fed chair? I, I mean, and with, you know, all the worry about independence and everything else, is it, I mean, is that someone that's going to play ball? Is that get tested out for that?

[Andrew Ross Sorkin]

I don't know. Well, the other question I was if Mirand goes back, like what's does he do? This is like a pit stop and then go back to the administration? How does that work?

[Joe Kernan]

Yeah, exactly. I don't know.

[Andrew Ross Sorkin]

And have we had that before?

[Joe Kernan]

I don't know.

[Andrew Ross Sorkin]

That sort of, sort of in and out.

[Joe Kernan]

We know a lot more about the Fed like 10 years ago, could you have meant that you've named all the governors and all the.

[Andrew Ross Sorkin]

No, no. Except that many of them come on, squawk. But over the last 10 years.

[Joe Kernan]

That's why I don't think everyone is like us, obviously, knowing every single, you know, the minutiae of the Federal Reserve. It's all, I mean, is that the way it's supposed to be? They are very important in our life. In a post on Truth Social, President Trump said, in the meantime, we'll continue to search for a permanent replacement. Mirren is a past critic of the Fed, specifically its aggressive stimulus action during the COVID pandemic. He's also author of of a plan to devalue the dollar as a way of managing the country's current accounts deficit.

[Andrew Ross Sorkin]

Meantime, OpenAI announcing its latest and most advanced large scale AI model. OpenAI saying that ChatGPT5 is smarter, faster and more useful, particularly in things like writing and specifically in coding and health care. Company says its hallucination rate is lower, meaning less frequently fabricated answers. And ChatGPT5 will be available to everyone. This includes OpenAI's non paying users. The first time those users are going to have access to what's described as a reasoning model, which carries out sort of an internal chain of thought before actually responding chat GPT5 announcement coming with a bit of corporate executive drama. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella posted about the new release on X, saying it's the most capable model yet from our partners at OpenAI. Now Elon Musk responding that post, saying the following says OpenAI is going to eat Microsoft alive. Well, we're going to speak with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. It's going to happen this morning. I got to play with chat GPT5 for a good part of the flight back from San Francisco yesterday and pretty good. It's better. It's better than, it's better than four. I think that most people are not paying users, so the difference might actually feel even bigger in terms of what it can do. And the coding piece is the whole game because right now Anthropic owns the coding world. That's their sort of purview. And these guys have really owned the consumer facing world. And the question is whether this model is going to effectively forget about eating Microsoft for lunch, whether it eats Anthropic for lunch or not.

[Joe Kernan]

Have you had a hallucination experience with AI?

[Andrew Ross Sorkin]

All the time.

[Joe Kernan]

You do? Yeah, I haven't used it enough, I guess for that. How can you, how can you tell? Just crazy stuff.

[Andrew Ross Sorkin]

It Just knows it, just makes up answers. Just you ask it something.

[Joe Kernan]

I have seen that.

[Andrew Ross Sorkin]

And the answer, I have seen that. Just completely made up.

[Joe Kernan]

I yell back at them, I go, you're an idiot. And they say, I'm sorry you feel that way. We tried it.

[Andrew Ross Sorkin]

You know, you can sometimes, sometimes it'll make up not. It'll make up facts and make up quotes. I'll say, where did you find this?

[Joe Kernan]

Only someone the other day was dead. And they.

[Andrew Ross Sorkin]

Right. I'll say, where did you find this? And it'll say, oh, I apologize, I must have gotten this wrong.

[Joe Kernan]

I remember I asked about, I asked about the interview with President Trump. I asked about was it a. You know, I asked some specific questions and it said, president Trump did not have an interview with CNBC today. So then I said, you really need to check your facts.

[Andrew Ross Sorkin]

And then what happened?

[Joe Kernan]

Then it came back and it checked its facts and it came back, yes.

[Andrew Ross Sorkin]

Yeah, I've had that.

[Joe Kernan]

Weird.

[Andrew Ross Sorkin]

Yeah, this I think should be better than that. But what is cool about this and actually all the reasoning models though this now does it so fast, is you actually sometimes can see the reasoning where it'll say, the user has asked me. It'll rewrite what the user says. The user's really trying to get at this and I need to figure out this. And then it'll do that and say, and the next permutation is this. And so you actually. It's crazy to see the computer thinking through the sort of various ways it's supposed to get in GPT5. It actually goes so fast that you can't really even see that part. And one of the things that Sam is now saying is sometimes you think the answer can't possibly be right because it's so fast that actually having watched the computer think was actually helpful to the user experience because you're like, oh, okay.

[Joe Kernan]

They all don't have the little progress on their thoughts. Do they all do that? Because sometimes. Now we're doing now I'm doing this, now I'm doing that.

[Andrew Ross Sorkin]

Not all of them do that.

[Joe Kernan]

Not all of them do that.

[Andrew Ross Sorkin]

By the way, I think that's a great sort of ui. Well, because it makes it feel very human. Even when they decided early on, I mean, and ChatGPT was the first to do it, to even just have the words right out in front of you. That's. By the way, all that is, is an animation. I don't know if people appreciate what's happening when I say it's an anim. It's Just animating the text.

[Joe Kernan]

Right, right, right.

[Andrew Ross Sorkin]

It could also just spit the whole thing out at one shot and seeing that it just feels different.

[Joe Kernan]

What sort of concerned me was it says that what entity is in the catbird seat for AI Reddit? I mean, if that's the place that cesspool of chat rooms is where you're getting information, I hope that gets a little bit better than that. I guess I shouldn't be poking the Reddit. The Reddit bear, not nut jobs. Yeah. Now to the pressure. Have no life, number one. Now to the pressure on Intel CEO Lip Bhutan. The Wall Street Journal says the Tan had experienced some tension with members of Intel's board even before President Trump said yesterday that Tan should resign and called him highly conflicted. Tan was named CEO of Intel in March, and the Journal says since then he has clashed with some intel directors on key questions, like whether the chip company should remain a manufacturer. Shares of intel ended yesterday, down 3% after Trump's criticism. Earlier this week, Republican Senator Tom Cotton sent a letter to Intel's chair raising questions about Tan's ties to several Chinese companies. He referenced a past criminal case involving Cadence Design Systems, which Tan previously led. In a statement yesterday, intel said that the company, Tan and Intel's board are deeply committed to advancing US national and economic security interests and are making significant investments aligned with the president's America first agenda. Fascinating. Andrew. I want. I don't assign. I assigned Albert Brooks book to you once, but you got this one talks everything about what we were talking about yesterday and it's like we're both right. This is. This is clearly industrial policy which nobody likes brought on by the original industrial. Industrial policy intel got in bed with with the federal government arguing for. For subsidies they couldn't even have built the manufacturing stuff with. Without subsidies. It's not going well. It was supposed to be ready in 2025. It's not going to be till 2030. They had to lay off people so it didn't create jobs. The I think that lost 21,000.

[Andrew Ross Sorkin]

This has been a failed effort. But if that's true. And by the way but it.

[Joe Kernan]

But now they're in bed with the government. So Trump feels like you are. You already owe us. You're already beholding to us for all these subsidies. So I can tell you what to do. It should have never gotten to that point in the first place.

[Andrew Ross Sorkin]

100%.

[Joe Kernan]

Okay, so it's industrial policy across the board, either party.

[Andrew Ross Sorkin]

Doesn't matter. And by the way, the Democrats were just as bad on the Industrial policy side.

[Joe Kernan]

No, I'm saying they started. Were much worse. Not just as bad.

[Sam Altman]

That's what I said.

[Andrew Ross Sorkin]

Well, but what I was going to say is, so go back in the debates that you and I used to have about industrial policy under Barack Obama, for example, Biden or whatever, including, by the way, I don't know if you described it, fdr, that we used to argue. I don't know if you described it as industrial policy, but I would say Biden's decision to this day not to invite Elon Musk.

[Joe Kernan]

I know.

[Andrew Ross Sorkin]

In the tents.

[Joe Kernan]

Yeah.

[Andrew Ross Sorkin]

On EVs, still. I don't even know if I put that in the industrial policy, but sort of.

[Joe Kernan]

No, it is.

[Andrew Ross Sorkin]

Anyway. All of those kinds of things were complete, complete mistakes. All I'm suggesting is if that is true, that we're deciding that it's a mistake and you decided it was a mistake a long time ago, then the question is, forget about Intel. Intel is an outlier at this point. There's so much of what we're doing right now is a grand industrial policy. And the question is, we're now doing industrial policy at scale. And if you didn't think we could do it properly, you know, in the micro, how, you know, can we really make it in the macro?

[Joe Kernan]

Do you remember in the CHIPS act, you had to subsidize childcare, you had to pay union wages.

[Andrew Ross Sorkin]

I agree.

[Joe Kernan]

So you did all these progressive. So now Trump.

[Andrew Ross Sorkin]

Yeah.

[Joe Kernan]

Who's going to stop him from saying no dei, no esg? You got. Don't you know, you can't have hiring, so it's going to be from the other side. But when you start it, you know, you stick your toe in the water, you can't pull it back out.

[Andrew Ross Sorkin]

Well, can you? Can you just end it?

[Joe Kernan]

Intel might end it itself.

[Andrew Ross Sorkin]

Well, no, no, when I say end.

[Joe Kernan]

It, but I mean it is a shadow of its former self.

[Andrew Ross Sorkin]

But I'm saying that this is corporate industrial policy. But you'd say tariffs are a form of industrial policy. Huge industrial policy.

[Joe Kernan]

Right.

[Andrew Ross Sorkin]

That's like a massive industrial policy.

[Joe Kernan]

Aimed at bringing back an industry here.

[Andrew Ross Sorkin]

Right.

[Joe Kernan]

Which is the same thing that this was aimed at in a totally different way.

[Andrew Ross Sorkin]

In a different way. And by the way, one may work better than the other.

[Joe Kernan]

Well, I think that goes without saying.

[Andrew Ross Sorkin]

We'll see.

[Sam Altman]

Cheese will be next.

[Podcast Narrator]

Coming up on Squawk Pod, our full interview with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, what the ChatGPT creator imagines for the future.

[Sam Altman]

One of the things I've always wanted, ChatGPT to do is when I wake up every morning, every email that came in overnight, I'd like a drafted response and then I can choose whether to send it or not or edit it. But we're only maybe another, maybe six months away from being able to do that really well.

[Podcast Narrator]

And if he looks really far to.

[Sam Altman]

The future, if I let myself dream forward to someday farming the future where I'm retiring to an AI CEO for OpenAI and I'm writing that final prompt of like, here's my advice to you. I would still feel like a lot of agency in the moment. I think.

[Podcast Narrator]

Don't go anywhere. Sam Altman is up next.

[Podcast Announcer]

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[Andrew Ross Sorkin]

Billy the Kid Sheriff's on our backs.

[Podcast Announcer]

From the creator of Vikings.

[Joe Kernan]

I'm sick of being on the run. From now on, you and me are the hunters.

[Podcast Announcer]

The legend ends here.

[Andrew Ross Sorkin]

They want to ride together, they can die together.

[AT&T Business Advertiser]

Billy I told you all, I ain't being taken alive.

[Podcast Announcer]

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[Sam Altman]

In just 30 seconds, there are likely.

[Andrew Ross Sorkin]

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[Sam Altman]

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[Andrew Ross Sorkin]

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[Podcast Narrator]

Welcome back to Squawk Pod.

[Andrew Ross Sorkin]

You're watching Squawk Box right here on CNBC on this Friday morning. I'm Andrew Sorkin along with Joe Kernan. Becky is off. Got a lot going on though. This Monday, This Friday. It's going to be Monday soon. Soon enough. It's basically Monday. Meantime, Open Air announcing its latest and most advanced large scale AI model. The company saying GPT5 is smarter, faster, more useful. I used it. It seems to be all of those things, particularly in things like writing, coding and particularly health care. We're going to talk about all of that this morning with. Yes, We've got the CEO Sam Altman first here on CNBC. So many questions from Mr. Altman this morning.

[Joe Kernan]

So have you ever created a software application.

[Andrew Ross Sorkin]

Oh, using ChatGPT? Yes, I've played. Yes, I've tried. I tried to actually create.

[Joe Kernan]

What would a normal person be doing that to do? I'm working on buying something online. That's possible.

[Andrew Ross Sorkin]

Right.

[Joe Kernan]

You can see something and then are, you know, delivered to your house. Is that. I have not thought I was gonna. No kidding. I've done that. But. But I don't. I haven't considered writing a software application for myself. What would I. Why would I do that? What would I want to do? Can you help me?

[Andrew Ross Sorkin]

Let's say there was a program that you wanted to build for yourself.

[Joe Kernan]

Okay. I don't really have that desire right now. I'd like to be better with. With from 90 yards in.

[Andrew Ross Sorkin]

But what happens if there was an app called the Kernan app that did what? That looked at the news every morning.

[Joe Kernan]

Yes. And sifted through all the mainstream media bias.

[Andrew Ross Sorkin]

Stream media bias, and then. And then tagged each one with a comment from the Kernan AI, which would then explain what's wrong with us.

[Joe Kernan]

Okay, I want to do that. Have you done this?

[Andrew Ross Sorkin]

No, I'm making this app up as we speak.

[Joe Kernan]

Why haven't you done it? And it's called Vibe.

[Andrew Ross Sorkin]

Vibe coding. We could Vibe code it together.

[Joe Kernan]

All right, we got to talk to this.

[Andrew Ross Sorkin]

How much do you want to sell the app for on the App Store? I could sell it, Yes. I think there should be a subscription model here. I think this is bringing me into the whole thing.

[Joe Kernan]

I'm in the 20th century, I think. Is it the 20th? It's the 21st. And then he says interacting with the new technology feels like talking to a PhD. Is that a selling point? Is that a good thing?

[Andrew Ross Sorkin]

You get to ask Sam Altman that very question.

[Joe Kernan]

All right, you got to. You got to say something.

[Sam Altman]

I don't want to.

[Joe Kernan]

I'm not necessarily sure that that's where you get the good answers. No, today, Mark, where do you think.

[Andrew Ross Sorkin]

We'Re going to get the good answers from?

[Joe Kernan]

You got to look into your heart, in your soul for those.

[Andrew Ross Sorkin]

Okay. Open Air launching its latest new model, GPT5, offering faster performance, fewer hallucinations, improved coding capabilities, and customizable personalities. I've been playing with it for the last 24 hours. Joining us right now is the man who co founded the company, CEO Sam Altman. Sam, it's great to see you, sir.

[Sam Altman]

Good to see you too. Thanks for having me.

[Andrew Ross Sorkin]

We've been trying to build, by the way, an app all morning. I mean, GitHub right now. Trying to build Joe Kernan an app. Unsuccessfully. Good. Well, I think you guys have done the right thing so far. I mean, I think that the code looks good. The problem is I can't get it to actually effectively play for me, if you will. I got to do it in GitHub. I was actually trying to get OpenAI to actually build me a way to play it effectively in the browser, but I'm not there yet. So I still with that, it can do that. But help us understand the distinction between where you think chat GPT5 is today versus where we were just even 48 hours ago.

[Sam Altman]

Yeah, so you said a bunch of things. Model smarter, it's faster, it's more intuitive, it's more useful in a bunch of ways. One of the biggest things, though, is it's an integrated, single experience. We have built a system that can answer easy questions quickly. It can think for a long time and answer hard questions. And it's, it's, you know, there's just one thing called GPT5 now instead of the long list of models we used to have, it's much better for businesses and enterprises. Coding in particular is something that people have been really waiting for a great model for. So we're seeing super strong enterprise adoption of this and.

[Andrew Ross Sorkin]

Yeah, well, so let me ask you. Some people have called it an anthropic killer because one of the things that anthropic, at least historically, has done well is the coding piece of this. How much of Chapi T5 was focused on the coding side of things?

[Sam Altman]

We did, we did really want to improve on coding. That was, you know, an area that we heard consistently from consumers, from users, businesses, enterprise, everything, that we just weren't good enough. So we did put in a lot of effort there, but it's improved at lots of things.

[Andrew Ross Sorkin]

The other piece of it is health care. Lots of people ask IT questions about their own health care, including myself. What's the difference between before and after? And I'm curious, how much, how much stuff do you put into the. The system? Because sometimes I think to myself, I'll upload my, you know, reports from doctors and blood and this and that. And then I think, oh, I don't know if I should be doing that. What do you think?

[Sam Altman]

So health care is, is maybe the area where there's the strongest improvement of any category. We have Seen health care become a huge issue. People use this, as you said, people are putting in all their reports, everything they can. And it's become really important to people as a sort of, you know, a way to get help with, with their entire health care journey. And I think people feel a very, very, very big difference there. Health care is a huge fraction of the usage of chatbots. It's one of the largest categories. So I put everything in. You know, I know a lot of other people do too. I think getting people better information on their health care and sort of the ability to make better decisions, that seems really important. And I'm thrilled that we were able to make this better. And definitely huge user of it.

[Andrew Ross Sorkin]

Personally, one of the reasons I asked the question is, and I think you made a mention of it maybe on a podcast recently, was just this idea that ultimately the information that we're inputting into systems like ChatGPT and by the way, into search, if you were to do this on Google, are all quote, unquote discoverable. At some point, if somebody were to either sue you or something, they could come to, they could come to a company like yours and say, give me everything. And we're now putting so much more into these systems because we're asking oftentimes relatively intimate questions or providing pretty intimate data.

[Sam Altman]

Yeah, look, I personally believe that society is likely to, and I think should come to the conclusion at some point that we, we need something, some concept like we have, you know, medical privilege or legal privilege. And if you are asking for this kind of advice, even though it's like a, you know, not a human doctor, but like an AI medical advisor, a lot of those same principles should apply. And that just the fact that you've asked ChatGPT to analyze your medical records does not mean they should then be discoverable by a court, but they should be protected by the same standards. And I think as AI becomes more and more a part of people, people's lives and the way we get this kind of information, I think, I hope whatever, that society will decide to extend similar legal protections. Right.

[Andrew Ross Sorkin]

What do you think about safety? And I know that there's a lot of sort of different safety parameters built into this, certain types of questions that you'll answer, but you won't answer fully explain what that means.

[Sam Altman]

So, you know, there's this question of, like, if you ask ChatGPT to help you build a bomb, you know, should it, should it do that? And there's educational value in that. There's other ways to learn that you could Be trying to learn it for a good reason. But if you're actually like, I'm going to go try to like, you know, really damage someone. Obviously we don't want ChatGPT to enable you to do, you know, cause like grievous harm in the world in a way that you couldn't without it. But a new thing that GPT5 does is try to be smarter and help you with parts of a question that might be okay and then not help you with parts that are, that could be used for significant harm. This is an evolving area. Like, the calls here are difficult. There's like a lot of, a lot of principles sound easy in theory, and then there's like a lot of edge cases. But as AI becomes very capable, society is really going to have to wrestle with these questions of we want to bring the tremendous value and enable people to do things they never could before. And then the amount of power and capability that brings people, you know, we don't want to enable really serious misuse.

[Joe Kernan]

Sam, can. Can you share any key architectural changes or training innovations that distinguish GPT5 from GPT4 and how they impact its reasoning or grounding capabilities?

[Andrew Ross Sorkin]

And by the way, he got that question, Sam from ChatGPT, is that okay.

[Joe Kernan]

Can it look at it? Can it look at itself? You know, that's supposedly the brain can't look at it at itself. I did get that. It's a really good question though.

[Andrew Ross Sorkin]

I thought, I'm watching him, by the way. Sam, literally looking at.

[Joe Kernan]

I was, I asked.

[Andrew Ross Sorkin]

He literally asked GPT for a question for you.

[Sam Altman]

Yeah, well, it's an interesting and good question. So, you know, thank you.

[Joe Kernan]

Thank you.

[Sam Altman]

Many improvements went into training GPT5, but one that goes in the direction you touched on is we really started using synthetic data. So the previous generation of model is teaching the next generation of model. And as these models get smarter, the data that they can create can be, you know, really quite interesting and helpful. And we saw that with this model. We expect to see that more with every future model.

[Andrew Ross Sorkin]

This is, you know, this gets to the AGI question, which is at what point do you think where it becomes, where the model starts to teach itself?

[Sam Altman]

That's definitely happening now to some degree. Like, definitely part of the reason GPT5 is better than previous models is those previous models helping to teach this new one.

[Andrew Ross Sorkin]

And so where do you think we are on this AGI path then?

[Sam Altman]

What's your personal definition of AGI? And then I'll answer.

[Andrew Ross Sorkin]

Oh, that's a good question. Well, what is your personal definition of AGI?

[Sam Altman]

I have many, which is why I think it's not a super useful term. I think one definition that people like is when it's doing a significant amount of work in the world, although that keeps changing because people do new jobs. Another that some people use is when it can do really good AI research on its own. I think the point of all of this is it doesn't really matter and it's just this continuing exponential of model capability that we'll rely on for more and more things. Maybe another one that people like is when it discovers an important new mathematical theorem or important new piece of science. I would expect that we're maybe like 2ish years away from something like that.

[Andrew Ross Sorkin]

Let me ask you a different question, just from a very practical perspective, in terms of productivity and maybe even the way you use it personally, how far are we away from it being able to be truly plugged in to just about every app, whether it's your email or your calendar or as an agent buying stuff for you and really, really fully integrated? Obviously the operator can do certain things, but it's not there yet. I think we would, we would agree. I mean, when do you think that it sort of gets like supercharged?

[Sam Altman]

So we announced yesterday that next week we're going to integrate with email and calendar and it'll be able to look at your calendar and do stuff for you and read your emails. You know, one of the things I've always wanted ChatGPT to do is when I wake up every morning, every email that came in overnight, I'd like a drafted response and then I can choose whether to send it or not or edit it. But you know, that would be like, I think that would just be like a great efficiency gain for me. And I think we're only maybe another, maybe six months away from being able to do that.

[Andrew Ross Sorkin]

Really well, in terms of the growth, this company is obviously just on a remarkable. I mean, just seeing the numbers from 500 million to 700 million active users, do you think that the growth is going to continue at that pace? Does it get faster? Does it get slower? And in terms of paid customers, how do you see that shifting?

[Sam Altman]

We are, it's only been, you know, 20 hours or whatever since we launched GPT5, but we are seeing crazy numbers from the level of GPT5 adoption. I would, it looks like we're going to have a significant acceleration in growth on the business side. The consumer side will keep growing very strong. Like at this point we have a, you know, I Think like we got to keep working hard to, to earn the right to keep this but a pretty good lead on the consumer side. On the business side I think you will see very strong growth from here. We prioritize the consumer side first because we think that that is like a very valuable thing to get. But now we'll, we'll try to really go grow at the same rate on the enterprise side.

[Joe Kernan]

Sam, do you, can you tell me and do you even know what to expect let's say five years from now? Do you know what, do you, would you even venture a guess at it? Because I think it starts, you know, it's kind of a singularity type thought where we don't even know when machines know so much more than we know. We don't even know what to expect. You feel like you have a good idea five years from now, 10 years from now, what, what AI is going to be?

[Sam Altman]

No one knows. Of course it's, it's what I would expect though. And you know, know I say there's a lot of humility be totally wrong is that five or ten years from now AI is vastly smarter than people and the rate of technological change in the world is astonishing. And yet the day to day way we live our lives and the way that society works changes surprisingly little. It's, I think in some sense you can see this already. Like if you could go back five years and you know, an oracle would tell you hey there's going to be like PhD level intelligence available via like a chatbot and it can't do long complicated tasks. But if you have like a question that would take you know, some number of minutes or tens of minutes to answer, it'll just, it can just tell you and it can like write a whole piece of software for you, you would probably say that's impossible. But if it does happen, the world will change like unrecognizably and it did happen in the world hasn't changed that much or society hasn't changed that much even this is an incredible technological change. So my guess on a five to ten year time frame is crazy scientific change, crazy technology gain and society changes of course, but not the impossible amount it sounds like it should.

[Andrew Ross Sorkin]

But do you think so? Ok there's a philosophical one and then I want to go back to the business but the agency that we're all going to have over our own lives and the reason I mention this is this is idea that I find myself taking advice from Chat GPT oftentimes right. I'll ask it A question, it'll give me an answer. And I could see a time in life where it. Not that I become the robot, but it. It starts to prompt me and then the question is whether I accept the prompt. And maybe that's the question by the agency in terms of what I do. Right. If in fact all of our emails are written pre. Written for us. Yes, hopefully we have the agency to decide whether to send it or not or change it or what, what have you. But over time, whether that sort of changes our own psychology about our own agency.

[Sam Altman]

Do you perceive any less agency now, even though Chatbot has given you?

[Andrew Ross Sorkin]

I don't. I don't. I also hope that I'm, you know, mature person who's figured some stuff out. I just wonder if I was younger, maybe I would be more listening to certain answers over other. I don't know. I don't know. I don't. I actually don't know the answer.

[Sam Altman]

One more question about that. If it got to the point where, where you were confident that ChatGPT was giving you the right advice every time, like better than the. And even if you didn't quite understand, you were just like, you came to believe that the advice it was giving you was better than any idea you think of on your own, but you still had chose whether to follow it or not, would that feel like less agency?

[Andrew Ross Sorkin]

I don't know. I mean, I was saying earlier, there are times where, by the way I look at the answer, I know the answer is not right and I'll say, no, no, no, that's not what I'm looking for. No, I don't think you're right. Can you check that again? So clearly I have agency today. I just wonder whether it changes the human condition. I mean, this is, I think, as I said, it's like a big philosophical question. We probably won't.

[Sam Altman]

My sense is it won't. It subjectively won't feel like not having agency, even if in some sense you know that the ChatGPT's advice is what you're supposed to do, even if you don't understand it at the time. I do worry about this general case of people that just make their decisions based off of what the advice ChatGPT gives them. Like it does feel to me like something gets important, gets lost in that process, even if the advice is always really good and today it's not really good, just like talking forward to the future. But, you know, like, we'll still be asking ChatGPT what to do, we'll still be telling it what our goals are and what we'd like to optimize for. And I think that will feel like all the agency, like if I let myself dream forward to someday far in the future where, you know, I'm like retiring to an CEO for OpenAI and I'm like writing that final prompt of like, here's my advice to you. I would still feel like a lot of agency, I think.

[Andrew Ross Sorkin]

Okay, got to go back to the business. Lots of questions about just the race for talent right now. These huge numbers we hear, you know, Mark Zuckerberg trying to, you know, pay people a billion dollars to attract them from, from your place and others. What does that race look like at the moment? How many people, by the way, are there out there right this moment that you think are in this sort of like super league that are almost, you know, indispensable?

[Sam Altman]

Definitely this is the most intense talent market I have seen in my career. But if you think about the economic value being created by these people and how much we're all spending on compute, you know, maybe, maybe the market stays like this. I'm not, I'm not totally sure what's going to happen, but it is like a crazy intense comp for a very small number of people right now.

[Andrew Ross Sorkin]

But is it like 200 people? And what do they, what do they know? What do these 200 people know that nobody else does?

[Sam Altman]

I mean the bet, the hope is they, they know how to like discover the remaining ideas to get to super intelligence, that there are going to be a handful of algorithmic ideas and a, you know, medium sized handful of people who can figure them out.

[Andrew Ross Sorkin]

How many people you think that really.

[Sam Altman]

Is, like how many people are capable of doing it or how many people will actually like make the discoveries that matter and how many people are capable?

[Andrew Ross Sorkin]

Like what's what we talk about like the market size, how big is the market right this minute for these people?

[Sam Altman]

I bet it's much bigger than people think. But you know, some companies in the space have decided that they're going to go after a few shiny names. But I think there's like many thousands of probably many thousands of people that we could find and probably tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of people in the world that are capable of doing this kind of work.

[Andrew Ross Sorkin]

Your company is reportedly now worth up to $500 billion. Is that accurate in terms of.

[Sam Altman]

I think I'm not supposed to like comment on currently in flight stuff.

[Andrew Ross Sorkin]

Well, let me ask you this. There is a effort by Robinhood and by the way, others to Try to sell your shares in a secondary market. Sometimes people are tokenizing these, these special purpose vehicles and other things like that. What do you make of what's happening and do you, do you think or want the public to be able to access these shares like that? Versus by the way, there's some people are buying into Microsoft now and buying into Softbank thinking that's like a public way backdoor into buying shares in your company.

[Sam Altman]

Look, I totally get why people wish we were just a public company now. And I have very conflicted, not, I have like negative feelings about how much growth happens in private markets and how, you know, not every investor gets access to this phase of growth. Whenever we do go public, if we ever go public, I think there will be tremendous upside left in front of the company. But I get, I get why people would like love for us to be public or sooner. And I'm sure people also get the reality of like we're in still a crazy position and it would be very hard for us to be public given just all of the realities of that. But, but I hate that people get pushed to like various degrees of sketchy ways to try to get exposure to the Internet.

[Andrew Ross Sorkin]

The company's still losing money and obviously you're building, building, building Stargate among them. What is the path to profitability? When do you see the lines cross, if you will?

[Sam Altman]

I mean, I think it could happen sooner than I originally thought if we wanted it to. But it seems to me like the right thing to do is to just keep investing in compute and continuing to grow. But is that grow our training compute budget?

[Andrew Ross Sorkin]

Is that a couple of years from now then you think, or I mean you're saying if you stopped investing, I.

[Sam Altman]

Think we should be willing to keep growing, to keep investing in training compute for a long time. Like as long as we're on this very steep curve of the models getting better and better. I think the rational thing to do is to just be willing to run at a loss for quite a while and continue to do that. Which is also part of why I think it's nice not to be public.

[Andrew Ross Sorkin]

Right. And then finally one of the paths to getting public is to make a deal with Microsoft. I think as you're trying to, when I say make a deal, you're, you're going to create this, this private vehicle effectively out of a not for profit. What is the state of play?

[Sam Altman]

They're still trying, you know, still like positive stuff. And we have lots of other things that are kind of higher priority at the moment. But like Positive progress on it.

[Andrew Ross Sorkin]

You knew I'd ask the question. I think you knew it asked the question. You probably saw Elon yesterday. He said, quote, OpenAI will eat Microsoft alive. And then Satya responding to that. What do you think when you read that?

[Sam Altman]

You know, I don't think about him that much.

[Andrew Ross Sorkin]

What do you think of the larger idea, though? That. That he's effectively saying that open air long term will eat Microsoft alive.

[Sam Altman]

I don't even know what that means. Do you know what that means?

[Andrew Ross Sorkin]

I'm not sure what he means, except to say that he. He thinks in the. In the grand scheme of the partnership that ultimately you'll have more power, more influence and more leverage over them than they'll have over you.

[Sam Altman]

I thought he was most. I mean, I thought he was just like, tweeting all day about how much, like, OpenAI sucks and our model is bad and not going to be a good company and all of that. So I don't know. I don't know how you square those two things.

[Andrew Ross Sorkin]

Fair enough. I am told that you have to go, sir. I wish you didn't. And that you could stay because I could talk to you as well. He needs help making my app a very long time. Oh, and I do need help with the app, but we can help with my app.

[Sam Altman]

I'm happy to help you.

[Andrew Ross Sorkin]

Well, maybe I'll send you a note later and I'll share the app with you. But, Sam, we appreciate you joining us this morning very, very much. And I know it's early for you on the West Coast.

[Sam Altman]

Thank you for having me.

[Andrew Ross Sorkin]

Thanks so much.

[Joe Kernan]

It's great. What do.

[Andrew Ross Sorkin]

What do we charge for the app?

[Joe Kernan]

Yeah. Do we ask?

[Andrew Ross Sorkin]

Chat, GPT. What.

[Joe Kernan]

What.

[Andrew Ross Sorkin]

What the market would bear for your app.

[Joe Kernan]

We want to get as many as we can, but we want to charge as much as we can. But we don't want to make it, you know, crowd out people that, you know, we don't want just real, really wealthy people getting it right.

[Andrew Ross Sorkin]

What do you think? 499amonth.

[Joe Kernan]

$499?

[Andrew Ross Sorkin]

No, $4.99. Well, actually, you know, they just got rid of pennies, so. Five bucks. We're going to round up. Five bucks.

[Joe Kernan]

Great. Add to our margins.

[Podcast Announcer]

This episode is brought to you by Schwab Market Update, an original podcast from Charles Schwab. Join host Keith Lansford for this information packed daily market Preview, delivered in 10 minutes or less, including projected stock updates, monetary policy decisions, and key results and statistics that may impact your trading. Download the latest episode and [e-mail] MarketUpdatePodcast or find Schwab Market Update wherever you get your podcasts.

[AT&T Business Advertiser]

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[Podcast Narrator]

And that is the podcast for today and for the week. It's Friday.

[Andrew Ross Sorkin]

What a week.

[Joe Kernan]

My app.

[AT&T Business Advertiser]

My app.

[Andrew Ross Sorkin]

I'm gonna work on it. I got Altman, Sam and I.

[Joe Kernan]

You do?

[Andrew Ross Sorkin]

We're gonna be building it. We're in GitHub trying to build the thing as we speak.

[Joe Kernan]

I know.

[Podcast Narrator]

Squawkbox is hosted by Joe Kernan, Becky Quick and Andrew Ross Sorkin. Tune in weekday mornings on CNBC at 6 Eastern to get the smartest takes and analysis and big interviews like Today's with Sam Altman to get all of that from our our TV show right into your ears. Please follow Squawk Pod wherever you like to get your podcasts. We'll meet you right back here on Monday. Have a great weekend.

[Andrew Ross Sorkin]

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[Joe Kernan]

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[Andrew Ross Sorkin]

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