Location the lab. Quentin only has 24 hours to sell his car.
Is that even possible?
He goes to Carvana .com.
What is this? A movie trailer?
He ignores the doubters, enters his license plate.
Wow. That's a great offer.
The car is sold, but will Carvana pick it up in time for...
They'll literally pick it up tomorrow morning.
Done with the dramatics?
Car selling in record time.
Save your time. Go to Carvana .com and sell your car today.
Pick -up fees may apply.
Banking with Capital One helps you keep more money in your wallet with no fees or minimums on checking accounts and no overdraft fees.
Just ask the Capital One bank guy, it's pretty much all he talks about, in a good way.
He'd also tell you that this podcast is his favorite podcast too.
Really, thanks Capital One bank guy.
What's in your wallet?
Terms apply, see CapitalOne .com slash bank, Capital One NA Member FDIC.
This episode is sponsored by SimpliSafe.
I want to tell you about SimpliSafe, a company that's revolutionizing home security.
What's fascinating about SimpliSafe is their approach to protection.
Their ActiveGuard outdoor protection doesn't just react to break -ins, it aims to prevent them.
With AI -powered cameras and live monitoring agents, they can spot suspicious activity and intervene in real -time.
It's like having a vigilant security team watching over your home 24 -7.
SimpliSafe offers peace of mind without the hassle of long -term contracts or cancellation fees.
Plus, their monitoring plans start at just about $1 a day, making advanced security accessible to more people.
They offer a 60 -day satisfaction guarantee or your money back.
Interested in learning more?
Listeners can get 50 % off their new SimpliSafe system with professional monitoring and their first month free at simplisafe .com slash TED Talks daily.
That's S -I -M -P -L -I, safe, dot com slash Ted Talks Daily.
There's no safe like SimpliSafe.
You're listening to Ted Talks Daily where we bring you new ideas and conversations to spark your curiosity every day.
I'm your host, Elise Hu.
The transformative power of artificial intelligence is a topic we talk a lot about here on this show and for good reason.
At TED 2025, Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI sat down with head of TED, Chris Anderson, for a conversation about the fast growing field, its global consequences, and where it's going next.
That's coming up. Sam, welcome to TED.
Thank you so much for coming.
Thank you, it's an honor.
Your company has been releasing crazy and say new models pretty much every other week, it feels like.
Yeah, the new image generation model is part of GPT -40.
So it's got all of the intelligence in there.
And I think that's one of the reasons it's been able to do these things that people really love.
I mean, if I'm a management consultant and I'm playing with some of this stuff, I'm thinking, uh -oh, what does my future look like?
I mean, I think there are sort of two views you can take.
You can say, oh, man, it's doing everything I do.
What's going to happen to me?
Or you can say, like through every other technological revolution in history, OK, now there's this new tool.
I can do a lot more.
What am I going to be able to do?
It is true that the expectation of what we'll have for someone in a particular job increases, but the capabilities will increase so dramatically that I think it'll be easy to rise to that occasion.
I mean, the writing quality of some of the new models, not just here, but in detail, is really going to a new level.
Yeah, this is an incredible meta answer, but there's really no way to know if it is thinking that or just saw that a lot of times in the training set.
And of course, if you can't tell the difference, how much do you care?
So that's really interesting, we don't know.
Isn't there, though ...
like, at first glance, this looks like IP theft. I will say that I think the creative spirit of humanity is an incredibly important thing, and we want to build tools that lift that up, that make it so that new people can create better art, better content, write better novels that we all enjoy.
I believe very deeply that humans will be at the center of that.
I also believe that we probably do need to figure out some sort of new model around the economics of creative output.
I think people have been building on the creativity of others for a long time.
People take inspiration for a long time.
But as the access to creativity gets incredibly democratized and people are building off of each other's ideas all the time, I think there are incredible new business models that we and others are excited to explore.
Exactly what that's gonna look like, I'm not sure, like, clearly there's some cut and dry stuff.
Like, you can't copy someone else's work, but how much inspiration can you take?
If you say I wanna generate art in the style of these seven people, all of whom have consented to that, how do you like divvy up how much money goes to each one?
These are like big questions, but every time throughout history, we have put better and more powerful technology in the hands of creators, I think we collectively get better creative output, and people do just more amazing stuff.
I mean, an even bigger question is when they haven't consented to it, in our opening session, Carol Cadwalader showed, you know, Chat GPT gave a talk in the style of Carol Cadwalader, and sure enough, it gave a talk that wasn't quite as good as the talk she gave, but it was pretty impressive, and she said, OK, it's great, but I did not consent to this.
How are we going to navigate this?
Like, isn't there a way, should it just be people who consent it, or shouldn't there be a model that somehow says that any named individual in a prompt whose work is then used, they should get something for that?
So right now, if you use our image -gen thing and say, you know, I want something in the style of a living artist, it won't do that.
But if you say, I want it in the style of this particular kind of vibe, or this studio or this art movement or whatever it will, And obviously, if you're like, you know, output a song that is like a copy of the song, it won't do that, the question of where that line should be and how people say like this is too much, we sorted that out before with copyright law and what fair use looks like.
Again, I think in the world of AI, there will be a new model that we figure out.
So from the point of view, I mean, the world's full of creative people are some of the angriest people right now, or the most scared people about AI.
The difference between feeling your work's being stolen from you and your future is being stolen from you, and feeling your work is being amplified and can be amplified, those are such different feelings, and if we could shift to the other one, to the second one, I think that really changes how much humanity as a whole embraces all this.
Well, again, I would say some creative people are very upset.
Some creatives are like, this is the most amazing tool ever, I'm doing incredible new work.
But, you know, like, it's definitely a change, and I have a lot of like, empathy to people who are just like, I wish this change weren't happening.
This is, I liked the way things were before, I like the way things are.
But in principle, you can calculate from any given prompt There should be some way of being able to calculate what percentage of a subscription revenue or whatever goes towards each answer.
In principle, it should be possible if one could get the rest of the rules figured out, and it's obviously complicated, you could calculate some kind of revenue share now.
If you're a musician, and you spend your whole life, your whole childhood, whatever, listening to music, and then you get an idea and you go compose a song that is inspired by what you've heard before, but a new direction, it'd be very hard for you to say, like, this much was from this song I heard when I was 11, than this much from an ISO.
That's right. We're talking here about the situation where someone specifically in a prompt names someone.
Yeah. Well, again, right now if you try to go generate an image in a named style, we just say, that or slim and we don't do it.
But I think it would be cool to figure out a new model where if you say, I want to do it in the name of this artist, and they opt in, there's a revenue model there.
OK. I think that's a good thing to explain.
So I think the world should help you figure out that model quickly, and I think it will make a huge difference, actually.
I want to switch topics quickly.
The battle between your model and open source.
How much were you shaken up by the arrival of DeepSeek?
I think open source has an important place.
We actually, just last night, hosted our first, like, community session to kind of decide the parameters of our open source model and how we want to shape it.
we're going to do a very powerful open source model.
I think this is important.
We're going to do something near the frontier, I think better than any current open source model out there.
This will not be all like, there will be people who use this in ways that some people in this room maybe you or I don't like.
But there is going to be an important place for open source models, as part of the constellation here.
I think we were late to act on that, but we're going to do it really well now.
I mean, your spending, it seems like an order, or even orders of magnitude more than DeepSeek allegedly spent, although I know there's controversy around that.
Are you confident that the actual better model is going to be recognized, or isn't this in some ways life threatening to the notion that yeah, by going to massive scale, tens of billions of dollars of investment, we can maintain an incredible lead?
All day long, I call people and beg them to give us their GPUs.
We are so incredibly constrained.
Our growth is going like this.
DeepSeek launched and it didn't seem to impact it.
There's other stuff that's happening.
Tell us about the growth, actually.
You gave me a shocking number backstage there.
I have never seen growth in any company, one that I've been involved with or not, like this.
Like the growth of ChatGBT, it's really fun.
I feel like great, deeply honored.
But it is crazy to live through and our teams are exhausted and stressed and we're trying to keep things up.
I think the last time we said was 500 million weekly actives, and it is growing very rapidly.
Like, it's full. CA so I mean you told me that it's like doubled in just a few weeks.
Like in terms of computer, in terms of ...
BG It's been set up privately, but I guess ...
CA Oh. I misremembered some, I'm sorry.
We can edit that out if you really want to.
And no one here would treat it.
BG It's growing very fast. CA Uh.
So you're confident, you're seeing it take off like a rocket ship.
You're releasing incredible new models all the time.
What are you seeing in your best internal models right now that you haven't yet shared with the world, but you would love to hear on this stage?
So first of all, you asked about, you know, are we worried about this model or that model?
There will be a lot of intelligent models in the world.
Very smart models will be commoditized to some degree.
I think we'll have the best, and for some use, you'll want that.
But, like, honestly, the models are now so smart that for most of the things most people want to do, they're good enough.
I hope that will change over time, because people will raise their expectations.
But, like, if you're kind of using ChatGPT as, like, a standard user, the model capability is very smart.
But, we have to build a great product and not just a great model.
And so there will be a lot of people with great models.
And we will try to build the best product.
And people want their image gen, you know, sort of some SOAR examples for video earlier.
Do they want to integrate it with all their stuff?
We just launched a new feature called, well, it's still called Memory, but it's way better than the Memory before, where this model will get to know you over the course of your lifetime.
And we have a lot more stuff to come to build this great integrated product, and I think people will stick with that.
So there will be many models, but I think we will, I hope, continue to focus on building the best -defining product in the space.
And after I saw your announcement yesterday that chat -GPT will now know all of your query history.
I entered. Tell me about me, chat -GPT, from all you know.
And my jaw dropped, so it was shocking.
It knew who I was and all these sort of interests that hopefully mostly were pretty much appropriate and shareable, but it was astonishing, and I felt the sense of real excitement, a little bit queasy, but mainly excitement, actually, and how much more that would allow it to be useful to me.
One of our researchers tweeted kind of like yesterday this morning that the upload happens bit by bit.
It's not that you plug your brain in one day, but you will talk to chat .gpt over the course of your life.
That someday, maybe if you want, it'll be listening to you throughout the day and sort of observing what you're doing.
And it'll get to know you, and it'll become this extension of yourself, this companion, and this thing that just tries to help you be the best, do the best you can.
In the movie, Her, the AI basically announces that she's read all of his emails and decided he's a great writer and persuades a publisher to publish him.
Is that, that might be coming sooner than we think?
I don't think it'll happen exactly like that, but yeah, I think something in the direction where AI, You don't have to just go to ChatGBT or whatever and say I have a question, give me an answer.
But you're getting proactively pushed things that help you, that make you better, whatever.
That does seem like it's soon.
So what have you seen that's coming up internally that you think is going to blow people's minds?
Give us at least a hint of what the next big jaw dropper is.
The thing that I'm personally most excited about is AI for science at this point.
We push back the frontier of what's possible.
We're starting to hear a lot from scientists with our latest models that they're actually just more productive than they were before, it's actually mattering to what they can discover.
What's the plausible, near -term discovery, Like room temperature — Superconductors, that would be a great one.
Yes, semiconducting.
Is that possible? Yeah, I don't think that's prevented by the laws of physics, so it should be possible.
Yeah. But we don't know for sure.
I think you'll start to see some...
...meaningful progress against disease with AI -assisted tools.
Physics maybe takes a little bit longer, but I hope for it.
So that's like one direction.
Another that I think is big is starting pretty soon, like in the coming months.
Software development has already been pretty transformed.
Like, it's quite amazing how different the process of creating software is now than it was two years ago.
But I expect, like, another move that big in the coming months as agentic software engineering really starts to happen.
I've heard engineers say that they've had almost religious -like moments with some of the new models where suddenly they can do it in an afternoon, what would have taken them two years.
Yeah, it's like, really, like, that's been one of my big, healthy AGI moments.
But talk about what is the scariest thing that you've seen, because like, outside, a lot of people picture you as, you know, you have access to this stuff, and we hear all these rumors coming out of AI, and it's like, oh my god.
They've seen consciousness or they've seen AGI or they've seen some kind of apocalypse coming.
have you seen, has there been a scary moment when you've seen something internally and thought, uh -oh, we need to pay attention to this?
There have been moments of awe, and I think with that, there's always like, how far is this going to go, what is this going to be?
But there's no, like, we don't secretly have, you know, we're not secretly sitting on a conscious model or something that's capable of self -improvement or anything like that.
So, you know, people have very different views of what the big AI risks are going to be.
And I, myself, have, like, evolved on thinking about where we're going to see those.
But I continue to believe there will come very powerful models that people can misuse in big ways.
People talk a lot about the potential for new kinds of bioterror, models that can present a real cybersecurity challenge, models that are capable of self -improvement in a way that leads to some sort of loss of control.
So I think there are big risks there.
And then there's a lot of other stuff, which honestly is kind of what I think many people mean, where people talk about disinformation or models saying things that they don't like or things like that.
Sticking with the first of those, do you check for that internally before release?
Of course, yes. So we have this preparedness framework that outlines how we do that.
I mean, you've had some departures from your safety team.
How many people have departed?
Why have they left?
We have, I don't know the exact number, but there are clearly different views about AI safety systems. I would really point to our track record. There are people who will say all sorts of things.
You know, something like ten percent of the world uses our systems now a lot.
And ... we are very proud of the safety track record. But track record isn't the issue, in a way, because what we're talking about, we're talking about an exponentially growing power where we fear that we may wake up one day and the world is ending.
So it's really not about track record, it's about plausibly saying that the pieces are in place to shut things down quickly if we see a danger.
Oh, yeah, yeah, no, of course that's important.
You can't, you don't, like, wake up one day and say, hey, we didn't have any safety process in place.
Now we think the model is really smart, so now we have to care about safety.
You have to care about it all along this exponential curve.
Of course, the stakes increase, and there are big challenges.
But the way we learn how to build safe systems is this iterative process of deploying them to the world, getting feedback.
While the stakes are relatively low, learning about, hey, this is something we have to address.
And I think as we move in to these agentic systems, There's a whole big category of new things we have to learn to address.
So let's talk about agentic systems and the relationship between that and AGI.
I think there's confusion out there.
I'm confused. So, artificial general intelligence, it feels like chatGBT is already a general intelligence.
I can ask it about anything, and it comes back with an intelligent answer.
Why isn't that AGI?
It doesn't, first of all, you can't ask anything.
That's very nice of you to say, but there's a lot of things that it's still embarrassingly bad at, but even if we fix those, which hopefully we will, it doesn't continuously learn and improve.
It can't go get better at something that it's currently weak at.
It can't go discover new science and update its understanding, and do that.
And it also kind of can't, even if we lower the bar, it can't just sort of do any knowledge work you could do in front of a computer.
I actually, even without the sort of ability to get better at something it doesn't know yet, I might accept that as a definition of AGI.
But the current systems, you can't say like, hey go do this task for my job and it goes off and clicks around the internet and calls someone and looks at your files and does it.
And without that, it feels definitely short of it.
But do you guys have internally a clear definition of what AGI is and when do you think that we may be there?
It's one of these, it's like the joke, if you got 10 open -air researchers in a room and asked to define AGI, you'd get 14 definitions.
That's worrying though, isn't it?
Because that has been the mission initially.
We're going to be the first to get to AGI.
We'll do so safely.
But we don't have a clear definition of what it is.
I was going to finish the answer.
What I think matters though, and what people want to know, is not, where is this one, you know, magic moment of, we've finished?
But given that what looks like is going to happen is that the models are just going to get smarter and more capable and smarter and more capable and smarter and more capable on this long exponential, different people will call it AGI at different points, but we all agree it's going to go way past that, you know, to whatever you want to call these systems that get much more capable than we are.
The thing that matters is how do we talk about a system that is safe through all of these steps and beyond as the system gets more capable than we are, as the system can do things that we don't totally understand.
And I think more important than a when is AGI coming and what's the definition of it, it's recognizing that we are on this unbelievable exponential curve.
And you can say, this is what I think AGI is.
You can say, you think this is what you think AGI is.
Someone else can say, super intelligence is out here.
But we're going to have to contend and get wonderful benefits from this incredible system.
And so I think we should shift the conversation away from what's the AGI moment to a recognition that this thing is not going to stop.
It's going to go way beyond what any of us would call AGI.
And we have to build a society together.
the tremendous benefits of this and figure out how to make it safe?
CA -F1 1 Of the conversations this week has been that the real change moment is ...
I mean, AGI's a fuzzy thing, but what is clear is agentic AI.
When AI is set free to pursue projects on its own and to put the pieces together, you've got a thing called operator which starts to do this.
And I tried it out.
You know, I wanted to book a restaurant, and it's kind of incredible.
It kind of can go ahead and do it, but this is what it said.
It's an intriguing process.
And you know, give me your credit card and everything else.
And I declined on this case to go forward. But I think this is the challenge that people are going to have. It's kind of like an incredible superpower.
It's a little bit scary.
And Yoshua Bengio, when he spoke here, said that agentic AI is the thing to pay attention to.
This is when everything could go wrong, as we give power to AI to go out onto the internet to do stuff.
I mean, going out onto the internet was always in the sci -fi stories the moment where escape happened and potential things could go horribly wrong.
How do you both release agentic AI and have guardrails in place that it doesn't go too far?
First of all, obviously, you can choose not to do this and say, I don't want this, I'm going to call a restaurant and read them my credit card over the phone.
I could choose, but someone else might say, oh, go out, church LGBT onto the Internet at large and rewrite the Internet to make it better for humans, or whatever.
The point I was going to make is just with any new technology, it takes a while for people to get comfortable.
I remember when I wouldn't put my credit card on the Internet because my parents had convinced me someone was going to read the number and you had to fill out the form and then call them and then we kind of all said, OK, we'll build anti -fraud systems, and we can get comfortable with this.
I think people are going to be slow to get comfortable with agentic AI in many ways, but I also really agree with what you said, which is that even if some people are comfortable with it and some aren't, we are going to have AI systems clicking around the internet.
And this is, I think, the most interesting and consequential safety challenge we have yet faced, because AI, that you give access to your systems, your information, the ability to click around on your computer, now, when AI makes a mistake, it's much higher stakes.
It is the gate on ...
So we talked earlier about safety and capability.
I kind of think they're increasingly becoming one -dimensional.
Like, a good product is a safe product.
You will not use our agents if you do not trust that they're not going to, like, empty your bank account or delete your data, or who knows what else.
And so ... people want to use agents that they can really trust, that are really safe.
And I think we are gated on our ability to make progress on our ability to do that, but it's a fundamental part of the product.
CAT go out onto the internet and, you know, spread a meme however you can that ex people are evil or whatever it is.
It doesn't have to be an individual choice.
A single person could let that agent out there and the agent could decide, well, in order to execute on that function, I got to copy myself everywhere, like, are there red lines that you have clearly drawn internally, where you know what the danger moments are and that we cannot put out something that could go beyond this.
Yeah, so this is the purpose of our preparedness framework.
And we'll update that over time, but we've tried to outline where we think the most important danger moments are, or what the categories are, how we measure that, and how we would mitigate something before releasing it.
I can tell from the conversation you wish AI, you're not a big AI fan.
No, no, actually, on the contrary, I use it every day, I'm awed by it.
I think this is an incredible time to be alive.
I wouldn't be alive any other time, and I cannot wait to see where it goes.
But we've been holding ...
I think it's essential to hold, you can't divide people into those camps.
You have to hold a passionate belief in the possibility, but not be over -seduced by it, because things can go horribly wrong.
No, no, I, I, I— What I was going to say is, I totally understand that.
I totally understand looking at this and saying, this is an unbelievable change coming to the world.
And maybe, you know, I don't want this.
Or maybe I love parts of it.
Maybe I love talking to Chad's EBT, but I worry about what's going to happen to art.
And I worry about the pace of change.
And I worry about these agents clicking here, clicking around the internet.
And maybe on balance, I wish this weren't happening, or maybe I wish we were happening a little slower, or maybe I wish it were happening in a way where I could pick and choose what parts of progress were gonna happen.
And I think the fear is totally rational.
The sort of, the anxiety is totally rational.
We all have a lot of it too.
But A, there will be tremendous upside.
Obviously, you know, you use it every day, you like it.
B, I really believe that society figures out over time, with some big mistakes along the way, how to get technology, right?
And C, this is going to happen.
This is like a discovery of fundamental physics that the world now knows about, and it's going to be part of our world.
And I think this conversation is really important, I think talking about these areas of danger are really important.
Talking about new economic models are really important.
But we have to embrace this with, like, caution, but not fear.
Or we will get run by with other people that use AI to do better things.
You've actually been one of the most eloquent proponents of safety.
You testified in the Senate, I think you said, basically, that we should form a new safety agency that licenses any effort.
I .e., it will refuse to license certain efforts.
Do you still believe in that policy proposal?
I have learned more about how the government works.
I don't think this is quite the right policy proposal.
But I do think the idea that as these systems get more advanced and have legitimate global impact, we need some way, you know, maybe the companies themselves put together the right framework or the right sort of model for this, but we need some way that very advanced models have external safety testing, and we understand when we get close to some of these danger zones.
I very much still believe in that.
It struck me as ironic that a safety agency might be what we want, and yet agency is the very thing that is unsafe.
There's something odd about the language there, but anyway, I asked ...
Can I say one more thing on that?
I do think this concept of ...
We need to define rigorous testing for models, understand what the threats that we collectively, society, most want to focus on, and make sure that as models are getting more capable, we have a system where we all get to understand what's being released in the world.
I think this is really important, and I think we're not far away from models that are going to be of great public interest in that sense.
So Sam, I asked your O1Pro reasoning model, which is incredibly ...
Thank you for the $200.
200 dollars a month.
It's a bargain at the price.
I said, what is the single most penetrating question I could ask you?
It thought about it for two minutes.
Two minutes. Do you want to see the question?
I do. Sam, given that you're helping create technology that could reshape the destiny of our entire species, who granted you or anyone the moral authority to do that?
And how are you personally responsible, accountable, that was good, that was impressive.
You've been asking me versions of this for the last half hour.
What do you think? I, I.
But, but, what I would say is this.
Here's my version of that question.
But no answer? What was your question for me?
How would you answer that one?
In your shoes? Yeah, or what do you as an outsider?
I don't know. I am puzzled by you.
I'm kind of awed by you because you've built one of the most astonishing things out there.
There are two narratives about you out there.
One is you are this incredible visionary who's done the impossible, and you've shocked the world with far fewer people than Google.
You came out with something much more powerful than anything you've done.
I mean, it is amazing what you've built.
But the other narrative is that you have shifted ground, that you've shifted from being open AI, this open thing, to the allure of building something super powerful.
And you've lost some of your key people.
There's a narrative out there, some people believe that you're not to be trusted in this space.
I would love to know who you are.
What is your narrative about yourself?
What are your core values, Sam, that can give us the world confidence that someone with so much power here is entitled to it?
I think like anyone else, I'm a nuanced character that doesn't reduce well to one dimension here.
So probably some of the good things are true, and probably some of the criticism is true.
In terms of open AI, our goal is to make AGI and distribute it, make it safe for the broad benefit of humanity.
I think by all accounts, we have done a lot in that direction.
Clearly, our tactics have shifted over time.
I think we didn't really know what we were going to be when we grew up.
We didn't think we would have to build a company around this.
We learned a lot about how it goes and the realities of what these systems were going to take from capital.
But I think we've been, in terms of putting incredibly capable AI with a high degree of safety in the hands of a lot of people and giving them tools to sort of do whatever amazing things they're going to do, I think it'd be hard to give us a bad grade on that.
I do think it's fair that we should be open -sourcing more.
I think it was reasonable, for all of the reasons that you asked earlier, as we weren't sure about the impact these systems were gonna have and how to make them safe, that we acted with precaution.
I think a lot of your questions earlier would suggest at least some sympathy to the fact that we've operated that way.
But now I think we have a better understanding as a world, and it is time for us to put very capable open systems out into the world.
If you invite me back next year, you will probably yell at me for somebody who has misused these open source systems and say, why did you do that?
That was bad. You should have not gone back to your open roots.
But, you know, we're not going to get.
There's tradeoffs in everything we do.
And we are one player in this one voice, in this AI revolution, trying to do the best we can and kind of steward this technology into the world in a responsible way.
We've definitely made mistakes.
we'll definitely make more in the future.
On the whole, I think we have, over the last almost decade, it's been a long time now, it's, you know, we have mostly done the thing we've set out to do, we have a long way to go in front of us, our tactics will shift more in the future, but adherence to this sort of mission and what we're trying to do, I think very strong.
There are some things you could do as well.
So, here's the Ring of Power from Lord of the Rings.
Your rival, I will say, not your best friend at the moment, Elon Musk claimed that he thought that you'd been corrupted by the Ring of Power, an allegation that, by the way, an allegation that, by the way, an allegation that you'd been corrupted by the Ring of Power, that could be applied to Elon as well, you know, to be fair.
But I'm curious, people, you have ...
I might respond. I'm thinking about it.
I might say something.
I ... It's in everyone's mind, as we see technology CEOs get more powerful, get richer, can they handle it, or does it become irresistible?
Does the power and the wealth make it impossible to sometimes do the right thing, you just have to cling tightly to that ring.
What do you think? I mean, do you feel that ring sometimes?
How do you think I'm doing relative to other CEOs that have gotten a lot of power and changed how they act or done a bunch of stuff in the world, like, how do you think?
audience applause You have a beautiful ...
you are not a rude, angry person who comes out and says aggressive things to other people.
Sometimes I do that.
That's my single vice.
I think in the way that you personally conduct yourself, it's impressive.
I mean, the question some people ask is, is that the real you?
Is there something else going on?
But I'll just take the feedback.
We all have seen CEOs.
you put up the Sauron Ring of Power or whatever that thing is.
So I'll take the feedback.
What is something I have done, where you think I've been corrupted by power?
I think the fear is that just the transition of open AI to a for -profit model, some people say, well, there you go, you got corrupted by the desire for wealth.
At one point, there was going to be no equity in it.
It'll make you fabulously wealthy.
By the way, I don't think that is your motivation personally.
I think you want to build stuff that is insanely cool, and what I worry about is the competitive feeling that you see other people doing it and it makes it impossible to develop at the right pace.
But you tell me, if you don't feel that, so few people in the world have the kind of capability and potential you have. We don't know what it feels like.
What does it feel like?
And then, I think that I'll end with just one.
Shockingly the same as before.
I think you can get used to anything step by step.
I think if I were transported from 10 years ago to right now all at once, it would feel very disorienting.
But anything does become sort of the new normal.
So it doesn't feel any different.
And it's strange to be sitting here talking about this, but, you know, the monotony of day -to -day life, which I mean in the best possible way, feels exactly the same.
You're the same person.
I'm sure I'm not in all sorts of ways, but I don't feel any different.
This was a beautiful thing you posted.
Your son. That last thing you said that I've never felt love like this, I think any parent in the room so knows that feeling, that wild, biological feeling that humans have and AIs never will, of your holding your kid.
And I'm wondering whether that's changed how you think about things.
Like if, you know, say here's a red box, here's a black box with a red button on it.
You can press that button and you give your son likely the most unbelievable life, but also, you inject a 10 percent chance that he gets destroyed.
Do you press that button?
the answers? In the literal case, no. If the question is, do I feel like I'm doing that with my work, the answer is I also don't feel like that.
Having a kid changed a lot of things, and by far the most amazing thing that has ever happened to me, like everything everybody says is true.
The thing my cofounder Ilya said once is, I don't know, this is a paraphrase.
like, I don't know what the meaning of life is, but for sure, it has something to do with babies.
And it's, like, unbelievably accurate.
It changed how much I'm willing to, like, spend time on certain things.
And, like, the kind of cost of not being with my kid is just, like, crazily high.
And I... But, you know, I really cared about, like, not destroying the world before.
I really care about it now.
I didn't need a kid for that part.
I mean, I definitely think more about what the future will be like for him in particular, but I feel like a responsibility to do the best thing I can for the future for everybody.
Tristan Harris gave a very powerful talk here this week in which he said that the key problem, in his view, was that you and your peers in these other models all feel, basically, that the development of advanced AI is inevitable, that the race is on, and that there is no choice but to try and win that race and to do so as responsibly as you can.
And maybe there's a scenario where your super -intelligent AI can act as a brake on everyone else's, or something like that.
But the very fact that everyone believes it is inevitable means that that is a pathway to serious risk and instability.
Do you think that you and your peers do feel that it's inevitable, and can you see any pathway out of that where we could collectively agree to just slow things down a bit, have society as a whole weigh in a bit and say, no, we don't want this to happen quite as fast, it's too disruptive?
First of all, I think people slow things down all the time because the technology is not ready, because something's not safe enough, because something doesn't work.
There are I think all of the efforts, hold on things, pause on things, delay on things, don't release certain capabilities.
So I think this happens, and again, like this is where I think the track record does matter.
If we were rushing things out and there were all sorts of problems, either the product didn't work as people wanted it to, or there were real safety issues or other things there, and I will come back to a change we made.
I think you could do that.
There is communication between most of the efforts.
With one exception, I think all of the efforts care a lot about AI safety, and I think that people, I'm obviously not going to say.
And I think that there's really deep care to get this right.
but I think the caricature of this is just like this crazy race or sprint or whatever misses the nuance of people are trying to put out models quickly and make great products for people, but people feel the impact of this so incredibly that I think if you could go sit in a meeting in OpenAI or other companies, you'd be like, oh, these people are really caring about this.
Now, we did make a change recently to how we think about one part of what's traditionally been understood as safety, which is with our new image model, we've given users much more freedom on what we would traditionally think about as speech harms. If you try to get offended by the model, will the model let you be offended?
And in the past, we've had much tighter guardrails on this, but I think part of model alignment is following what the user of a model wants it to do within the very broad bounds of what society decides.
So if you ask the model to depict a bunch of violence or something like that, or to sort of reinforce some stereotype, there's a question of whether or not it should do that.
We're taking a much more permissive stance.
Now, there's a place where that starts to interact with real world harms that we have to figure out how to draw the line for, but I think there will be cases where a company says, OK, we've heard the feedback from society.
People really don't want models to censor them in ways that they don't think make sense.
That's a fair safety negotiation.
Yes, but to the extent that this is a problem of collective belief, the solution to those kinds of problems is to bring people together and meet at one point and make a different agreement.
If there was a group of people, say, here or out there in the world, who were willing to host a summit of the best ethicists, technologists, not too many people, small, but you and your peers to try to crack what agreed safety lines could be across the world, would you be willing to attend?
Would you urge your colleagues to come?
Of course, but I'm much more interested in what our hundreds of millions of users want as a whole.
I think a lot of the room has historically been decided in small, elite summits.
One of the cool new things about AI, is our AI can talk to everybody on Earth, and we can learn the collective value preference of what everybody wants, rather than have a bunch of people who are blessed by society to sit in the room and make these decisions.
I think that's very cool.
And I think you will see us do more in that direction.
And when we've gotten things wrong, because the elites in the room had a different opinion about what people wanted for the guardrails on ImageGen and what people actually wanted, and we couldn't point to real -world harm, so we made that change, I'm proud of that.
I mean, there is a long track record of unintended consequences coming out of the actions of hundreds of millions of people.
And there are people ...
If 100 people in a room make a decision for us.
And the hundreds of millions of people don't have control over, they don't necessarily see what the next step could lead to?
I am hopeful that that is totally accurate and totally right.
I am hopeful that AI can help us be wiser, make better decisions, can talk to us.
And if we say, hey, I want thing X, you know, rather than, like, the crowd spin that up, AI can say, hey, totally understand that's what you want.
if that's what we want at the end of this conversation, you're in control, you pick.
But have you considered it from this person's perspective or the impact it'll have on this people?
I think AI can help us be wiser and make better collective governance decisions than we could before.
CAFEE TRIVETTE Well out of time.
Sam, I'll give you the last word. What kind of world do you believe, all things considered, your son will grow up into?
SMITH I remember so long ago now, I don't know when the first iPad came out, I just said, like, fifteen years, something like that.
I remember watching a YouTube video at the time of, like, a little toddler sitting in, you know, a doctor's office waiting room or something, and there was a magazine, like, one of those old, you know, glossy cover magazines, and the toddler had his hand on it and was going like this and kind of angry.
And to that toddler, it was like a broken iPad.
And he never, she never thought of a world that didn't have touchscreens in them.
And to all of the adults watching this, it was this amazing thing because it was like, it's so new, it's so amazing, it's a miracle.
Like, of course magazines are the way the world works.
My kid, my kids hopefully, will never be smarter than AI.
They will never grow up in a world where products and services are not incredibly smart, incredibly capable.
They will never grow up in a world where computers don't just kind of understand you and do, you know, for some definition of whatever you can imagine, whatever you can imagine.
It will be a world of incredible material abundance.
It'll be a world where the rate of change is incredibly fast and amazing new things are happening.
And it'll be a world where, like, individual ability, impact, whatever, is just so far beyond what a person can do today.
I hope that my kids and all of your kids will look back at us with some pity and nostalgia and be like, they lived such horrible lives, they were so limited.
The world sucked so much. I think that's great.
So, it's incredible what you've built.
It really is. It's unbelievable.
I think over the next few years, you're going to have some of the biggest opportunities, the biggest moral challenges, is the biggest decisions to make of perhaps any human in history, pretty much. You should know that everyone here will be cheering you on to do the right thing.
We will do our best. Thank you very much. Thank you for coming to TED.
Thank you. Sam. Awesome.
Thank you. Thank you very much. Enjoyed it.
Thanks. That was Sam Altman in conversation with Chris Anderson at TED 2025.
If you're curious about TED's curation, find out more at ted .com slash curation guidelines.
And that's it for today's show.
TED Talks Daily is part of the TED Audio Collective.
This episode was produced and edited by our team, Martha Estefanos, Oliver Friedman, Brian Green, Lucy Liddell, Alejandra Salazar, and Tonzaka Sarmarnivon.
It was mixed by Christopher Fazy Bogan, additional support from Emma Toppner and Daniela Balerezo.
I'm Elise Hu. I'll be back tomorrow with a fresh idea for your feed.
Thanks for listening.
to an hour. There are thousands of Peloton members whose lives were changed by taking charge of their fitness routines.
Now you can be one of them.
Spring into action right now.
Find your push. Find your power.
With Peloton. At onepeloton .com.
Ever wonder what your lashes are destined for?
The cards have spoken.
Maybelline New York Mascara does it all.
Whether you crave fully fan lashes with Lash Sensational, big bold volume from The Colossal, a dramatic lift with Falsi's Lash Lift or natural looking volume from Great Lash, your perfect lash future awaits.
Manifest your best mascara today.
Shop Maybelline New York and discover your lash destiny.
Shop now at Walmart.
This podcast is brought to you by Sony Pictures Classics presenting On Swift Horses starring Daisy Edgar Jones, Jacob Elordi, Will Poulter, Diego Calva, and Sasha Kaya.
Miriel and her His and his husband Lee are beginning a bright new life in California when he returns from the Korean War.
But their newfound stability is upended by the arrival of Lee's charismatic brother Julius, a wayward gambler with a secret past. A dangerous love triangle quickly forms. When Julius takes off in search of the young card sheet he's fallen for, Muriel's longing for something more propels her into a secret life of her own, gambling on racehorses and exploring a love she never dreamed possible.
On Swift Horses opens April 25th only in theaters.
Get tickets now at OnSwiftHorses .com
