Sam Altman on OpenAI's Vision, AGI Progress, and AI-Energy Nexus

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sort of thought we had like stumbled on this one giant secret that we had these scale-in-laws for language models and that felt like such an incredible triumph.

I was like we're probably never going to get that lucky again and deep learning has been this miracle that keeps on giving and we have kept finding breakthrough after breakthrough.

I again when we got the reasoning model breakthrough like I also thought that was like we're never going to get another one like that.

It just seems so improbable that this one technology works so well but maybe this is always what it feels like when you discover like one of the big, you know, scientific breakthroughs is if it's like really big it's pretty fundamental and it just keeps working.

Open EI isn't just building an app.

It's building the biggest data center and human history.

Yesterday I sat down with Ben Horowitz and Sam Alman, CEO of Open EI.

We talk about Open EI's vision to become the people's personal EI, the massive infrastructure behind it and how the company's research is pushing toward AGI, including AI that can do real science.

We also talk about how his views have changed an open source regulation in why AI and energy are now deeply linked.

Let's get to it.

Sam, welcome to the agency podcast.

Thanks for having me.

You've described in another interview you've described Open EI as a competition for companies.

Consumer technology business, a mega scale infrastructure operation, a research lab, and all the new stuff including planned hardware devices.

From hardware to applications, job marketplace to commerce, what are all these bets add up to?

What's Open EI's vision?

Yeah, I mean maybe you should kind of just three maybe is four for kind of our own version of what traditionally would have been the research lab at the scale but three core ones.

We want to be people's personal AI subscription.

I think most people have one.

Some people have several and you'll use it in some first party consumer stuff with us but you'll also log into a bunch of other services and you'll just use it from dedicated devices.

It's something you'll have this AI that gets to know you and be really useful to you and that's what we want to do.

It turns out that to support that we also have to build out this massive amount of infrastructure.

But the goal there, the mission is really like build this AGI and make it very useful to people.

And is the infrastructure do you think it will end up?

Yeah, it's necessary for the main goal.

Will it also separately in a being a another business or is it just really going to be in service to the personal AI?

Or are I known?

I mean like we sell it to other companies, that's my infrastructure.

Yeah, would you sell to other companies?

You know, it's such a massive thing where to do something else.

It feels to me like there will emerge some other thing to do like that but I don't know.

We don't have to currently just meant to like support this service we want to deliver and the research.

Yeah, that makes sense.

Yeah.

This skill is sort of like terrifying enough that you've got to be open to doing something else.

Yeah, if you're building the biggest data center in the history of human kind.

The biggest infrastructure building like that.

Yeah.

There was a great interview you did many years ago in Strictly, V.C., early opening at WW4 ChGBT and they're asking, what's the business model and you said, oh, well, last AI, it'll figure it out for us.

Everybody laughs, but there have been multiple times and there was just another one recently where we have asked a then current model for what should we do and it has had an insight for answer we missed.

So I think when we say stuff like that, people don't take us seriously or literally.

Yeah.

But if you're maybe the answer is you should take us both.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, no, I said, somebody runs an organization.

I asked, yeah, a lot of questions about who what I should do.

It comes up with some pretty interesting answers.

Sometimes sometimes it does.

You have to give it enough context, but what is the thesis that connects these bets beyond more distribution, more compute?

I mean, the research enables us to make the great products on the infrastructure enables us to do the research.

So it is kind of like a vertical stack of things like you can use ChGBT or some other service to get advice about what you should do running the organization, but for that to work, it requires great research and requires a lot of infrastructure.

So it is kind of just this one thing.

And do you think that there will be a point where that becomes completely horizontal or will it stay vertically integrated for the foreseeable future?

I was always against vertical integration.

And I now think I was just wrong about that.

Yeah.

And just so.

Because you'd like to think that the economy is efficient in the theory that companies can do one thing and then that's supposed to work.

I'd like to think that.

And in our case, at least it hasn't really.

I mean, it hasn't some ways for sure.

Like, you know, if it makes an amazing chip or whatever, that a lot of people can use, but the story of open now has certainly been towards we have to do more things than we thought to be able to deliver on the mission.

Right.

Although the history of the computing industry is kind of been a story of kind of a back and forth in that there was the wing word processor and then the personal computer and the blackberry before the smartphone.

So there has been this kind of vertical integration and then not, but then the iPhone is also a vertical integration.

The iPhone, I think is the most incredible product the tech industry has ever produced and it is to be extraordinarily, vertically integrated.

Yeah.

Amazingly so.

Yeah.

Interesting.

Which bets would you say are in neighbors of AGI versus which are surpages against uncertainty?

Then you could say that on a surface sore, for example, does not look like it's AGI relevant, but I would bet that if we can build a really great world models, that'll be much more important to AGI than people think there were a lot of people without Chatchee BT was not a very AGI relevant thing and it's been very helpful to us, not only in building better models and understanding how society wants to use this, but also in bringing society along to actually figure out, man, we got to contend with this thing now.

We for a long time before Chatchee BT, we would talk about AGI and people, this is not happening.

We don't care and then all of a sudden they really cared and I think that research benefits aside.

I'm a big believer that society and technology have to co- evolve.

It's can't just drop the thing at the end.

It doesn't work that way.

It is a sort of ongoing back and forth.

Yeah.

Same work about how sore if it's into your strategy because there's some hullabaloo on X around.

Hey, why do boat pressures, GPUs to sore up it?

Is it a short-term long-term trade-off or are we so each?

Well, and then the new one had a very interesting twist with the social network and it would be very interested in how you're thinking about that and did medical you up and get mad or what do you expect the reaction?

I think if one company of the two of us has feels like more like the other one has gone after them, it wouldn't.

They shouldn't be calling us.

Well, I'm not a history, but first of all, I think it's cool to make great products and people love the new sort and I also think it is important to give society a taste of what's coming on this co-evolution point.

So like very soon, the world is going to have to contend with incredible video models that can deepfake anyone or kind of show anything you want and that will most to be great.

There will be some adjustment that society has to go through and just like with chatGPT, we were like, the world kind of needs to understand where this is.

I think it's very important.

The world understands where video is going very quickly because video has much more like emotional resonance than text and very soon we're going to be in a world where like this is going to be everywhere.

So I think there's something there.

As I mentioned, I think this will help our research program and it's on the AGI path.

But yeah, it can't all be about just making people like ruthlessly efficient and they are like solving all our problems.

There's got to be like some fun and joy in the light along the way.

But we won't throw like tons of compute at it or not by a fraction of our compute.

Yeah, it's tons in the absolute sense, but not in the relative sense.

Yeah.

I want to talk about the future of AI human interfaces.

Back in August, you said the models have already saturated the chat use case.

So what if future AI human interfaces look like both in terms of hardware and software is a vision for kind of a wee chat like so to wrap.

Solving the chat thing in a very narrow sense, which is if you're trying to like have the most basic kind of chat style conversation and it's very good.

But what a chat interface can do for you.

It's like no weird near-saturn because you could ask a chat interface like, please cure cancer.

A model certainly can't do that yet.

So I think the text interface style can go very far even if for the chat use case models are already very good.

But of course there's better interfaces to have.

Actually it's another good thing that I think is cool about Sora.

Like you can imagine a world where the interface is just constantly real-time rendered video.

Yeah.

And what that would enable and that's pretty cool.

You can imagine new kinds of hardware devices that are sort of always ambiently aware of what's going on and rather than your phone like blast you with text message notifications whenever it wants like it really understands your context and when to show you what and every long way to go on all that stuff.

Yeah.

Within the next couple of years, what will models be able to do that they're not able to do today will be sort of white color replacement at much deeper level AI scientist, Shimanoids.

I mean I was a lot of things but you touched on the one that I am most excited about, which is the AI scientist.

Yeah.

This is crazy that we're sitting here seriously talking about this.

I know there's like a quibble on what the terrain test literally is but the popular conception of the terrain test sort of went voicing by.

Yeah.

That was fast.

You know, it was just like we talked about it.

It was an important test of the AI for a long time.

It seemed impossibly far away.

Then all of a sudden it was passed.

The world freaked out for like a week, two weeks and then it's like, all right, I guess computers can do that now and everything just went on.

And I think that's happening again with science.

My own personal like equivalent of the terrain test has always been when AI can do science.

Like that is also like that is a real change to the world.

And for the first time with GPT5 we are seeing these little examples where it's happening.

You see these things on Twitter, did this, it made this novel in that discovery, did this small thing in my physics research, my biology research.

And everything we see is that that's going to go much further.

So in two years, I think the models will be doing bigger chunks of science and making important discoveries.

And that is a crazy thing like that will have a significant impact on the world.

I am a believer that to a first order scientific progress is what makes the world better over time.

And if we're about to have a lot more of that, that's a good change.

It's interesting because that's a positive change that people don't talk about.

It's gotten so much into the realm of the negative changes of AI, I get extremely smart.

But carry it up in disease.

Who's life?

You could use a lot more science.

Yeah, but that's really a good point.

I think Alan Turnne said this is somebody asked him, they said, well, you really think the computer is going to be smarter than the brilliant minds.

He said, don't have to be smarter than brilliant mind, just smarter than a mediocre mind, like the president of a 20.

And we should use more of that, too, probably.

We just saw periodic launch last week, open AI loans.

And to that point, it's amazing to see both the innovation that you guys are doing.

But also the teams that come out of open AI just feels like creating tremendous, capable of things.

We certainly hope so.

I want to ask you about just broader reflections in terms of what sort of about diffusion or development in 2025 has surprised you or what is sort of updated your world views since chat to you came up.

A lot of things again, but maybe the most interesting one is how much new stuff we found.

Sort of thought we had like stumbled on this one giant secret that we had the skill and loss for language models.

And that felt like such an incredible triumph that I was like, we're probably never going to get that lucky again.

And deep learning has been this miracle that keeps on giving.

And we have kept finding like breakthrough after breakthrough.

Again, when we got the reasoning model breakthrough, I also thought that was like, we're never going to get another one like that.

It just seems so improbable that this one technology works so well.

But maybe this is always what it feels like when you discover one of the big scientific breakthroughs, if it's like really big, it's pretty fundamental.

And it just keeps working.

But the amount of progress, like if you went back and used GPT 3.5 from chatchipyT launch, you'd be like, I can't believe anyone used this thing.

And now we're in this world where the capability overhang is so immense, like most of the world still just thinks about what chatchipyT can do.

And then you have some nerds and silicon out that are using codecs and they're like, wow, those people have no idea what's going on.

And then you have a few scientists who said this we're using codecs have no idea what's going on.

But the overhang of capability is still big now and we've just come so far on what the models can do.

And in terms of further development, how far can we get with LLMs?

At what point do we need to do the New York architecture?

How do you think about what breakthroughs are needed?

I think far enough that we can make something that we'll figure out the next breakthrough with the current technology.

Like, it's a very self-arthramptly answer, but if LLN based stuff can get far enough that it can do like better research than all of opening up, put together.

Maybe that's like good enough.

Yeah, that would be a big breaker.

A very big breaker.

So on the more mundane, one of the things that people have kind of started to complain about, I think South Park did a whole episode on it is kind of the obsequiousness of kind of AI and chatchipyT in particular.

And how far to problem is that to deal with is it not that hard or is it like kind of a fundamentally hard product?

Oh, it's not at all hard to deal with.

A lot of users really want it.

Yeah.

Like, if you go look at what people say about chatchipyT online, so a lot of people who like really want that back.

Yeah.

I mean, so it's not technically it's not hard to deal with at all.

One thing, and this is not surprising in any way, but deemed incredibly wide distribution of what users want, like how they'd like a chat about to behave in big and small ways.

Does that do end up having to configure the personality then you think?

Is that going to be the answer?

I think so.

I mean, ideally, you just talked at chatchipyT for a little while and it kind of interviews you and also sort of sees what you like and don't like.

I'm to chatchipyT just figures out that in the short term, you'll probably just pick one.

Got it.

And then that makes sense.

Very interesting.

And actually, so one thing I want to ask about is, I think we just had a really naive thing which, you know, like, it would sort of be unusual to think you could make something that would talk to billions of people and everybody wants to talk to the same person.

Yeah.

And yet that was sort of our implicit assumption for a long time.

Right.

Because people are very different.

People are very different friends.

Yeah.

So now we're trying to fix that.

Yeah.

And also kind of different friends, different interests, different levels of intellectual capability.

So you don't really want to be talking to the same thing all the time.

And one of the great things about it is you can say, well, explain it to me like I'm five, but maybe I don't even want to have to do that front.

Yeah.

I always want you to talk to you like that.

I get a particular for teaching me stuff.

I want to ask you a kind of like a CEO question which has been interesting for me to observe you is you just did this deal with AMD.

And, you know, of course, the companies in a different position and you have more leverage in these kinds of things.

But like how has your kind of thinking changed over the years since you did that initial deal, I thought all?

I had very little operating experience.

Then I had very little experience running like I'm not naturally someone to run a call.

I'm a great fit to be an investor.

I thought that was going to be that was what I did before this and I thought that was going to be my career.

Yeah.

And although you were a CEO before that, not a good one.

And so I think I had the mindset of like an investor advising a company.

I'm interesting.

Right.

Now I understand what it's like to actually have to run a company.

Yeah.

Right.

Right.

Right.

There's more there.

I've learned a lot about how to, you know, like what it takes to operationalize deals over time.

Right.

All the implications of the agreement as opposed to just, oh, we're going to get distribution of money.

Yeah.

That makes sense.

Yeah.

Because I just has very impressed at a deal structure improvement.

More broadly, in last few weeks alone, you mentioned AMD, but also Oracle Nvidia, you've chosen to extract these deals of partnerships with companies that you collaborate with, but could also potentially compete with in certain areas.

How do you decide you know, when to collaborate versus when not to or how do you just think about?

We have decided that it is time to go make a very aggressive infrastructure bed.

And we're like, I've never been more confident in the research roadmap in front of us, and also the economic value that will come from using those models.

But to make the debt at this scale, we kind of need the whole industry to, or being chunk of the industry to support it.

And this is like, you know, from the level of like electrons to model distribution and all the stuff between which is a lot.

And so we're going to partner with a lot of people.

You should expect like much more from us in the coming months.

Actually, expand on that, because when you talk about the scale, it does feel like in your mind, the limit on it is unlimited.

Like you would scale it is, you know, comes back and it's like, it's not a song.

There's totally a limit.

Like there's some amount of global GDP.

Yeah.

Well, you know, there's some fraction of it that is knowledge work.

And we don't do robots yet.

Yes.

But the limits around here feels like the limits are very far from where we are today.

If we are right about, so I shouldn't say from where we are, like, if we are right that the model capability is going to go where we think it's going to go, then the economic value that sits there can go very, very far.

Right.

So you want to do it like if we were to have us today's model, you wouldn't go there.

No, that's like nomination.

I mean, we would still expand because we can see how much demand there's we can't serve with today's model.

But we would not be going this aggressive if all we have us today's model.

Right.

We get to see a year to advance those.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Interesting.

Chad to be using 800 million weekly active users, about 10% of the world's population, fast is going, it's a more product, you know, ever.

It seems how do you balance, you know, optimizing for active users at the same time, being a product company and a research company.

How do you feel?

When there's a constraint, we almost like which happens all the time.

We almost always prioritize giving the GPUs to research over supporting the product.

Part of the reason we realm build this capacity, so we don't have to make such painful decisions.

There are weird times, you know, like a new feature launches and it's going really viral or whatever, where research will temporarily sacrifice some GPUs.

But on the whole, like we're here to build a GI, and research gets the priority.

Yeah.

You said in your interview with Mr. Brother Jack around how, you know, other companies can try to imitate the products or buy your, you know, or hire your, you're, you're trying to write.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So it's a thing.

But they can't buy the culture or they can't, maybe the sort of repeatable sort of, you know, machine, if you will, that that is, you know, constantly, the culture of innovation.

How have you done that?

What are you doing?

What did it talk about this, this culture of innovation?

This was one thing that I think was very useful about coming from an investor background.

A really good research culture looks much more like running a really good seed stage, investing in firm and betting on founders and sort of that kind of then it does like running a product company.

So I think having that experience was really helpful to the culture we built.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That's how I see, you know, many diseases in some ways, which we, you know, your CEO be also having, you know, have his portfolio and have an investor money.

Right.

Like I'm an opposite.

Yeah.

Yeah.

See you going to investor.

He's investor going to see you.

It is unusual in this direction.

Yeah.

Like, yeah.

Well, it never happens.

You're the only one who I think I've seen go that way and have it work.

Workday was like that, right?

But a meal was he was a operator before he was an investor and I mean, he was really an operating people's office and why is it because once people are investors, they don't want to operate it.

No, I think that investors, generally, if you're good at investing, you're not necessarily good at like organizational dynamics, conflict resolution, you know, like just like the deep psychology of like all the weird shit and then, you know, how politics gets created.

There's just like all this, there's the detailed work and being an operator or being a CEO is so vast and it's not as intellectually stimulating.

It's not something you can ever go talk to somebody a cocktail party about.

And so like you're an investor, you get like, oh, everybody thinks of so smart.

And you know, because you know everything you see all the companies and so forth.

And that's a good feeling.

And then being CEO is often a bad feeling.

Yeah.

And so it's really hard to go to a good feeling to a bad feeling.

I would just say, I'm shocked by how different they are and I'm shocked by how much the difference between a good job and a bad job they are.

Yeah.

Like, yes.

Yeah.

You know, it's tough.

It's rough.

I mean, I can't even believe I'm running the firm like I know better.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And he can't believe he's running opening.

He knows better.

Go back to progress today.

Are you still useful in a world in which they're getting saturated game?

Are they still the, what is the best way to gauge market belief?

Um, well, we're talking about scientific discovery.

I think that'll be an evil.

It can go for a long time.

Revenue is kind of an interesting one.

But I think the like static evils of Benchmark scores are less interesting.

Yeah.

And also, those are crazily gained.

Yeah.

More broadly, it seems like that's all there is.

Yeah.

And this is where it's how I can tell you.

More broadly, it seems that the culture, the culture, Twitter, X is less AGI pill than it was a year or so ago when the AI 2020, seven thing came out.

Some people point to GPD5, they're not seeing sort of the obvious.

Obviously, there were a lot of progress that in some ways under the surface are not as obvious to what people were expecting.

But should people be less AGI pilled, or is this just Twitter vibes?

Well, a little bit of time.

I mean, I think like, like we talked about the Turing test, the AGI will come.

It will go wishing by the world will not change as much as the impossible amount that you would think it should.

AGI just won't actually be the singularity.

It will not.

Yeah.

Even if it's like doing kind of crazy areas, they're like the society will not faster.

But one of the kind of retrospective observations is people and societies are all just so much more adaptable than we think that, you know, it was like a big update to think that AGI was going to come.

You kind of go through that.

You need something new to think about.

You make peace without it turns out like it will be more continuous than we thought.

It's just good.

It's just really good.

I'm that up for the big bang.

Yeah.

But to that end, how have you sort of evolved your thinking?

Even if you've all been here on sort of a vertical integration?

Have you evolved you think it was the latest thinking on sort of AGI's stewardship?

Yeah.

Safety.

But what's latest again?

I do still think they're going to be some really strange or scary moments.

The fact that like so far the technology has not produced a really scary giant risk doesn't mean it never will.

It also like there's we're talking about it's kind of weird to have like billions of people talking to the same brain.

Like there may be these weird societal skill things that are already happening.

We that aren't scary in the big way, but are just sort of different.

But I expect like I expect some really bad stuff to happen because of the technology which also has happened with previous technologies and I think all the way back to fire.

Yeah.

And I think we'll like develop some guardrails around it as a society.

Yeah.

What is your latest thinking on the rate mental models we should have around the right regulatory framework to think about or what we shouldn't be thinking about?

I think most I think the right thing to I think most regulation probably has a lot of downside.

The one thing I would like is as the models get, the thing I would most like is as the models get truly like extremely superhuman capable.

I think those models and only those models are probably worth some sort of like very careful safety testing as the frontier pushes back.

I don't want a big bang either.

And you can see a bunch of ways that could go very seriously wrong.

But I hope we'll only focus regulatory burden on that stuff and not all of the wonderful stuff that less capable models can do that you could just have like a European style complete cramped on and that would be very bad.

Yeah.

It seems like the the thought experiment that okay there's going to be a model down the line that is a super superhuman intelligence that could you know do some kind of take-off light thing.

We really do need to wait till we get there.

Or like at least we get to much bigger scale or we get close to it because nothing is going to pop out of your lab in the next week that's going to do that.

And I think that's where we as an industry kind of confused the regulators because I think you really could one you damage America in particular in that.

But China's not going to have that kind of restriction.

And you getting behind an AI I think it would be very dangerous for the world.

Extremely interesting.

Much more dangerous than not regulating something we don't know how to do yet.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You just want to talk about copyright.

Yeah.

So that's a sick way.

But when you think about well I guess how do you see copyright unfolding?

Because you've done some very interesting things with the opt-out.

And you know as you see people selling rights do you think well they would be bought exclusively well they'd be just like I could tell it to everybody wants to ping me or how do you think that's going to unfold.

This is my current guess.

It speaking of that like society and technology co-volve as the technology goes in different directions.

And we saw an example of a different like video models got a very different response from rights holders than image gen stuff.

Yeah.

So like you'll see this continue to move.

But forced guess from the position we're in today.

I would say that society decides training is very useful.

But there's a new model for generating content in the style over with the IPF or something else.

So you know anyone can read like a human author can anybody can read an off one gets some inspiration but you can't reproduce the novel in your own.

Right.

And shouldn't talk about Harry Potter but you can't breathe spit it out.

Yes.

Although another thing that I think will change in the case of Sora we've heard from a lot of concerned rights holders and also a lot of names and like and a lot of rights holders who are like my concern is you won't put my character in enough.

Yeah.

I want restrictions for sure but like if I'm you know whatever and I have this character like I don't want the character to say some crazy offensive thing but like I want people to interact.

I definitely developed the relationship and that's like my franchise gets more valuable and if you become really if you're picking like his character or my character all the time like I don't like that.

So I can completely see a world where subject to the decisions that a rights holder has they get more upset with us for not generating their character often enough then too much.

Yeah.

And this is like I mean this was not an obvious thing that yeah recently that this is how it might go but yeah this is such an interesting thing with kind of Hollywood where we saw this like one of the things that I never quite understood about the music business was how like you know okay you have to pay us if you play the song in a restaurant or like at a game or this isn't that the other and they they get very aggressive with that.

When it's obviously a good idea for them to play your song at a game because that's the biggest advertisement in the world for like all the things that you do your concert.

Yeah that one felt really irrational.

But I would just say it's very possible for the industry just because the way those industries are organized or at least the traditional creative industries to do something irrational.

And it comes from like the music industry I think it came from the structure where you have the publisher who's just yeah you know basically after everybody yeah you know that their whole job is to stop you from playing the music yeah which every artist would want you to play.

So I do wonder how it's going to shape and I agree with you that the rational idea is I want to let you use it all you want and I want you to use it but um here I'm going to shut down the mess up.

Yeah character yeah.

So so I think like if I had to guess some people will say that something is absolutely not but it doesn't have the music industry like thing of just a few people with all of the right it's one of the and so people will just try many different setups here and see what works.

Yeah and maybe it's a way for a new creative to get new characters up.

Yeah and you'll never be able to use Daffy Ducker.

I want to read this yeah.

I want to chat about open source because there's been some evolution I'm thinking too and that GPD3 didn't have the open open weights but you released a you know very capable open model or this year.

What sort of your your latest thinking what was the evolution there?

I think open source is good.

Yeah I mean I'm happy like it makes me really happy that people really like GPDOS us.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And what do you think like strategic like what's the danger of deep-seek being the dominant open source model?

I mean who knows what people will put in these open source models over time?

Like like the weights will actually be a hell of me.

Yeah it's really hard so you're a seating control of the interpretation of everything to somebody.

Yeah.

Who may not be influenced heavily by the Chinese government.

Yeah.

Wouldn't that be the way we see?

I mean you know just to give you and we really thank you for putting out a really good open source model because what we're saying now is in all the universities there I'll use the Chinese models.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Which it feels very dangerous.

You've said that the things you care most about professionally are AI and energy.

I did not know they were going to end up being the same thing.

I mean they were too independent interests that really can urge.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Talk more about how you're interested in energy as or began how you sort of chosen to to play in it and then we could talk about how they prepare.

Because you started your career in physics.

Yeah.

See I see us in physics.

Yeah.

Well I never really had a career.

I studied physics.

Yeah.

I might as well my first job was like a CS draw like yeah.

This is an over-simplification but roughly speaking I think if you look at history the best the highest impact thing to improve people's quality of life has been cheaper and more about the energy and so it seems like pushing that much further is a good idea and I I don't know I just like people have these different lenses they look at the world but I see energy everywhere.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And so get into it because we've kind of in the West I think we've pain ourselves into a little bit of a corner on energy by both outlying nuclear for a very long time.

That was an incredibly dumb decision.

Yeah.

And then like also a lot of policy restrictions on energy and you know we're so in Europe than in the US but also dangerous here and now with AI here it feels like we're going to need all the energy from every possible source and how do you see that developing kind of policy wise and technologically like what are going to be the big sources and how will those kind of curves cross and then what's the right policy posture around you know drilling, fracking all these kinds of things.

I expect in the short term it will be most of the net new in the US will be natural gas for relatively at least base low energy in the long term I expect it'll be a I don't know what the ratio but the two dominant sources will be solar plus storage and nuclear I think yeah some combination of those two will in the future like the long term future no long term right.

And it is a clear really good SMR's fusion the whole the whole stack and how how fast you think that's that's coming on the nuclear side where we're at a brilliant scale because you know obviously there's a lot of people building it yeah um but then we kept it completely legalized and all that kind of thing but I think it kind of depends on the price if it is completely crushingly economically dominant over everything else then I extract happen pretty fast yeah again if you like study the history of energy when you have these major transitions to a much cheaper source the world moves over pretty quickly yeah the cost of energy is so important yeah so if if nuclear gets radically cheaper relative to anything else we can do I'd expect this a lot of political pressure to get the on our sea to not quickly on it and we'll find a way to build it fast if it's around the same prices other sources I expect the kind of anti nuclear sentiment to overwhelm and it to take a really long time yeah it should be cheaper it should be no yeah it should be the cheapest one of the energy on earth like or anything yeah yeah cheap cleaned what's there now to like really a lot on open had what's what's the latest thinking in terms of monetization in terms of either certain experiments or certain things that you could see yourself I spent more time or less less time on different models that you're excited about the thing that's top of mind for me like right now just because it just launched and there's so much usage is what we're going to do for Sora yeah another thing you learn once you launch one of these things is how people use them versus how you think they're going to use them yeah and people are certainly using Sora the ways we thought they were going to use it but they're also using it in these ways that are very different like people are generating funny memes of them and their friends and sending them in a group shot and that will require a very different like sort of videos are expensive to make are so that will require a very different you know for people that are doing that like hundreds of times a day she's gonna require a very disemmonization method and the kinds of things we were thinking about I think it's very cool that the thesis of Sora which is people actually want to create a lot of content it's it's not that you know the traditional naive thing that it's like 1% of users create content 10% leave comments and 100% of you maybe a lot more want to create content but it's just been harder to do and I think that's a very cool change but it does mean that we got to figure out a very different modernization model for this number thinking about if we want to create that much I assume it's like some version of you have to charge people per generation per generation when when it's as expensive but that's like a new thing we haven't really think about before which is thinking on ads for the long tail.

Open to it like many other people I find ads somewhat distasteful but not not a nonstarter and there's some ads that I like like one thing I give meta a lot of credit for is Instagram ads are like a net value ad to me um I like Instagram ads I've never felt that like you know on Google I feel like I know what I'm looking for the first result is probably better they had as an annoyance to me on Instagram it's like I didn't know I want this thing it's very cool I never heard it but I never would have fought to search for it I want the thing so that's like there's kinds of things like that but people have a very high trust relationship with Trashy even if it screws up even if it hallucinates even if it gets it wrong people feel like it is trying to help them and that it's trying to do the right thing and is if we broke that trust it's like you say what coffee machine should I buy and we recommended one and it was not the best thing we could do but the one we were getting paid for that trusted vanish so like that kind of ad does not does not work there are others that I imagine that could work totally fine but that would require like a lot of care to avoid the obvious traps and then how how big of problems you know just you exactly Google example is like you know fake content that then gets slept in by the model and then they recommend the wrong coffee maker because somebody just blasted a thousand great reviews of you know this doesn't make so there's all of these things that have changed very quickly for us yeah um this is one of those examples that people are doing these crazy things to maybe I can fake reviews but just paying a bunch of like human or like yeah really trying to figure out or using chat to be did a rest of good ones right me a review that chat to BT would love yeah so this is like coffee exactly yeah so this is a very sudden shift that has happened we never used to hear about there's like six months ago yeah certainly and now there's like a real cottage industry that feels like it's sprouted up overnight yeah you're going to do this yeah yeah yeah yeah no they they're very clever out there yeah so I don't know how we're gonna fight it yet but people figure this out so that gets into a little bit of this other thing and we've been worried about um and you know we're trying to kind of figure out blockchain sort of potential solutions to it so forth but there's this problem where like the incentive to create content on the internet used to be you know people would come and see my content and they'd read like you know five right a blog people will read it so forth um with chat GPT if I'm just asking chat GPT and I'm not like going around the internet who's gonna create the content and why um and is there an incentive theory or or or something that you have to kind of that break the covenant of the internet which is like I create something and then I'm rewarded for it with like either attention or money or something uh the theory is much more of that will happen if we make content creation easier and don't break the like kind of fundamental way that you can get some kind of reward for doing so so for the dumbest example of so I since we've been talking about that it's much easier to create a funny video than it's ever been before yeah um maybe at some point you'll get a revshare for doing so for now you bit like internet likes which are still very motivating to some people yeah um but people are creating tons more than they ever created before in this gone in any other kind of like video app yeah so but are this at the end of text I don't think so like people are also are human beings are human generated people turn out to be like you have to you have to you have to verify like what percent yeah so like fully encrafted was it like tool-added yeah I say yeah probably nothing that tool-added yeah interesting we've uh we've given met of their flowers so I now I can feel like I can ask you this question which is the great talent war haul of 2025 has has taken place in open AI remains intact the team is strong as ever shipping in incredible products what can you say what would it would it's been like the sear in in terms of just everything that's been going on me every year it's been exhausting yeah since I remember when the first few years of running open AI were like the most fun professional years of my life by far and I was like unbelievable as you know until before you were released the product yeah running a research lab with smartest people doing this like amazing like historical work and I got to watch it and that was very cool and then we watch actually BT and everybody was like congratulating me and I was like my life is about to get completely ransacked and of course it has uh and but it it feels like it's just been crazy all the way through it's been almost three years now and I think it does get a little bit crazier over time but I'm like more used to it so it feels about the same yeah we talked a lot about open AI but you also have a few other companies retro bow sciences longevity and energy companies like Helion and and Aquilo did you have a a master plan you know decade ago to sort of make some big bets across these major spaces or how do we think about that same moment arc in this way?

No I just wanted to like use my capital to fund stuff I believed in like I I didn't it if yeah I felt like a good use of capital yeah like and more fun are more interesting to me and certainly like a better return than like buying a bunch of art or something yeah what about the clinical human algorithm do you think AI's of the future will find most fascinating I mean kind of the whole I would bet the whole thing like the whole my intuition is that like hey I will be fascinated by all other things to study and observe and you know like yeah yeah in in closing I love this insight you you had um where you talked about how you know the the next opening there's a mistake investors make is pattern matching off previous breakthroughs in just trying to find out what's the what's the next Facebook or what's the next open AI and and that that the next you know because that's a trillion dollar company won't look exactly like open AI it will be built off of the breakthrough that open AI is helped you know emerging which is you know near free AGI it's scale in the same way that open AI the opportunity previous breakthroughs and so for founders and investors and people trying to ascertain the future listening to how do you think about a world in which there is open AI achieves this mission there is near free AGI what types of opportunities might emerge for company building or investing that Europe is actually excited about as you put your investor out on a company building out I I have no idea I mean I have like guesses but they're like they're I have learned you're always wrong you've learned you're always wrong I've learned deep humility on this point um I think the the own like I think if you try to like I'm chair quarterback it you sort of say these things that sounds smart but they're pretty much whatever the else is saying and it's like really hard to get the right kind of conviction the only way I know how to do this is to like be deeply in the trenches exploring ideas like talking to a lot of people and I don't have time to do that anymore yeah I only get to think about one thing now yeah so I would I would just be like repeating other people's or saying the obvious things but I think it's a very important like if you are an investor or a founder I think this is the most important question and you don't you you figure it out by like building stuff and playing with technology and talking to people and being out in the world I have been always enormously disappointed by the willingness of investors to back this kind of stuff even though it's always the thing that works you all have done a lot of it but most firms just kind of chase whatever the current you know things and so do most founders so I hope people will try to go yeah we talk about how you know silly you know five year plans can be in a world that's constantly changing it feels like when I was asking about your master plan you know your career arc has been following your curiosity staying you know super close to the the smartest people the super close to the technology and just identifying opportunities and to kind of run organic and income out the way from there yes but I was always the thing I wanted to do I went to come I I studied AI I worked in the AI lab between my freshman and sophomore year of college yeah it wasn't working at all the time so I'm like not I'm not like enough of a I don't want to like work on something that's totally not working it was creating a time I was totally not working um but I've been in it since I was a kid like this yeah so amazing how it you know you got enough GPUs got enough data and the lights came on it was such a hated like people were all right man when we started like figuring that out people were just like absolutely not the the the field hated it's so much and that's hated it too it's not it's not the it's somehow not an appealing answer to the problem yeah the bitter less yeah well the rest is history and we're perhaps listening to this wrap on that we're lucky to to be part of the long for the ride Sam thanks so much for coming to the podcast thanks very much thank you thanks for listening to this episode of the A60Z podcast if you liked this episode be sure to like comment subscribe leave us a rating we're a view and share it with your friends and family for more episodes go to YouTube Apple Podcasts and Spotify follow us on x a 16z and subscribe to our sub-stack at a16z dot sub-stack.com thanks again for listening and I'll see you in the next episode as a reminder the content here is for informational purposes only should not be taken as legal business tax or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a 16z fund please note that a 16z and its affiliates may also maintain investments in the companies discussed in this podcast for more details including a link to our investments please see a 16z dot com 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