Barry Weiss
Appearances
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Sam Altman on His Feud with Elon Musk—and the Battle for AI's Future
Hi, Honestly listeners, it's Barry here with a big end of year ask. By the end of 2024, in a few short weeks, we want to get to 1 million free press subscribers. That's right, a million people, 1 million. That's right, 1 million people who value journalistic independence and curiosity, and above all, who want a news source that reflects reality.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Sam Altman on His Feud with Elon Musk—and the Battle for AI's Future
Give us like the 10,000-foot version. What is the fundamental conflict between Elon Musk and his various allies, Meta being one of them, and you guys? Like what is the disagreement fundamentally about?
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Sam Altman on His Feud with Elon Musk—and the Battle for AI's Future
For someone who's just sort of tuning into this topic, why is it important, Sam, that OpenAI has a for-profit arm or converts in the way that you've been talking about? Why is that essential to your growth?
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Sam Altman on His Feud with Elon Musk—and the Battle for AI's Future
Maybe another way to say it is like it's absolutely essential for the computational power to create.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Sam Altman on His Feud with Elon Musk—and the Battle for AI's Future
From the Free Press, this is Honestly, and I'm Barry Weiss. Just a few years ago, as AI technology was beginning to spill out of startups in Silicon Valley and hit our smartphones, the political and cultural conversation about this nascent technology was not yet clear, or at least it wasn't clear yet to civilians like me.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Sam Altman on His Feud with Elon Musk—and the Battle for AI's Future
You've said a lot of different things about Elon in recent days. You gave this interview at Dealbook where Andrew Ross Sorkin is sort of asking you how you feel about the conflict. And you say, sad. And you also say that you think Elon's companies are awesome.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Sam Altman on His Feud with Elon Musk—and the Battle for AI's Future
And then he asked you, do you think he's going to use his newfound political influence to kind of punish you or punish OpenAI or punish his competitors? And you said in that interview that you thought he would do the right thing. How do you square that with what you just told me, which is that Elon's a bully? Bullies don't typically do the right thing.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Sam Altman on His Feud with Elon Musk—and the Battle for AI's Future
Until now, much of this battle – for those of us who are like perpetually online and perpetually on Twitter, we have been following the conflict via like tweets lobbed, subtweets. It's all sort of been playing out in real time on Twitter for us to watch. OpenAI, though, has sort of been in, like, response mode sometimes or mostly kind of ignoring everything. That's sort of how I'd characterize it.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Sam Altman on His Feud with Elon Musk—and the Battle for AI's Future
That changed a few days ago when you guys published this very, very long memo on OpenAI's website. And it's like a timeline going back to 2015, proving from your perspective that, you know, via emails and screenshots of texts and explanations of those screenshots and those texts that... Elon was open to OpenAI being a for-profit going all the way back then. I read all 29 pages.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Sam Altman on His Feud with Elon Musk—and the Battle for AI's Future
For those who don't want to do that, they could go to ChatGPT and ask Chat to summarize it. Here's how ChatGPT summarized it. This article details the rift between Elon Musk and OpenAI's leadership, particularly Sam Altman, stemming from Musk's dissatisfaction with OpenAI's shift from a nonprofit to a hybrid for-profit model.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Sam Altman on His Feud with Elon Musk—and the Battle for AI's Future
This feud is crucial, Chet told me, because it underscores the broader ethical dilemma of how AI should be developed and controlled, whether it should prioritize public good or corporate profit, especially as powerful AI technologies become increasingly influential in society in the economy. I thought that was pretty good. What do you think?
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Sam Altman on His Feud with Elon Musk—and the Battle for AI's Future
Anything you would add to it?
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Sam Altman on His Feud with Elon Musk—and the Battle for AI's Future
In the early days of OpenAI, the brand, like the way I encountered the brand of it was transparency and nonprofit. Like those were the things that it over and over emphasized. And the reason you said that you couldn't take any equity and the reason you took such a small salary is because you said, you know, I don't want to be conflicted.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Sam Altman on His Feud with Elon Musk—and the Battle for AI's Future
I remember asking former Google CEO Eric Schmidt on Honestly in January 2022 if AI was just like, and this is actually what I said, the sexy robot in Ex Machina. I literally said to him, what is AI? How do you define it? I do not understand.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Sam Altman on His Feud with Elon Musk—and the Battle for AI's Future
I want to always be motivated to do the thing that's best for humanity. The day after OpenAI launched in December in 2015, you described it to Vanity Fair as a nonprofit company to save the world from a dystopian future. You also said that trying to make OpenAI a for-profit would lead to, quote, misaligned incentives that would be suboptimal to the world as a whole.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Sam Altman on His Feud with Elon Musk—and the Battle for AI's Future
I guess I want to ask, like, do you still agree with that, but simply you've had to adapt to the reality, which is that developing these models takes billions and billions and billions of dollars? Two things.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Sam Altman on His Feud with Elon Musk—and the Battle for AI's Future
Naive how?
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Sam Altman on His Feud with Elon Musk—and the Battle for AI's Future
Do you think that we need a Manhattan Project here?
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Sam Altman on His Feud with Elon Musk—and the Battle for AI's Future
Meta right now, you know, Mark Zuckerberg's company, is also siding with Elon. A few days ago, Meta asked California's AG to block OpenAI from becoming a for-profit. And this is what they said in their letter. OpenAI's conduct could have seismic implications for Silicon Valley.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Sam Altman on His Feud with Elon Musk—and the Battle for AI's Future
I cringe listening back to that because today, in the waning days of 2024, not only has it become clear what AI is and how to use it, ChatGPT, just to choose one example, averages more than 120 million daily active users and processes over a billion queries per day.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Sam Altman on His Feud with Elon Musk—and the Battle for AI's Future
If OpenAI's new business model is valid, nonprofit investors would get the same for-profit upside as those who invest in the conventional way in for-profit companies while also benefiting from the tax write-offs bestowed by the government. This echoes what Musk said last year when he said, I'm confused as to how a nonprofit, which I donated to, somehow became a market cap for profit.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Sam Altman on His Feud with Elon Musk—and the Battle for AI's Future
In other words, if this is legal, like, why isn't everyone doing this?
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Sam Altman on His Feud with Elon Musk—and the Battle for AI's Future
But for the civilian who's hearing, how does a nonprofit become a for-profit? What's the answer? It doesn't.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Sam Altman on His Feud with Elon Musk—and the Battle for AI's Future
At the end of the day, Sam, who is going to profit most from the success of OpenAI?
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Sam Altman on His Feud with Elon Musk—and the Battle for AI's Future
Will you have equity or do you have equity or what kind of stake do you have in this new capped for-profit?
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Sam Altman on His Feud with Elon Musk—and the Battle for AI's Future
But it's also becoming clear what the political and cultural ramifications and the arguments and debates around AI are and what they're going to be over the next few years. Among those big questions are who gets to lead us into this new age of AI technology? What company is going to get there first and achieve market dominance?
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Sam Altman on His Feud with Elon Musk—and the Battle for AI's Future
I mean, you understand why. Do you get why people are fixated on that?
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Sam Altman on His Feud with Elon Musk—and the Battle for AI's Future
If you could go back in time, how would you have done this from the beginning? Like, let's wind back the clock to 2015.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Sam Altman on His Feud with Elon Musk—and the Battle for AI's Future
How essential was Elon to getting OpenAI off the ground? Like if the Oracle also told you about this fight that would ensue with someone that you regarded as your close friend, would you have said, you know, don't need him, can do it myself?
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Sam Altman on His Feud with Elon Musk—and the Battle for AI's Future
I remember, I think it was the first time I ever saw Elon Musk was on stage at a conference. You were interviewing him. You guys had a wonderful dynamic. You seemed like you were really good friends. He has said some really harsh things about you. He's compared you to Littlefinger in the Game of Thrones. And he has most devastatingly said, I don't trust him.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Sam Altman on His Feud with Elon Musk—and the Battle for AI's Future
And I don't want the most powerful AI in the world to be controlled by someone who isn't trustworthy. Why is he saying that?
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Sam Altman on His Feud with Elon Musk—and the Battle for AI's Future
I'm trying to put myself in a position of a former friend, a former co-founder of mine, saying those kinds of things about me. You seem relatively calm about it.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Sam Altman on His Feud with Elon Musk—and the Battle for AI's Future
How those companies are structured so that bad actors with bad incentives can't manipulate this technology for evil purposes. What role the government should play in regulating all of this. At the center of these important questions, at least for right now, are two men, Sam Altman and Elon Musk. And if you haven't been following, they aren't exactly in alignment.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Sam Altman on His Feud with Elon Musk—and the Battle for AI's Future
This recent blog post that went up on OpenAI's site said that Elon should, quote, be competing in the marketplace rather than in the courtroom. And the cynical view, of course, is to say, and you've alluded to this in this conversation, that Elon, who now owns an OpenAI competitor himself called XAI, is suing you not out of some concern over...
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Sam Altman on His Feud with Elon Musk—and the Battle for AI's Future
AI safety or anything else, but really just to get in on the competition. What do you say to that? Is the cynical view true? Is this really just a fight to be the first to dominate the market? Or is there... You should ask him. I hope, yeah, I hope to. I invited him on.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Sam Altman on His Feud with Elon Musk—and the Battle for AI's Future
After the break, more with OpenAI's Sam Altman. We'll be right back.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Sam Altman on His Feud with Elon Musk—and the Battle for AI's Future
Let's talk a little bit about AI regulation and questions about safety in AI. You're not just known as one of the most important AI CEOs, AI developers in the world. You're also a very, very well-known proponent of AI regulation.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Sam Altman on His Feud with Elon Musk—and the Battle for AI's Future
And the cynical view here, right, is that in the very same way that you could cast dispersions on Elon's motives, you could look at the way that you have lobbied for AI regulations as a way to stifle competition and benefit your company. Obviously, you've heard that argument before. I'd love for you to respond to that.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Sam Altman on His Feud with Elon Musk—and the Battle for AI's Future
But the argument that some of these startups are making, startups like – there's an AI startup called Hugging Face, which is an unbelievable name, the founder of a company called Stability AI. They're basically saying what Sam and the other big guys, the incumbents, are trying to do, OpenAI, Google, and Apple, is to kind of create –
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Sam Altman on His Feud with Elon Musk—and the Battle for AI's Future
basically asking government to kind of build a moat around you and stifle the competition through regulatory capture. What do you say to those people? And this is sort of like the argument between big tech and little tech. We can frame it in all kinds of ways.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Sam Altman on His Feud with Elon Musk—and the Battle for AI's Future
What do you say to those people who are saying, we want to get in on the competition, the regulation that people like Sam and others at many other times are pushing for will hurt us and benefit them?
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Sam Altman on His Feud with Elon Musk—and the Battle for AI's Future
If you're here, it's not just because you believe in fearless old-school journalism for yourself. It's because you believe in it for other people too. You believe it's for the good of the country. Free pressers tell us again and again that we're not just a media company. We're a public trust.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Sam Altman on His Feud with Elon Musk—and the Battle for AI's Future
I definitely – first of all, I don't even understand what we're talking about when we talk about superintelligence. You understand what that means and the implications of it in a way that I just don't. So that's number one. And number two, if this technology is as powerful as people like you and Elon and so many others that are closer to it say that it is –
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Sam Altman on His Feud with Elon Musk—and the Battle for AI's Future
Of course, I think it should be regulated in some way. How and when is obviously like the relevant question. How and when matters a lot.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Sam Altman on His Feud with Elon Musk—and the Battle for AI's Future
Recently, Marc Andreessen was on this show. And he talked to me about his perception of what the Biden administration was trying to do around AI technology. He came on and made the argument and told a story, really, that he experienced. He says... that the Biden administration was trying to sort of completely control AI.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Sam Altman on His Feud with Elon Musk—and the Battle for AI's Future
And what they were aiming to do was to make it so closely regulated by the government that in his words, there would only be sort of two or three big companies that they would work with and that they were trying to ultimately protect them from competition. Is that true? Do you know what he's referencing? Was OpenAI one of those companies?
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Sam Altman on His Feud with Elon Musk—and the Battle for AI's Future
They started off as friends and business partners. In fact, Sam and Elon co-founded OpenAI, the company that makes ChatGPT, in 2015. But over the years, Elon Musk grew increasingly frustrated with OpenAI until he finally resigned from the board in 2018.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Sam Altman on His Feud with Elon Musk—and the Battle for AI's Future
So OpenAI was not one of those companies?
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Sam Altman on His Feud with Elon Musk—and the Battle for AI's Future
You weren't like in a room with OpenAI and a number of, you weren't in a room ever with the Biden administration and other AI companies.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Sam Altman on His Feud with Elon Musk—and the Battle for AI's Future
What was your feeling in general about the Biden administration's posture toward AI and tech more generally? You just said, like, you didn't think they'd have the competence to –
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Sam Altman on His Feud with Elon Musk—and the Battle for AI's Future
OK, that's like a perfect analogy to get us to the comparison that's often made, which is the comparison between AI and nuclear weapons. When Mark was on, I asked him to kind of steel man the Biden administration's perspective or steel man the perspective that this should be heavily regulated.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Sam Altman on His Feud with Elon Musk—and the Battle for AI's Future
And he basically drew the analogy to the Manhattan Project and the development of the atomic bomb when the government failed. felt that it needed to make sure that this new science and innovation remained classified. First of all, do you think that that's a good analogy?
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Sam Altman on His Feud with Elon Musk—and the Battle for AI's Future
And if so, if it is as powerful as nuclear weapons, wouldn't it make sense for this to be not OpenAI and Gemini and Claude, but rather a project of the federal government?
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Sam Altman on His Feud with Elon Musk—and the Battle for AI's Future
That feud escalated this past year when Elon sued Sam and OpenAI on multiple occasions to try to prevent OpenAI for launching a for-profit arm of the business, a structure that Elon claims is not only never supposed to happen in OpenAI. He likes to remind people that a nonprofit transparent company should not become a closed for-profit one.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Sam Altman on His Feud with Elon Musk—and the Battle for AI's Future
At the beginning of the nuclear age, we had people in this country who functioned almost like chief science officers, right? I'm thinking about people like Vannevar Bush who helped launch the Manhattan Project and came up with the National Science Foundation and kind of guided American policy for those first few like very crucial years of nuclear energy. Does that person exist?
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Sam Altman on His Feud with Elon Musk—and the Battle for AI's Future
Like, if we wanted to have someone like that who sort of understood the technology, had no financial stake in it, and could talk, whether it's President Biden or Trump or whoever comes after him, sort of the pros and cons, not just of the development of AI here, but the competition with China. Like, does that person exist actually right now in America? Like, could you be that person, arguably?
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Sam Altman on His Feud with Elon Musk—and the Battle for AI's Future
Don't you feel, though, that, I mean, what do you make of not just the political vibe shift, but the cultural vibe shift that we've been experiencing since November 5th? Like, if you made that argument to me eight weeks ago, I would say, yeah, Sam's probably right. Now it feels like a different country.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Sam Altman on His Feud with Elon Musk—and the Battle for AI's Future
I don't know science. I just think that there's a shift in the direction of growth is a good thing. Technological progress is a good thing. Nihilism feels like it's passe and falling out of favor. Like I feel that change happening in a dramatic way.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Sam Altman on His Feud with Elon Musk—and the Battle for AI's Future
Now maybe it's because I spend a lot of time on X and like a lot of it's sort of like fomenting there and sort of leaping from the online into the real world. So, you know, if you went and like talked to the average PhD student uptown at Columbia, I don't think that they would have the same experience I do because everything is so balkanized.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Sam Altman on His Feud with Elon Musk—and the Battle for AI's Future
But he argues that changing its structure in this way might even be illegal. Now, on the one hand, this is a very complex disagreement. To understand every single detail of it, you probably need a law degree and special expertise in American tax law, neither of which I happen to have.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Sam Altman on His Feud with Elon Musk—and the Battle for AI's Future
Well, one of the companies that I feel excited about, perhaps it's controversial to say this, but I just think the founder is one of the most interesting people in the country, is Palmer Luckey and his company, Anderle Industries. And OpenAI recently entered into an agreement with, with Anduril to develop AI with military applications.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Sam Altman on His Feud with Elon Musk—and the Battle for AI's Future
Now, previously, OpenAI had had a prohibition against using its technology for weaponry. Now, with the caveat, of course, that you're concentrating on defensive systems at the moment, the sorts of things that could guard us against attacks like drone swarms, perhaps like what's happening in New Jersey right now. We don't have time to talk about that.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Sam Altman on His Feud with Elon Musk—and the Battle for AI's Future
But what made you change your mind fundamentally about integrating your company's technology with into even a defensive weaponry system.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Sam Altman on His Feud with Elon Musk—and the Battle for AI's Future
A year and a half ago when we were talking, part of our conversation was where the AI arms race with China was. I think now it's like well and definitively clear that we are very much in that arms race with China. And I think even people who worry about the power of AI in this country feel like, well, if it's a choice between us and China— It's got to be us. We got to win.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Sam Altman on His Feud with Elon Musk—and the Battle for AI's Future
Spell out for us, Sam, in your mind, because I'm sure you're thinking about this all the time, like what it looks like if China wins the AI arms race. Like what happens to America? What happens to the world?
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Sam Altman on His Feud with Elon Musk—and the Battle for AI's Future
And do you think the possibility of that happening is a real one? Them winning?
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Sam Altman on His Feud with Elon Musk—and the Battle for AI's Future
How do we know if they are winning given how much they lie and also steal stuff from us?
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Sam Altman on His Feud with Elon Musk—and the Battle for AI's Future
President Trump talks a lot about, you know, peace through strength. Is the Sam Altman OpenAI version of peace through strength, we have to crush, get ahead and win on AI so it's not even a question that China could do whatever it wants?
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Sam Altman on His Feud with Elon Musk—and the Battle for AI's Future
But you don't need any special degree or specialization to understand that at its heart, this feud is about something much bigger and more existential than the business model of open AI, although that's extremely important.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Sam Altman on His Feud with Elon Musk—and the Battle for AI's Future
Meaning if there's an arms race, we want to win, but we don't want the arms race, period.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Sam Altman on His Feud with Elon Musk—and the Battle for AI's Future
You mean collaborate with our enemies?
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Sam Altman on His Feud with Elon Musk—and the Battle for AI's Future
Are we doing that right now? With China on AI? Like, you know more than I do.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Sam Altman on His Feud with Elon Musk—and the Battle for AI's Future
If Trump called you tomorrow and said, hey, Sam, I want to make you AI regulation chief. You can do whatever you want in this position. What's the first thing that you would do? What's the most important thing that the person in that position would do?
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Sam Altman on His Feud with Elon Musk—and the Battle for AI's Future
Bias and censorship in AI is an enormous topic and one that we think a lot about here at the Free Press. And, you know, the most obvious example of this, the one that trended for days and everyone was laughing at, was when Gemini generated those images of, like, a black George Washington and, like, a trans Nazi, and it was hilarious. Yeah.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Sam Altman on His Feud with Elon Musk—and the Battle for AI's Future
In a way, it was really serious because it felt like only the most sort of like exaggerated, hyperbolic, obvious example of a much, much deeper endemic problem, which is the bias that is baked into these technologies, both because of the people programming those technologies and because of the information that they're sort of scraping online.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Sam Altman on His Feud with Elon Musk—and the Battle for AI's Future
At its heart, what this is really about is a fight over who will ultimately be in control of a technology that some say, if used incorrectly, could very well make human beings obsolete. So the stakes are low. Here to tell his side of the story is Sam Altman.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Sam Altman on His Feud with Elon Musk—and the Battle for AI's Future
Talk to us about how you're thinking about it at ChatGPT because obviously the system that is closest to reality, it seems to me, will win in the end of the day. If a ChatGPT is giving me images of, you know, is telling me George Washington was trans, I'm like, I'm not going to rely on this. We don't do that. Okay, fine. But you understand my point.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Sam Altman on His Feud with Elon Musk—and the Battle for AI's Future
How do you think about the problem of bias and how are you solving for it?
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Sam Altman on His Feud with Elon Musk—and the Battle for AI's Future
Is it possible to build a thing like ChatGPT or any other technology in this lane that we can't even conceive of yet that doesn't have a political point of view? Isn't that inevitable?
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Sam Altman on His Feud with Elon Musk—and the Battle for AI's Future
Do you believe that AI or chat GPT has a responsibility to fight pernicious ideas? Let me give you an example of what I mean. If you knew that by... putting your thumb on the scale and in the teeniest, tiniest way, you might be able to usher in a world where there's less racism, less anti-Semitism, less misogyny. And maybe it would even be invisible to people because they wouldn't know.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Sam Altman on His Feud with Elon Musk—and the Battle for AI's Future
At a certain point, as we've just talked about, this is going to be, I don't know if this was Mark or somebody else, the control layer of all of our information.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Sam Altman on His Feud with Elon Musk—and the Battle for AI's Future
How do you think about that?
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Sam Altman on His Feud with Elon Musk—and the Battle for AI's Future
We talk about where AI is headed, why he thinks superintelligence, in other words, the moment where AI surpasses human capabilities, is closer than ever. We talk about the perils of AI bias and censorship, why he donated a million dollars to Trump's inaugural fund as a person who had long opposed Trump, What happens if America loses the AI race to a foreign power like China?
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Sam Altman on His Feud with Elon Musk—and the Battle for AI's Future
Sam, you've donated a million dollars to Trump's inauguration, and it turned some heads because in the past you've called him a racist, a misogynist, and a conspiracy theorist, among other things.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Sam Altman on His Feud with Elon Musk—and the Battle for AI's Future
You've been a prolific donor to Democratic candidates and causes over the years, but now you say that Trump is going to lead us into the age of AI, and you're eager to support his efforts to ensure America stays ahead. Is this a change of heart, a political evolution, a vibe shift inside of you? What's going on?
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Sam Altman on His Feud with Elon Musk—and the Battle for AI's Future
What's the vibe shift inside of you? We know that there's one going on inside Silicon Valley and one going on in the culture. How have you changed in the past few years?
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Sam Altman on His Feud with Elon Musk—and the Battle for AI's Future
Do you think growth and the growth of open AI and the growth of AI more generally is a patriotic duty?
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Sam Altman on His Feud with Elon Musk—and the Battle for AI's Future
I'm going to use my 30 seconds on a lightning round. Sam, lightning round. What are the drone things, what are the flying objects flying over New Jersey right now?
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Sam Altman on His Feud with Elon Musk—and the Battle for AI's Future
No, we're reporting on it a lot. I find it interesting that various electeds are saying it's the Iran mothership or China. Do you think Twitter has become better or worse since Elon Musk took control? Worse. You're having a baby. Yes. Will you let your kid have an AI friend?
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Sam Altman on His Feud with Elon Musk—and the Battle for AI's Future
Will you let them go on social media?
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Sam Altman on His Feud with Elon Musk—and the Battle for AI's Future
Will you let them have screen time?
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Sam Altman on His Feud with Elon Musk—and the Battle for AI's Future
What's your favorite sports car? You love sports cars.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Sam Altman on His Feud with Elon Musk—and the Battle for AI's Future
Favorite movie?
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Sam Altman on His Feud with Elon Musk—and the Battle for AI's Future
Do you have any normal hobbies?
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Sam Altman on His Feud with Elon Musk—and the Battle for AI's Future
And of course, what went wrong and is going wrong between him and the richest man on Earth? We'll be right back. Today's episode is brought to you by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression or FIRE. FIRE believes that free speech is the foundation of a free society. This freedom is fundamental.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Sam Altman on His Feud with Elon Musk—and the Battle for AI's Future
You built a treehouse recently. I did. Why'd you do that?
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Sam Altman on His Feud with Elon Musk—and the Battle for AI's Future
Would you box Logan Paul?
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Sam Altman on His Feud with Elon Musk—and the Battle for AI's Future
Will we enter World War III in 2025? I hope not. What's your New Year's resolution?
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Sam Altman on His Feud with Elon Musk—and the Battle for AI's Future
Sam Altman, thank you so much for coming on Honestly.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Sam Altman on His Feud with Elon Musk—and the Battle for AI's Future
Thanks for listening. If you liked this conversation, if it got you Googling or chatting things about Elon Musk, open AI, tech, government, the future of humanity, that's all good. Share this conversation with your friends and family and use it to have an honest conversation of your own.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Sam Altman on His Feud with Elon Musk—and the Battle for AI's Future
I can't think of a better holiday topic than whether or not humans are going to become obsolete in the next few thousand days. Last but not least, if you want to support Honestly, there's one way to do it. It's by going to the Free Press' website at thefp.com and becoming a subscriber today.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Sam Altman on His Feud with Elon Musk—and the Battle for AI's Future
Happy Hanukkah, Merry Christmas, something festivus, and we'll see you next week for some holiday episodes that we love and that we're really excited for you to hear.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Sam Altman on His Feud with Elon Musk—and the Battle for AI's Future
So if for some crazy reason you listen to Honestly and you still don't support the free press, here's your moment. Take out your computer or your phone and go to the Free Press' website. Go to thefp.com slash subscribe and become a Free Presser. You don't even need to take out your credit card.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Sam Altman on His Feud with Elon Musk—and the Battle for AI's Future
It drives scientific progress, entrepreneurial growth, artistic expression, civic participation, and so much more. But free speech rights don't protect themselves. And that's where FIRE comes in. Proudly nonpartisan, they defend free speech and the First Amendment where it's needed most, on campus, in the courtroom, and throughout our culture.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Sam Altman on His Feud with Elon Musk—and the Battle for AI's Future
If you believe in that fight, and if you believe in the principles of free speech, consider joining FIRE with a gift before the end of the year. Your donation will help FIRE continue their critical work and its tax deductible. Visit thefire.org slash donate today to make your gift and join the free speech movement. Bernard-Henri Lévy's new book, Israel Alone, will make the perfect holiday gift.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Sam Altman on His Feud with Elon Musk—and the Battle for AI's Future
You may have read BHL in our pages ahead of the French elections this past summer, or perhaps you remember our reporting in the free press about how an ad for his new book, Israel Alone, was rejected from a trade publication on the grounds that it would cause controversy. You heard that right. An ad for a book about Israel would itself cause controversy.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Sam Altman on His Feud with Elon Musk—and the Battle for AI's Future
Or perhaps you're familiar with one of the 48 books that Levy has written. Regardless, I urge you to pick up a copy of his new book, Israel Alone. It's a passionate creed decor about Israel and the tragedy of October 7th, starting with Levy's eyewitness account. He was on the ground in Israel the day after the pogrom.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Sam Altman on His Feud with Elon Musk—and the Battle for AI's Future
From his unique humanist perspective, Levy analyzes what exactly Hamas did to Israel on October 7th and delves into how Iran, Russia, radical Islamist groups, Turkey, and China have played roles in and profited from this tragedy.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Sam Altman on His Feud with Elon Musk—and the Battle for AI's Future
He weaves in his experiences from his first trip to Israel in 1967 and his meetings with Israeli leaders throughout the decades, including Menachem Begin, Shimon Peres, Ariel Sharon, Yitzhak Shamir, and Yitzhak Rabin. The book addresses the worldwide eruption of anti-Semitism. over the past year and takes head-on the arguments for a ceasefire.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Sam Altman on His Feud with Elon Musk—and the Battle for AI's Future
It's a deep meditation on Zionism and Israel, and I think regular listeners of this show will get a lot out of it. Israel Alone is available on Amazon and at local booksellers. If your local independent bookstore does not carry Israel Alone, ask them to order it. This ad is sponsored by Marty Peretz in honor of Bernard-Henri Lévy. Sam Altman, welcome to Honestly.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Sam Altman on His Feud with Elon Musk—and the Battle for AI's Future
The last time we spoke, and I know you've given a zillion interviews since then, but it was in April of 2023, and it feels like a world away. ChatGPT had just launched, and people were just at the very beginning of trying to figure out, like in the abstract, what this technology was and how it might transform their everyday lives. And
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Sam Altman on His Feud with Elon Musk—and the Battle for AI's Future
Now, sitting here in December of 2024, ChatGPT is a household name. So is OpenAI, and of course, some of your competitors are too, like Perplexity and Gemini and Claude. And average Americans are using these tools every day, everything from math tutoring to debugging code to drafting emails, and it's very, very good at doing that.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Sam Altman on His Feud with Elon Musk—and the Battle for AI's Future
Sign up for free and get our daily emails that gives you our view of the world and a view into the world of the Free Press in your inbox every morning. If you're already signed up, why not give a gift subscription to your friends and family members or anyone you think can use a good dose of reality? Okay, one more time.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Sam Altman on His Feud with Elon Musk—and the Battle for AI's Future
Tell me about how ChatGPT and, I guess, AI technology more broadly has changed since we last spoke a year and a half ago and whether or not it's where you expected it to be today or further along.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Sam Altman on His Feud with Elon Musk—and the Battle for AI's Future
Give me a sense of, like, how are you using the tool that you have helped create in your daily life? Like, the way that most people I know are using it, Tyler Cowen and lots of people who are, like, passionate early adopters, it almost seems to have, like, replaced Google for them. And it's just, like, a much, much deeper Google. Is that how it's working for you?
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Sam Altman on His Feud with Elon Musk—and the Battle for AI's Future
What do you call it? Do you call it searching or is there a verb in the way that Googling is a verb?
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Sam Altman on His Feud with Elon Musk—and the Battle for AI's Future
in September, so just a few months ago, you published this manifesto on your website predicting the emergence of superintelligence in the next few years, or as you put it, and memorably, in the next few thousand days. Explain to us what superintelligence is. Tell us how we'll know if it's actually here and how it stands to change people's lives over the next decades.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Sam Altman on His Feud with Elon Musk—and the Battle for AI's Future
Support us by going to the Free Presses website at dfp.com slash subscribe or click the link in our show notes and help us get to our goal of minting 1 million Free Pressers by December 31st, 2024. Thanks so much.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Sam Altman on His Feud with Elon Musk—and the Battle for AI's Future
Okay, well, Sam, one of the reasons we wanted to have this conversation with you today is not just because we want to hear about the ways that AI is going to transform the way that we live and work, but because you're in a very public battle right now with your original OpenAI co-founder, Elon Musk.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Sam Altman on His Feud with Elon Musk—and the Battle for AI's Future
And I think it's safe to say that most listeners of this show will like vaguely know that there's a conflict between Elon Musk having to do with this, one of his companies, one of his many companies. But they're certainly not following the nitty gritty details of the various lawsuits and of the conflict more generally. So I want to try and summarize it in the most fair way that I can.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Sam Altman on His Feud with Elon Musk—and the Battle for AI's Future
And then you'll tell me if I've gotten it. wrong or where I've overstepped. So OpenAI begins in 2015, and it starts as a nonprofit. And in a blog post introducing OpenAI to the world in December of that year, you wrote this, "'OpenAI is a nonprofit artificial intelligence research company.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Sam Altman on His Feud with Elon Musk—and the Battle for AI's Future
Our goal is to advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return.'" Since our research is free from financial obligations, we can better focus on a positive human impact. And this was a huge aspect of the brand.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Sam Altman on His Feud with Elon Musk—and the Battle for AI's Future
Then, fast forward four years, in 2019, OpenAI moves to what it called a hybrid model with a for-profit arm that got a billion-dollar investment from Microsoft in that year. Since then, Microsoft has poured something like $13 billion—it might be a higher number—more into the company. And Elon was one of the co-founders, as I mentioned, since the beginning.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Sam Altman on His Feud with Elon Musk—and the Battle for AI's Future
But his relationship with the company soured over time because he disagreed with the shift that I just described, the shift from this nonprofit model to a hybrid model. And he eventually leaves the company and steps down from the board. And that takes us to this year.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Sam Altman on His Feud with Elon Musk—and the Battle for AI's Future
in which Elon has sued you and OpenAI on several different occasions so far this year, and he has given many interviews and posted countless amount of tweets or exes or whatever we're supposed to call them about this conflict. All of the lawsuits claim that you were in some kind of contract violation by putting profits ahead of the public good in the move to advance AI.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Sam Altman on His Feud with Elon Musk—and the Battle for AI's Future
And then last month, and this is the most recent development, Elon asked the district judge in California to block OpenAI from converting to this for-profit structure. Okay, that was a mouthful. Did I summarize it properly? And is there anything crucial that I left out or misstated?
The Dan Bongino Show
The Bongino Brief: Watch Out! Here Is The Left’s Plan For AI
Mark, add a little color to absolutely horrifying. What did you hear in those meetings?