Sam Altman

That it's not going to be as big of a deal as people think, at least in the short term.

Long term, everything changes.

I kind of genuinely believe that we can launch the first AGI and no one cares that much.

But like 20 minutes later, they're thinking about what they're going to have for dinner that night.

What's the question you have for me as an organizational psychologist?

Oh, what advice do you have for OpenAI about how we manage our collective psychology as we kind of go through this crazy superintelligence takeoff?

Like, how do we keep the people here sane, for lack of a better word?

We're not really in the like super intelligence part of the takeoff.

But I imagine as we go through that, it'll just feel like this unbelievably high stakes, immensely stressful thing.

I mean, even now, as we're in sort of the AGI ramp, it feels a little bit like that.

I think we need much more organizational resilience for what's to come.

Good decisions in the face of incredibly high stakes uncertainty and also adaptability as the facts on the ground and thus the actions that we need to consider or to take change at a very rapid rate.

Do you still agree with that?

I think so.

It's hard to overstate.

When we were starting OpenAI, we believed this thing.

That was like right about the time of like maximum skepticism in OpenAI relative to what on the outside relative to what we believed inside.

And I think my most important contribution to the company in that phase was that I just kept reminding people like, look, the external world hates anything new, hates anything that like might go in a different direction than established belief.

And so people are saying all of these crazy

crazy negative things about us and yet we have this incredible progress and I know it's early and I know we have to suspend disbelief to believe it'll keep scaling but it's been scaling so let's push it ridiculously far and now it seems so obvious but at the time I truly believe that had we not done that it might not have happened for a long time because we were the only people that had enough self-belief