We have been a misunderstood and badly mocked org for a long time. Like when we started... We announced the org at the end of 2015. We were going to work on AGI. People thought we were batshit insane. I remember at the time, an eminent AI scientist at a large industrial AI lab was. DMing individual reporters being like, "These people aren't very good, and it's ridiculous to talk about AGI. I can't believe you're good." I can't believe you're given them time of day. That was the level of pettiness and ranker in the field that a new group of people say we're going to try to build AGI. Open AI, Deep Mind, was a small collection of folks who were brave enough to talk about AGI. In the face of mockery. We don't get mocked as much now.. The following is a conversation with Sam Altman, CEO of Open AI, the company. ehind GPT-4, Chat GPT, Dolly, Codex, and many other AI technologies which both individually. And together constitute some of the greatest breakthroughs in the history of artificial intelligence, computing, and humanity. Please allow me to say a few words about the possibilities and the dangers of AI in this current moment. the history of human civilization, I believe it is a critical moment. We stand on the precipice of fundamental societal transformation. We are soon. Nobody knows when, but many including me believe it is within our lifetime. The collective. ntelligence of the human species begins to pale in comparison by many orders of magnitude to the general. Superintelligence in the AI systems we build and deploy at scale. This is both exciting and terrifying. It is exciting because of the innumerable applications we know. nd don't yet know that we'll empower humans to create, to flourish, to escape the widespread power of the world. Spread poverty and suffering that exists in the world today, and to succeed in that old, all-too-human pursuit of. It is terrifying because of the power that super-intelligent AGI wields to destroy. The power to suffocate the human spirit. In the totalitarian way of George Orwell's 1984 or the pleasure-fueled mass hysteria. The new world, where as Huxley saw it, people come to love their oppression, to adore the technology. They adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think. That is why these conversations would. With the leaders, engineers, and philosophers, both optimists and cynics is important now. These are not merely technical conversations about AI. These are conversations about power, about companies, institutions, and political systems. Those are the systems that deploy, check, and balance this power, about distributed economic systems that incentivize the safety of the system. And human alignment of this power, about the psychology of the engineers and leaders that deploy AGI and. About the history of human nature, our capacity for good and evil at scale. I'm deeply honored to have gotten to know and spoken with on and off the mic with many folks who. now work at Open AI, including Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, Wojciech Zaremba, Andrej Karpathy, Jakub Pachocki, and many others. It means the world that Sam has been. otally open with me, willing to have multiple conversations, including challenging ones, on and off the mic. I will continue to have these conversations to both celebrate the incredible accomplishments of the AI community and the steel. an, the critical perspective on major decisions various companies and leaders make. Always with the goal of trying to. help in my small way. If I fail, I will work hard to improve. I love you all. This is the Lex Fridman podcast. Disappointed. Please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends. Here's Sam Altman.AEGISDOME20260215