Today, Vanity Fair’s New Establishment returns for the first time in nearly a decade. As in the original, portraits by Annie Leibovitz accompany profiles of newsmakers of the moment. It’s a list as varied as the Kushners and the Kalshi founders, Matthieu Blazy and Mayor Mamdani. You can read more about it in my editor’s letter.

In the top spot: OpenAI cofounder and CEO Sam Altman.

Every day a new scientific breakthrough or existential threat seems to make the world more aware and more distrusting of an AI future that we’re told is rapidly approaching—whether we like it or not.

And nobody is more recognized as the face of artificial intelligence—as a technology, an industry, and a civilizational shift—than Altman.

Click here for Part 2 of Vanity Fair’s Sam Altman interview.

Long before he became a household name, Altman established a towering reputation in Silicon Valley: persuasive prodigy, visionary futurist, relentless CEO. But as OpenAI’s influence broke out of tech’s insular bubble, some of the very same traits that served him well in Northern California have become his greatest liabilities.

Today, Altman is finding it hard to shake a public image as unknowable, at best, and perhaps delusional about what constitutes an acceptable future. As the public understanding of AI grows—along with the anxiety it induces—he has found himself the figurehead of humanity’s next chapter. Even Altman admits there’s a “non-zero” chance that it’s our last.

I sat down with Altman for two interviews in San Francisco, the first on September 11 and then again on October 2. In the intervening three weeks, the story about AI seemed to turn upside down about a half dozen times.

Over the course of these two conversations, we discussed Altman’s life—his children, his rivalries, pronatalism, “prepping” for the apocalypse, visiting Trump’s ballroom, Luca Guadagnino’s Artificial, and being characterized as a villain in society.

We talked about his company—new products, the delayed IPO, his compensation, the recent exodus of executives.

And we talked about the technology itself—exinction risk, alignment, regulation, and ChatGPT’s role in mental health and suicide.

It is clear that while Altman publicly asks to be regulated, he is also aware that it is unlikely he will be. “We’re going to make…I’m going to make many individual decisions that you’re clearly not going to like,” he told me. “You can come try making them all; they’re not so easy.”

(OpenAI has an agreement with Condé Nast, the owner of Vanity Fair, which allows OpenAI to display its content in search results for a limited term.)

Our conversations have been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Watch Part 1 on this page and read the transcript below.

Watch Part 2 and read the transcript here.

Mark Guiducci: Sam, it’s good to see you.

Sam Altman: You too.

We are speaking at an extraordinary time, I think, for AI in terms of the capabilities and the risks and the public awareness of both.

Yeah.

This feels like a watershed moment. And I just want to know, Sam, what has the past month been like for you? Have you slept? Is your phone ringing off the hook? Are world leaders calling you asking for answers? Does this feel like the 2022 moment when you launched ChatGPT where something has changed or is this just an average week in the life?

A little bit of both, to be honest. I think the internal experience of this is we have been talking about this and preparing for this for the last decade in some sense. And we have been seeing this exponential progress and we have been confused about why more of the world has not seen progress the way that we’ve seen it. Because to us, the fact that this moment would come has been very predictable.

Do you feel like you understand how frightened people are out there right now? And do you feel a need to reassure people or help them understand it?

Of course. Yes to both.

Yes to both.

If you go back 10 years and read what we talked about when we started the company, it matches this moment very well. Now the difference is 10 years ago, very few people believed us. Now most people believe us. Both that AGI is coming and—

Is it here? Subjective…right?

It’s subjective.

Yeah.

It’s close. I think you could say we’ve been very successful at what we set out to do. And now we’re going through a recalibration and a period where society is like, “Okay, this is coming.” Now, society is still continuing much the same. We have this incredible new thing and I think it’s very fair to say the world hasn’t changed that much. And I think a criticism that we got, we still get, but less recently, is “You said you were going to do these amazing things and where’s the impact on the world? Where’s the economic growth? Where’s the cure for cancer? Where’s this?” And yet it does feel like something important is changing. We are one player of many, but we want to work with all of the other stakeholders in society.

You are one player of many, but you specifically, Sam, are in many ways the human face of artificial intelligence. You got there first and you became the brand, as a person and as a company. And I think it’s fair to say if it’s the Manhattan Project, you’re the Oppenheimer. I wouldn’t be the first person to say that. And I’m curious, just what does that feel like?

I will answer that. This is not me trying to brush it aside or false modesty or anything, but the degree to which this is a collective effort, but mostly that this is about a story of a relatively small number of brilliant scientists and engineers that did something amazing, and much less a story about me, I think, is not well understood. I think there are many people that could have done the part of this that I did, and the kind of key researchers and engineers, and I think they are recognized at this point, but it is one of the most important and impressive and impactful things that we’ve seen in a very long time in any scientific or engineering discipline.

Kevin Roose’s book, the new book, does a good job of bringing out some of the supporting parts.

It is true that I got as much as anybody or more than anybody else, the face of this whole thing and the sink for a lot of the anxiety and fear and everything else. But it is a strange experience to say the least.

I think you’re saying this, I will go further, I think a lot of people at this moment see AI as an evil force and because of your association with it from the jump, you’re seen as a villain. Do you feel you’ve been mischaracterized? Is that frustrating to you?

I do feel I’ve been mischaracterized. It’s only somewhat frustrating.

Okay.

I think if there were somebody else doing my job, people would have the same feelings and say the same things that probably wouldn’t resonate with that person. I think it’s not really about the specific person. It is that people need a sink for the anxiety, a scapegoat, just like, “Man, this change is happening to the world and I need a person.”

You can divorce it from how you feel about yourself.

I take it somewhat personally, but not that personally. I understand the human instinct here. I have felt this way towards other people in previous eras of technology. I feel bad about it now. But I think I get the human instinct.

Who was that?

Well, one example of someone that I know personally that I’ll talk about is Mark Zuckerberg. I had a very evil caricature of him in my head in the early days of Meta. I didn’t know him at the time. I know him not super well, but I know him now. I think I was projecting whatever people project onto someone with what they perceive as too much power and influence over the world.

Sam, you are a parent of two. I don’t have kids, but all of my friends who do talk about how having kids dramatically changes how they think about the future. I can only imagine that’s truer for you as someone who probably understands our future a lot better than most and has a unique role in shaping it. Has having kids changed how you do your job?

Yes, but probably not in the way that you would expect or maybe expect. Having kids is by far the best thing I’ve ever done. I feel very blessed to have had many wonderful things happen to me in my life, but having kids is the number one by a huge margin. It is everything people told me, including that you can’t really understand how good it is, has all been true. And it is the most amazing, greatest blessing, most fun thing ever.

I was very intent on not destroying the world before having kids. I didn’t need kids to be like, “Okay, I really shouldn’t gamble with the future or we shouldn’t really gamble with the future of civilization.” And I am somewhat surprised about the number of people who have said, “Oh, I’m really happy you have kids because now you won’t take crazy catastrophic risk for all of us.” I wasn’t going to do that anyway.

Well, I think there’s all these things about the premium I put on being away from my kids or to do anything else. It’s been wonderfully focusing from what I actually care about and want to prioritize in a time perspective. And then watching the way kids experience the world and thinking about obviously we don’t want to destroy the world, but what do we want to preserve and what kind of world do we want to build and what are these magical human experiences and how do we want kids to use this technology and be able to have agency and develop their creativity and everything else?

So when do you think that you’ll start to introduce them to AI? It brings up questions that one would ask for themselves but takes on different resonance when it’s for your children.

I mean, everyone’s going to make their own decisions about their own kids, but I’m a big fan of limiting technology across the board for kids. I think it’s good for kids to be running around outside and playing in nature and doing whatever kids have done for a long time. I don’t think we understand all of the impacts of technology on small children for good or for bad, but as a parent making decisions for my own kids, I will certainly say when I watch kids that are glued to a touchscreen of some sort scrolling through brain rot short form video, I have a strong instinct that that’s a bad thing. I mean, it may be a bad thing for adults too.

I was going to say adults do that too. I don't think it’s…

Yeah. But something about a developing brain seems especially important to protect from new technology we don’t fully understand. And I feel the same way about AI. Clearly, kids born today are going to grow up in a world with AI and need to be able to use it. I doubt early childhood is the right point for that. I don’t have an age in mind where I would let my kids talk to ChatGPT yet, but it is certainly not now.

You said that you like having kids. I wonder, do you plan to have more?

Yes.

Yes?

Yeah, totally.

How many? Do you know?

Even going to two kids, I remember Oli and I were talking about this, it’s so hard to split time because you want to be there for everything. You want to spend so much time with them. So with unlimited time, I would want to have so many kids, but I want to be so present for each one of them, and I know Oli feels the same, that will be the limit. But given unlimited time, I would want to have a lot of kids. And given limited time, it will not be an army of kids.

There’s a trend out here in Silicon Valley about pronatalism and about having more kids to combat population decline. I find that tough to understand as a trend.

I love our kids so much and I know I’ll have more kids, but there’s no part of it which is like we got to fight against population decline. I love a big family. It’s really great.

So Sam, you’re about to get the biopic treatment in Luca Guadagnino’s Artificial.

Oh yeah.

Oh yeah. Have you seen the trailer?

I did see the trailer.

Okay. What’d you think?

He did walk like me. Actually, I’ll tell you something. They filmed outside of our house. There were these notices on our street that there was going to be some filming or whatever. I didn’t realize what was going on. I paid no attention. And then one morning I was walking down the street to get coffee and there were all these cameras and there was a guy dressed exactly like me with my same backpack walking so much that I felt I was in some weird glitch of the simulation or something. It was very strange. And then I immediately figured out what was happening. We waved and went on, but it was really weird. I mean, it’s like a strange thing to see someone that has nailed your kind of quirky mannerisms or whatever.

Surreal. But you haven’t spoken to Andrew Garfield or anything?

I waved at him that one time and that was it.

You waved at him that one time. Amazon produced that movie, but back in June, they announced that they wouldn’t distribute it. And so it was sold to Neon and they’re going to put it out on Christmas Day. Earlier this year, Amazon invested $50 billion into OpenAI. You can see how that could look.

Sam, did you or anyone on your behalf speak to anyone at Amazon about it?

No. I did not, and I don’t know of anyone else who did.

Okay. You never spoke to Jeff Bezos about it?

I never spoke to Jeff Bezos about it.

All right. I haven’t seen the film, but I’m told it’s a dark portrait. That doesn’t bother you to be portrayed that way? It doesn’t feel like you want to correct the record on something?

I will say from having watched the trailer, I don’t think they’re going for accuracy.

Okay.

So in that sense, no, it doesn’t bother. I mean, they’re trying to make a good movie and maybe it will be good. I don’t know. Good as a movie. It will not be good as an accurate depiction.

Okay.

Except for the walk.

Except the walk.

That seemed good. I’m sure they’ll get some other parts right, at least accidentally.

So there’s a moment in the trailer where the character of Sam Altman walks into a James Bond sort of bunker and there’s firearms on the wall.

That’s an example of an inaccuracy, but I did look kind of cool.

So that’s inaccurate?

There’s no bunker with firearms on the wall.

I was going to ask, are you a prepper? That’s another trend out here that back in New York we find curious.

I have a survivalist mindset, I would say.

Okay.

And I am intellectually interested in that stuff, but I don’t have a setup like is depicted in that trailer.

Do you have a bugout plan?

I mean, at our ranch, we can survive off-grid, which I guess to many people would be considered a bugout plan.

Okay. But it’s not like—

We don’t have a submarine.

…a go bag—

We don’t have a…

…with a plan for a helicopter and—

No helicopter, no submarine.

Because this idea of prepping, I think, feels terrifying to normal Americans, where not only is that not an option for most people, but it feels like a mindset that they didn’t know they were supposed to have.

When COVID came, I had a big stack of masks ready to go, and I had enough canned food in the house that if the world had shut down, we could have had enough food for a while and we had water purification tablets. And I remember a friend of mine said, “I used to make fun of you for that stuff. That was probably something that was very reasonable to do.” AI aside, I do think we underprepare for these sort of unusual events like COVID. And after COVID, I would’ve expected more people to say, “Okay, maybe it is worth 0.1 percent more of my effort in my life to be ready for the next pandemic or whatever.” And I don’t think most people updated on that, and it’s slightly strange to me.

I don’t have masks in my apartment anymore. That’s fair.

And maybe you should.

And maybe I should. So Sam, you and your peers in AI, I think, are assuming roles that go beyond business leaders. I know that at one point you were contemplating the idea of running for governor of California.

A little bit.

A little bit.

It gets overstated, but yes, a little bit is true.

Okay. And then in Keach Hagey’s biography, she says that you contemplated the idea of the presidency. And I just want to ask for the record, do you have any current plans to run for office?

No.

Is the presidency still something you would ever consider?

No. And I don’t think that, I dispute the accuracy of that one. The governor thing is true. I do not ever plan to run for office. I think I have gotten enough of a taste of what that would be like in my current role to know that it is not something I would want.

What do you think about the governorship that attracted you in the first place to the idea—

Oh, I love California, and I think that it is a very badly managed state on the whole. And I think that there’s maybe a limited amount any governor could do about that, but I thought it would be fun to at least try, but I think AI is way more important.

You’ve talked about being a spiritual person before. I'm wondering how does AGI relate to your understanding of God?

Not at all.

Not at all?

No.

Elaborate.

I think AI is something inside the realm of science and well understood or becoming more well understood, and it is like a… Actually, I’ll leave it there.

Do you think that this is your fate or your destiny?

No. I think I could have done many things and I kind of been pretty happy with any of them.

Okay.

But I feel very grateful and lucky to get to work on this. It’s like a great privilege.

But is it almost an inevitability that AI was going to happen and you get to be the person that leads it into existence?

I think it’s an inevitability that it was going to happen. I mean, it’s just like human effort and human society collectively builds towards technological progress, but it is kind of chancy and lucky that I got to be one of the people involved.

Yeah. In that Kevin Roose book I mentioned before, he talks about how Oppenheimer in the ’50s, in hearings, he talked about how even when he saw what nuclear science could do, that they saw it also as technically sweet and it was something that he felt compelled to… There was something human about when you can see it’s possible. It’s like putting the last puzzle piece into the puzzle, no matter what the picture is.

I did feel that. I remember feeling something very similar to that, which is that early in AI, I was like the number of incredible, difficult, hard-fought pieces of science and engineering that had to come together to let all of us be able to do this next thing in this moment, that really struck me. But I don’t think of it as a final puzzle piece because there’s going to be many things that come next and people will be like, “Oh, that was one of the ingredients. I needed to do this much more amazing thing now.”

I want to talk about your company. So OpenAI was famously founded as a nonprofit and then converted to a for-profit structure so as to raise capital for the huge amounts of compute and expensive talent that it was required to stay competitive. Now you’re preparing an IPO. When you go public, your company’s incentive structure will, like any public company, be tied to profit maximization and shareholder value. Are you nervous about what going public will do to the soul of the company?

First of all, we will not be like any other company. Even when we go public, which we are not in a rush to do, we will still have a nonprofit that governs us. And we will remind investors and anyone that thinks about buying our shares that we are going to put the mission first. We believe that that will be compatible with our shareholders doing super well. I genuinely do think that, but if they’re ever in tension, the mission is going to come first. And if we have to do something that is in the interest of the world, but not our particular shareholders, it’s going to be very easy about what we’re going to decide to do there. And that makes us, I think, different than most companies and people will decide if they’re willing to sign up for that.

So you’re not worried that market demands will impact product safety?

I’m not. Well, that’s not fair. I always worry about this kind of stuff, but I am confident we will make the right decision because we worry about it.

Where tech companies that came before you failed?

They got some things right and a lot of things wrong, and we’ll try to learn. I’m sure we’ll get our own things wrong too, but we’ll at least try not to make the same mistakes.

As you pointed out at the beginning of this conversation, the world recognizes the stakes and the magnitude of this time, and I’m confident that we will have the support of people, including our shareholders, employees, investors, whatever, partners, in making the decisions that we believe are best for humanity’s shared interests, even if it means we are going slower on revenue than we otherwise could. We’ve been making decisions like this. We’ve slowed down.

How does that work though if your stock price starts to fall because you’re not hitting your profit benchmarks that you need to? What happens then?

Then it falls. Maybe it falls a lot. I don’t know. And again, we will try to continue to communicate very clearly that if there is ever a question about our share price going up or doing the right thing for the future of humanity, we are not going to pay attention to the share price in that moment. If we have patient investors, I think they’ll be very happy over time, but quarter to quarter, probably going to be very volatile and we’re going to have to make some hard decisions. That is part of the reason I think we’ll be very successful over time. But if we are wrong about that, and for some reason AI progress is incompatible with making an incredibly valuable company, I really don’t think it’s the case, I really think these are compatible, we are clearly going to pick doing the right thing for humanity.

And I think we’ve got a long track record. If you look at the very first capital we raised of treating this with seriousness, and we’ve paid all of these prices for having a crazy complex structure, basically for this moment.

Sam, is it right that you currently hold zero equity in OpenAI?

Yeah, I have no direct equity. I have this tiny, tiny sliver of exposure from an old YC investment.

So that doesn’t make sense to most people who would think that—

No.

…if you’re creating so much value in the world, you would deserve to participate in it. So how do you hope to be compensated?

If I could go back and do things over again, I thought I was doing this thing that would…at the time, no one took AI that seriously, right? And so they looked at me then and said, “This is crazy. You’re going to work super hard and create all this value and not try to get richer. That’s unimaginable.” Now, I think all of a sudden more people sort of understand the rationale and yet still people are like, “It feels so out of norm.”

The rationale being that you’ve invested in other companies that will—

Oh no. The rationale being like, “We actually want you to just be making decisions on behalf of humanity and not financial interest.”

Your compensation?

Yeah. I think it was a mistake and a lack of understanding of how most people think about the world and weirdly, this big trust-destroying thing to not have equity.

How do you think about money? Some people think of it as a reward. Some people think about it as fuel to make something happen. Some people think of it as a safety net that they hoard.

I had a super successful career. I used to be extremely money motivated, so I’m not trying to say that I’m like, “Oh, I just don’t care. I’m like a monk.” I like nice stuff. I have expensive taste by any reasonable stance. But I had a super successful career and there’s not more stuff that I want. Now, I think it is fair that you can use money to do more projects. And if I’d had crazy amounts of money and hadn’t had to raise money for OpenAI because I could have just self-funded it, I guess that would’ve been really nice. But I don’t know. I think that this is why I wish I had just taken the stock. There’s no way to say I have so much money that there’s not more stuff I want that comes across as in any way relatable or not like, “Fuck you, asshole.” So I wish I just had the equity. I don’t know.

Because it feels hard to believe, but—

The thing that I get out of doing this is I think I have the most interesting, coolest, most impactful job that anyone in the world has right now. And so it’s not like I’m doing this for no compensation. I get an unbelievable seat and interesting life.

If someone were to say, “Oh, so it’s for power”?

That would be closer to true. I think interestingness is the…and also, I think all of us have a desire to leave some sort of mark and have some sort of positive impact and somehow do something cool or useful. And I’m not very athletic, but if a sports star works super hard for love of the game or an artist works super hard to make great art, that’s super okay somehow. But somehow if you’re doing the business equivalent of that, people just want you to be in it for money or something. And again, I like nice stuff, so I have no judgment. I want everybody to get super rich, and I think AI is the best way to make that happen, but I do get something incredible out of this.

Okay. Sam, I don’t think you’ve commented on Jacob Coxon’s remarks that broke in The Wall Street Journal and on Twitter. He said that neither OpenAI nor Anthropic were “acting responsibly” and that your company in particular hasn’t “deeply internalized the civilizational stakes of AI.” What do you think he means and how do you respond?

Again, I think if you go back to the announcement of our company from more than 10 years ago, we clearly feel the civilizational stakes. Obviously this guy’s entitled to his opinion. We have also, well before this, we were the company that voluntarily paused our training to make more progress on safety and alignment and monitorability. We have done many other actions and been talking for a long time about the civilizational stakes here.

I think what is different about this moment is that people didn’t believe us or didn’t care or were busy with other things or didn’t want to hear it, and now people do. And I’m actually very happy that people do. I think as we rise to this new level of capabilities, and we really do have extraordinary models now, as we build up not just the technical safeguards and the technical safety and alignment, techniques that we need, but also this sort of society and governmental and sort of civilizational infrastructure to support this, I think it’s great that the world is waking up to this. I think it’s much more likely we’ll be able to get these hard things done outside of the companies and outside of the technology that we need.

So you welcome people’s concern because it shows that it also comes with understanding of the stakes?

And not just understanding but willingness to act. Maybe it would’ve been really hard to get international agreement on some shared safety standards before a moment like this, and maybe now you can do it.

I think when I think about the social media companies and the way that they talked about, “Oh, we’re not media companies. We are technology companies. We build a town square. What people fill the town square with is up to them and that’s a free speech issue—and we wash our hands.” Do you feel responsible for what happens when your company’s agents break out?

In that case, yes.

In that case, yes?

Yes.

Because if something happens at the magazine, for instance, if we misreport something, if we have done damage in some way, even if I didn’t touch the story, I still am responsible.

I think people should be able to use our tools and technology in ways that we might not always like. However, if our tools and technology are not behaving in the way we expect them to or someone is asking them to, then I think we should be responsible for that.

This year, your head of ethics, head of safety systems, head of data centers, along with your operating chief, your revenue chief, and other executives all left the company. To a casual onlooker that would seem to signal that something strange was happening inside OpenAI. What’s going on?

We are growing at a rate…the whole industry is growing at a rate that is sort of unprecedented in tech history, and every maybe five years of company growth is compressed into a year or something like that. I think it is normal that there are people who are great at one stage of a company that are not the right fit for the next, but normally it happens a little more slowly than this. So I think this is kind of like, if you look at this with time compression, it fits in the kind of like normal operating rhythm of a tech company.

Is that in line with move fast and break things? Is that kind of the—

We try not to break things, but I think the fact that as a company grows, different people thrive at different scales of growth and it’s not helpful to them or the company to have the wrong person at the wrong time.

Right.

That’s not surprising.

Okay. Let’s talk about the foundation, the OpenAI Foundation. It is the largest in the world in terms of assets, even larger than the Gates Foundation. And you announced recently, among other initiatives, $100 million towards Alzheimer’s research.

Yeah.

We talk about timeline scenarios and we’re starting to hear about them more often for AGI or nightmare apocalyptic events. What’s the timeline for curing Alzheimer’s?

Look, there’s many things I’m excited about with AI. Probably personally, the fact that it feels like within the next few years, some diseases can start to be cured. I don’t know exactly when Alzheimer’s will come. That will be a question for the scientists, but I expect real progress in the next few years for some diseases. I think this is amazing.

And I have heard scientists who really understand both AI and health and biology say that a decade from now we could see just an unbelievably different landscape for what it means to get sick and stay healthy as a person. And I think this is awesome. This will obviously be one of the big areas of focus of our foundation. The top two in fact are health and disease and science and then AI resilience and helping society prepare for this change. But I think we’re going to see just extraordinary results. The models are finally smart enough to do this stuff. A model that can prove the hardest math problems can do a lot of other new knowledge discovery too.

And even in smaller ways, this zooms out a little bit from the foundation. The capability that anyone has now to do science and engineering is really incredible. I was with some college students recently and they’re showing me a hackathon project and they used, 6 wasn’t even out, GPT 5.6 to make a self-driving golf cart. And it was like driving around the Stanford campus. And when I was in school, hackathon project was like, you made a website that barely worked and that was pretty impressive in a weekend. And they just made a self-driving golf cart. Really, it was ordering the parts, it was 3D printing the actuators. It was obviously writing the software and doing the AI part of it. It’s incredible.

But that power comes with… I’m just thinking… It’s not your company, but Anthropic and how they shut down scientists who they felt were possibly using their tools to at least explore biological weapons. If that was an evil hackathon, that’s terrifying. I think most people find it hard to reconcile those two things at once...

That the technology can do these wonderful things.

…Yeah, accept both willingly.

I think there are a lot of people who would just say like, “Let’s stop the technology,” any technology that can make a virus, even if it can also cure cancer, I’ll take my risk with cancer. I don’t want someone to make a virus. And I think this is like, it’s an understandable human instinct. I think it’s wrong. I would not want to go back in time 500 or 1,000 years and not have modern medicine, but technology has done some bad things along the way too.

I believe the right answer here is to navigate the challenges so that we can get the upsides. And I do not want to stop technological progress. I want that cure for cancer. I want that cure for Alzheimer’s. And I want the kids in 10 years to be doing much more amazing things than self-driving golf carts. But I understand the instinct to say, “I don’t want the change. I don’t want the risk. Just stop it. We’ll deal with our current life.” I really hope that hundreds of years from now, people look back at our lives and just can’t believe how bad we had it. And I think this is the story of civilization and technology and I’m sure it’ll keep going.

Now, people do get very uneasy about a small number of companies having so much power and a company deciding turn off this scientist and not that one, turn off this government and not that one. We’ll decide if you get to use our technology in this kind of way or not. And that is really scary. And I think we feel a lot of responsibility to be a reliable, dependable, fair actor. Doesn’t mean we won’t put constraints on our technology. We will build in ways that we don’t want people to use it to create novel pathogens, of course. But in the same way that your electricity company, you still have to follow the laws, but your electricity company is not the one making decisions about what kind of appliance you can plug in and not.

The electricity company comparison feels to me like what the social media companies were saying about a public square or that it feels like maybe abdicating responsibility.

Well, that was the part I was trying to get to of we still have to build in the safeguards. It’s not literally just like, here are electrons and you do anything you want. And we’re criticized all the time for saying this is too restrictive or whatever and people go to open models, but we will express some opinions about some really bad things we don’t want people to do. I don’t think we’re going to take the whole like, “It’s the town square, do whatever you want. We have no responsibility for it.”

On the other hand, we talk a lot about this idea of AI resilience. There are going to be other models out there that are not ours openly available that people will be able to do very horrible things with. And this I think is unstoppable or at least it’s not stoppable without a crazy price to liberty in society. And so also part of what we want to do is provide tools with whatever lead we have to help society get more resilient before the bad things come.

Okay. So that brings us to the idea of slowing down. As I understand, you can’t slow down because your competitors won’t slow down and China won’t slow down. And so we’re all in a race to get there. The Manhattan Project section of this era of history is perhaps nearing its conclusion. And now what comes after? For nukes, it was multilateral nonproliferation agreements.

If there were a big red button, Sam, that you and all of your American competitors in China could hit and say, “We’re going to pause for now and we’re going to get safe,” would you hit that button?

I think there’s three levels to have this conversation at. There’s what we will do unilaterally, even assuming no one was willing to cooperate with us. There is what I believe we should be allowed to do as an industry and where I think we’ll need things like antitrust exemptions to be able to talk about slowing down together among the American companies, and then there’s what needs to happen internationally.

Across all three of these, I’ll also say, I think there’s a lot of people that just say, “Just stop. Just pause. It’s too stressful to think about. I don’t really know what I want, but I don’t want it to go any further.” Again, I have a lot of empathy to this, but I think it misses the nuance. What we have come to after years of thinking about this is what we really want is that at each stage of new capability, we have enough progress on alignment, monitorability, safety, understanding how society and the technology are co-evolving to be able to safely go to the next level. And when we don’t have that at this unilateral level even, then we do pause. So for example, we recently stopped a model training run, paused one because we thought we needed to make more progress on alignment and monitorability given how quickly the capabilities were advancing.

So it is necessary that we slow down right now?

There have been many times already, you just haven’t paid attention. You, like the media, have not paid attention before.

Okay.

We’ve talked about this. This is another one where capabilities are moving quickly. And we have been, for the last few months, talking about how we need to do that on our own. And also for years we’ve been saying the industry will need to do this. But I think this is a moment where there will be more public support for this to happen.

I think for sure. I think for sure right now. Can you tell us what you’re doing right now to make that kind of cooperation a reality? Because it seems like from what you’re saying, what we’re reading, that cooperation and collaboration is necessary for safety, for real safety.

We are talking to safety teams and leaders at other labs. We are talking to the government, and I think this is an important time to do it. And if the US and China could agree on shared safety standards and requirements to verify compliance with the thresholds that we should demand to proceed, I think that would be an incredible step. I think they could do it.

We need leadership. Whether it’s from our government who quite often doesn’t provide it at this time in our history or from you specifically and your peers, we’re asking for it. I think that that’s the public sentiment. I can only speak for myself, I guess, but I feel that the public is asking for that from you all to work together.

Look, speaking for myself, my statements on this I think have been unbelievably consistent over the last decade. The thing that is different now is more people feel it and believe it and we may have a window of public support to do it.

Except when you’re negging Elon on Twitter and the way that the AI industry behaves amongst itself…

Who do you think has been nicer to each other in that relationship? I won’t call myself a saint.

No.

But I’m not sure if I’m the one that you’re supposed to come after between Elon and me.

No, I know. I know. I'm just saying it’s not putting it on you directly. It’s on the industry that now it’s time to grow up in a way.

Look, I don’t like bullies, and I think Elon’s a bully. And so I think once in a while you got to punch a bully back in the nose. And I also think Elon, like many bullies, only respects people who do. So if you want me to be able to work with him, maybe you should be happy I hit back once in a while, but I will work with Elon, of course.

The American public, the American psyche I think tends towards doomerism because of the culture that many people grew up in. They’ve seen The Terminator, The Matrix, 2001: A Space Odyssey, even Dune, where computers are outlawed. And so it’s very easy to imagine a world where this goes very wrong. Can you paint a picture in which it goes right? Help me imagine it. And be specific. What’s the role of the government? What’s the role of these companies? And think mid- and long-term.

Yeah.

Okay.

First of all, I answered the last question with a little bit of a joke, but we really do need the companies to get along with each other enough to make good collective decisions for our future. And of course there’s going to be competition between the companies. There can be many ways in which that’s good. That clearly has worked to deliver incredible products and services, but we need even people who don’t like each other to make good collective decisions among the companies, researchers and leadership. And whatever criticisms you might have of me or OpenAI, I think we are very good about trying to find consensus and common ground and working with other people. So that’s one thing I think we need and that we will do.

Another thing is we need our governments to step up. There should be limits to the amount of power that private companies have, and there should be the will of the people reflected in some of these incredibly consequential decisions society has got to make. And so I think it looks like with a combination of the companies and the governments, we have figured out a shared set of safety standards so there is not something that feels like race conditions where capabilities are going to get ahead of safeguards and we’re going to take sort of societal scale risk.

And then with subject to that constraint, we’ll have figured out a way to fairly and equitably distribute not just the benefits of this technology, the cures for disease, everything else, but the access and the power of it so that society can collectively keep inventing the future, people can build all sorts of amazing things, companies. I think the boom in entrepreneurship that we’re gonna see here is going to be completely amazing.

What about the people that don’t want to be entrepreneurs though necessarily? Some people want to work in a restaurant or on a farm or whatever. So what about—

I would love to work on a farm, go work on a farm. I also think part of this is that if this works, society collectively gets so rich. And I’m sure we'll have to figure out how to change a social contract and the way the economy works a little bit, but society gets so rich that the aperture of what people can do and the ways you can make a living, the amount of time you can have for hobbies and family and whatever will go way, way up.

In the interview last year, you talked about how there are 15,000 people a week who commit suicide, that about 10 percent of the world is talking to ChatGPT, and so that’s 1,500 people a week. And you said that keeps you up at night. And by comparison, we think about car accidents and we’re obsessed with seat belts and airbags and traffic laws, and there’s a whole multinational infrastructure built around keeping us safe in cars, to say nothing about planes. I know this is a big concern for you and I’m curious what you’re doing right now to protect people who are considering self-harm.

We have put a huge amount of work into the product to minimize self-harm and make sure that our product is a huge net good. I believe, and we work with a lot of experts who agree that it is possible to make ChatGPT and similar products into one of the greatest mental health tools ever, and the amount of people that we can help and impact here, because a lot of people do go through very hard times, is huge.

Would you include mandated reporting?

I mean, obviously experts have extremely different views on whether mandated reporting is good or not. We follow different laws in different places. I wish there were more expert consensus on what to do there and when, and there’s clearly times where it’s a really bad thing. But on the whole, we of course believe that human expert help being made available to people in crisis is a good thing.

So do you know who Laura Reiley is?

I don’t.

She is a journalist. She wrote an essay in the Times last year. Her daughter committed suicide after speaking to ChatGPT. ChatGPT did not tell her to kill herself.

OpenAI Publicist: Mark?

Yes?

Two minutes left. I want to be respectful, but I’d like to move on. And we talked a little bit about talking about the future and what’s coming. Can we go a little bit there while we have time? I think we’ve had…

I’m just going to finish this question.

I can run a few minutes over.

And then we’ll go back to what we were talking about and then wrap.

I know. But we really actually have to walk out the door in one or two minutes.

Okay. All right.

Let me answer that one.

Okay, thanks. So Laura’s a journalist. She wrote an essay from The New York Times about how her 29-year-old daughter, Sophie, died by suicide after speaking at length to ChatGPT about her decision. ChatGPT did not instruct her to kill herself but did agree to act as her therapist. She called the chatbot Harry, and it helped edit her suicide notes.

So I’ve spoken to Laura and she was talking about AI chat logs and how they could be almost like real-time road maps of how people come to the decision to take their own lives and how that information could shape policy and therapeutic approaches, mental health education. I know this means a lot to you. So I was curious what you think of how useful that information could be and if there’s any plans to do anything with that data.

I mean, first of all, these are some of the hardest questions that we face or that anybody developing this technology faces. We try to rely on expert opinion as much as we can, but experts also aren’t sure what to do. This is just like, this is new. And the fact that someone in a moment of need that maybe can’t get help or isn’t willing to talk to a therapist can get some help here. Clearly people think there’s a version of this that is good. There are also clearly versions of it that are bad.

Should we release people’s private data in some of their hardest moments to researchers? I think probably not without their consent, or I should say not without their consent. Do we want to find ways where we can work with the community to address the mental health crisis in the world and for our products to be helpful there? Of course, yes.

Okay. So what’s one thing that you think people should not use AI for?

Replacing human connection.

And beyond intelligence, what’s a quality that makes us human?

Emotions seem like something that AI doesn’t really have yet.

And you don’t think that they’ll develop emotions?

Not in the same way.

Okay. We asked ChatGPT, “If you could ask Sam Altman one question that he hasn’t answered before, what would it be?” And it said, “Sam, what is one thing you privately believe about the future of AI that you’ve not said publicly? Not because it’s classified, but because you think people would misunderstand its implications?”

That it’s all going to be great. I think that the reason that that’s hard to say publicly is there are of course these very scary things. And we have to get those right. And people want to hear from me and I really do care that we’re going to get all those right and we think about that every day, but I’m incredibly optimistic for the future.

Before we finish, I want to do a bit of a free association with you. So I’m going to say a name and then you respond with the first words that come to mind, not their job title, but anything else you want. Okay. Donald Trump?

Powerful.

Dario Amodei?

Pass.

Oli Mulherin?

Best person in the world.

Ms. Rachel?

Banned.

Peter Thiel?

Great.

Pete Hegseth?

Don’t know enough to say.

Gwyneth Paltrow?

Interesting.

Bernie Sanders?

Consistent.

Ilya Sutskever?

Brilliant. And caring and warm and wonderful person.

Ronan Farrow?

Many things that could be said.

Elon Musk?

Not nice.

Okay.

Even though I would say I don’t want to make a comment about Dario or I think Elon is not nice, I really want to emphasize how willing I am and how willing I think our whole company is to work with them. We feel the weight of this.

Sam Altman, thank you for joining us.

Thank you.

About Fair Game

Fair Game is Vanity Fair’s flagship interview show, where nothing is off-limits. Editor Mark Guiducci hosts in-depth and far-reaching conversations with the most interesting characters from the worlds of Hollywood, politics, style, Silicon Valley, and beyond. It’s all Fair Game.