How Sam Altman Uses Dots to Take Back His Time

0:00Do you do all your prompting on ultra-fast? I do. That's crazy. Yeah. That's crazy. You know, seven people's dots can work together create something new that kind of existed in all of our heads to some degree, but was like an emergent thing. Hey, this is Dan Shipper. You might be wondering, what happened to AI? This is the same show. We are just rebranding it to the every podcast. I'm really excited for our first episode with Sam Walman. Here it is. Sam, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. Psych to have you here. So we're here at DevDev. I think if you had told me four years ago that the coding models were at this level of their facility, I would have been like, wow, I don't know if there would be a lot of developers at DevDev. But there's more developers than ever, it seems like, and more work to do than ever. So what has the, like, riding the increasing capabilities of coding models and seeing the impact on engineering

1:01taught you about the future of engineering and more broadly, like the future of work with AI? I think people just want so much more stuff. People's expectations are so high. And I think that's a wonderful thing. I think this is why we'll all have this incredible future in front of us to explore. But developers, they've never been able to do more, but there's never going to hire bar, either. I think that's great. I think it's like a nice thing about society. Is that something that surprised you did you expect that to happen? I think I was never, like, as Doomery about the job stuff as other people, but it still has surprised me somewhat on the upside of just how much latent demand existed in the world. And also how much, like, people have remained the center of everything that is happening with AI. Do you think there's a limit to that, or do you think that translates pretty clearly to other areas of work? I think there will be some areas of work where there's actually not much creativity required, and we don't care about the person doing it. And many of those tasks or jobs will be done by AI.

2:01But I think there's so much other stuff people want in the world. There's going to be no shortage of new things to go do. I think that's been one of the lessons of recent time. Why do you think it's so human centered, even though we talk a lot about automation? I mean, one observation is we don't care that much about what the machines do. And in some sense, we never have. And we're just like we're obsessed with other people. We want to know about the person behind the art, or the person behind the company, or the idea, or the product. And I think this is like a wonderful positive surprise that we probably should have all known before. I agree. It's I've been thinking, like, if an agent solves an obvious docks in a data center, but no one finds out, did it really solve it? I think that was like a great example, where 10,000 agents worked super hard for four days in perfect coordination with each other and did this amazing thing. And almost none of the public reaction was about that actually, the problem being solved. A lot of talk about the interpretation, a lot of talk about the people involved in it in different ways.

3:02But that was a good thing. So it's DevDay. You launched by my account, 22 new things today, which I've been at all four DevDays. And I think last year was like nine, and the year before that was four or five. So it's a lot more than usual. Is that? Next year. OK. I'm tired. I'm tired. We caught a bunch of things that we were going to launch today, just because you have to like fit it in the 50 minutes. But we try to practice what we preach. And if we are saying these tools can make people much more productive and build more and that people want more stuff, like, we better build more ourselves. What are the new kind of bottlenecks and best practices for doing that? Because I can see for myself. And I assume you guys are seeing this too. Now that you can build everything, you're like, what should we build? And how do we make it all coherent? How do you think about that? Moving to this world of persistent intelligence,

4:03active intelligence, whatever people want to call it, this idea that you're going to have these agents that are running in the background 24, 7 connected to your systems, doing stuff practically for you. This is clearly a direction that feels important to explore. I think we're going to see amazing stuff happen there. Another thing we really wanted to do is there are now so many ideas that are capable of being built. And what we are missing is the creative spirit to figure them out and build them. So we wanted to really open up our ecosystem, let people build apps in Chattatubt, and like the same way that we get to do them, let people bring their subscription wherever they'd like, have the marketplace, and really try to let people get connected to all the stuff that people will not be able to build. Yeah, I mean, just looking at all the platform features that you launched and the way that you talk about platforms, it reminds me a lot of the way that Bill Gates used to talk about Windows as a platform where you create more value than you capture. What have you learned?

5:04You said this in your keynote, and I've observed it as well. There's, DevDevDev, there's always an app store. You've been taking swings at app stores for a while. What have you learned about building a platform and what do you think makes this one different? I mean, we clearly have not yet figured out the app store equivalent, but we have figured how to build a platform that a lot of people are building incredible value on top of. I think there are really kind of two schools of thought among people building AI model companies. There are people that believe, or hope, that there's only going to be one company in the world. And then there are people like us that believe we are going to see a ranna sauce in the number of companies and just an absolute lowering of the bar to people, one person companies, small team companies, creating incredible new products and services. And we want to go as hard as we can with the platform to enable people to do that. And although I think we haven't figured out the app store yet, that's totally fair. I think we have figured out how to help

6:05like millions of people build and create significant new products and companies. If you had to narrow in, you talked at the keynote about an industrial revolution versus a ranna sauce, which you just mentioned now. If you had to narrow in on the key things that make the difference between those two worlds and maybe opening a eyes partner, but maybe even the broader ecosystem, what do you think those things are? One take on this would be that the ranna sauce was fundamentally centered around people and the industrial revolution was fundamentally centered on machines. There were a lot of good things about the industrial revolution. It had a hugely positive impact on the world in many ways. But I think a lot of people did not have a purely positive personal impact from that. And this feeling that people had these rich lives and did all these things. And yeah, of course, they struggled and wanted more and better stuff. And that's the part the industrial revolution to deliver in some ways. But they were kind of turned into, in many cases,

7:06just like cognitive machine doing some extremely specialized thing and kind of disconnected from a lot of the parts that made life good. I get sad to hear people talk about, like, oh, AI is going to automate everything. There's going to be no rule for humans. We're going to be like house cats and the AI will decide how to reward us and tell us what to do. And I have heard people say that. That's certainly not what we think. Yeah. What I am hopeful for is that this is just a huge new wave of scientific discovery, art, company formation, like everybody that wants to start a new thing. And that people do get the benefits of all the economic growth and the new stuff happening here. But also people get to back and control their lives and ability to kind of do the things they want and spend their time the way they want. One of the things that strikes me about the Renaissance versus the industrial revolution is in the Renaissance, you have a sort of different understanding of what it means to be a person. And like an individual, as opposed to sort of the cog

8:08and the machine. Do you feel like you're starting to see any difference in how we think of ourselves as human that's comparable to the way that we changed how we think of ourselves during the Renaissance? I mean, so much happened during the Renaissance. It's hard to say there's like this one thing. But definitely a big part of it was about people like sort of reconnecting to a lot of things that had in the distant past. And you do hear, and then also this kind of combination about what this crazy futurism and discovery of science and engineering and just sort of this feeling that human potential had massively expanded. And you do hear people talk about both of those things simultaneously with AI, which is kind of how I got interested in this as an analogy in the first place. I mean, this is like a very trivial example relative to what is going to be possible already as possible. But the dots, the new thing we launched today is the first thing that has given me back control of my mornings and my mental space in the mornings. I used to love the early mornings.

9:09It's my favorite time of the day to work. It's like maximum creativity. That's when I would do the really deep complicated project of the day. And then now I run this big company, and something is going wrong all the time. And overnight, a lot of stuff happens. And if I don't check my phone right away, then sometimes it was fine. And sometimes there was like a real disaster that if I ignored for an hour, just got much worse. The problem had been that as I checked my phone, I polluted my brain with all these other things and I lost the deep work period. But now I trust my dot to go have good judgment about what I need to think about and not think about if there's something very urgent, otherwise, handle things for me. And I get this space for creativity or to just hang out with my kids back. And that has been like, you know, it sounds small, but like a significant improvement to my life. That's what I was going to ask is, so it seems like it's deflecting a lot of things that you might have had to deal with immediately that you can just leave for later because you're confident you get the thing you need when you check it. Yeah.

10:09I mean, two things that happened today about that. During the keynote, we had like a big seven production. This is the risk of live demos and trying to deploy many new features that once. I was recurring. I was. So that happened. Tibo got a message from his dot five minutes for the demo saying, just to let you know, there's, I see that you're in the DevDakeno. I know you were working on it. I know what the demo is because I was able to look at the presentation in space or whatever. And there, you know, this sub is probably going to make the demo not work. Would you like me to try to fix it? There's like a few minutes to go. And now it couldn't fix it. Yeah, but like maybe the next version we'll be able to go fix that and prod. And like think about that whole, like all the stuff that had to come together to make that work. Just right now, before I came here, I've been in like back to back stuff all day. Very, very behind on all of my normal stuff. My dot just before I had walked into the last thing

11:10said, you have one little break between now and this thing you're going to go to with Dan, you have to pay attention to this one thing. I never would have found that otherwise. And like it would have been a big mess. And just the fact that I like don't have to worry about that feels super different. What's your dot's name? Dottie. I had an Alfred earlier. And then like many people are calling it Dottie. But I'm trying to like think of a great name. Mine's name is Boo. That's a good one. Yeah, that's a good one. What do you think so far? I know it's like super early and still rough. I like it. It has become the default way that I use chat, which I think is a very promising thing. Me too. And I share with you like I think, you know, I'm in the beta. So I was in the early period. So I think it's, you know, it has limits. It's like has been a little bit buggy for me. So there's a lot of different surfaces that I can be used on, like mobile and it has a cloud computer and like all that kind of stuff. And I think those kinds of things, getting that cleaned up is a big deal. But yeah, that I think this is the kind of thing where it's going to get like better rapidly each week from here.

12:10But it's going to definitely take some time to smooth it all up. I had a similar example where I was trying to reschedule a flight. And it was like, hey, you have a meeting during this flight that you're rescheduling. But it wasn't on my calendar. It had just like read it in Slack. Yeah. And then it was like, yeah. That, that thing about the ability to bring context together from across your entire life and like really do things in ways that would be hard even for an attentive person to get right has been super impressive. That's been one of the things I found most useful about it. What had to happen from a research perspective to make this possible? This is like a very complicated system with a lot of stuff. But maybe most important was Astra. We needed like a, you need to just find enough model. And then there were a lot of other things you had to build too. But getting the model over the intelligence bar was a key part. You've told me that there's like, there have been a couple times, not just for like scheduling or things that are urgent like filtering, but there have been a couple times where it's helped you see something or make a decision with an AI that you could not have said you couldn't have hired someone to do that.

13:12Like it would just be too complicated. Do you have any specific examples you can share? There was one like new feature that I was kind of excited about. And it would have been very hard to explain it to people in enough detail to get it built. And even then there were like a lot of ways to do it and I wouldn't have been confident in which one. And I just like, I would just like constantly jot notes as I thought of something or as I was like on a walk or whatever to my dot. And then the dot went off and built like five or six versions. I was able to give feedback. I was able to iterate. It was just like whenever I had a spare moment or had an idea and the kind of like, the ability to just like dump that in raw form, the ability to like get and give pretty continuous feedback on it was very cool. And then so there's like many categories like that where like an idea that would be, you'd be so unsure about or it would be too much effort for you or for someone else to build. You can actually just kind of like continually iterate on and it's like, it's pretty cool to go to sleep and like just leave a long voice note as you're kind of drifting

14:15off with a bunch of thoughts and like wake up in the morning, not only is the thing built but it like went off and did like the next seven steps. It's the best. And it's like, all right, this is like a very cool way to express stuff. And then also like there, there's a set of tasks that I would normally give up on or that I would have given up on before. There was a thing that I was sure I had seen in Slack and Slack search is obviously terrible so I mostly use codecs to search it. And I had been searching for this thing so I wanted to find it again. I wanted to reference it. And I spent like a good 10 or 20 minutes trying to search with codecs and find this and I kept trying different things and didn't find it. And I was like, man, like maybe I dreamed it and this didn't really happen because codecs doesn't usually fail. And I kind of gave up on it. And then the next day my dog was like, hey, I noticed you were trying to do this thing and you didn't find it. But I kept thinking about it overnight and I found it for you. Wow. And I was like, what? And it was a screenshot. I had forgotten in my head it was a screenshot and not text in Slack.

15:17And it's just like, they're very patiently looking for something to do to be helpful to me and like looked at, like, image-rect every screenshot and found the thing. And I was like, that's really, that's really, I would have given up on that. I think there's a, you're constantly feeling like there's way too much to read in Slack on your mail and all that kind of stuff. And it's perfect for that amount of context to just like get you the right thing at the right time. People have talked about the need to have an agent deal with the just onslaught of the internet and all of the various things trying to like hack our attention and distract us and whatever. I have definitely learned in the few weeks that I've been using dots that although technology is very wonderful in many ways, they're kind of like crazy attention hacking of social media and phones and notifications had gotten way worse than I realized for me personally. You hear a lot about AI tools on this show, but the one that's truly at the center of your work is your CRM. It's where all of your customer context lives and where the work either happens or gets

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17:19And you can use it yourself or you can have a lot of things that you can do. You can have AI use it on your behalf. But to really collaborate closely, especially when it's multiple people and multiple people's AI is all working together, like a lot of the current abstractions we have breakdown. So this is definitely an ambitious bet. But I think that the space of human AI collaboration is really important to explore. How are you working with it? Like are you reviewing docs in space or are you making docs and do you have expectations for how much of it you're typing versus how much of it your dot is doing for you and also with the docs you get, like are you reviewing it from that perspective too? If there's like a new idea, I like writing the old fashioned way because it helps me like think about it. So I still do that and then maybe have my daughter, other people's dot, like do the follow-ups. But one of the things that I have found most amazing about it, and I don't think we have

18:20a word for this yet, but for lack of a better word, these live documents creating a doc that is going to automatically update as people interact or as other things change in the world. And something that like many of our dots can work with together, not only to like share information, but actually like seven people's dots can work together, create something new that kind of existed in all of our heads to some degree, but was like an emergent thing. That's been very fun as we think about like new features to explore. Is there a specific live doc that has been most useful for you? I have swit, like the dashboard, I think everybody's probably got like a dashboard that they look at every day for how the company's doing and the way they care about. And you know, I used to share one with everybody else or many other people. And I now have one that is kind of like a changing summary of the business just for me based off of like the evolving things that I'm caring about or not caring about. Like looks at all my Slack messages, makes me a new thing like constantly updates it. And it's like, oh, this just feels like a living document.

19:22That's sick. What do you care about now? A lot on my mind recently is just how we're thinking about the safety, alignment, security challenge in front of us. But you know, six months ago, I probably cared more about revenue and growth and metrics of this sort of traditional part of the business. So watching that evolve, I've actually been thinking about how I can like, because I'd be very curious to see what my dot thinks I care about each day the most over time. And we don't currently have a good way to visualize that. That is really nice. I have not been able to get my dot to figure out a cool way to do that. I've been, I would love to see that over the course of years. I think that's really cool. I've been wanting one that just like, it's a live dashboard of my mood because I have my dot like when I get a Slack message and I'm like, I don't know if I want to look at this Slack message. I have my dot go look at it. And then I'm like, should I look at this now or later? And it's like, you should look later. And I kind of want like a live thing of my mood so I know it's totally. Yeah, I want that too. I'm just not. Very cool. Tell me about Decisions API. I feel like the Decisions API is one of the sneaky most important things today because

20:28Jev is this new hot thing that has honestly changed how we think about building things internally. Is Decisions API, did you start that from Jev or has it been in the works for a while? How do you think about it? Diego used to work open AR and Diego was awesome and he was talking about this class of ideas for a long time. And we had been working on trying to figure out how to make it work. The number one request of Luna and this is like an example of how people always want like more cheaper, faster better. But the number one request with Luna, even though people love that model, was I wanted to be even cheaper and even faster. And so we have been thinking about how we could push it further in that direction. Definitely seeing the response to Jev made us more excited to prioritize things in that direction. But and like Diego has inspired me for a long time on thinking about this. But I think you will see us try to push, you know, in different ways in the spirit of

21:30make the technology super fast and super low cost for common use cases. How do you think about, you know, if something like Jev comes out, it's a kind of new type of model and then opening it can add like a decisions API. How do you think about how that changes the race between Neo Labs and Labs and what opening I can cover and what a new lab can focus on? As I understand the approach of Jev, it's pretty different and I don't think we can go, well, maybe we could go do something from scratch like that. But I think we have other things to go do. You know, like we want to make the best, cheapest, fastest, most capable model at every point on the Pareto curve of cost and speed and modality. But I think there will be new approaches, new architectures, new technologies that are things we just can't cover all of. But for the kind of main line workhorse, like we will try to deliver that. So I've been like in your year a lot about codex native apps for a little while now. I finally did it. And you finally did it.

22:31I'm psyched. So plug in extensions. Yeah. And also being able to bring your tokens from your chat to be to subscribe to an app developer, like it changes the equation for someone like me where normally you're thinking about, okay, how much AI can I let my users use? So that doesn't bankrupt me. And then you're like, can I use lower price models and then the experience is worse. But if someone can bring their subscription, I'm like, great, you can use whatever model you want under your subscription. What are you most excited about for the kinds of applications and products that can be built at the application layer in this new world? I mean, I'm most excited for the ones that we haven't thought of. Like there's many reasons that we wanted to do this. But one of the biggest is, and why we do this big, dev day thing, is just this very deep belief that there are way more good ideas outside of our building than inside. And I don't know what I'm going to love the most as like a chat to be to native app. I plug an extension, but I am very confident that there will be things that I really do love

23:32that I cannot imagine today and that no one in open AI really could imagine with conviction today. And that's why, I mean, that's one of the reasons why this is so important to do. Like we want to find a way to get that creative spirit into people's hands and we want to find a way to help builders connect with people who are going to find the technology useful. In terms of bringing your chat to be T subscription with you everywhere, like we just want that ourselves. There's all this great stuff that people are building. There's all these new apps we want to try them. And I like, I hate having to sign up for 100 subscriptions. And I also like when I try something, I'm like, hey, I like to be able to use this with full juice. AI. So we want to make it just super easy for people to take it with them. And it's your subscription, like you should get to use wherever you want. Do you think anyone at the app layer is doing this well today? Like building interesting apps? Well, not with the new stuff, just because it's brand new. But yes, I think there's an unbelievable, for all of the fear people had a couple of years ago about, man, AI model companies are just going to eat everything.

24:33There is an unbelievable amount of significant new companies, great new products, building this stuff all of the time. I've never seen startups get as successful as quickly. Does that change, you know, you were part of our company here before opening AI. Does that change how you think about when people ask you about, how do I start up or how do I think about how to grow all that kind of stuff? I would love to be a startup investor again, I mean, because like, oh man, what a fun time. The watching what people are doing right now, getting to spend time with some of these founders, which I don't get nearly as much as I like, it is just a golden age. What are you looking for? I mean, obviously besides the fact of themselves, like what are you looking for in the shape of things that you'd be like, oh man, I want to invest in that. I was always a very fond of investor. Like I have my pet project, like anybody else, but my whole MO as an investor was like, find the absolute best founders I can that are working on the ambitious projects and be willing to take a lot of risk with them. Yeah, I feel like there's always that narrative of the NET Labs are going to eat everything

25:34and DevDays, like the tweet that always works is like, opening AI just killed X startup or whatever. The tweet works because people like Dumaism, but it never actually happens. Yeah, why is that? Why does it never happen? Well, A, I think we have a lot of conviction that empowering builders and not just trying to be like the one giant Edle Nager Corp is important. So I think we took a lot of steps today that no other AI lab would do about saying, we're going to give you all of the same tools we use. We've always pushed the frontier on model access. And so I think we're like uniquely committed in the industry to doing this and we really do love developers. And I think that's partly I just also love startups and that's where I came from. But I also think speaking of like a new Renaissance, it's just there is so much to explore. People are going to do such incredible stuff. We are going to have such a tiny fraction of that vision ourselves that, you know, like the world has a fundamentally new enabler. This is like, I mean, I don't even know what this is like fire or something.

26:36This is like a real change to what's possible. You know, maybe we like brought it down from the mountain, but we want to give it to everybody and we want people to like do stuff with it. There's a lot of basic startup lore like you should always have co-founder or, you know, even the structure of how I comment or does investments that is based on a previous, for example, cost structure. If you were going to start those things from scratch or think about them from scratch, like what do you think changes? There are a few things that are probably just like, invariance, you know, you've got to like make something people want. That advice was good. Or agents want one years ago. Yeah. Yeah. Yes, but at least by our understanding of the world today, like at some level, people want to do something about it. Yeah, you got it. So there's some stuff that just hasn't changed. And then there's a lot of other things like how much work you can get down with one person or two people or whatever that feels totally different. And I don't think there has been enough re-examination of that in this sort of startup conveyor belt

27:36of Silicon Valley yet. As a person who's running a gigantic company and generally probably wouldn't have time for building stuff and announcing you're like, you are, how does that change how you are able to lead or what you're able to do that you can like make stuff on the side? I mean, we are not a gigantic company, first of all. Like there's probably, I don't know, like maybe the big tech companies have like a hundred times more people than we do, something like that. I am way, I really believe in if you lower friction a little bit, people build way more. And I have really felt that now with dots and these like, you know, little chunks of time I have or even like a long chunk of time where I can like have this interactive thing that a lot done. I feel like I will do something that is not just like a little side project for myself, like I used to do with codex, but like I hope I want something to the world. Like I hope I actually make a cool new thing and like get it over the threshold. And like, does that go out on like Sam Altman dot com or are you talking about like a

28:37real like open AI product? I meant like I would try to like build a plugin extension or something and put it out. That's maybe maybe I'll ship a real open AI product. And like all bets are off now. And so you know, you have to make that decision. Do I, you know what I will do that? I'm inspired. What's do you have? No, I don't know. I don't think about it. But now I want to do something. I love it. I'm kind of like you could just put a team on that. So what do you get to what does that add that instead of having to put a team on it, you can now be like, oh, I'm going to make a plugin. Well, I think today was an example of this. Like you talked about how the amount of stuff every Dev day has gone up. Like we cannot have not all of this stuff without having AI to help us. And if this works like next year, we will put the teams on it. And I will do something and more people will do something and we'll have like a crazy amount of amazing stuff. Or just one really great thing that would be fine too. But like hopefully the total amount of like utility we put out into the world goes up. Do you do all your prompting on ultra fast?

29:39I do. That's crazy. Yeah. That's crazy. No, I've been thinking about this. I worry that in some ways we kind of get out of touch with people building on our tools and we try it. We've tried to like put all of these constraints on ourselves. You know, I'm like very aware that not everybody is going to be able to use ultra fast all the time for everything. But I have such a hard time dragging it back over. Given that you're like living in that future that I think, you know, all of us can experience a little taste of it. What is different about the ultra fast world in terms of how you can use these tools? There was an amazing talk, like I don't know, 15, 20 years ago from Brett Victor about kind of the principle that he thought people like how he did his work. And one of the things, I'm going to get this a little bit wrong, but it was something like creative should have an immediate connection to what they're creating and how speed and the feedback loop was so important. And I did not realize what a difference that makes to my kind of iterative thinking loop

30:44to have responses come in so quickly. But in terms of trying to build somebody and trying to think through a problem, it's like a wild difference. I know you've been thinking for a long time about AI as a democratizing force to allow anyone to build stuff. And in the sort of ultra fast world or in the asterisble and more expensive model world, I know you're also thinking about that means something that you pay more for better intelligence. So like, what are you thinking there? So historically, what we have mostly focused on and I think done a great job of is bringing down the price of IQ. And we have made hugely more capable models that get dramatically, dramatically cheaper every few months or every year. Now there's this new vector that is clearly going to be very important of speed. And we are putting the investments in place. Like our own chip is going to be an incredible contributor to letting us get very fast inference in the hands of everybody to say nothing of what the models will do to improve research and our inference stack and everything else.

31:47And I think we now realize that we've got to go invest in the democratization of this like we have for model intelligence. So when can I expect to use ultra fast for all my prompts? You can pay us for it and do it now. I don't think I can afford it. I think we can deliver 8x at a great price in the not-distant future. But then we'll have 100x faster. And they'll also be like GPT7 Galaxy or whatever. And so I think the right way to think about this is as far as I can see, there will always be a real frontier in terms of intelligence or speed or whatever else at a higher price. But I think you can also bet that we will keep doing what we've done of just a ridiculous, like put Moore's Law to shame, relentless focus on driving value per dollar up and up and up kind of in this big compony way.

32:48Amazing. Sam, thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you all for coming. I didn't realize there was going to be like a live audience. That was fun. See you. See you.