Some interesting insights from the "Sam Altman in conversation with Chris Anderson" session at TED2025 in Vancouver today (Friday, April 11) - Sam said the new OpenAI open-weight model should be very powerful and close to frontier level, better than any current open model out there, and admitted it's late to act on that but they will act now - Chris accidentally "leaked" from a private conversation with Sam that the number of ChatGPT users has doubled in just a few weeks - The "next big thing" Sam is personally most excited about right now is AI-first science - enabling new scientific discoveries, doing more with fewer resources, and possibly seeing meaningful progress against disease using AI-assisted tools; another big step coming up soon is in software engineering, where agentic software development is expected to really take off in the next few months - The conversation also got quite "heated" around topics like artists vs. fair use/"IP theft", AI safety and the risks of an "AI race", vague definitions of AGI, and what kind of world Sam thinks his son will grow up into More soon (want to re-watch and double-check my notes on the other insights)
Q: "What kind of world do you believe, all things considered, your son will grow up into?" Sam: "My kid, my kids hopefully, will never be smarter than AI. They will never grow up in a world where products and services are not incredibly smart, incredibly capable. They will never grow up in a world where computers don't just kind of understand you and do, you know, for some definition of whatever you can imagine."
Q: "Do you guys have internally a clear definition of what AGI is?" Sam: "It's one of these, it's like the joke, if you've got 10 OpenAI researchers in a room and ask to define AGI, you'd get 14 definitions."