Sam Altman on Astra, AGI, and the future of OpenAI

Sam, what's going on ? It's definitely an exciting time in the world of AI . Um, model capabilities are progressing very quickly and we're seeing people do amazing things with these . And then as we talked about uh and as we knew would happen at some point , the model capability is progressing so quickly that we've had to make some changes to how we work to be able to make the safety cases and safety threshold standards, guarantees, whatever you want to call it , that we need to make to be able to confidently uh proceed with our training . It's it's very important that alignment, safety, and security progress along with capabilities . And I think we have had a moment recently where the capability progress has been I mean sort of in awe is the only way I can describe it and we have needed more time to catch up with safety alignment and security . Um that's always been a core part of our work but these have to progress together and uh you know we've needed time to catch up . So uh we delayed a frontier RL training . Um even before that over you know weeks in the past of that we had paused uh and slowed down on a lot of training to have more compute to go into safety and alignment work . This is a thing that I think we should be proud of uh and it's you know a thing that I think will happen again in the future as we reach even higher levels of capability . But it is you know when you like live through it it's like ah this is a moment we talked about for a long time and now it's happening . What has it been like living through it ? Well, it started even longer than that with the hugging face incident , right? And that was a real moment of man, this is like it's like a sci-fi story . You can understand how every piece of it happened , but the number of things that came together for the hugging face incident to happen was a real wakeup call is too strong of a word because again we had talked about this , but it was like that and the things that happened at other companies were a legitimate moment of like wow the AI capability level has reached new heights