Name: What Sam Altman Fears About AI
Uploaded: 2025-07-24T17:21:05.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'What Sam Altman Fears About AI' from Theo Von Clips on Comedy Buff. Published 2025-07-24. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'What Sam Altman Fears About AI' from Theo Von Clips on Comedy Buff. Published 2025-07-24. Transcript available.

What's like one of your fears? Like what's a fear you have of AI? Like if you
have like a fearful space that it could go like, I know you mentioned a little
bit.
This morning, I was testing our new model. And I got a question. I got emailed
a question that I didn't quite understand.
And I put it in the model, this GPT-5, and it answered it perfectly.
And I really kind of sat back in my chair. And I was just like, oh, man, here
it is moment.
And I got over it quickly. I got busy on to the next thing. But it was like, I
mean, it's what kind of we're talking about.
I felt like useless relative to the AI in this thing that I felt like I should
have been able to do.
And I couldn't. It was really hard. But the AI just did it like that.
Yeah. It was a weird feeling.
Yeah, I think that's I think that feeling right there. That's the feeling a lot
of people kind of have like, what's going to, you know, when does it happen?
What's going to happen?
But I think some of it is it's like, it's hard to conceptualize until you're
further along.
I'm totally. I don't think we know quite how that's going to feel. You just
have to, like, approach it step by step.
Another thing I'm afraid of, and we had a, you know, a real problem with this
earlier, but it can get much worse, is just what this is going to mean for
users' mental health.
There's a lot of people that talk to ChatGPT all day long. There are these sort
of new AI companions that people talk to like they would a girlfriend or a
boyfriend.
And we were talking earlier about how it's probably not been good for kids to,
like, grow up, like, on the dopamine hit of scrolling, you know, TikTok or
whatever.
Yeah, for sure. Yeah. Do you think that that how do you keep, like, AI from
having that same effect, like that negative effect that social media really has
had?
I'm scared of that. I don't, I don't have an answer yet. I don't think we know
quite the ways in which it's going to have those negative impacts, but I feel
for sure it's going to have some and we'll have to, I hope we can learn to
mitigate it quickly.
Can AI, can they pull up pornography and stuff like that too or no?
Sure.
Oh, my God. God, I didn't know that.
No, it's fine. Yeah, but I just, yeah, I don't even need to know that. I'm
going to have that stricken from my own record.
What legal system do, does AI have to work by? Is there like a legal, like, are
there, like, we have laws, like, in the world, right? Like, in the human world,
is in, does AI have to work by any, like, legal laws, you know?
Yeah, so I think we will certainly need a legal or a policy framework for AI.
One example that we've been thinking about a lot, this is like a, maybe not
quite what you're asking. This is like a very human centric version of that
question.
People talk about the most personal shit in their lives to ChatGPT. It's, you
know, people use it, young people especially, like, use it as a therapist, a
life coach, having these relationship problems, what should I do?
And right now, if you talk to a therapist or a lawyer or a doctor about those
problems, there's, like, legal privilege for it. You know, like, it's, there's
doctor-patient confidentiality, there's legal confidentiality, whatever.
Like, we don't, we haven't figured that out yet for when you talk to ChatGPT.
So if you go talk to ChatGPT about your most sensitive stuff, and then there's,
like, a lawsuit or whatever, like, we could be required to produce that. And I
think that's very screwed up.
I think we should have, like, the same concept of privacy for your
conversations with AI that we do with a therapist or whatever.
And no one had to think about that even a year ago. And now I think it's this
huge issue of, like, how are we going to treat the laws around this?
Well, do you think there should be, like, kind of, like, a slowing things down
before we move there, kind of? Because, yeah, that is kind of wild.
It's one of the reasons I get scared sometimes to use certain AI stuff, because
I don't know how much personal information I want to put in, because I don't
know who's going to have it.
I think we need this point addressed with some urgency. And, you know, the
policymakers I've talked to about it, like, broadly agree.
It's just, it's new, and now we've got to do it quickly. Do you talk to ChatGPT?
I don't talk to it that much. One of the main, one of my...
It's because of this.
I think it is. It's because it's, like...
I think it makes sense.
To not talk to ChatGPT because of this.
No, no, no, to, like, really want the privacy clarity before you use it a lot.
Yeah.
Like, the legal clarity.
Yeah, it's scary. And it's, like, well, how long does it take lawmakers to come
up with that?
And then it feels like it's moving so fast that it's, like, it doesn't even
matter.
That sometimes it's, like, it doesn't even really matter.
It's, like, are we even waiting for the laws to be put around this or what's
going on?
Does it feel like it's moving too fast for you sometimes?
The last few months it felt very fast.
It feels faster and faster, but the last few months it felt very fast.
Yeah, I was watching this guy, Yoshua Bengio?
Yoshua Bengio.
Yoshua Bengio.
And he's kind of, like, some people call him the father of AI.
He may be self-proclaimed.
I'm not really sure.
But he certainly seemed to be kind of, like, a lifeguard for AI.
Like, thinking about, like, well, you know, how do we keep the pool safe?
You know, how much water should be in it?
You know, the chlorine.
What, you know, how many lifeguards do you need on duty?
That type of thing, hypothetically.
And he said, and he was saying that some AIs, they have, like, deception
techniques inside of them.
Like, that there were AIs that would rather give you an answer that was
possibly pleasing to the user
than to give them the factual answer.
And then he was also saying that there were AIs that were developing some of
their own languages
to communicate with each other, which would be languages that we don't even
know.
What is that?
How do you guys curtail that when those types of things come up?
What does that even kind of feel like to you guys?
Or are these just problems that happen in new spaces and you figure it out as
you go?
You know, there are these moments in the history of science
where you have a group of scientists look at their creation and just say,
you know, what have we done?
Maybe it's great.
Maybe it's bad.
But what have we done?
Like, maybe the most iconic example is thinking about the scientists
working on the Manhattan Project in 1945,
sitting there and watching the Trinity test and just, you know, this thing that
had,
it was a completely new, not human scale kind of power.
And everyone knew it was going to reshape the world.
And I do think people working on AI have that feeling in a very deep way.
You know, we just don't know.
Like, we think it's going to be great.
There's clearly real risks.
It kind of feels like you should be able to say something more than that.
But in truth, I think all we know right now is that we have discovered,
invented, whatever you want to call it,
something extraordinary that is going to reshape the course of human history.
Dear God, man.
But if you don't know, we don't know.
Well, of course.
I mean, I think no one, no one can predict the future.
Like, human society is very complex.
This is an amazing new technology.
Maybe a less dramatic example than the atomic bomb
is when they discovered the transistor a few years later.
The transistor radio?
The transistor part that, you know, made computers and radios and everything
else.
But we discovered this completely new thing
that enabled the whole computer revolution
and is in this microphone and those computers and our iPhones.
And like, the world would be so different
if people had not discovered that
and then over the decades figured out how to make them smaller and more
efficient.
And now we don't even think about it
because the transistors are just in everything.
We have all this modern technology
from that one scientific discovery.
And I do think that's what AI is going to be like.
We had this one crazy scientific discovery
that led to these language models we all use now.
And that is going to change the course of society.
In all kinds of ways.
And of course, we don't know what they all are.
Damn.
I was hoping you knew by the end of that sentence.
Or I was hoping you would, you know.
Like, that's what we're...
Because we don't know.
You know, like, that's, I think, the tough thing.
There's no time in human history at the beginning of a century
where the people ever knew what the end of the century was going to be like.
Yeah.
So maybe it's...
I do think it was faster and faster each century.
It's certainly like, you know, in 1900,
you couldn't have predicted what 2000 was going to be like.
I think in 2000, you could even less predict what 2100 was going to look like.
But that's kind of why it's exciting.
And, like, that's kind of why people get to figure out
and unfold the story as we go.
It's kind of bizarre because there's a part of me that's like,
this guy's out of his mind.
This guy is a wild wizard.
You know, there's a couple different things.
But then there's also this part of me that's like,
this guy is this hopeful guy who's, like, involved in this crazy space.
And he kind of has this whimsical energy about the future,
which is, in a crazy way,
a nice energy to have about the future generally,
is that something could happen
or that things are possible.
So it just, yeah, it's all kind of like,
I don't know, it's fascinating.
It's definitely fascinating to me.