the full discussion between OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Oracle co-CEO Clay Magouyrk

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: Next, I want to kind of discuss more about how we've actually been able to build these incredible new technologies in partnership with OpeningEye, and for that please help me welcome Sam Altman to the stage. Thanks for coming Sam. Thanks for having me. Well, look, you guys have been doing a lot, and the pace of innovation has clearly been incredible. And I mean, I can tell you from my perspective, the rate of change of the models only seems to keep accelerating. You launched GPT-6 in August. How's that [00:00:44] Sam Altman: been going? The rate of change has been one of the biggest surprises to me this year. I mean, we've talked about how fast it's been going for four years, you know, as we launched GPT almost four years ago. And four years ago, our models couldn't solve grade school math. And now they're like knocking down the hardest unproven math problems we know of. But the last, say, six months have felt like a very accelerated version, even on that timeframe. And GPT-6 was one of those moments where I think the models took a step forward all at once, both in terms of their ability to discover new knowledge, to do very hard things, but also for people's ability to work with the models and get, you know, substantial pieces of work done at a rate that they never could before. So adoption of GPT-6 has been our strongest adoption by far of any new model. And watching what people are doing with this across, you know, coding and kind of any version of enterprise software you'd like, security, science, like, industry after industry. It's really been quite amazing to see. [00:01:49] Speaker 1: Yeah, I, you know, I can tell you from, obviously, within Oracle, we're a big open AI user, we made the decision to roll ChatGPT desktop out to everybody. But what's been surprising to me as well is if you look at, say, codecs, right, and, right, the integration of who now is a developer, like, you know, the vast majority of code, more than 70% of our software these days is written by AI, and that's only accelerating. Yeah. But in addition to that, like, the number of people I go and I talk to, who I don't think they could, you know, could not imagine themselves being a developer just a few years ago, are out creating entirely new applications. And the joy that they have about being able to actually solve their problems and create has been incredible. I mean, it's a big part of the reason why we focused on building App Composer was, we had so many people building these new applications, and we ended up secure, you know, a controlled way to actually deploy them. How are you seeing AI change, like, how people think about actually solving their problems, and who can do that for themselves? [00:02:54] Sam Altman: You know, you mentioned that Oracle has rolled this out to everybody at Oracle, and that's been great to see you all have been some of the most aggressive adopters of this. So, as we've had this big push into enterprise, there have been a bunch of surprises, but one of them has been watching that when a company does do this all the way across the board rollout, just how much people that did not think of themselves as creating software, in the broad sense of getting a computer to do things that they want to do, how much that sort of spreads quickly throughout a company, and so you see people, they may not describe it as programming, in fact, I kind of think they wouldn't, but the fact that now when they need something, they make an app to just do it, and the way that they interact with their own computer, the way that they create artifacts for other people to interact with, for whatever their job function is, That has really changed quite a lot, and, you know, like, at this point it's become very trite, but this comment of people saying that I feel twice as productive at the end of 2026 as I did at the beginning of 2025, at the beginning of 2025, and that I enjoy my job much more because I'm doing kind of less of the, you know, less of the schlep. [00:04:14] Speaker 1: Yeah, I think, you know, part of what's happening, right, is that, you know, I used to, I used to, I think of myself as having once been a software developer, although it feels like it's been too long now, and what's interesting is that there's this big separation, it feels like, between that creative thing that got me hooked on it, right? Like, I remember being a kid and going, I'm going to learn how to, like, I, the first time I started programming, it was like, I can have an idea and I can make it real, but that creative aspect is very separate from how do I actually instruct this computer to do what I want? And I feel like what's happening right now is that by having AI automate the kind of manual aspects of this activity, it unlocks that creativity to people that, for whatever reason, weren't necessarily inclined that way naturally, right? One of the most, I strongly agree with that. [00:05:07] Sam Altman: It unlocks it in people that maybe weren't as inclined, and for people who are more inclined, it just gives you, like, much more ability. My experience, my subjective experience now, sitting in front of the computer using the latest tools, is, is some, like, it's like I am managing a factory inside of my computer, and I can get things that I don't enjoy doing to be automated, I don't feel like I'm stumbling or waiting or can't figure something out, I feel like I can sort of, like, move from one idea to another pretty continuously and without getting blocked, and even if there's something that I've got, like, a vague sense for, but I'm not quite sure how to do it, and normally I would, like, give up on it and not try the activation energy would just be too high, I am willing to explore these unlikely but sometimes big payoff creative directions, and it feels like, I mean, it kind of feels like the cool thing we were all promised in sci-fi, where we're effectively just talking to a computer about our ideas, and it's all happening, and we get to, we get to be the creative force behind it. [00:06:09] Speaker 1: Oh, I mean, it's, it's the, the same, it's, I remember the joy I had when I discovered programming, and I've, I've been able to help a few younger people with that, I see that joy now in people who are 30 years old, and who are building complete websites from scratch to achieve their goal, who just didn't think it was possible before. Well, look, we are on a time limit, Sam, okay, I want to talk about security, it's changing very rapidly, the models that you guys are creating clearly can both discover vulnerabilities and help us fix them, that's a big part of why, right, we've worked together and kind of created AI security mesh, because it was like, we saw a need from customers where they had access to the models, but okay, how do I use it? How do I point it at things? How do I then validate the issues? How do I then go out and deploy them? We all have a lot more to do in the security space. How should companies be thinking about adopting AI to protect themselves and their data? [00:07:06] Sam Altman: If I could recommend like only one thing to a company right now to do with AI in the very short term, even more than like become super productive with codecs, it would be to really understand the security threat landscape from AI and mitigate against that. And I realized that this is probably somewhat annoying for me to say, and it's kind of like me, like they're like, well, you're creating the problem, now you're telling us we have to like, spend or work on the solution. [00:07:35] Speaker 1: Look, and that's where I think Rob did a good job, sorry to interrupt. I don't, AI is not creating the problem. AI is not creating these bugs. AI is helping us discover all of the security issues that we have developed over the past 50 years. I'm glad that we're able to now discover them with AI rather than waiting for some unknown hacker to let us know about them. [00:07:54] Sam Altman: Super strongly agree. I think the only way through this is to go find all these issues and fix them. In fact, I think we'll need new ways to fix them. It's maybe too hard to patch every bug one by one across the entire supply chain that we're all dependent on. And I think we'll have to like look at new kinds of services that are constantly monitoring traffic and not letting these things be exploited. But I, I find myself shocked at just how many vulnerabilities these AI systems are finding and what it's going to take. Just the incredible, the Herculean effort that it's going to take to get ahead of us. Yeah. [00:08:31] Speaker 1: Well, I think, I agree with you. I think that's actually where AI is going to help us as well. I think that we'll be able to, we can't do it manually. We're going to automate it and we're going to use new technology to help us solve that. Okay. Last question. So we could not have had this conversation a year ago, right? The technology didn't exist. The experience didn't exist. So everything's moving faster as we discussed. When you think about what comes next across both software and hardware, like what are you most excited about? And what do you think everybody should be considering? [00:08:59] Sam Altman: I, many things here, but one of them that I can't resist talking about is how much AI is now helping us discover new science, invent new technology, actually like do this work of innovate and create better things. We have seen tremendous examples with math problems that I mentioned earlier. We're seeing that in lots of science. We're seeing that in some of the most valuable technological problems we have. AI is really good at chip design. In fact, we made a chip called jalapeno that we're deploying in OCI and we're thrilled to be doing. Um, and we did this chip, which I think is the best AI chip in the world for inference, um, faster than would have ever been imaginable without AI to do a lot of this work. So we have, we have seen in a small number of years, AI move from a chat bot to coding agents, to the ability to, you know, directly convert AI into innovation, like AI compute into innovation. And whether that's make a chip or cure disease, it means we're all going to get much better stuff, higher quality services, lower cost services. And, um, I, I think what this is going to enable, we're, we're still like, even though we know intellectually, except that it's happening, we have not emotionally felt that yet. And the models all of a sudden are here. [00:10:20] Speaker 1: No, I, I completely agree. I think that the, the rate of change continues to increase. Um, well, Sam, look, I want to say thank you for coming. Uh, thank you for the great partnership with you and everyone at OpenAI. It's been great. And I'm really excited for what comes next. Thank you very much. Thank you for having me.