Limitless Podcast

We finally know what Ilya Sutskever saw, and why OpenAI’s chief scientist moved to oust Sam Altman. We unpack the newly released 52-page deposition: a year of plotting with Mira Murati, the board’s shock decision, and the near-walkout of 700 employees. Then we break down Sam’s $1.4T compute spree, that fiery BG2 exchange, and the only paths that might pay for it (ads? devices? an “AI cloud”?). If you care where AGI, OpenAI’s rumored IPO, and your data are headed, hit play.

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TIMESTAMPS

00:00 What Did Ilya See
04:04 The Deposition
08:01 Well That Was Unexpected...
13:37 The Viral Clip
19:13 Can $1T Actually Make Sense?
24:56 The OpenAI Ad Strategy
31:20 Are You Buying The IPO?


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RESOURCES

Josh: https://x.com/JoshKale

Ejaaz: https://x.com/cryptopunk7213

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Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here:
https://www.bankless.com/disclosures⁠

Creators and Guests

Host
Ejaaz Ahamadeen
Host
Josh Kale

What is Limitless Podcast?

Exploring the frontiers of Technology and AI

Josh:
[0:03] Let me fill you in on some ai lore that would have impacted trillions of dollars and probably altered the trajectory of the ai industry as a whole and thus the world as a whole so nearly two years ago to this day almost november 17th 2023 sam allman the co-founder and ceo of open ai was fired gpt4 had just come out like six months earlier

Josh:
[0:25] it was on top of the world and it was the most exciting company in the world. I mean, we were stoked to be using ChatGPT, OpenAI, and this decision came as a total shock to everyone, myself included, as well as the 700 OpenAI employees that threatened to quit in the case that Sam Altman was not reinstated as CEO. Behind this decision was one key player, the chief scientist and co-founder of OpenAI. His name is Ilya Satskever, known to be amongst the best researchers in the world who caught everyone by surprise in this crusade against Sam. No one really knew why the person who helped to build this amazing company was now behind trying to tear it down, or at least tear down the leader of this company. So the internet went wild with speculation of what caused him to seemingly go rogue around such a high stakes decision. And we've spent the kind of the last two years asking ourselves the single question, what did Ilya see that made him make this decision? Well, I'm excited to say that just last week, we finally have our answer.

Ejaaz:
[1:19] And all of this comes after yet another week of Sam Altman signing a bunch of multi-billion dollar deals, bringing his total projected spend over the next five years to $1.4 trillion.

Ejaaz:
[1:31] That's a lot of money for a company that's currently running at a loss, Josh.

Josh:
[1:35] So Ijaz, maybe you can give everyone a little more backstory about what we're about to step into with this deposition that came out last week.

Ejaaz:
[1:42] Sure. I've got to take us back a decade to 2015 when OpenAI was founded. And Ilya Sutskeva was one of the co-founders of OpenAI alongside Sam Altman and others like Greg Brockman, who is the current president. And Ilya's background is very, very impressive. It's incredibly technical. He is an AI researcher and was at the time the chief scientist at OpenAI. He was the brains behind GPT-4 and the foundations of GPT that we use and see today. So pretty much the brain and brawn behind OpenAI.

Ejaaz:
[2:14] But back in 2023, in November 2023, Josh, where he was caught at the center of Silicon Valley's biggest controversy, Sam Altman getting fired by Ilya himself. He managed to convince all of OpenAI's board members, and this was something he was planning for a year. And some of the rumors that leaked at that time, Josh, was pretty damning. Reports of consistently lying to not only OpenAI's board members, but his chief colleagues and the rest of the team and pitting these colleagues against each other to fight against one another so that Sam could end up getting what he wanted. But this whole saga lasted over a period of I think two or three days, a weekend actually, where he managed to convince the board that he was actually good enough and Sam got reinstated and Ilya started apologizing saying, I shouldn't have done that. This was my fault. And I rushed the gun. I shot the gun way too early. But we never really got any answers from this, Josh. And that's kind of been like the key concern over the last two years.

Ejaaz:
[3:21] We don't really know what happened there. It was all kind of brushed under the rug. And so this 52-page deposition, which was just released this week, which was a byproduct of Elon suing OpenAI, and so he brought Ilya in as a witness, has been the most revealing thing ever around Sam's character and what his true intentions are for OpenAI.

Josh:
[3:41] The funny thing around this AI Game of Thrones saga is just the plot lines, the narratives, the characters. This is better than any TV show because it's real. It's high stakes. There's so much drama. And thanks to our buddy Elon, we have even more drama last week. So one of the questions, like you said, for the last two years that everyone's been asking is, what did Ilya see? What caused this crazy backlash? Because I vividly remember where I was when I found out about this and totally shocked because it was seemingly so out of

Josh:
[4:08] character for everyone. but now we have the context. So I want to get into this context, EJs. Let's walk through this deposition that we just got last week, all about what Ilya saw.

Ejaaz:
[4:17] Let's do it. So right now, I have pulled up on my screen a tweet which summarizes kind of like the key takeaways from this deposition, Josh. I'm going to read them out quickly, and then let's dig into each of them. Number one, Ilya plotted over a year with Biro Murati, who was the current CTO at that time, to remove Sam. Planning for over a year to remove your CEO without him knowing is an insane level of scheming that you don't normally see. Number two, Dario wanted Greg fired and himself in charge of all research. If you're wondering who the hell Dario is, it's none other than Dario Omoede, currently founder and CEO of Anthropic. And you're probably wondering what the hell he was doing there. We'll get into that. Thirdly, Mira told Ilya that Sam pitted her against other colleagues so that he would get what he wants. So you can see some strategic political movements from Sam there. And so Ilya wrote this 52-page memo. The thing that shocked me the most is how long he was planning this for, Josh. To me, at the time when Sam was fired, it appeared that this was kind of like an in-the-heat-of-the-moment thing, demonstrated by the fact that he kind of went back on his words when Sam got rehired. He said, I made a mistake. I rushed into this decision-making. And I shouldn't have done what I had done. And if you pull up, if we pull up some of these screenshots of like him thinking about this, this is a direct verbatim

Ejaaz:
[5:42] So for how long had you been planning to remove Sam? And Ilya responds, for some time. I mean, planning is probably the wrong word because it doesn't seem feasible. And when he's pushed more, he goes, yeah, I was probably planning this for about a year. What this tells me is he had been experiencing some of these rumors that Sam was lying, that he was acting maliciously for a while now. But I think, Josh, the second kind of hammer to fall that shocked me was how he got informed about this, none other than Mira Murati telling him all about this.

Josh:
[6:15] And Mira, I guess for context, for people who don't know, she was another co-founder of OpenAI. She was very deeply involved in the company. She was one of four people. When you think of OpenAI, the founding team, it was Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, Ilya, and Mira. And Mira is this fourth person. Mira was a very important person in the company. And it seems that she had probably the most pivotal role in this whole thing because she was the one, I suspect, was feeding information to Ilya.

Ejaaz:
[6:41] That's right. So the way it goes is Mira, being the CTO, worked very closely with Sam building their key product, GPT. And so spending the most time with Sam, you kind of get exposed to all of Sam's tendencies and behavioral traits. And what she experienced, or what rather she claimed to experience, was Sam consistently lying to her and pitting her against other colleagues so that she would fight with them and Sam could get what he wanted. One of those employees she fought with was Daniela Omode.

Ejaaz:
[7:11] If that surname sounds familiar, it's because she is the sister of Dario Omode. Both siblings happened to work at Open Air. I think Dario left a little earlier to start Anthropic, but Daniela stayed and Sam pitted them against each other. And so what she did was she screenshotted a bunch of texts and comms that she had with Sam where he was Proposedly lying to her And she sent them to Ilya Over the course of the year So Ilya being a co-founder And chief scientist Was kind of like reading these messages And I think he got convinced By Miramurati That Sam's character, morals and ethics Wasn't in line with the open AI vision

Josh:
[7:54] Yeah. So there, it appears like there's this huge disconnect that happens, which is the big takeaway for me is Mira's kind of working directly with Sam. She's sending him, she's sending Ilya a lot of screenshots saying like, Hey, Sam is, Sam is kind of a jerk. He's like acting up. He doesn't really have alignment in mind when it comes to building these products. He's mostly building for profit. A lot of these things were kind of the stories we're hearing today, but Mira was sending directly to Ilya. Now Ilya took with this information, what he thought was appropriate. And he formed this little thesis and he shared it with the.

Ejaaz:
[8:23] Board and said,

Josh:
[8:24] Hey, I don't think Sam Altman is fit to be CEO. What happened next is the part that really shocked him and surprised everyone. And reading the deposition, it happened surprisingly quickly. He shared this with the board. I don't think he expected the board to take this extreme action. In fact, Ilya said that he didn't expect it was even a possibility to get Sam fired. They immediately fired Sam, which Ilya suspected would not come with much backlash, but to surprise again, almost a majority of the employee base was furious and they said we're not even going to continue working here unless sam is reinstated so not only did he get what he wanted but it backfired in the worst possible way because one he was using a lot of information that was assumed because it was not direct from the source it was mira kind of sending this to him and the other is just this this gross, misinterpretation of how the public would receive this i know i felt kind of gross about it i was like, what do you mean Sam is gone? I'm sure the OpenAI employees, they have this very strong affinity for Sam. And that was definitely a miscalculation on Ilya's part in moving this forward. And it's one of those cases where like, you really got to be careful with what you wish for. And I think, Ijaz, correct me if I'm wrong, but this led to Ilya being kind of, unhappy with his decision and like deeply regretting his decision that he made?

Ejaaz:
[9:40] Yeah, I mean, he ended up regretting it outright. So just to give some context here, Sam was fired before the stock market closed on Friday, which is just a wild thing, because OpenAIR has a lot of prominent investors. So their stock price could go up, down and round and around. And then by Sunday of that same week, the decision was reversed. And Ilya had come out publicly saying I had made a mistake and he regrets his action. So to your point, Josh, I think he was kind of convinced by someone's side of the story and he didn't make the effort to get Sam's side, which is probably

Ejaaz:
[10:14] his biggest mistake here. And it's kind of hard not to walk away from this whole scandal and this deposition without thinking that Mira had kind of manipulated Ilya to an extent. She had fed him her version of events, her story or what she thought Sam was doing without having any concrete proof on the other side of whether what she

Ejaaz:
[10:34] was saying was actually true. All of this being said, Josh, I want to kind of zoom out and look at Sam's character very briefly. One, how it's conceived and thought of in the public, and then maybe the other that is conceived through this deposition behind closed doors.

Ejaaz:
[10:50] Both sides seem to think that he's a pretty conniving person, that he lies a lot, and that he's pretty political. Now, there's two instant reactions that I would have from this. Number one is, oh, wow, such an evil guy. He shouldn't be in charge of this company, particularly a company that's responsible for building one of the most important technologies, which can influence people's job roles, whether they get paid, et cetera, et cetera. But the other side of me is thinking, I feel like some of these traits are, you know, not too shocking when it comes to entrepreneurship at the upper echelons of companies and tech. I don't think we've seen like many such different cases across other than major CEOs that kind of pioneered tech sectors back in the day. So I'm wondering how much of this is actually just sensationalization versus, you know, Sam being an evil person.

Josh:
[11:41] Yeah, I guess time will tell. Just to wrap up this part of the story, Mira now owns her own company called Thinking Machines. She just left, spun out her own company, is working in a silo. Now, Ilya also did the same. He spun out his own company called Safe Super Intelligence, and they are very well funded. In fact, Ilya received offers for many billions of dollars to come work for other companies. He turned them down. So they are now both no longer really associated with OpenAI

Josh:
[12:07] in terms of their day-to-day workflows. They're doing their own thing. But moving forward, Ejaz, to your point, we can now skip to 2025 where we sit today and continue to evaluate Sam's sentiment, perhaps not in the private, but at least in the public with this clip that went kind of viral this week on X.

Ejaaz:
[12:26] Yeah. So some context here.

Josh:
[12:28] What we just described happened in 2023.

Ejaaz:
[12:30] And we're getting the answers from that from 2023. But in 2025, has Sam's character changed? Has it been validated for him being a liar? Or is he, you know, this renowned entrepreneur of our time? This clip is from another podcast where he was asked by the host, listen, OpenAI is currently running at a loss. You're spending multiple billions of dollars. You've committed $1.4 trillion to spend on compute to train and inference all of current and future GPT models. And he asked the simple question, how do you plan to afford this? This isn't a crazy question, by the way. This is a question that any investor would ask of their portfolio company founder. And in this case, the host is a founding investor in OpenAIR. So it's a completely valid question. And Sam's response is probably not what you expect.

Josh:
[13:22] You know, how can the company with 13 billion in revenues make 1.4 trillion of spend commitments? You know, and you've heard the criticism, Sam. First of all, we're doing well more revenue than that. Second of all, Brad, if you want to sell your shares, I'll find you a buyer. I just, enough. Like, you know, people are, I think there's a lot of people who would love to buy OpenAI shares. I don't think you would want to sell them. Including myself. Including myself. people who talk with a lot of like breathless concern about our compute stuff or whatever that would be thrilled to buy shares so i think we we could sell you know your shares or anybody else's to some of the people who are making the most noise on twitter whatever about this very quickly we do plan for revenue to grow steeply revenue is growing steeply we are taking a forward bet that it's going to continue to grow and that not only will chat to be t keep growing but we will be able to become one of the important ai clouds that our consumer device business will be a significant and important thing that AI that can automate science will create huge value. You know, there are not many times that I want to be a public company, but one of the rare times it's appealing is when those people are writing these ridiculous open AI is about to go out of business and, you know, whatever. I would love to tell them they could just short the stock and I would love to see them get burned on that.

Ejaaz:
[14:42] So just an incredibly emotional and visceral response from Sam here. You could probably liken it to kind of like a petulant child that's not getting his way. And he's just like, listen, I'm tired of your stuff. I don't want to listen to you anymore. And I'm just going to throw a tantrum. He does also justify and say that, listen, OpenAI is projected to make way more revenue than you're projecting right now. And me being the CEO has the strategy and plan laid out for how we're going to achieve this. I may not be revealing the strategy right now on this podcast that I'm doing with you, but I have this planned out. But then just the outright kind of request to just short the stock or sell his shares, knowing that this guy that he's speaking to is a founding investor,

Ejaaz:
[15:25] is just pretty insane and telling of Sam.

Josh:
[15:29] It's funny. So this is the BG2 podcast. This is Brad Gerstner. He's one of the founders of Altimeter Cap. They have OpenAI on the Cap table. Also funny that Sati Nadella is here, the CEO of Microsoft. So it was this very interesting interview and I would recommend going to watch it because you get a lot of context between the dynamics of Microsoft and OpenAI. The defensiveness was a little weird, a little out of character. Brad actually had something to say after the episode was recorded, which is basically him saying like, hey, people are reading too much into Sam being feisty because people were really freaking out. They were like, guys, Sam, Sam is acting like kind of like a child. And maybe it's just it's it is difficult to read too much into this. But the sentiment was just like, hey, we laughed afterwards about it. If you listen to his words, here's what he said. He kind of explains what he said, walking through revenues. And it's basically an apology and kind of like trying to make things right. Or he concludes it with, I'm still a buyer. DM me if you are selling. And I mean...

Josh:
[16:26] Do I agree? Not entirely. Do I understand where he's coming from? Absolutely. I myself would love more OpenAI shares. I think it's a phenomenal company. Brad is certainly trying to defend his position while also get a little bit more. So I would say my advice to people listening, go listen to the interview yourself. Make your own decisions based on, make your own judgments based on what you see in the episode. Because there's a lot of different ways to take it. I am kind of of the mind that it did come off a bit insecure. Yeah. But I'm not sure if it was just getting him at the wrong moment. Another interesting thing is Sam just dropped off the interview suddenly about 30 minutes after this happened. So there was a bunch of small coincidences. I'm not sure if I want to read too much into this, but it's definitely it's a funny thing. It's a funny topic to talk about. It is what was your take after after watching that?

Ejaaz:
[17:12] I mean, I'm down to to give off my opinion, which is I think Sam was rattled and rightly so. Right. He's probably like the only entrepreneur in our time in the existence of humanity who was spent and invested so much without any explicit ROI on a product, right? We're talking trillions of dollars now. It's not multiple hundreds of billions of dollars. So his response told me that he was rattled and annoyed. And the fact that he dropped off 30 minutes after very abruptly when he committed to the hour and a half or however long this podcast was, was again, very telling. I think Brad's response is him kissing the ring. If I'm being honest, I think Brad wants access to more OpenAI equity stock and future deals and partnerships that they sign.

Ejaaz:
[17:55] Sam, remember, aside from being the OpenAI CEO, gets access to all the coolest investments, right? And so if you can be a friend with Sam and get access to all these deals, this isn't something you're going to forego for a little bit of a sassy comment that you receive from him on your show. But I want to get into the crux of what Brad was addressing here, Josh, which is just the unfathomable amount of deals and spend that OpenAI is committed to over the next five to 10 years. I've got a list up on the screen here. This post is outrageous. This is insane. Like they've signed this year alone, actually not even this year alone, like in the last couple of months,

Ejaaz:
[18:34] $500 billion Stargate deal, that's for OpenAI's data centers, $100 billion NVIDIA deal, $100 billion AMD deal, a $38 billion Amazon deal, which they signed this week, by the way, all of this just to buy and build compute that doesn't even exist. OpenAI is currently projected to make tens of billions of dollars this year. How they will manage to pay for these hundreds of billions of which isn't even on the cap table or the revenue table right now is unknowns to me. And so I think the question that Brad asked is extremely valid and not too crazy to figure out, right? There was this guy that did some projected estimates, right? And I just want to paint a picture into the listener's head right now of how crazy this amount of spend is. He kind of lays out the math of what OpenAI will need to achieve year upon year to be able to pay for all of this. But what was most poignant was his summary at the end of this tweet here, where he goes, this implied revenue figures suggest OpenAI would need to grow from $10 billion in 2024 revenue to $577 billion in 2029, roughly the size of Google's revenue in the same year, assuming Google grows from $350 billion 12% annually.

Josh:
[19:51] Is just unfathomable.

Ejaaz:
[19:53] Remember, that is Google's entire revenue from all the other different product lines that aren't just AI-based. OpenAI is just an AI company. They just have a chat interface currently and maybe a few other app products, and they have by no means projected the same amount of potential or demonstrated the same amount of potential that Google has as an established multi-decade company. So it just seems like it's a very bubbly type of system that sam has set up and therefore i thought the question was valid and i thought his response was pretty telling

Josh:
[20:23] Yeah i'm looking into ways that open ai can kind of back themselves into that figure of yes of 500 billion half a trillion dollars in revenue or whatever it was it's really high i was looking at apple services industry they're taking in about 108 billion per year and then i was thinking well open ai is soon going to unlock the hardware element of things right they're gonna they're working with open ai they're johnny ive they're going to have some sort of hardware suite. And then I was like, well, what is Apple selling? And Apple's revenue annually is 209 billion in iPhone sales. So... There's a long way to go to get there. One of the funny stats, we actually included this in our newsletter. If you are not subscribed to the newsletter, we will put it in the description. Please go check it out. We publish once a week, every Saturday. It's kind of like a recap plus a thought piece on everything you need to know about the leading edge of AI and frontier technology. This was one point that we had, which I just thought was really funny that needed to be added because OpenAI is supposed to be, or supposedly going to be going public at around a trillion valuation. And there's this really funny reference point that I loved, which was Microsoft went public for an inflation adjusted $2.3 billion valuation in 1986. It's worth $4 trillion. It's one of the most valuable companies in the world. For OpenAI to get those same returns while public, it would need to be worth double the value of all of Earth's assets today, which is estimated at about $900 trillion.

Josh:
[21:44] So we're getting some compression, multiple compression here over the last couple of decades like i suspect that is not going to happen so if you are looking for the next microsoft type return you probably don't have that now sure it's a testament to how different companies are run now companies went public much earlier back in the day companies are going public much later today, It's just a testament to how expensive this really is. This is going to be the second largest IPO ever in the case that they do launch at one trillion, second to only Saudi Aramco. So it's a big deal that's coming down the pipe. And the numbers are just getting a little outrageous.

Ejaaz:
[22:20] I mean, what's the saying that humanity is incredibly bad at estimating exponential growth? So maybe you and I are wrong, Josh, right? Maybe Sam has some miraculous way to kind of understand the exponential growth of his future potential revenues. And therefore he's making the right investments at the time. Time will tell in hindsight, but the looming question that still remains is, okay, what are your plans to make all this money, to pay for all this compute? Because so far the subscriptions aren't making you the kind of bank that you need to. And the answer, Josh, might not be one that we like,

Josh:
[22:57] Might be ads.

Ejaaz:
[22:59] Switching on ad revenue. Now, this is a model which basically keeps the entire internet economy alive. It's the reason why you and I and everyone else can get access to these products for free that can read information for free, but it's never actually for free. We have ads being kind of plugged into every part of our social media experience, to every website that we go to. Ads kind of pay the bills when it comes to internet companies for most of the part.

Ejaaz:
[23:26] And so ChatGPT has kind of been rumored to be switching on ads. But as of last week, a bunch of leaks came out that apparently this is most certainly the plan, and they're going to be turning it on pretty soon. And so the question then becomes, well, how are they going to do this? What kind of data are they going to kind of like use to kind of like create personalized ads? And then you kind of step back and realize that OpenAI has probably the richest, most revealing data set for every single internet user that has ever lived and probably also died than any other company has ever had. If you think about Facebook, they get access to likes, they kind of see some of your comments, but nothing flows quite as rich

Ejaaz:
[24:05] And experientially as ChatGPT. Josh, I don't know about you, but ChatGPT knows everything about me, probably more than my own entire family knows about me. It knows more about my personal habits, my memories that I talk to it about, my history in such rich context. So I had imagined that if they were to turn on an ad product, they'd be able to sell me ads, but also not so explicitly like a social media company would. Imagine scrolling TikTok and you see these kind of like placement ads and you're like, I know this is an ad, let me go through it. But what about if it's ChatGPT? someone who you've known to trust and that you've learned to grow with, that kind of subtly shills you products in the advice that you're requesting and asking for. That kind of like crosses the line of like being like kind of unethical in a way, but maybe that ends up becoming the norm. And from the advertiser's perspective, you can imagine they want this more than ever. They would probably stop paying Meta and Google for ads and start paying all of that for ChatGPT and OpenAI if they can get better ad placement and more conversion into people buying their products.

Josh:
[25:08] Yeah, well, when it comes to ads, I think it's important to approach this topic by removing any preconceived notions that you have about ads, because advertising is a very kind of gross, icky word that a lot of people don't like. They think ads, they think, ooh, I don't want that. I don't want any sort of ads in my life. The reality is that ads are not always bad. There are wonderful ads. In fact, I think of all the places where ads exist.

Josh:
[25:31] Meta and instagram in particular has kind of figured this out where ads can actually serve you good quality content whether it be like just an interesting video that you like from a company that sponsored it or a product that you'll actually like because they have this deep understanding and a lot of ads are garbage of course but there's a world in which ads are getting better and open ai by having all this memory all this context about you is able to make ads that, you actually want. So a lot of time and effort is spent in making decisions online. Like a lot of these really popular review sites like Wirecutter or whatever other review sites exist, they get hundreds of millions of impressions every month. And you kind of see this with tech YouTubers. A lot of consumers are looking for answers on what they should buy. And if a system comes along that has all the context of what you like, all of your preferences, and has all the knowledge of these reviewers, well, it can tell you what to buy without needing to put in all of the extra effort of making the decision yourself. So granted, the word ad has become this icky thing, but I suspect that if it's done tastefully, if it's done using the context in the correct way, it can actually absolve users of a lot of this mental load, which is deciding what needs to be purchased, when it needs to be purchased. If I could just kind of turn on this thing that could get all of my subscriptions taken care of, that can cancel it when I stop using things, that can tell me which products are best for what I'm interested in. I don't hate it. And if OpenAI is going to collect some revenue off of the fees associated with those sales.

Josh:
[26:58] I don't think that's a terrible way to go.

Ejaaz:
[27:01] Okay, well, that's the big question, right? Are they going to do it tastefully? I agree with you that like ads in general, if they can be worked off of more personalized data, means that you and I do fewer clicks. I don't want to be scrolling a bunch of Google search ranked websites to find the thing that I'm looking for. I would love if you kind of just kind of prompted it and gave it to me. But what we've seen repeatedly with ad models in existing social media companies is at some point, they kind of cross a line where they're like, okay, I'm just going to like try and sell you as much as I can. Like for example, Instagram Reels, we went from having no ads to now sponsored Reels, like kind of every third Reel. TikTok is the same. So I think we're going to see this arc of any company that turns on ads to eventually kind of like inundate you with it to some extent, just to kind of like meet a certain shareholder or projected revenue goal. That's just me with my pessimistic take, right? The optimistic take, of course, is the ads that you'll be served, as you said, will be more relevant to you. It'll be more useful to you. It'll be tailored towards your budget and your wallet so that you're not overspending on things. And that's a real problem that you see with other kind of like ad models that

Ejaaz:
[28:13] are being seen. So there's the optimistic take. Given that we've spent half this episode describing kind of all judging kind of Sam's ethical behaviors and putting that into question, I don't know whether OpenAI is going to do it super tastefully. But my hope is that they will.

Ejaaz:
[28:27] The other side of this, Josh, is like, okay, these are rumors, but like, is there any evidence behind like OpenAI actually kind of like prepping themselves for ads? And the answer, in my opinion, is yes. They have all the infrastructure and apps to kind of like enable this. And they've been hiring the right kinds of people. Just to run you quickly through this, Josh, you know, they've hired a small army of ex-meta ad and monetization people. So on the show, we've mentioned the CEO of OpenAI Applications, Fiji Simo. She is ex-Meta and specialized in ads and products at Meta. She recently hired a VP of tech that's going to work alongside her. Guess what, Josh? He was the VP of tech for ads and monetization at Meta as well. And there's a whole entire list of other Meta employees that I have listed on my screen here, which are all at the exec level. So they're very strategic when it comes to kind of figuring out how to implement this at scale at large companies, which is what OpenAI would qualify under. So it's obvious that there's some kind of a plan coming here around monetization. And then the other thing is they've recently launched a browser, which basically plugs into all your internet browsing and all your prompts and queries and searches that you do. It has access to all your docs if you give it access to it. And you can run an agent which gets access to your Gmail and your Google Docs and whatever that might be. They've launched Sora 2,

Ejaaz:
[29:48] Which kind of like taps into your imagination and what you want to see, what you want to reveal. And one of the coolest features on that app is that you can cameo with people, Josh, right? And one cool thing I found with cameoing is you can kind of create the fantasy or what your desired reality is via that Sora app. Now that information is truly powerful if you want to figure out what does Josh want in the future? What does Ejaz want to build in the future? If I can help him create reality as, Sorry, if I can help create his reality as the fantasy that he's typing in Sora, that would be super cool. And then finally, they released Pulse over the last month, which is kind of like a personalized AI that feeds you and predicts things that you may want to know or learn about that morning of the day that you wake up. So all these types of things hint towards giving you the ideal personalized life that you want. And switching on monetized ads kind of seems like the obvious next step.

Josh:
[30:45] So, Ejaz, are you buying the IPO at $1 trillion?

Ejaaz:
[30:49] Yes. Yes. I mean, these products are incredibly addictive. To your point, they can be used as a good tastemaker to help people kind of like evolve in reality and become better people. But they could also be used nefariously. One thing that has been proved consistently, though, is that they make a hell of a lot of money. And whether it comes down to OpenAI reaching that trillion-dollar valuation and deserving that trillion-dollar valuation, I think it's so, so obvious. They have the richest data set. They have one of the quickest growing distributions and user bases, 800 million weekly active users, just insane arc over the you know, the couple of years that they've existed, it's a no-brainer for me. Are you? Yeah.

Josh:
[31:29] At a trillion dollars, yes. I suspect it doesn't actually launch at a trillion dollars. This is going to be the largest IPO in history, I assume by a fairly large margin. What's going to be fun is you can start to, once the company becomes public, you can start to evaluate the disclosure documents when they report earnings. If they make any money, you'll start to get a price-to-earnings ratio where you can kind of value this and it'll start to become more of a legitimate company with public shareholder interest, there are these funny things that can happen because sometimes someone can buy enough shares to do some sort of hostile takeover. It allows the dynamics of this fun Game of Thrones to continue in a way that is much more publicly visible and therefore more entertaining for the rest of the world. So I think I am excited for the IPO, regardless of whether it prices above or below a trillion because excitement is guaranteed either way. This is kind of the update on the OpenAI debacle. This is where we're at currently. It's still, I mean, it's a wonderful company. They're growing so fast. At this point, they're probably getting close to a billion users, if not there already. A billion weekly active users, which is just an outrageous level of growth. The reason why it's important too, and I find we often talk about Sam Altman a lot on the show, and we're often critical of the people in charge, but it's because that they really play a huge role in the future of not just AI, but humanity. This is, it's the most important technology.

Josh:
[32:55] In a very long time if not in history that will redefine a lot of things around us that we call life and the people who are at the top of these companies are responsible for distributing that and pioneering that in a way that hopefully leads to an optimal outcome for the world and people like us so it's important to be critical of these things it's important to understand where the people stand what they're doing what their motives are and i think placing a magnifying glass on this stuff is is healthy and productive because the stakes are so high in this game of thrones so that has been an update on the open ai world we now know what ilia saw we now know kind of where sam stands we understand where the company is headed in terms of being a for-profit instead of a non-for-profit open source company and i think we'll just leave it there and we'll see we'll see what type of new things come into the fold as we go along this journey yep.

Ejaaz:
[33:51] That is a wrap for the episode folks thank you for listening we hope you enjoyed this episode we have had our best month yet the most views most downloads and josh 5 000 new subscribers on youtube and across our listing platforms just insane levels of support you guys are obviously loving the content and we are loving all the feedback that you guys are giving. Now, if you want to prevent a future where Sam Altman's AGI shuts us down and replaces us with AI avatars of ourself, please like, subscribe, share your comments, support, five-star ratings, wherever you are, wherever you listen. It's incredibly helpful to us and helps us grow as a platform and gets you the best content that we can ever produce. But that's it for today. We're going to release a slew of different episodes over the next week or the rest of the week, so stay tuned for that. And we will see you on the next one. Awesome.

Josh:
[34:43] See you guys.