Cheeky Pint

Sam Altman joined John Collison for a pint to discuss the scaling laws of agent teams, proving Navier-Stokes, why hand-written software will soon look quaint, the optics of token pricing, and what computing looks like beyond the keyboard and screen. 00:00:00 Introduction 00:00:12 PHP week 00:02:37 Internet early days 00:07:33 Cyber Blue 00:08:54 Sandboxing 00:15:47 Math 00:23:12 Agent swarms 00:24:48 Stripe Atlas 00:25:17 Compute 00:37:53 Revenue per gigawatt 00:49:27 Token pricing is fake @sama @collision

“People give different numbers for the cost per gigawatt measured in the five-year total cost of ownership right now. Let’s pick $70 billion as a number.” “I think if that number were 20 instead of 70, we should be much happier and we should still demand to get 10x better performance out of it with smarter models every year.” @sama @collision

“I bet we could redo Navier-Stokes at 1/100th of the cost a year from when it was done.” @sama @collision

“People just didn’t think the model was going to do these things. We had this collective experience of watching people’s hardest research problems from their academic careers—the model was just knocking them down, one after another. Across many different fields, it was incredible to watch.” “I was tremendously excited and happy. But I also had much more sadness and melancholy—a feeling of something ending—than I was expecting.” @sama @collision

Sam Altman on OpenAI almost abandoning token pricing: “We almost made what would’ve been a bad call to say we’re not going to price our next model in tokens at all. You’re just going to give it a prompt, and we’re going to give you a price back. It’s going to be like AWS to just do something and we send you a bill. But the customer response on that is so negative.” “They’re like, ‘I need to know what I’m paying for somehow.’ I asked a few people, ‘Would you rather pay more for the same output, but have it priced in some number of consistent tokens? Even if we inflated the tokens?’ And they’re like, ‘Oh, I’d much rather you inflate the tokens and pay more. Because I know there’s a real thing there.’” “So I think you are right, people don’t just want us to give them a price, because they feel like over the long term they’re gonna get screwed somehow. In the same way that maybe people would rather pay for CPU hours rather than just getting their thing done, even if it was less expensive.” @sama @collision

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