OpenAI CEO: AI Isn't Killing Writing (Sam Altman Interview)

you ever wonder how Sam Alman takes notes thinks about annual planning thinks about sabatical what he's going to actually work on how he chose to focus on AI but those are the things that we talk about in this episode and we get answers let's get into the conversation with Sam mman all right Sam I want to begin with how has knowledge of llms changed how you think about writing and communication I mean I think we are going to all not all all I think many of us are going to write in a different way in the future I don't mean like people are just going to use llms to like write stuff for them because one of the strangest things that I think happens is when people put a few bullet points into an llm have it generate a nice email send it to somebody else and then they summarize it on the other end because we can't we we just can't agree that you know we just want the bullet points back and forth and there's still this

societal nicity but someone is going to build probably somebody already has built a first version of this like a great tool to write in a new way where you have this thing that is not you know expanding your bullet points but is helping you discover new things in the idea space and that's awesome like that's what computers do at their best right is they they help they are a tool that help you do things you otherwise couldn't do I've always thought it was strange how we've had this Tools For Thought idea for decades and yet the vast majority of the way people people write is they open up Microsoft Word and they have no aid from a computer really it's just like a typewriter

yeah I mean it turns out that like writing's pretty good I don't we can for sure make it better but I understand why that's where we are tell me if this is baseless or accurate or where on the Spectrum it is but I find it interesting that there's a justos between words being more important on the input and then moving away from words with the outputs T Dolly I think words are going to be a huge part of how we communicate with computers how we program computers and natural language is kind of the interface to computers that people want I think uh I think that's been you know sci-fi predicted that for a long time but I think a big part of the revolution of chat PT was you could just talk to a computer in plain English and get it to do all these things um it won't be the only way we want to interact with computers of course and you'll have multimodal input as well as output but we are very finely evolved to use

language there's also something special about text yeah for sure searchable malleable there is a reason that this has been such a part of like to imagine Humanity human culture without language it's like oh It's seems imposs I can't do it and even text itself the there's a rigor to text there's a riger to thinking in text for sure yeah I get it I get it because you can point to specific words and sentences that you disagree with rather than just the overall Vibe so if we're having a conversation I can't remember the exact word that you said but if

there's a transcription I can say ah it was this that I really like this that I think we can make some minor changes to how should chat GPT be changing how we teach our kids how to write I don't think we know yet what the writing of the future the process is going to look like I would bet it's just like a safe Baseline that it's not going to change all that much I think we will have new tools that let people write in different ways and hopefully get more sort of idea refinement and generation out of the process but uh you know this thing that people say of like no one's ever going to learn to write anymore because now it's just like that that's not why people really write in the first place like the kind of writing that you can just the kind of thing you can do by having Chach PT go write your your kind of you know essay for English class that's not real that's not what this is about anyway and if Chachi BT

can help people do do a writing like activity and get higher quality thinking out of it that's wonderful hm tell me about that literally if if we believe that part of the value a big part of the value of writing is to clarify ify your own thinking and we can have new tools that help you do that better than before that'll be a big win what I think of chat GPT as raising the returns to is the initial seed the Big Bang moment of an idea and this is a way that I like using chat GPT is I know that I have a distinct idea if chat GPT disagrees with me and then once I have that idea if I can clarify in some sort of way then chat gbt can help me find examples and stories things that amplify and help to grow the initial seed that I've planted totally uh I think I I've I you know I try to like watch people like very different walks of life use Chach PT and it's always Illuminating so I watched two students

use it to kind of like help with their homework do their homework to be honest recently and one of them um basically just like put in their thing and wrote their whole essay and I was like aul cuz I kind of knew that that was a theoretical thing that people were doing at you know significant volume or whatever but you hear about it but like to like watch someone just like do that and then get an essay that was you know bad but like passible out of it was in like that was like a real like what have we done moment I was like visceral in a way that you know I just hadn't I'd never seen someone do it before and then I watched someone else use it uh in a in a very different more interactive way to try to do something more like what you're talking about which is like I have this idea I can't quite articulate it I'm kind of stuck let me get unblocked and let me generate a bunch more ideas and the thing that came out

of that was far better than I think anybody would have done on their own and I was like reflecting a lot on that and the first question was like a bad question like if you can just put something in and get a super interesting or I thought not like I I a super passible response I I think we're just like asking people to do the wrong thing whereas if it's something that like gets them to want to think about a question differently and use the tool to help them get somewhere they wouldn't have gotten on their own that's really interesting how do you use chat GPT every day I used to only use it for a few things and both chat GPT has gotten better and I figured out how to use it more and so the cool thing now is I really do use it a general purpose tool and I hope that a few years from now when you ask that I'll say I use it for most things that I do like every few months I find new ways to use it new

ways to incor it's it's obviously still terribly integrated into most people's workflows but that's just going to get better and better when you're talking to friends you're like you should use chat GPT for this what are the themes that you're telling them to do uh I mean the thing that I hear about from my friends that they love it for the most is uh like computer programming help in some way or other and the number of people who say that's like transformed my life you know I mean like it's very gratifying to hear it's a lot of fun like there are other things where you people say it's like change the way my kids learn or teachers say change the way I teach is that's great too and but I uh and then there's like incredible examples with Healthcare the way people using this for Creative work but the programming one is like near and dear to my heart many of my friends are programmers so I hear about that a lot

email yeah you do a lot of writing by email and you've uh I do a lot of like very short email like I do a lot of like seven-word emails and how has chat gbt helped you with that um it's super good to summarizing long emails that like most long emails honestly I just stop I don't even read but if I have to read one it's super good at like chat gbt's ability to effectively summarize long pieces of content like a really long thread or

whatever very impressive yeah it was just I got a tour to the library here yeah that's a cool space By the way nice job I like that space a lot it's beautiful thank you and the I saw the enero on the wall by Nim TB and he says that basically the definition of a good book is one that can't be summarized and maybe there's an equivalent for GPT there's a really interesting um there's a really interesting thing there which is that at some sense uh it took me like years to really understand this but Ilia would always say that uh what these models are really about is compression and we're going to go figure out how to compress as much knowledge as possible and that's how we're going to make AI compression is like the secret to intelligence and that was like I had to meditate on that for a long time I'm sure I still don't fully understand it but there's something deep there I was talking to your assistant

she said that you think very clearly you're like a man of few words but when you say something it's it's really you're clear on what you want and you've really crystallized your message I guess the part of that that resonates is I do try to like get at the essence of a problem and I I definitely don't like when other people communicate unclearly I thought it was really interesting in your conversation with Joe Hudson how you spoke about the way that you've released anxiety from your life how has that change in your internal State shown up in your thinking I don't remember who said this but someone I don't even remember if this is a friend this is like a famous quote with someone said like most people uh can't even let themselves think the interesting thoughts much less say the interesting ideas and I think there is something about the world that has gone horribly wrong there and I'm sure having like background

anxiety running is a process makes it harder to think uh new thoughts and to focus for sure if you're like a bundle of anxiety and you have like a inner monologue spinning you in all sorts of different directions it's hard to really sit down and focus um but if you're like constantly self-critical if you're constantly saying well other people think about this if I even you know I think a lot of people have I've I've heard people say things like well that might be an interesting idea but I would like feel embarrassed or foolish to even like tell people that I was thinking about it or working on it like if if you can't even let yourself like go pretty far down the path of and exploring an idea before you worry about what other people are going to think about it that that seems bad this idea

that you have around people spend so much time trying to think about how to be more productive but you're like hold on hold on hold on let's talk about how to really think about what we're going to work on in the first place How does writing help you do that so first of all I I I strongly agree that if you have a choice between spending some effort thinking about what to work on versus how to like be a little bit more productive in this new method or that new method uh with a very you should have a very high bar uh for doing anything but thinking about what what to work on um I think that's just sort of a higher higher impact thing most of the time um of course that doesn't work all the time at some point you actually have to go execute but I I I often see people who I think are really talented um work super hard are super productive just not spend much time or surprisingly often not really spend any

time at all in a meaningful way thinking about what they're going to work on and I think that's like the high order bit uh so that's that's part one in terms of writing as a way to do that I I think of writing is sort of uh like external ized thinking um I I I still if I have like a very hard problem or if I feel a little bit confused about something have not found anything better to do than to like sit down and make myself write it out um write out like what I'm you know how I'm thinking about it what I think somebody should be try to like figure out how to explain it to myself or to somebody else so I think it's just like it is a super powerful thinking tool um I write for my write things down for myself uh or for the most and for like private groups the second most and public at this point very rarely

what are the different parameters of clear communication there's sort of the sloganeering there is a good tagline there's also the depth the IDM yeah actually I think clear communication is very much less important and very much Downstream of actually clear thinking so if you know what you're going to do if you've and if you've like figured out how to like reduce that to the essence of why it's a good idea and what the plan is going to be what the priorities are going to be then communicating clearly about that is not so hard but getting clear clear about the actual ideas is really hard and so I think unclear communication is is a symptom of unfocused thinking for the most part Napoleon he has a line about the importance of clear directives clear communication because when you're on the battlefield you need to be able to articulate things simply and have alignment for the team lots of similarities with what you're saying I

mean I don't think that's just Napoleon I think that as I understand it I haven't studied a lot of military history but that's like a pretty common refrain like that seems to have been borne out by history um but I also think that's like born out in business uh that Clarity speed quality of execution uh all linked of all the things that you've written what are you most proud of this is not false modesty truly none of it writing is not my gift and I'm okay with that like writing is Super Value to valuable to me as a tool for thinking for communicating with internally with the org but there's nothing I I am I hope I will do things that like stand the test of time and matter to the world it's not going to be my writing but that doesn't mean I don't get a lot of value out of it I think that to give you a little bit more credit maybe the purple Pros isn't your gift but a piece like how to be successful really influence me thank you

I appreciate that to make every next thing that you do be a footnote to what you've done before that's a profound idea yeah I I mean I think I I hope that like I will contribute some ideas to the world that matter I again I hope all of those matter much less than open AI does um but that's nice of you to say so I genuinely appreciate it what got you to start writing the personal blog I wanted to like practice writing I had this like S I watched Paul Graham right and he's an amazing writer I never had any aspirations that I was going to be anything like that but I I had seen how powerful it was for helping startup Founders and for getting to invest in good startup Founders um so I wanted to get I wanted to like try to get good at it I I'm like uh I'm not a naturally gifted writer but I believe like you know with practice anybody people can get good at a lot of things um I wanted to like kind of continue doing

the thing that seemed to work so well for YC getting good Founders um but honestly it wasn't it's not my calling in life uh I don't really do it anymore you wanted to be a novelist that astounded me uh I did but only for the like romantic life of it not that I thought I was ever going to be a good writer it just seemed like this like very cool thing sit you know smoking in a cafe in Paris yeah you can still do that I could I could probably not the path my life so it turned out I'm like not a very good writer and I'm not going to be a blogger and that's okay but I am still very happy with the experiment because I learned that I can like write for myself to clarify my own thinking and that has been super powerful even the ability to like write a message to like explain to a team what a plan is and why we're going to do it I think doing that in writing versus doing that in a meeting is often very powerful have you done

that recently it's like if we're starting a new project or if we're putting together some sort of like plan that we're going to execute on forcing myself to write it down rather than just like sit in a meeting and let it spitball around has been very good do you have a format of sorts no no I mean I try to like keep it under I don't think long is good yeah so I try to keep it short but beyond that no real constraints tell me about your just communication lessons that you've learned from Peter teal he is so distinct in the way that he

communicates I know you've spent a lot of time with him especially early in your career he's an amazing Communicator uh and one thing that he does super well is he comes up with these uh like very evocative very short statements that really stick in your brain and I don't know I don't know how to do that I don't really know anybody else who does that like he does but it's a he has like very interesting things to say and very interesting ways to say them and most people you're lucky to get one or the other he is like a very rare combination of both it's super impressive what do you think contrib to that he thinks about the world in this sort of like deeply unconstrained way he has you know I mean the first thing anybody would say about him is he is a truly brilliant original thinker and that's just rare there's a boundlessness about your thinking that really stands out like I feel like you

have that same sort of lack of constraint I think he's he's more of a like here is this to toally here is a totally different view on something that no one else has ever

expressed and now sounds like obviously at least interesting and often obviously correct and I think my view of the world is often more like can we just do more like we have this like vector can we push on it harder is that like the David dor sense of like everything is possible that's not limited by the constraints of physics yeah and also that there's not enough people don't to tie back to Peter um I remember sometime someone asked like a long time ago someone asked him what was your biggest inves mistake ever and everybody expected him to say something like while I invested in this company put all this money and it blew up and he said the biggest mistake I don't know if this B or C but the biggest mistake ever let's say was not investing in the series via Facebook and that is the kind of mistake I try not to make so I'm like a big believer and find what is working and like go aggressively after it ideas are

such a power law and it's about finding that core thing and just doubling tripling down on that yeah I think that the really good ideas are rare and when you find one you should quadruple down on it and should be the only thing you push on you know you should only push on a few of these things in writing in business whatever I I I really I really really believe in this principle and I mean I think this is why like all business almost all business books are terrible right there's like three good ideas and 300 pages and what a reader once is three good ideas on one page yeah did Paul Graham teach you anything specifically about writing yeah mostly just by reading his essays I think like many other people my introduction to the startup world and excitement about it came from Reading PG's essays he's like an unbelievable writer and that was a topic of like great interest to me and many other people

um I think a whole generation of us like copied PG in all of these ways uh and so although he was never like let me teach you a class on how to write I and others clearly took a lot of inspiration because I think he just does it in a style that resonates so much Clarity Precision density yeah like if you go read average Business book versus pgs it's like they're both business writing but other than that they're like different species there's no posturing he says interesting stuff he says it clearly he doesn't waste your time nothing feels fake MH pitching coming up with the story How does writing factor into that uh again I think of like writing as a tool to think more clearly or to get to the essence of something and then hopefully when you're in a pitch meeting for your or whatever you've already figured out how to get that down to the clear essence of it um and if you

can it's really dramatically different to be on the other side of a pitch if the person has like gotten their thinking clear ahead of time or not it's also a bonus if they're a clear communicator and and I and I can like think of a few examples of people who I think are exceptionally clear thinkers and horrible communicators but it's rare like I had to sit here earlier as you were talking about that and think um and so if someone can get their thinking clear before a pitch then they can get across to you what they're trying to do and there are a lot of people who can do this without writing but I often find that writing is is really it's really helpful and I often find that there are these ideas that I think I'm super clear on and then I try to make myself write it down write down like a onepage summary and I was like oh I didn't really understand that in the first place do you do a lot of Google Docs

exchanges with friends I used to I used to like all of life it's just been in this like weird through the Looking Glass past year and a half or whatever it's been but not even that much um since chachy BT launched all of like the normal Hobbies of Life pretty much have gotten attenuated when you were doing that how did it help what did you ask for be like I'm thinking about this I'm about doing this thing or I'm thinking about this idea just because it's interesting um what's the next step or tell me where I'm wrong and you can do like a lot of that over dinner parties and make a lot of progress you know you can like host friends for a weekend and talk about something a lot and make a lot of progress but there is something about the process of trying to crystallize it onto a sheet of faor that has to be like internally consistent that doesn't let you like hide from the weak points the the constraint I like to give

people is it needs to be short enough that you can send it to me in a screenshot like a mobile phone screenshot I I not for everything but I like that I personally think that's like maybe too constraining for some important ideas even though I directionally super agree with you that like short is short is critical how much of your own writing the inspiration is born from conversation a lot but but but it it kind of like comes in as this jumble of ideas and then right wrting is helpful because it you know I think of

like conversation as this very generative process and then you've got to like grind it down to the essence and that is best done like sitting in front of a big monitor with no one else around the image of Tangled headphones came into my mind interesting you know for me the image is much more like grinding Down rocks than than untangling something because it's more like a process of like removing than untangling and when you have all these like slightly different ideas banging against each other you kind of end up with the right core if you were to write a book what would it be about I mean a lot of times people say like hey this AI think is really important can you recommend me a book to read and I kind of thinkk about it and say no not really so I think I would try to like write the book for the people that ask what they should read about Ai and I think I would with like here is the historical context of other

technological revolutions why this one will be similar why it'll be different um here's how the technology actually works here's what is possible right now here's how this is going to impact your life this year here's the range of things that might be possible in five years and how it might impact your life then and then if we really kind of let ourselves dream out a 100 years here's like what this means for all of us and if I was your editor and I was like Sam what is the biggest thing that people are missing right now what would your answer be well that's why I'm not going to write the book uh I I haven't had time to like think about that and I don't think I will anytime soon where did the all lowercase thing come from um I mean I was like I lived online as a kid and that was just I don't know I stopped using the shift key I do it if I'm still if I'm writing something that feels like a school paper I just I actually wrote

something that I may do as a blog post but it's like super long it's like 20 pages it's way too long um and I may just not have time to edit it down but it was still interesting to write um but

like for something like that I still you know capitalize it perfectly so it's like still in there somewhere I like that I may not have time to edit it down there's something about that that it's really the editing that takes work yeah for sure I heard a nice line from David Ogie he said I'm a terrible writer but I'm a great editor that's a real skill that's very tough to do especially on your own stuff do you get help with editing like is that is that something that happens like in Google Docs here or how do you think about it the you know the things that are like written just for like an internal document those those don't really get edit I mean that's I I kind of write it once maybe I read it once if if I'm have extra time and just send it out but for like internal coordination why I think writing is super valuable it's not that's not like getting edited for publication internal coordination why do

you use those words oh if like if there's like a bunch of teams that have to agree on what we're doing I think like having a ritten do we are like a document heavy culture in that sense um I think that's a good thing is that document heavy culture something that you got from Matt machari no that predated him predated him did YC have that no actually that's interesting I think it's probably something about like the academic culture of researchers that started it here in what ways did people's thinking reveal themselves through the writing of YC apps the biggest thing that you that I took away most of the time is how rare Clarity of expression in a YC application is and it's rare even though we say like this is really important and it seems obvious that that's what you should try to do but I found on the whole that people who did not express themselves clearly in a YC application did not run the company in a clear way

did not explain to the team what they were doing did not explain to investors to customers everything else what they were doing in a clear way and that is a very hard way to have a chance success for a company um so much of your job as a founder or anyone leading any kind of company is is like evangelist and Chief and it's hard to Be an Effective evangelist without clear communication when you were at y commentator you had a big initiative of open sourcing knowledge around a course and you wrote a book called the startup the startup Playbook I would say I wrote like a pamphlet sure well okay you wrote

a 50-page book but tell me about why you did that and the process of writing the book um I think getting the knowledge out about how to do startups is just like a clear net win for the world it's not the most important part of what YC does like the the one-on-one mentoring support the network that's all more important but putting the knowledge out there is is I think a good and easy thing to do and what is something that you learned while running YC that you feel like really influences the way that you run open AI a big part of YC was just like encouraging Founders to be more ambitious and to like kind of go after what they believed in and I think there's a lot of that in R the company too what is something that you're excited to do with your writing with GPT that you can't do now the thing that I have been thinking about is uh how can I use chbt to just like make writing feel higher volume and lower

Stakes like how I still like if I have to go write like a 10 page thing that still feels like a huge thing to have to go do and there's like a lot of activation eny I have to like write wait time in like the right mood and then I have like hours of uninterrupted focus and if if if using chat GPT and I haven't figured this out yet but I've been thinking about it can somehow mean like it's the kind of thing I do when I'm like in an Uber for 15 minutes because it just makes the activation energy that low that would be very cool how can GPT amplify different personalities you know one of the things I like to use it for is hey rewrite this in the style of Amer tols or Tyler Cowen

how can GPT continue to do that well future future versions of GPT will be very capable of that what the fair thing to Tyler Cowen is in that case we're trying to figure out um so it's like not an obvious question um

but for sure what everybody agrees on is there there can be many personalities that are not based on real people and that's a cool thing to have and the fact that you can have let's call them like personas you can have like Chachi PT remix things in different personas uh I think that'll be helpful in the creative process um the thing that I hope for more than anything else out of chat gbt and future versions is that it will be a tool that lets us do things we just couldn't do before think of ideas we just couldn't have before be more creative than we could be before and this is kind of the Arc of Technology uh but I think this is a going to be a particularly great example of it creativity not limited by skills but by the ability to think of the idea in the first place and not even that like if these tools like can help you think of the idea but you have got to have you've got to be a great curator

like I don't know exactly what it's going to be like um but I do know people are going to get very good at using the tool like they do with any new tool and that will expand the realm of human possibility hey I want to tell you about a new site that I built called writing examples we take writers like Steinbeck Orwell Seinfeld and break down what makes their writing so good if that sounds like it's kind of your thing we'll go to writing examples.com and if you go there you enter email I'll send you my three favorite editions right away all right back to the episode one of the things that I really admire about you is how deliberate you are about thinking about what to work on and I'm curious how you thought about your choice to work on AGI and what that process of envisioning that one thing that you were going to focus on was all about your process is the right word for it right like it all of these things

sort of start as these like almost jokes so not quite a joke but like a a sort of like somewhat ridiculous idea um at the now working on AGI seems like the obvious only decision for me at least um but at the time it seemed like a pipe dream uh but I think ideas in general are very fragile good ideas uh the best ideas are extremely fragile and there is an unbelievable amount of value in figuring out a setup a method whatever you want to call it for not killing very fragile but potentially very great ideas this comes down to like how you think about it what your process to make a decision is it comes down to like who you surround yourself with um I think a particular kind of toxicity to avoid are the people who are like so smart they understand why every great idea is bad um but I think in the the very early days the main thing is not to

accidentally kill good ideas so tell me about fragility and how writing factors into this the thing that is most important to me personally about writing is like externalized thinking and organization magnification whatever you want to call it of vague ideas I find it astonishing how much writing just for yourself uh sometimes for a small group of other people you're exploring an idea with but mostly writing just for yourself helps clarify what you actually think helps like sharpen stuff in a way that for me and I think for a lot of other people people is somehow impossible to do just like thinking carefully on a long hike like in your head yeah it's harder to hide really messy thinking when you have to actually write it down and look at like stare at it so tell me more about the process as you thought about your plan in the early days of open AI in terms of focusing on this what was the

sort of final output of that process where you said let's do it I do remember intermediate stages where it was like talk to like a bunch of people uh have all these ideas right out like okay here's what we're going to do like here's our here's our plan you would write some of those down and it would be like very obvious to you immediately like okay this actually makes no sense you you feel it or you think it through and when you when you stare at it like it's one thing to like have a couple of beers with some friends and say we're going to build AGI um and it's another to say like okay here's like here's like a full cohesive plan for what it's going to look like that makes some of the Fall Away um so many of those we'd write out as we were thinking through the different things we could do and how we would going to be an organization you know we all going to go join some University research lab like

that helped get rid of some of the silliness and again now it all seems so obvious that this feels weird to even say because like of course this is what we're going to do right but at the time it was deeply not obvious or a lot of other people would have been doing it that would be sort of my like evidence point for it and then eventually if you write something down that looks like

credible enough you send it around to other people uh they the same experience they might rewrite it they might edit it but they also kind of say like all right when I have to like stare at this in black and white it's a little different I'm a big believer in getting like input from lots and lots of people um especially on like hard questions of what to go do in the broadest sense and now as you do annual planning and you think in one maybe three year time frames is that process the same different it don't do this with like as much rigor as I should it hasn't been annual but maybe like every 2 years I've written a document for open eye called literally our plan nice and the first one was like 25 pages and that was like lots of hours of talking to people getting feedback but it was like a sharpening process to the whole thing there was then one later that was like 15 there was then one that was like four

I believe we could do like a half page version now and I think that's like a good that's a that's a great side of progress yeah how much writing are you doing day-to-day now every weekend I mean every weekend I'll like write something and usually share it with like 10 people internally or something just like here's a thing I've been thinking about that we should do I have been working on something I actually plan to publish which is rare for me now about just sort of what the world looks like if we get AI driven abundance and like why that's important but it's like it's a long way to go as you think about how AI is going to change writing you know what are comparatively what skills are going to be more valuable versus less valuable in a world where like AI can do lots of things for you having great ideas knowing what you want the a to do when AI can do anything is really important

taste creation like expert level you know like whatever it is that PG does yeah that's going to be super valuable I love using chat gbt to help me write something um especially like as I've been trying to write this thing if I get like stuck it's a sort of like super thesaurus if I just can't figure out how to phrase something or I'm like struggling with something or like just can't get something to flow but it's definitely not like going to replace coming up with the ideas anytime soon it's an incredible tool for writers like incredible tool for writers but definitely not a writer like a sparring partner like a collaborator like someone you can like give like a subtask to yeah that's a lot of how I use it is a lot of times I have a word that I'm struggling with and I'll say give me 10 words that would work in this sentence and then I'll take the sentence quote it and then it'll give me the output it's really

good at that yeah how do you think that we should be training writers differently in the chat GPT world I

heard this story once I I don't know if it's true or not but it was like some creative writing teacher they would have these students come and you know the first day or whatever she'd like give an assignment which is right the first paragraph of your novel and people would come in with all of the standard like freshman and college mistakes like you know way too many like stretched metaphors way too much like flowery language um and then she'd go through this like exercise of I think a standard one first which is cut one metaphor from every page cut one unnecessary word from every sentence cut this cut that cut that you take this like 10 page thing down and you cut it down to one page and it would like it would not be so torturously overwritten and then the class would read them and they would say like okay what happened here like what's the and the answer was there was like no story at all there was the the Instinct

was try to like write this like beautifully whatever kind of satisfying to write thing but it's no fun to read like the readers want a story yeah and the thing from this like teacher is that we might teach people to write beautifully but uh there's there's no

interesting story on the other hand you have these like sort of mass massively Mass Market successful I don't even know what like I'll pick on like the Twilight books or something quite interesting story horrible writing sure and and the question is like can we make it easier to get both and can we teach people how to use these tools do you have a sense for how good chat GPT storytelling is like if I turn on voice mode and read it to a kid how much better is that versus Mom I think the storytelling is not yet very good but I would expect it to get better we're still at a place where the models are just generally improving so much I mean there's areas that we could push on that'd be better for storytelling but if the model just gets a lot smarter and also if we train it to be better at storytelling um that will help how do you do that you show it a bunch of examples of what makes a good story what

makes a bad story which I don't think is like magic I think we really understand that well that we just haven't tried to do that yeah when you're sitting down to right and you're thinking about creating a focus state what is it that you're doing in your process to really create that I used to think like oh I got to get in the perfect place and I gotta like set a time that I'm gonna like go to this coffee shop and put on my noise cancelling headphones and I'm going to be in writing mode and now I will take any 11 minutes uninterrupted that I can get like sitting in the back of a car laying in bed like whatever it is I mean if I do have like if I had like a perfect thing it would be like you know Saturday morning with a cup of coffee and nothing scheduled and that is great like if I got to sit down and like if I have to write like a long thing I will try to set that up but most of it

happens in like short chunks in the back of a car you know what I use a lot is I use the voice feature I take it and I ask it to just clean it up and I find chat gbt to be so helpful with that because I'm much more generative with my mouth than I am with my fingertips interesting for me it's the opposite really yeah I'm convinced there's ideas I would never have sitting and talking with people that I just need to sit and type for this is like obviously a very common observation but but figuring out like the right amount of being with people talking you know getting exposed to like a lot of ideas and then having some time alone to think to write to just sort of like do some deep work whatever that is I think obviously this is a super important pattern to a lot of people definitely to me my sort of like roughly rough rhythm is I'm like you know in the office kind of non-stop all week uh I have no time

to think it's just like kind of crazy packed and then on the weekends I have like long quiet blocks and I'm not really around people and uh that cycle is very important to me H and is that fractal like do you sometimes take a few weeks off or anything like that I used to uh I think that's like really good like when I've taken like long chunks of time off I would do like a month of like non-stop hanging out with people and then like a month of you know being in the woods on the beach whatever that doesn't really happen anymore yeah do you take notes during the week that you reflect on or is it just your head no I'm a huge Note Taker oh tell me about that there's all these like fancy notebooks in the world yeah you don't want those um you definitely want a spiral notebook because one thing that's important is you can rip Pages out frequently and you also want it to lie like flat and open on the table and if

you like open pages you want them to like you know like be able to lay like this whatever you definitely want to be able to like rip Pages out I'm a big believer of like I take a bunch of notes and then I like clearly like rip them out so I can look at multiple Pages at the same time and I can like crumple them up and throw them on the floor and I'm done like when our house cleaner comes in on like a you know whatever there's just just these pile of crumpled papers that I'm like typed my notes in or whatever on the floor you definitely want like a kind of paper that is uh like good to write on which is a feel thing but most paper is terrible to write on huh um you want a hard front and back to the notepad so and you also something that can fit in a pocket I was about to say that I think the uniball micro5 pen um is the best pen overall but the Muji 36 or 37 in dark blue ink is a very nice pen for other reasons uh

so those are the two I would use but I think this kind of notebook and one of those two penants is the right answer and how many notes you're writing per

day on that thing uh I go through one of these like every three two or three weeks oh wow you're taking a lot of well this you can see how much I've ripped out like this used to have like 100 pages in so that's how you think about it so you're going to basically take the notebook and then you rip out the pages you don't have completed notebook I don't have completed notebooks wow what inspired this where does this come from lots of trial and error uh many kinds of notebooks many pens many different systems this one's really good another thing I've been thinking about when it comes to the influence of AGI on Creative mediums is just the competence with the written word is going up so much and here's what I mean there's now you know with Sora you can create videos using text as the input you can do that with music you can do that with images and that's a big change in terms of the influence on of writing on our world

again for me like writing is a tool for thinking most importantly and I don't think that's going anywhere and so I think it's like it's really important that people still learn to write for this reason in the same way that even if there's going to be like less traditional coding jobs coding is a great way to learn to thing too should still learn code So when you say it's important that people learn to write what does that mean what it means to me is that I like figured out this tool to think more clearly now if there's a better way to think more clearly with I great I would switch to that definitely not found that yet a final question that we can close with is there's just a lot of people out there who are saying that AI is going to kill writing and they're angry about it about it and what do you make of that I don't see any evidence whatsoever that AI seems to be killing right I mean there's like a lot of bad AI writing

like plastered over the Internet um and there's like a lot of like bad student assignments that have probably been written by AI but I don't think anyone's

serious I don't think Paul Graham is sitting around being like AI is gonna you know kill my writing here I think it would have to be like full super intelligence before I was like okay this is going to replace human writing full stop and we have much bigger issues to worry about at that point even if that happened um let's say we have a system that can write better than a human uh do you think that the most popular novel of 20207 has a human name on it or not like a human writer on it or not I think yes I think it does too when I finish a great book the first thing I go do is like I want to know about the writer I want to know their life story and I don't think I'll ever have that feeling to like AI writing um there there is there is something about you read an incredible book and you kind of you could connect to a person even though you don't literally know them you feel like you do you feel like you have this

important shared Human Experience and that is like some significant percentage of the enjoyment of a great book to me and I bet we keep doing that all

right Sam all right thank you very much this was fun this was fun