In Conversation: Indeed CEO Chris Hyams and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman

For nearly two decades, Indeed has used artificial intelligence to advance its mission of helping people get jobs. In this video, Indeed CEO Chris Hyams speaks with Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, about AI’s impact on society, creativity and the future of work. Their conversation touches on:

The vital role user experience plays in adopting new technologies
What young people and aspiring computer scientists can do to keep up with the rapid pace of innovation
How our relationship with creative work will evolve as our tools evolve

Hyams also explains how Indeed’s partnership with OpenAI is enhancing our AI-powered products and features, making the hiring process faster, simpler and more human.

Transcript

Chris Hyams: Sam, thanks so much for joining me today.

Sam Altman: Thanks for having me.

Chris Hyams: So, Indeed and OpenAI are both mission-driven companies. Our mission is to help people get jobs; yours is to ensure that artificial general intelligence (AGI) benefits all humanity. Talk a little bit about how you think those missions complement each other.

Sam Altman: Quite a bit, I think. We think AGI will be an incredible tool for people to use to express themselves, to create new things, to continue to build this valuable society that we all get to benefit from. And I personally think this will be one of the most incredible tools people have yet built, and the jobs of the future, and the impact that people can have on creating value for each other will just be incredible. So we’re very excited.

Chris Hyams: So, AI as a field has been around since the ’50s. It’s been in practice since the ’80s, and in the last couple of decades it’s pretty much in and around our lives all day, every day. And yet public interest really exploded starting in November of 2022. What do you think it was about ChatGPT that has captured people’s imagination in a way that AIs didn’t seem to before?

Sam Altman: I think the user experience of the technology always matters a lot. You know, we had good models in the API, and, in fact, part of the reason that we got excited to do ChatGPT was noticing that people were using our API in our playground, which is how you can test things out, for chat-like use cases. But that was a hard way to do it. We were like, well, if we make the model be a little bit — behave more like a chat interface, and then if we build a nice consumer wrapper around it, maybe that’ll make a big difference. And it turned out to make way more of a difference than we thought.

Look, it’s always a little hard to say, why was it that moment exactly, like, why not GPT-3? Or why not have to wait for GPT-4? GPT-3.5 was clearly, in retrospect, over the threshold of where you’re like, 'Wow, I’m talking to this thing, and it’s understanding enough of what I want and doing enough useful stuff that I get value out of it.' But I think there’s technology and product, and they interact in these complex ways, and when they come together and the product of them is the multiplicative product of them is sufficient for people to say, 'Wow, I really get it now.' There’s a little bit of chance in when that moment happens. We knew it was going to happen, but why right then and not a little bit before or after, less clear.

Chris Hyams: So one question that I get a lot, and I’d love to hear your thoughts: The pace of innovation is breathtaking in AI right now, and an undergraduate who is a freshman in college right now, by the time they graduate might find that some of the things that they’re learning might be potentially obsolete by the time they graduate. What would you say to a high school student or a college student on what they should be studying to help them prepare for the future?

Sam Altman: I mean, the clearest, most obvious two things to say: Number one, you’ve got to learn to use the tools. When I was in school, computer programming was already popular, but nothing like it is popular today. And people would say the same things — many of the same things — they say about AI now than they would say about programming, which is like, 'Oh man, this is going to change things so much, and this is going to make a lot of the jobs of today go away.' And to me, the most obvious thing was, 'Well, if that’s the case, I’d better get really good at using this tool if that’s the thing that’s going to have this big impact.' And I think the story on computer programming has been a huge net positive. It has made some classes of jobs go away; it’s made way more new things happen, and also given us the ability to do a lot of new things. But in retrospect, that was a really good decision that I should get very comfortable with that tool. And I think the same thing is true now. You want to get really comfortable with these new tools because we don’t know exactly what the jobs of the future are going to look like.

I’m confident that there will be lots of jobs, and also that many of them will look somewhat different than the jobs of today. But we never seem to run out of stuff to do.

Thing number two is, which I touch on a little bit, I think we can say some deeply true statements about what humans seem to care about, and that figuring out how to create those things, figuring out how to build the experiences, products and services that people of the future are going to want — figure out how to be useful to people — that seems like a really valuable thing, more than any specific set of knowledge.

Chris Hyams: You talked about creativity before, and I think earlier narratives around technology and automation is that it’s going to be good at doing repetitive tasks but not things that require human-level creativity. But now tools like OpenAI DALL-E can create images, ChatGPT can write poetry and write stories. How do you think our relationship with what we think of as human creativity will evolve given these types of tools that we can now use?

Sam Altman: Again, if we look at the historical examples, you know, you’ve heard artists say, 'The camera has been invented, painting is over, or art is over.' And then other people say, 'This is an incredible new tool, I’m going to make great art.' I think we’re going to see the same thing happen here, which is it’s always tempting to call it the end of creativity. It will not happen — I don’t believe it will happen — but as the tool chain changes, the output will change too. I think it’s amazing to see what artists are doing with these image generators, for example. I think it will soon be amazing to see what writers are doing to make novels be incredible with these new tools.

I had a conversation last night — it’s not quite about creativity, but I’m going to say it anyway because it’s just stuck in my mind so much, with a scientist. He was like, you know, I started using these tools, been studying the field — I am convinced that someday I will be able to ask an AI to cure cancer. And, yeah, maybe it will email me a few times and say, I need you to run this experiment in the wet lab and tell me the results, and then go off and think for a few more weeks. And then ask me one more experiment and come back and, whatever, and at the end cancer will be cured, or this particular cancer will be cured. And I was like, Yeah, I think that’ll happen too. You know, that’s actually one of the examples I often give. And he’s like, it makes me so sad. He’s like, look, of course, as a member of Team Human I’m thrilled for that. But your thing is making AGI, my thing is curing cancer, and I wanted to be the one to do it. And he’s like, I’ve really been wrestling with this because, again, as a member of Team Human, the faster the better, like, go at this for my own personal satisfaction. What I want is a tool that tells me, 'Go investigate this,' but doesn’t quite give me the answer, and then I still get to do it. And, you know, notwithstanding everything we said earlier, which I also still believe in, that stuck with me. I think it’ll be awesome when AI can do my job better, but I’ve been doing it for a while, and I got to have the fun part.

Chris Hyams: Fantastic. Well, Sam, thank you so much for joining us today. This was an incredible treat. I know for our customers who live and breathe in the world of work and hiring, thinking about what kind of impact this technology might have on them is something to think about every day, and to have you be able to weigh in on it is really incredible. So thanks so much for joining us.

Sam Altman: Really appreciate it. Thank you.

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