Sam Altman, the CEO of Open AI, the startup behind ChatGPT and Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft, Open AI's biggest investor.

They spoke to the Economists editor in chief about what the future of AI really looks like.

Sam, let's start with you. What are the most important capabilities that Chat GPT will develop in the next year?

The world had like a two week freak out with GPT-4, right?

This changes everything. AGI is coming tomorrow.

There are no jobs by the end of the year, and now people are like, "Why is it so slow?"

And I love that, I think that's a great thing about the human spirit that we always want more and better.

We've not had this where there has been some general purpose technology whose diffusion happened instantaneously everywhere.

In any place, health care and education is most of the government spent.

You now have, right, the ability to give every student and every citizen of the of the globe a better health advice and a better personalized tutor.

You know, I often think one interesting way to measure this is what percent of tasks can GPT-4 do, let's say it's 10%, can GPT-5 do 12% of human tasks or 15% or 20%?

But the fact that so many people are able to use it for productivity in their workflow, that's the power.

And I know it's not as satisfying as saying, here's each thing it will do, but it's that it becomes a companion for knowledge work.

It becomes a way to use a computer.

I hear that.

And that's a absolutely appropriate answer to my question.

But I guess I'm trying to get at the sense of whether this is incremental or whether it's radical, even in the next year.

I believe that someday we will make something that qualifies as an AGI by whatever fuzzy definition you want. The world will have a two week freak out and then people will go on with their lives.

Sam Altman just said the world would only have a two-week freak out when we get to AGI.

That's quite a statement to make.

One thing I say a lot is no one knows what happens next.

And I can't see to the other side of that event horizon with any detail, but it does seem like the deep human motivations will not go anywhere.

This is when people start getting alarmed that we have no idea. - Why?

Well, I think that's just... - We're gonna habe some intelligence that is more intelligence than all of us and we have no idea what happened.

No, no, I like one thing I love to do is go back and read about the contemporaneous accounts of technological revolutions at the time and the expert predictions are just always totally wrong.

And you need to have some flexibility in your opinions and look, have a tight feedback loop of how it's going with the world.

The amount of focus on safety and regulation is sort of very, very high.

Tell me whether you think regulators have got it right or whether we're not doing enough.

At this point, you know, if I look at what the White House EO is or what the UK Safety Summit is, what's happening in Europe, what's happening in Japan,

they are going to have a say, nation states are absolutely going to have a say on what is the regulation that controls any technology development.

Most importantly, what is ready for deployment or not.

And so I feel like we will all be subject to those rags.

If you were ever in that room and you thought to yourself, "This is getting dangerous and this could actually have consequences that I would not want upon the world."

Would you then shout stop and would you stop?

There's no, like, one big magic red button we have that blows up the data center which I think some people sort of assume exists.

It's not this binary go-stop decision.

It is the many little decisions along the way about allow this, don't allow this.

How to predict what the the risks of the future are going to be, how to mitigate those set this new value here.

Things like that.

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