Reid Hoffman and OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar on where AI goes from here

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Trust is earned. It's not just doesn't just fall down on you like manna from heaven. It is earned, so it takes time and it's grindy. About a third of those one point, 2 billion people around the globe ask ChatGPT a health or wellness question every week. And if you go look in health deserts, that number spikes. It can be upwards of eighty, ninety of all users are using it for health or wellness. We just announced this morning 100,000 advertisers on the platform.

It's important because those one point, 2 billion people, ninety of them can get AI for free because we're building a durable business model behind it. And free is important because our mission is AGI for the benefit of humanity, not AGI for the benefit of humanity. Who can pay for it?

Hi folks, Jeff Berman here. Masters of Scale Summit is happening right now in San Francisco. You will hear more of the phenomenal conversations from the summit stage on Masters of Scale, Rapid Response, and Pioneers of AI in the weeks ahead. But we wanted you to hear this one right away. In today's episode, our very own Reid Hoffman sits down with OpenAI chief financial officer Sarah Friar. They discuss the frontier AI company's role in this extraordinary moment and what is coming next.

Stay tuned.

Okay, we get a little hug. Okay, since we were in a hearts conference, we get a little hug.

Yes, exactly. Well, it's, uh, you know, uh, super smart and and and super, uh, wonderful. I think, is the right way to describe you. That would be the

I will give you the check in the chat. Thank you.

yes, correct. Um, so let's start with what is the kind of age that is the age of AI?

Wow, that is a big question. Thank you for letting us be here. Um, we are in an incredible moment to be alive. Um, a lot of people talk about the age of AI as another industrial revolution, right? We laid the tr- rail tracks, we put up electricity wires. We kind of gave people the first taste of what it was like to get an extra hour of light in their homes. And I think we're in that early, early zone in the age of AI, but I think it's so much more than that.

Um, Sam has used this w- this term, a renaissance of creativity and innovation. Um, we announced yesterday the acquisition of a company called Orchestra Bio. And what is that? It's a platform for AI agents and scientists, so this is working together to speed up drug discovery, drug delivery out into the world. Um, beyond that, if you look at, you know, our platform today at OpenAI, what we're seeing is people going from asking so the kind of ChatGPT moment to doing so the agentic moment to actually really proactive.

Everybody in the world can now have a virtual co-worker. And you know, what does that mean for one point, 2 billion people who use ChatGPT every week? That's a fifth of the world's population. And they might be asking something fairly prosaic, like, What I make for dinner tonight for my picky kid, or literally doing something that is life-changing. That's what we're talking about. And and just a couple more comments on then what it means for OpenAI.

We are seeing an incredible inflection in our business, too. So of those, you know, for example, in ads, we just announced this morning 100,000 advertisers on the platform, um, now offering in eighty-nine different countries. But why is that important? It's important because those one point, 2 billion people, ninety of them can get AI for free because we're building a durable business model behind it. And free is important because our mission is AGI for the benefit of humanity, not AGI for the benefit of humanity.

Who can pay for it? Or who live inside a corporation, right? Literally, everyday people getting to benefit. And then I we're gonna talk about it, but it's it's not without risk either. These models, you know, cause I remember when you called me about Dolly and you were talking about a panda riding a bicycle, and I was like, Why is Reid Hoffman excited about a panda riding a bicycle? But we can talk Hey, it's about that later.

great. Um, but they're very powerful in areas like cyber. Um, the bad guys are getting access to very powerful Chinese models. We need to make sure the good guys, the defenders, have the tools. This morning, the journal just ran an article about PHP, where we've been working with them since the end of the summer. When we discovered using actually a M minus one model, five, six, all a set of vulnerabilities in PHP, which really means the internet.

So about 70% of websites would have been impacted, would have brought down probably a lot of the internet. So we've been working in a very secret way to get those vulnerabilities fixed before the offense discovers them. And so happy to announce today that we've done that work. Is the work done? Definitely not. Is the bar gonna keep getting raised? Absolutely. But yeah, the age of AI, I mean, I'm grateful to be alive right yeah, what a time now.

to be alive. Um, so um, last year we had Brené Brown on, and um, part of the thing for leadership and leadership in these times where we're redefining the scope of how society, you know, uh, industry, uh, operate. What it means to be human, what are where are we going? It's important to have the the cycles to think about the like big questions to make the space for that. So how do you do that? How does OpenAI do that?

Given that the questions here are like the invention of electricity, the invention of the printing press. So h how do you? How do you make that space for these kind of important, very big thoughts?

Yeah, and and happening, you know, the printing press or electricity happened a little bit at a much slower pace. Although I bet if you lived then, you thought it was an incredible pace, by the way. Um, to make the space, I mean, we've used a phrase called pacing the frontier, and pacing the frontier is really about, as we think about safety and alignment, giving our researchers and our whole company and the world, to some degree, time to digest.

Like, what are the implications? So right now, we have paced the frontier most recently by actually holding back our most powerful model. Um, partially because we want to make sure it's the safety and alignment is at a place where our researchers have a time to really think it through. That model is the model that solved the Navi Stokes Millennium Math problem, and also about 350 more theorems have certainly moved along. Um, from a theoretical proof perspective, what I think a lot about internally, where I try to make the space, is theories are great and we need to work closely with the scientific community on that.

But what does it actually mean in practice? Like, you know, I was a material scientist, so I actually remember Navi Stokes coming up only because I think Stokes was Irish. So I was very taken by that. I'm Northern Irish, in case you wonder why I'm going down that track, hence the green shoes. Um, but what does it really mean when you discover something in fluid dynamics from a theoretical math problem? It means now we actually can have thoughts on how to make heart valves in artificial hearts more, um, just more efficient, more effective.

It means data center cooling actually can become more efficient, which means that when we go into communities and talk about water use, we now can talk about less water being required. It's about two Olympic swimming pool sizes, by the way, for a data center, particularly one with a closed loop cooling system that uses about, um, 300 households worth of water per year. So it's not a big amount of water, but if we can make that a hundred households, suddenly it's a much better conversation with the communities.

So, to me, finding the time is about allowing that pacing of the frontier. It's allowing, like, if you saw us at work, we really try to. We just had an offsite last week at Sam's house. Friday and Saturday, we, you know, you give up all your time to sit down and have these much deeper conversations. So, unlike a lot of, you know, having grown up somewhat in corporate America, you did offsites. And it was to talk about, like, what's our revenue going to look like next year or next quarter, and how are we going to think about head count and so on?

Like, we, I would say, that shrinks back a lot. That's still my job make sure we have a strong financial footing, but most of the space is for these much bigger conversations. And, of course, it's how do we engage with the world writ large as we have those conversations and help people understand the pace at which we're moving.

yeah. Well, one of the key things is trust, cause trust in all institutions is at an all-time low, right? I mean, it's, it's, it's actually disastrous for society, it's disastrous for us functioning. And, um, it obviously makes business itself difficult. But given AI, and given the problem is is that most people are like, Ah, what's going on? What's what's what's the work? What's the effort to try to build some understanding and trust? Like, what, what are you doing?

What is OpenAI doing? What could people do to kind of help understand that?

yeah. So, first of all, trust is earned. It's not just doesn't just fall down on you like manna from heaven. It is earned, so it takes time and it's grindy. Because, you know, I always call it you're filling the bucket, cause we all the things will happen where you take. I always tell my kids like, you'll take stuff out of the bucket, but you got to fill the bucket. I would start by saying something like healthcare is actually a very strong footing for us in a world where people do trust AI and healthcare together.

So of those one point, 2 billion people around the globe, about a third ask ChatGPT a health or wellness question every week. And if you go look in health deserts, um, like West Texas, for example, is a health desert. That number spikes. It's not a third, it can be upwards of eighty, ninety of of all users are using it for health or wellness. So that's kind of a starting point where consumers feel it. Then we can create tools for physicians, which we've done, and to me, that's important.

Cause if you look at AI in the world of medicine, there's a lot we can talk about, you know, better, faster drug discovery, right? In Boston Children's Hospital, they gave us genetic data, diagnostic data, scientific literature, and today, I think they gave us something like 300 plus not yet resolved diseases to try to resolve. And today we've gotten to forty, so still a lot to get. But what does that forty mean? It means answers for families who didn't have an answer before.

But for physicians, a lot of what happens, or nurses, who are like the whole gamut. Um, a lot of their work is paperwork. My brother is a doctor in the UK in the NHS, he's an HDU doctor. What that means is if you show up in the ER, his job is to right away triage you. If you're having a heart attack, you go to cardio. If you've got a w- gunshot wound, you go to trauma, but mostly you don't know and that and you do not want to show up in front of my d, my brother.

That is n- not cause he's not a good doctor, but it means not good things are happening for you.

you're in trouble.

Do you think that this man wants to do paperwork in that moment? Let me fill out a form. He's like, No, I'm in, what can I do? And when I talk to him about how much he does, spends time on paperwork, we can shrink that. So then, if you think about how we work with enterprises, we work with some of the largest hospital chains in the world. And there we just did a proof of concept that showed HCA, which is the largest in the US, that we could speed the time a patient spends in hospital, lowering it by 25%.

What that means is those patients get out of hospital faster into community medicine, and they're not getting sicker. Cause often, if you hang around in a hospital too much, you will actually just catch the next disease. So it's a way to talk about the unified platform that OpenAI is building consumers to individual, you know, could be a dentist office, a doctor's office, to a large enterprise. And it's important that we're touching all three, which comes back to your question of trust.

Because then you start earning trust because you're showing up, creating outcomes, and you're not just telling the world, trust us, AI is great. You're actually showing what these magical outcomes can be.

So one of the things that kind of throws people off, um, and I think it's good for Sam to have said things like this. Which is, you have to accept some of the bad things, some of the risks, et cetera, because that is what the path looks like in order to deploy to the good things. Um, what's the way that that kind of you're cause, you know, one of your primary jobs is also navigation of risk.

How do you both, like from your perch and also open eye think, okay, here's how we navigate risk in order to get these good things?

So, first of all, it's deeply embedded at the company level through our mission. So AGI for the benefit of humanity. If we don't manage risk, we will not be able to achieve the mission. And so that actually is a very strong alignment function for us internally, because then every decision we make, from small to really big ones, has to come back to say, is it mission aligned? So in terms of the managing of risks, sometimes, again, it's always actions speak louder than words, right?

In the case of of models that are very cyber capable, we have both number one held back models till we're sure. That's not necessarily great for business in the short run, but it's absolutely mission aligned, and I believe good for business in the long run. Second is to do the work right with something like what we saw with agentic swarms, making sure we feel it's safe to now start repacing at the frontier. And then I think the third thing is going out into the world, like there's risk inside of our business.

But frankly, I feel like I've been on a personal world tour to remind everyone where we are with cyber and the need to patch those vulnerabilities because it's starting to happen. I think I was in Europe, I don't think last week I was in Europe, bad tick. I was in Europe. And, um, one of the news reports was a a supermarket chain in France where hackers had gotten into their systems and turned up the temperature on their freezers, spoiling all of the frozen goods.

Like that is the sort of hacking that we have not really seen historically before. We've thought about ransomware and trying to break into banks to steal money, but this is going to start happening in many, many other ways. I started my career actually covering infosec, so I've seen the original viruses, NIMDA, Code Red. So we're just on a continuum of that. But again, the speed is ticking up, and I think part of earning trust is showing people like this is where we're going and then providing them frontier tools to be on the defense.

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So one of the things is the risk is gonna have to be managed, not just from OpenAI, but from the industry, from governments, from banks, from folks with h- with frozen good freezers, right, Indeed, et cetera. Um, how do you kind of, uh, help, like, how should p each people think about their responsibilities? What is your hope for? What is the various ways to work together, either companies and companies, industries, government? How do we collectively navigate these risks?

yeah, so first of all, at the industry level, I mean, first of all, it's just getting started, right? We are seeing some really major shifts happen, and we have a phenomenal economic research team. And some of the data they put out, um, uh, in September showed if you look at on our platform and we get to see a broad swath of what are companies doing today. The frontier firms that we define as kind of the top ten of companies in the world, the number of agentic tokens they're using today versus even just an average firm is about eight x, and that number's gone from about two x back in January.

So actually, the pace of companies using technology has really started to accelerate for the frontier. And if you're average or, god forbid, below average, you cannot get left behind. And I'll give you another stat at OpenAI, internally, often say we have this benefit of living in the future. Let's not waste it. So if you were to look at our agentic token use, it's thirty three x the frontier. So my belief is in a year from now, two years from now, the frontier firms will have caught up to us, the the traditional firms will have caught up to the frontier.

And so that growth is happening, that transformation is happening. Of course, what does that really mean inside of companies? That means you're probably starting with things like coding tools. You've now started to deploy cyber, you're starting to deploy knowledge work like Dots, the product we just rolled out. So the virtual assistant, mine is called Una. She has a fine Irish name because Una was the wife of Fin McCool. If you know any Northern Irish mythology, he was the giant, but his wife was the brains of the operation.

She was Una, she was my brains of the operation, female power. yes, and Um, but they're starting to roll out that knowledge work where people literally have that virtual co-worker, and then they're starting to transform based on their vertical, like a life sciences company, a chip design company, um, you name it, a bank, or by horizontal. Like, actually, what I'm seeing in the office of the CFO, right? I'm trying to do finance like no one's ever done it before.

We are doing finance like no one's ever done it. So that's kind of one way is how do we talk to companies and make it real? Um, by the way, we just announced this morning we're live on GCP, on Google, so we now can meet our customers on every cloud that exists, um, or the the all the big ones Amazon, Azure, GCP, Oracle. That's gonna be a huge tailwind into 2027. On the government front, it's also about going to meet governments where they are, right?

The reason I was in Dublin is Ireland right now has the presidency of the EU. I wanted to spend time with the Taoiseach, cause I'm probably one of the few people that can say his title correctly.

yes, and but do tell them what it is, cause, uh, while I know what Taoiseach is, I'm The Taoiseach not.

is the the prime minister, effectively or president, whatever your title, but Taoiseach and Taoiseach. Um, because we really wanna make sure continents like Europe don't get left behind, right? In that top ten of frontier firms that we see, only ten of them are European-based. So what's that gonna mean for GDP growth in Europe? Like, you do not want to get left behind again, like you did to some degree in the internet revolution. So it's both bringing governments along, but also recognizing, look, we are talking about having regulation that makes sense for frontier labs.

And today we work with organizations like Cassie here in the US, ASI, the AISI in, um, the UK. But you have to find people who can actually keep pace with you, those two organizations do. But I think those are some of the main ways, like inside of organizations, meeting them where they are, solving their actual problems, not some sort of made up, like, here's what you could do, here's what you can do. And then a government's showing up and making sure we're part of the conversation.

so our theme for Masters of Scale Summit this year is our agency. It's not just because I wrote did I wrote this book, Super Agency, which I know you have a copy of,

I do.

cause cause I sent you one. Um,

No No, I I bought it off the shelf, read it five times.

yes, um, but we'd actually talked about it. So it was it wasn't, it wasn't, uh, it wasn't, uh, it wasn't meant to be quite so self-deprecating, but it is entertaining. Um, so, uh, um, so one of the reasons I did this is because it's really important, and it's part of the reason why we're doing the summit this way. It's really important to realize that agency is some degree a mindset. Like people worry about AI because they worry about.

It's, uh, it's like taking my agency from me. Like, takes my job, it it takes my cognition, it takes, you know, the and it's like, no, no, that's a question of mindset, how you approach it, how you engage it. So how how do you think about how the world at large, not just the the builders of these amazing AI, should think about their agency? And how should they? They kind of, uh, em embody their agency with AI?

yeah. So I mean, first of all, I I just find extremist conversations so frustrating. There's so much nuance and shades of everything between white and whatever color we're going over here. Um, the reality is, if we go to the world of jobs to start with, jobs are changing, but actually work is changing inside of jobs. Again, what we see in our research is about if you look at someone's job title, but then how they use ChatGPT, they only use it for about forty of what their job title says.

Let me make that a little more real. As a finance person, if you show up with a finance job title today on our platform, you do about twenty five of your tasks on ChatGPT that are truly financial. Like, run me a DCF, or God, now I've started to talk in finance speak. It's scary, okay, do a reconciliation of treasury or whatever. Twenty five are engineering tasks. What does that mean? It means everyone has now become a builder.

I lo- I am, like, set free to now build sites, to build, like, uh, whether it's for fun stuff, to professional stuff, in a way that, you know, I've done more coding in the last two months than from when way back, and when I actually was an engineer. And now the coding language for me is English. I just talk to my computer. I don't even tippy-tap anymore. So twenty five is engineering, twenty five is marketing, which gladdens my heart, cause I tell finance people all the time, if you don't realize you're in sales, you are losing because you need to go sell.

You need to sell an annual plan, you need to go sell a change to a number, you

Budget?

need to sell a budget, you really need to sell a budget. Um, particularly at OpenAI, keeping people to a budget is a sales motion in and of itself. So people's jobs are really changing. Um, again, sorry, cause Dublin is very fresh in my mind. I did an event on Monday night. You know, I have a nonprofit on the side, or, uh, that I do with an amazing co-founder called Ladies Who Launch. So it was about 250 to 300 women in the room, and just the excitement on stage of them talking about how empowered they felt, how much agency they had gotten back.

They were talking about, Oh my goodness, when I did my first startup, and I used to be awake to the wee small hours creating the pitch deck. Cause I had, you know, my two kids, I had to get them to bed, and then I would start the work. Or then I would walk into these meetings to fundraise, and people would blind me with like, DCF-type terms that I didn't know what that meant. Now I just sit there and I ask chat, and I feel so empowered.

Um, too, I was talking about it earlier in the green room. One of my best examples was Lynda dot ai. This is a company, um, built by two sisters in Dublin. Their dad is a dentist. He had a receptionist, which is their word, um, called Linda, and their whole lives was, How do we clone Linda? Cause Linda was so good. They have cloned Linda in Lynda dot ai. Lynda dot ai worked with Linda to call the 600 people he had in his reci- you know, in his contacts, to say, Hey, you should come in and get your teeth cleaned or looked at or whatever.

Three days later, cause Lynda dot ai doesn't stop, um, Lynda dot ai had 250 new scheduled patients coming in. So it's great for the dentist, it's great for the people, and it's great for teeth. And that, to me, is agency coming back into the world in really optimistic ways. I am super optimistic for the builders of the world, cause they are empowered like never before.

100%. Um, so we only have a couple minutes left. Um, and by the way, thank you for the gymnastics. I know you did on your calendar in order to get get here and be with us.

For you, it's always seven.

No, um, but I actually think it's worth sharing. Where are you going to next and why?

Okay, okay, so I I'm running out the door for Reed. I will make everything work. Um, but today I'm supposed to be in Savannah, Georgia, um, which I'm super excited to go to. We have a new powered land, um, uh, site that's going to become a large data center, and I wanna go spend some time with the community. Because data centers are clearly can be a contentious conversation for communities. They can be really good. They bring jobs, like really high-skilled jobs, like Abilene, Texas, that West Texas that I was just talking about.

They bring electricians, HVAC. Um, we do a lot in the community to actually give people those skill sets, and so we find a lot of the unions actually are quite excited by what's coming in Georgia. What we've done is given the community 80 million grant that they can deploy over five years, but they get to decide what it means, like, what do they wanna do? And the very first ask that came to me was we would like to pay for free school dinners or free school lunches.

Um, and I was like, Absolutely, like, how much is it? It was like four, 5 million. I'm like, that is an easy decision. And since we did that, the number of of the uptake on this free lunch has gone up fifty. It's not to give us like a huge amount of kudos. I'm actually saying it because I think this is where you earn trust. You go, you listen, you hear concerns, you talk about how you're mitigating, you bring communities along, but most importantly, you show up and you don't tell them what they need to do, you ask them.

And I think this is the important part about reindustrializing America right now. Like, in totality, AI is probably adding about a point to GDP, depending on how you cut it. That is growth, growth begets better outcomes, I think, for the nation writ large. And this is why I wanna see growth, not just here, but I'd like to see it back in my homeland. I'd like to see it back in my home continent. I would like to see it around the world.

And I think I'm, you know, like I s we said at the beginning of this talk, there's never been a better time to be alive. We need to figure out how to embrace while managing the risks, but how cool that we get to do this.

So you can see why I wanted to open with Sarah. Let's give her a hand.

Thank you.

Thanks so much to OpenAI's Sarah Friar for joining us at the 2026 Masters of Scale Summit. This conversation was recorded live at the Presidio Theater in San Francisco. For more from the event, be sure to check out our YouTube channel. Masters of Scale is a Wait What original? Our executive producer is Eve Tro. Senior supervising producer is Tricia Bobita. Associate producer is Masha Makatunina. Video editor is MG Frederick. Senior talent executive is Stephanie Stern.

Mixing and mastering by the audio boys themselves, Aaron Besanelli and Brian Pugh, with original music by the remarkable Ryan Holiday. Visit Masters of Scale dot com to find the transcript for this episode and to subscribe to our newsletter, and be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel.