GPT-4 boss: Don't panic, I have a plan, the future of AGI is really bright!

OpenAI’s chatbot shocked the world.

But when people realized that the technology was also a way to spread disinformation and persuade people to do dangerous things, some critics accused Altman of acting recklessly. .

Many industry leaders, artificial intelligence researchers and academics consider ChatGPT to be a fundamental technological shift, as significant as the birth of the web browser or the iPhone. But few can agree on the future of the technology.

Some people think it will lead to a utopia where everyone has all the time and money they need. Others believe it could destroy humanity. Others spend most of their time arguing that the technology will never be as powerful as everyone says it is, insisting that neither nirvana nor doomsday is still far away.

Over the past week, more than a thousand artificial intelligence experts and technology leaders have called on OpenAI and other companies to suspend their efforts on systems like ChatGPT jobs, saying they "pose profound risks to society and humanity."

As CEO of OpenAI, Altman embodies each of these seemingly contradictory views in some way, and he hopes to bring this strange, powerful pushing flawed, flawed technology into the future while balancing countless possibilities.

#This means he is often criticized from all directions. But Greg Brockman, president of OpenAI, thinks this is appropriate: "If you make people on both extremes equally uncomfortable, then you're doing something right."

Manhattan Project leader Robert Oppenheimer believed that the atomic bomb was an inevitable product of scientific progress, and Ultraman shared the same birthday as Oppenheimer. When talking about OpenAI's technology, Altman also quoted him as saying: "Technology happens because it is possible." He believes that artificial intelligence will happen in some way, and it will do things that even he can't imagine. Wonderful thing, and we can find ways to mitigate the harm it can cause.

This attitude reflects Ultraman's own development trajectory. He climbed fairly steadily toward success and wealth, driven by effective personal skills. It makes sense that he believes good things will happen.

But, he also said, if he's wrong, there's an escape hatch: In contracts with investors like Microsoft, OpenAI's board reserves the right to shut down the technology at any time s right.

Self-pull

Ultraman is a person living in a contradiction. He is a vegetarian but raises cows.

When he talks about the technology developed by his company, he believes that technology will "solve some of our most pressing problems, truly improve living standards, and find ways for human will and creativity to Better uses."

But he's not entirely sure what problems it will solve. At the same time, he is equally concerned that the technology could cause serious harm if it fell into the hands of authoritarian governments.

Kelly Sims, a partner at the venture capital firm Thrive Capital who worked with Altman as a board advisor at OpenAI, said he felt like he was constantly arguing with himself: "In conversations, , he himself is on both sides of the debate."

The question is whether Ultraman's two sides are ultimately compatible: Does it make sense to be ahead of the curve if it could end in disaster? Ultraman is of course determined to see how this happens.

As president of Silicon Valley startup accelerator and seed investor Y Combinator from 2014-2019, he advised a steady stream of new companies and astutely invested in several that are now household names companies, including Airbnb, Reddit and Stripe.

He prides himself on his ability to identify whether a technology can achieve exponential growth.

I'm not interested in money

Like many people in Silicon Valley, whose personal wealth is tied up in a variety of public and private companies, Altman is like them . And his wealth is not amazing.

He does not have any shares in OpenAI. The only money he makes from the company is an annual salary of about $65,000 and a small portion of Y Combinator's old investment in the company.

Paul Graham, the founder of Y Combinator, is his partner and mentor. He explained Altman’s motivations this way:

"Why does he To take a job that won't make him richer? One answer is that a lot of people do that once they have enough money, and that's what Sam did. And the other answer is that he likes power."

Bill Gates Must Be Like This

In the late 1990s, the student body of John Burroughs, a private prep school named after the 19th-century American naturalist and philosopher, was rife with anti-gay sentiments. of fear.

At the beginning of the 21st century, 17-year-old student Ultraman began to change the culture of the school, convincing teachers one by one to post "safe space" signs on classroom doors as a way to support people like him Statement from gay students.

Georgeann Kepchar, who teaches the school’s advanced computer science course, considers Altman one of her most gifted computer science students: “He has creativity and vision, plus With his ambition and strength of character, he could persuade others to cooperate with him and put his ideas into action. Altman also told me that he once successfully asked a particularly homophobic teacher to post safe space signs."

After his freshman year, he worked in the artificial intelligence and robotics laboratory of Professor Andrew Ng, who later founded the flagship artificial intelligence laboratory at Google. But he said he learned more from playing poker at night during his brief stay at Stanford than from other college activities, and that poker taught him how to see people and assess risks.

"How to notice patterns that people have over time, how to make decisions with very imperfect information, how to decide when it's worth the pain to get more information, is a Great game."

Graham, who has worked with Altman for a decade, sees the same persuasiveness in the St. Louis native: "He has a natural ability, Can convince people to do things. If it's not innate, at least it was fully developed before he was 20. The first time I met Sam, he was 19, and I was thinking : 'That's what Bill Gates must be.'"

When Graham resigned as president of Y Combinator, he picked the 28-year-old Altman as his successor shocked people in Silicon Valley because this wasn’t about hiring coders or engineers or artificial intelligence researchers; he was the one who was going to set the agenda, build the team, and close the deals.

As the president of YC, Altman almost gave up on the company’s expansion, established a new investment fund and a new research laboratory, and made the company provide consulting every year The number of companies expanded to hundreds.

He also began working on several projects outside of investment firms, including OpenAI, a nonprofit he founded in 2015 with a group including Musk. YC became increasingly worried that Ultraman was exhausting himself, so he decided to refocus his attention on a project that, as he said, would have a real impact on the world: artificial intelligence.

According to his brother, he believed he was one of the few people who could change the world through artificial intelligence research.

In 2019, just as OpenAI’s research was beginning to take off, Mr. Altman seized the opportunity to step down as president of Y Combinator and focus on a company with less than 100 employees. , a company that doesn’t even know how to open a payroll.

Within a year, he transformed OpenAI into a nonprofit with a for-profit arm. That way, he could seek funding to build a machine that could do anything the human brain can do.

He met Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella at an annual gathering of tech leaders often called "Billionaire Summer Camp," and later met in person with Nadella and Microsoft's chief technology officer Official Kevin Scott negotiated the deal.

Mr. Brockman, President of OpenAI, said that Altman’s talent lies in understanding people’s needs: “He really tries to find the right solution for a person. Saying what matters most and then finding a way to get it to them is an algorithm he uses over and over."

This agreement puts OpenAI and Microsoft at the center of a movement , a movement poised to reshape everything from search engines to email apps to online tutors. And the speed at which this is happening has surprised even those who have been tracking this technology for decades.

Amidst this craze, Ultraman remained as calm as ever. Microsoft CTO Scott believes that Ultraman will eventually become as great as Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg.

"These are people who have left an indelible mark on the fabric of the tech industry, and maybe the fabric of the world. I think Sam will be one of those people. 》

The Long Road to Dreaming

Yudkowsky and his work played a key role in the creation of OpenAI and DeepMind. He also helped spawn a vast online community of rationalists and effective altruists who believe artificial intelligence is an existential risk and fear it will one day destroy the world.

Researchers from many top artificial intelligence laboratories, including OpenAI, belong to this very influential group. They don't see this as hypocrisy: Many of them believe that because they are in the best position to build this technology, they understand the dangers better than others.

Altman believes that effective altruists have played an important role in the rise of artificial intelligence and can alert industries to the dangers. He also thinks they exaggerate the dangers.

While OpenAI was developing ChatGPT, many other companies, including Google and Meta, were building similar technology. But it was Ultraman and OpenAI who chose to share this technology with the world.

Many in the field have criticized the decision, arguing that it sets off a race to release technology that will go wrong, that will be made up, and that may be used quickly to spread false information quickly.

On Friday, the Italian government temporarily banned ChatGPT from being used in the country, citing concerns over privacy and exposure of minors to dangerous content.

Altman believes that rather than developing and testing this technology completely behind closed doors before fully releasing it, it is better to share it gradually so that everyone can better understand the risks and how to deal with them. This is safer.

It will be a "very slow takeoff," he said. He said he could not imagine a world in which human intelligence was useless. If he was wrong, he thought he could make amends for human faults.

He rebuilt OpenAI into what he calls a profit-capable company. This allowed him to secure billions of dollars in financing by promising profits to investors such as Microsoft. But those profits are capped, and any additional revenue will be siphoned back into the OpenAI non-profit organization founded in 2015.

His grand idea is that OpenAI will capture most of the world's wealth by creating AGI and then redistribute this wealth to the people.

However, he is not sure how to redistribute the wealth. He believes that in this new world, money may mean different things, but "I think AGI can help solve this problem."

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