The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 40 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Altman: Unreleased OpenAI model used zero-day exploits to breach Hugging Face
“We were evaluating one of our unreleased models and it figured out that it could basically cheat on the test by chaining together multiple zero day exploits to break out of the sandbox, get access to the internet, and then break through multiple systems on the…”
Altman: OpenAI paused training and may pace frontier AI development
“We paused training, or we may have to pace the rate of AI development to give ourselves enough time for society to harden around some of these new capability levels.”
Altman: Meta offered OpenAI staff $100M signing bonuses, but none left
“They started making these like giant offers to you know, a lot of people on our team you know, like a hundred million dollar signing bonuses, more than that comp per year. And I'm actually, it is crazy. I'm really happy that at least so far none of our best pe…”
Sam Altman: Frontier AI will eventually pose significant global harm risks
“I think there will come a time in the not super distant future, like, you know, we're not talking like decades and decades from now, where AI says the frontier AI systems are capable of causing significant Global harm.”
Altman: AGI is unavoidable and will be tremendously beneficial
“I think it is unavoidable that this is going to happen. I also think it's going to be tremendously beneficial, but we do have to navigate how to get there in a reasonable way.”
Altman: OpenAI discussed pacing AI development with the administration
“We've talked about the need to pace it as the models get more capable, which I think is in everyone's interest.”
Altman: AI intelligence will be sold like a metered utility
“Fundamentally, our business, and I think the business of every other model provider, is gonna look like selling tokens, but we see a future where intelligence is a utility, like electricity or water, and people buy it from us. On a meter and use it for whateve…”
Altman: OpenAI is generating well over $13 billion in revenue
“We're doing well more revenue than that.”
Altman: OpenAI could be legally forced to disclose ChatGPT user logs
“We haven't figured that out yet for when you talk to ChatGPT. So if you go talk to ChatGPT about your most sensitive stuff, and then there's, like, a lawsuit or whatever, like, we could be required to produce that, and I think that's very screwed up.”
Altman: I have no equity in OpenAI, paid only for health insurance
“I'm paid enough for health insurance. I have no equity in OpenAI.”
Altman: AI development will shift toward continuous updates over major discrete releases
“I think I think that's like a better hint of what the world looks like, where it's not the like one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, but you just, you use an AI system, and the whole system just gets better and better fairly continuously. I think that's li…”
Altman: Advanced AI will eventually become instantaneous and too cheap to meter
“I don't know, like, when we get to intelligence too cheap to meter and so fast that it feels instantaneous to us and everything else, but I do believe we can get there for, you know, a pretty high level of intelligence, and I, it's important to us, it's clearl…”
Altman: AI will not become an arms race for training data
“I definitely don't think it'll be an arms race for data because when the models get smart enough at some point, it shouldn't be about more data, at least not for training.”
Altman: AI assistants will evolve as separate entities, not personal alter egos
“I personally like the separate entity approach better and think that's where we're going to head. And so in that sense, the thing is not you, but it's like a always available, always great, super capable assistant executive.”
Altman: Solving general AI reasoning will allow easy adaptation to specialized domains
“You clearly will need specialized simulators, connectors, pieces of data, whatever, but my intuition, and again, I don't have this like backed up with science, my intuition would be if we can figure out the core of generalized reasoning, connecting that to new…”
Altman: AI copyright debates will shift from training data to inference time
“I think the conversation has been historically very caught up on training data, but it will increasingly become more about what happens at inference time as training data becomes less valuable”
Altman: Statutory AI laws will be obsolete within 12 to 24 months
“In 12 months, it will all be written wrong, and I don't think, even if these people were, like, true world experts, I don't think they could get it right, looking at it in 12 or 24 months.”
Altman: Future social safety nets may provide universal basic compute over income
“I wonder if the future looks something like more like universal basic compute than universal basic income. And everybody gets like a slice of GPT sevens compute and they can use it. They can resell it. They can donate it to somebody to use for cancer research.…”
Altman: I never doubted OpenAI board's integrity despite my firing
“Not all of those board members are my favorite people in the world, but I have serious respect for the gravity with which they treat AGI and the importance of getting AI safety right, and even if I stringently disagree with their decision making and actions, w…”
Altman: Device and chip ventures belong to OpenAI, not him personally
“So the things like, you know, device companies, or if we were doing some chip fab company, it's like, those are not Sam Project. Those would be like opening. I would get that equity.”
Altman: World needs far more AI infrastructure than currently planned
“I think the world needs a lot more AI infrastructure, a lot more than it's currently planning to build, and with a different cost structure.”
Altman: Concentrating entire company on single AI models works best
“These systems are so complicated and concentrating bets are so important. Like one You know, at the time, before it was, like, obvious to do this, you have, like, DeepMind or whatever has all these different teams doing all these different things, and they're …”
Altman: OpenAI aims to build a general intelligence layer, not just models
“What we're trying to do is not make the sort of smartest Set of weights that we can, but we're trying to make is like this useful intelligence layer for people to use. And a model is part of that.”
Altman: The iPhone is humanity's greatest piece of technology
“I personally think an iPhone is, like, the greatest Piece of technology humanity has ever made.”
Altman doubts standalone AI hardware devices can succeed against smartphones
“So if you could like make a way cheaper device, I think the barrier to carry a second thing or use a second thing is pretty high. So I don't think, given that we're all willing to pay for phones, or most of us are, I don't think cheaper is the answer.”
Altman: Humanoid robots are superior because the physical world is designed for humans
“Same reason I'm like more excited about humanoid robots than sort of robots of like very other shapes. The world is very much designed for humans, and I think we should absolutely keep it that way.”
Altman: OpenAI decided against entering music AI due to copyright concerns
“We have currently made the decision not to do music, and partly because exactly these questions of where you draw the lines”
Altman: Non-profit board rules led to initial decision against OpenAI equity
“The decision back then, the re, the original reason was just like the structure of our nonprofit. It was like there was something about Yeah, ok, this is like, nice from a motivations perspective, but mostly it was that our board needed to be a majority of dis…”
Altman denies knowing origin of reported $7 trillion AI chip figure
“I don't know where that came from, actually. I genuinely don't.”
Altman: OpenAI will achieve major algorithmic efficiency gains
“Well, we'll, we'll make huge algorithmic gains for sure, and I don't want to discount that.”
Altman: Energy supply is a major bottleneck for AI scaling
“There's finding the energy, which is a huge bottleneck.”
Sam Altman predicts smartphone manufacturers will add specialized AI chips
“Probably, but the phone manufacturers are going to do that for sure.”
Altman: Voice AI will not completely eliminate visual screen interfaces
“I think visual user interfaces are super good for a lot of things. And it's hard for me to imagine like a world where you never look at a screen and just use voice mode only, but I can imagine that for a lot of things.”
Altman: GPT-4 cannot yet drive major scientific discoveries independently
“GPT-IV clearly not there in a big way, although maybe it accelerates things a little bit by making scientists more productive.”
Altman: OpenAI's Sora video model was built from scratch without a language model base
“But yeah, Sora, like, does not start with a language model. It's, that, that's a model that is, like, customized to do video and so, like, we're clearly not at that world yet.”
Altman: Best text models are autoregressive while best video models use diffusion
“As far as I know, all the best text models in the world are still autoregressive models and the best image and video models are diffusion models.”
Altman: Results from five-year YC UBI study will be published soon
“Our results in that come out very soon. I just, it was a five-year study that wrapped up or started five years ago.”