What-if
Altman: AGI is an exception to capitalism and should be government-led
“Obviously I think capitalism is great. But I think AGI is sort of an exception to that. In a well-run society, I think even if we rewound the US, you know, 50 plus years, this would absolutely happen by the government.”
Insight
Altman: Open-sourcing AI model weights is an irreversible one-way door
“If we just publish the weights of a model on the internet, and then we realize, like there's actually a safety issue here, we can't take that back. It's done. It's like a one-way door. We also cannot put any usage restrictions on it after we open source it.”
Prediction Held up
Altman: AI is automating creative jobs before blue-collar labor
“You know, the strong consensus Five, 10 years ago, was that first of all the AI was going to come for the blue-collar jobs. Second of all would be the less sophisticated white-collar jobs. Third of all would be the very high cognitive load white-collar jobs li…”
Opinion
Altman: Becoming a VC felt like an admission of defeat
“I didn't, like, have a ton of respect for the career path. And so there was, like, some sense in which it was an admission of defeat about, you know, I just, I can't run a company, so I'm gonna go do the easy job, or I'm gonna go do the retirement job or somet…”
Opinion
Altman: AGI will likely be the most important invention in human history
“And I think if we're able to accomplish that, it will be perhaps the most important invention in human history, and it will be the culmination of this phenomenal amount of effort all the way down the stack and like the collective knowledge, accomplishment, mor…”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Altman: AGI will eventually be capable of finding a cure for cancer
“Eventually, now this will require more compute, but if we society at allocate to compute to that, you can say, like, could you go off and find a cure for cancer? And it can spend a lot of its compute cycles doing amazing scientific progress like that.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Altman: Everyone will eventually have an AGI companion assisting them all day
“But I imagine that we get to a world where each of us has sort of like a, what feels like an AGI companion that we are talking to all day that is helping us be the best version of ourselves, learn, be efficient, be happier, and we'll all experience that way.”
Assertion Supported
Altman: OpenAI's board can wipe equity to zero for safety
“We also have something in our documents which says if we need to for safety, the board can just totally wipe out everyone's equity value to nothing.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Altman: Models orders of magnitude above GPT-3 could enable massive disinformation
“Like, at some point there will come a time, one, two, three orders magnitude, who knows what, how much more powerful than GPT-III, where I think a language model Can really have a huge disinformation effect on the world.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Altman: Powerful digital intelligence will exist within 10 years
“Sometimes these things take longer than you think, but let's say, like, in 10 years, I think there will be powerful digital intelligence in the world.”
Opinion
Altman: Traditional work should be optional
“I think, like, traditional work, in the way we think of it, should be optional, and you should be able to do less of it.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Altman: Human creativity and desire for status will not disappear with AI
“I don't know what the jobs of the future will look like, but I am confident that human creativity Desire for status. Desire to, like, do new things and to, like, accomplish. That's not gonna go anywhere.”
Opinion
Altman: The best long-term future involves humans merging with AI
“And the most positive long-term futures that I can imagine involve some degree of a merge. It doesn't have to be the crazy sci-fi, like, you know, plug something into our brains or upload ourselves or whatever. But at a minimum, I think it needs to involve som…”
Disclosure
Altman: Angel investing paid orders of magnitude more than founding Loopt
“I made like orders of magnitude more money from angel investments that I made. That I spent no time on the thing I poured my life into.”
Disclosure
Altman: OpenAI paused robotics research because hardware and simulators were too limited
“Well, it turned out to be a mistake. I mentioned that Dota was a great environment. It turns out that robotics are a very hard environment. Robotics is hard, and it's not hard because the machine learning is hard. It's hard because the simulator is bad, the ro…”
Assertion Supported
Altman: OpenAI charter permits shutting down to merge with leading rivals
“And we have something called the merge and assist clause, which says, similar to that, if another effort's ahead, and we want to avoid a race condition we can just shut down and merge with some other effort.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Altman: AI will become a ubiquitous layer across all software
“And I think the same thing will happen for AI. There will be a layer of intelligence provided by us and others. It's just everywhere. And as the systems continually get smarter, everything you use will get smarter and smarter as well.”
Insight
Altman: Location apps struggled because adults have far less spontaneity
“Even as the world has gotten very mobile, most people are sort of still at home or work all the time, and there's just, like, far less spontaneity than it felt like to, like, a, you know, twenty-year-old or whatever I was at the time.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Altman: Silicon Valley was not geared toward capital-intensive science
“There's a thing about Silicon Valley, which is it's, it had not been that well geared towards the time and capital intensive science projects.”
Assertion Supported
Altman: Deep neural networks showed performance scaling with compute in 2012
“And then in 2012 deep neural networks started to work. And not only did they start to work, it appeared that the more compute you threw at them, the better they got.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Altman: In 2016 researchers believed AGI was a century away
“At the time, People thought we were crazy. Like, good researchers say you've totally discredited yourself by talking about AGI. Most other people were like, this is, you know, a hundred years away or more.”
Insight
Altman: OpenAI picks projects by following what works, not a grand plan
“The way we pick projects to work on is, like, not as exciting as everybody would hope. You know, I think there's this belief that you have a bunch of people, like, sitting in a room picking this, like, brilliant secret strategy. We just sort of, like, run our …”
Insight
Altman: Helion Has Clear Roadmap Certainty While OpenAI Operates in Uncertainty
“The other company I'm involved with is this nuclear fusion company called Helion. And there are a lot of similarities between the two companies in terms of like a very hard Scientific and engineering problem. But the biggest difference is like what to do, what…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Altman: The government refused to fund OpenAI
“We did also just see if the government wanted to fund us. They definitely did not.”
Sam Altman