Altman: OpenAI paused robotics research because hardware and simulators were too limited
Sam Altman · HIBT Lab! OpenAI: Sam Altman · Sep 29, 2022 · at 26:28
Sam Altman (CEO of OpenAI) explains why OpenAI halted its robotics initiative (including the Rubik's Cube project Dactyl) despite early technical success.
0:00 / 0:43exact quote · 43.7s
720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“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 robot breaks, you can't run it that fast like you know, you don't have like hundreds of thousands of robots like you have hundreds of thousands of CPUs to run a game on. And so we thought it would be interesting because robotic control seemed very interesting to us at the time and still does. But what happened is it was too hard of an environment, and we ended up pausing our robotics work. Someday we'll come back to it when the robots and the simulators get better.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Sam Altman
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.”
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.”
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…”
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…”
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…”
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.”