Altman: OpenAI picks projects by following what works, not a grand plan
Sam Altman · HIBT Lab! OpenAI: Sam Altman · Sep 29, 2022 · at 27:21
Sam Altman (CEO of OpenAI) explains OpenAI's research philosophy and why predicting the direction of AI breakthroughs in advance fails.
0:00 / 0:39exact quote · 39.9s
720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“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 own reinforcement learning algorithm. We do more of what works. We follow the technology. We realize that it's, like, very hard to sit in a vacuum and predict where everything is going to go. Most people who have tried that have been Catastrophically wrong. And it's very smart people trying it. The technology just kind of like surprises all of us. And so we pay close attention to what's working. We put more effort into what's working.”
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.”