Sam Altman
About
OpenAI CEO, former YC president, early YC founder
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Claims by Sam Altman (20 of 123)
Publish A Model's Desired Behavior Spec
To handle bias and safety disputes, companies should write out the desired behavior of a model—concretely specifying how it should respond to specific prompts, including edge cases—make it public, and take input on it, so that when a model misbehaves it is clear whether that is a bug to fix or intended behavior to debate at the policy level, rather than being caught ambiguously in between.
GPT-4 Will Look Bad From Future Vantage
Progress is on an exponential curve, so just as GPT-3 now looks 'unimaginably horrible' compared to GPT-4, the delta from GPT-4 to GPT-5 will be similar to the delta from 3 to 4, and it is the team's job to live a few years in the future and remember today's tools will look bad in retrospect, which is how they ensure the future is better.
OpenAI Combines 200 Medium Things Into One
There is no single big unlock behind GPT progress; rather, as an Ilya Sutskever quote puts it, OpenAI 'multiplies 200 medium-sized things together into one giant thing,' with distributed constant innovation across teams that come together in surprising ways, requiring people to keep the whole picture in their heads even while working in the weeds.
Box-Escape Fixation Crowds Out Other AI Risks
Loss of control of the AI itself is not Altman's top current worry; the dramatic 'escape the box' scenario is a theatrical risk that a group of well-meaning AI safety researchers got super-hung up on—arguably without much progress—and which pushed many other very significant AI-related risks out of the space of discourse.
Elon Wanted OpenAI Merged Into Tesla
Elon Musk thought OpenAI was going to fail and wanted total control to turn it around, including at various times wanting to make it a for-profit he could control or merge it with Tesla under Tesla's full control; OpenAI declined, and Elon decided to leave.
No One Person Should Control AGI
No single person should have total control over OpenAI or over AGI; a robust governance system with balance of power is needed, and ultimately governments must put rules of the road in place because no company should be making these decisions alone. Notably, although the board legally had the ability to fire him, in practice it did not work, which is itself a governance failure.
Putting Powerful AI Tools In People's Hands For Free
One of the most important things OpenAI does is put increasingly powerful technology in the hands of people for free as a public good, without ads or other monetization of the free version, because giving people great tools lets them build an incredible future for each other—this is the meaningful sense of 'open' for the mission, distinct from open-sourcing the code.
Measure AI By Tasks Not Jobs Replaced
The right framework for AI's economic impact is not what percentage of current jobs AI will replace, but what percentage of tasks across different time horizons (five-second, five-minute, five-hour, five-day tasks) AI can do, because AI is a tool that lets people operate at higher levels of abstraction; at some point this shifts from a quantitative efficiency change to a qualitative change in the kinds of problems people can hold in their head.
Compute Will Be The Future's Most Precious Commodity
Compute will become the currency of the future and possibly the most precious commodity in the world, because intelligence behaves like energy rather than like discrete consumer goods: demand is elastic to price, so at low prices the world will use vast amounts of compute for everyday tasks and at high prices only for the most valuable problems, meaning total demand will be enormous and hard to reason about.
Open Source Suits Smaller Locally-Run Models
There is a real place for open source models, particularly smaller models that people can run locally where there is huge demand, and the ecosystem will end up with a mix of some open and some closed models, not unlike other technology ecosystems.
Nonprofit Boards Hold Unchecked Power
The structural flaw exposed by the board crisis is that, unlike typical corporate boards answerable to shareholders, the board of a nonprofit has very large power and answers to no one but themselves unless other rules are put in place, whereas what OpenAI really wants is for its board to answer to the world as a whole.
Hire Board Members In Slates Not Individually
Board members should be hired in slates rather than as individuals one at a time, because while an executive needs to do one role well, a board must collectively cover a whole range of governance competencies—nonprofit expertise, company-running experience, and legal and governance expertise—which is best optimized for as a group.
Road To AGI Is A Giant Power Struggle
The road to AGI will be a giant power struggle, and the board crisis was a preview of escalating high-stress conflicts that will intensify as the stakes get higher, which is why building a resilient organization and robust governance structures matters.
Discourage Nonprofit-To-For-Profit Startup Path
Any startup considering starting as a nonprofit and adding a for-profit arm later should be heavily discouraged from doing so; OpenAI would have structured itself differently from the start had it known what would happen, and laws make exploiting this path for tax savings difficult, so it won't set a precedent.
Leadership Quality Shows In Quiet Moments
The truest measure of a leader is not how they act in dramatic crisis moments but how they show up in the normal day-to-day drudgery—the quality of decisions they make on a boring Tuesday at 9:46 in the morning—because most of the work and value is created meeting by meeting.
Creators Of Valuable Data Deserve Compensation
People who create valuable data deserve some way to be compensated for its use in training AI; specifically artists should be able to opt out of having art generated in their style, and if their style is used anyway there should be an economic model that pays them, even though the exact mechanism (analogous to the CD-to-Napster-to-Spotify transition) is not yet known.
Humans Will Always Care Most About Humans
Even when AI surpasses humans at a task, people will still fundamentally care about other humans—as seen in chess (humans still play despite AI dominance) and running races (despite cars being faster)—so humans will keep creating and society will find ways to reward it, because the drive to create, be useful, and achieve status is hardwired.
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