Sam Altman: OpenAI CEO on GPT-4, ChatGPT, and the Future of AI | Lex Fridman Podcast #367

We have been a misunderstood and badly mocked org for a long time. Like, when we started... when we, like, announced the org at the end of 2015 and said we were going to work on AGI, like, people thought we were batshit insane.

Yeah.

You know? Like, I, (laughs) I remember at the time, a eminent AI scientist at a large industrial AI lab was, like, DM'ing individual reporters being like, you know, "These people aren't very good, and it's ridiculous to talk about AGI, and I can't believe you're giving them the time of day." And it's like, that was the level of, like, pettiness and rancor in the field at a new group of people saying, "We're going to try to build AGI."

So OpenAI and DeepMind was a small collection of folks who were brave enough to talk about AGI, um, in the face of mockery.

We don't get mocked as much now.

We don't get mocked as much now. The following is a conversation with Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, the company behind GPT-4, ChatGPT, DALL-E, Codex, and many other AI technologies which both individually and together constitute some of the greatest breakthroughs in the history of artificial intelligence, computing, and humanity in general. Please allow me to say a few words about the possibilities and the dangers of AI in this current moment in the history of human civilization. I believe it is a critical moment. We stand on the precipice of fundamental societal transformation, where soon, nobody knows when, but many, including me, believe it's within our lifetime, the collective intelligence of the human species begins to pale in comparison, by many orders of magnitude, to the general superintelligence in the AI systems we build and deploy at scale. This is both exciting and terrifying. It is exciting because of the enumerable applications we know and don't yet know that will empower humans to create, to flourish, to escape the widespread poverty and suffering that exist in the world today, and to succeed in that old, all too human pursuit of happiness. It is terrifying because of the power that superintelligent AGI wields to destroy human civilization, intentionally or unintentionally, the power to suffocate the human spirit in the totalitarian way of George Orwell's 1984, or the pleasure-fueled mass hysteria of Brave New World, where, as Huxley saw it, people come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think. That is why these conversations with the leaders, engineers, and philosophers, both optimists and cynics, is important now. These are not merely technical conversations about AI. These are conversations about power, about companies, institutions, and political systems that deploy, check, and balance this power, about distributed economic systems that incentivize the safety and human alignment of this power, about the psychology of the engineers and leaders that deploy AGI, and about the history of human nature, our capacity for good and evil at scale. I'm deeply honored to have gotten to know and to have spoken with, on and off the mic, with many folks who now work at OpenAI, including Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, Wojciech Zaremba, Andrej Karpathy, Jakub, uh, Pacholke, and many others. It means the world that Sam has been totally open with me, willing to have multiple conversations, including challenging ones, on and off the mic. I will continue to have these conversations, to both celebrate the incredible accomplishments of the AI community and to steel-man the critical perspective on major decisions various companies and leaders make, always with the goal of trying to help in my small way. If I fail, I will work hard to improve. I love you all. This is the Lex Fridman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Sam Altman. High level, what is GPT-4? How does it work, and, uh, what to you is most amazing about it?