Greg Brockman: OpenAI and AGI | Lex Fridman Podcast #17

The following is a conversation with Greg Brockman. He's the co-founder and CTO of OpenAI, a world-class research organization developing ideas in AI, with a goal of eventually creating a safe and friendly artificial general intelligence, one that benefits and empowers humanity. OpenAI is not only a source of publications, algorithms, tools, and datasets, their mission is a catalyst for an important public discourse about our future with both narrow and general intelligence systems. This conversation is part of the Artificial Intelligence Podcast at MIT and beyond. If you enjoy it, subscribe on YouTube, iTunes, or simply connect with me on Twitter @lexfridman, spelled F-R-I-D. And now, here's my conversation with Greg Brockman. So in high school and right after, you wrote a draft of a chemistry textbook.

(laughs)

I saw that. It covers everything from basic structure of the atom to quantum mechanics. So it's clear you have an intuition and a passion for both the, uh, the physical world with chemistry and now robotics, to the digital world with, uh, AI, deep learning, reinforcement learning, so on. Do you see the physical world and the digital world as different? And what do you think is the gap?

A lot of it actually boils down to iteration speed, right? That I think that a lot of what really motivates me is, is building things, right, is the... Uh, you know, think about mathematics, for example, where you think really hard about a problem, you understand it, you write it down in this very obscure form that we call proof. But then, this is in humanity's library, right? It's there forever. This is some truth that we've discovered. And, you know, maybe only five people in your field will ever read it, uh, but somehow you've kinda moved humanity forward. And so I actually used to really think that I was going to be a mathematician, and, uh, then I actually started writing this chemistry textbook. One of my friends told me, "You'll never publish it because you don't have a PhD." So instead, I, I decided to build a website and try to promote my ideas that way, and then I discovered programming and, uh, I... You know, that in programming, you think hard about a problem, you understand it, you write it down in a very obscure form that we call a program. But then once again, it's in humanity's library, right? And anyone can get the benefit from it, and the scalability is massive. And so I think that the thing that really appeals to me about the digital world is that you can have this, this, this h- insane leverage, right? A single individual with an idea is able to affect the entire planet, um, and that's something I think is really hard to do if you're moving around physical atoms.

But you said, uh, mathematics, so if you look at the, the wet thing, eh, o- over here, our mind, do you, you ultimately see it as just math, as just information processing? Or, or is there some other magic as you've seen, if you've seen through biology and chemistry and so on?