No Priors Ep. 46 | Best of 2023 with Sarah Guo and Elad Gil

(instrumental music) Hi, No Priors listeners. Happy 2024. This week, we're taking a look back on 2023 by bringing you clips from a few of our favorite conversations of the year. We had so many insightful guests and these are really just scratching the surface. We'll list all of the episodes featured, so you can go back and re-listen to the whole conversation. Up first, we have a clip from our conversation with Ilya Sutskever, the co-founder of OpenAI. We talked with him before all of the drama with the board asking Sam Altman to step down, and then his return, so we don't touch on any of that. But in this clip, we talk about OpenAI's nonprofit roots and their evolution into the capped profit.

So the goal of OpenAI from the very beginning has been to make sure that artificial general intelligence, by which we mean autonomous systems, AI that can actually do most of the jobs and w- activities and tasks that people do, benefits all of humanity. That was the goal from the beginning. The initial thinking has been that maybe the best way to do it is by just open sourcing a lot of technology. We later, and we also attempted to do it as a nonprofit. Seemed very sensible. This is the goal, nonprofit is the way to do it. What changed? At some point at OpenAI, we realized, and we were perhaps among, among the f- the earlier, the earliest to realize that to make progress in AI for real, you need a lot of compute. Now, what does a lot mean? The appetite for compute is truly endless, as, as now, as it is now clearly seen. But we realized that we will need a lot, and a nonprofit was, wouldn't, wouldn't be the way to, to, to get there, wouldn't be able to build a large cluster with a nonprofit. That's why we became, we converted into this unusual structure called capped profit, and to my knowledge, we are the only capped profit company in the world. But the idea is that investors put in some money, but even if the company does incredibly well, they don't get more than some multiplier on top of their origin- original investment. And the reason to do this, the reason why that makes sense, you know, there are arguments that... One could make arguments against it as well. But the argument for it is that if you believe that the technology that we are building, AGI, could potentially be so capable as to do every single task that people do, does it mean that it might unemploy everyone? Well, I don't know, but it's not impossible. And if that's the case, it makes sense, it will make a lot of sense if the company that built such a technology would not be able to make, uh, infinite... Would not be incentivized, rather, to make infinite profits. I don't know if it will literally play out this way because of competition in AI. So there will be ma- mul- multiple companies, and I think that will have some unforeseen implications on the argument which I'm making, but that was the thinking.