Based on Sam’s 2-hour interview with Lex Fridman
Interestingly, Sam regards ChatGPT 4 as just an announcement to the human race of what is coming and believes that history will define the start of the AI Revolution as when it allows thousands of scientific breakthroughs that benefit humans from cures to significant diseases or understanding whether and where alien life may exist in the universe.
So basically, we have not seen anything yet, and Open AI is attempting to release iteratively so that they don’t scare us to death with one massive lead forward we are not pre-prepared for.
The ultimate goal is AGI (Artificial General Intelligence), which, for newbies to the topic, is defined as when artificial intelligence encompasses the ability to understand, learn, and apply knowledge in a way that is not limited to a specific task or domain, or discipline”. In other words, machines are capable of independent thought.
The race between Elon Musk, Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Open AI, to name a few, is clearly on, and the winner will yield massive power.
Altman stresses that there must be clear board frameworks to ensure that no one man can yield the full power of AGI, but openly admits that the recent failure of the Open AI board, misguided or not, to successfully remove him as CEO, shows that his own business is not yet structured correctly.
Personally, having listened to several of Alman’s interviews, I am glad he is leading the charge towards AGI. He is incredibly intelligent, reasonably humble, and appears to have a clear moral compass.
But hey, I liked Boris at first, so what do I know!
Surprisingly, Altman is against adding advertising revenue into Open AI’s income stream because it will add “bias” to the models and potentially distort the route to the “right answer” for the customer. He prefers that customers pay higher fees for ad-free, unbiased models, but he accepts that competition may force his hand.
The biggest restrictor of AI in the short term is “Computing Power,” and Altman flagged that AI needs to start getting smarter at allocating and charging for computing resources between simple questions and answers to complex mathematical formulas. Currently, Open AI charges a flat fee per response, ignoring the processing cost of creating the response.
Altman talks about “Compute” being the currency of the future and believes we need to power these computers via nuclear fission or fusion. He flagged that it is the “theoretical” fear of Nuclear meltdowns like Chornobyl that has put humans off nuclear energy, when in reality, the death toll from the pollution from coal power stations has been much higher and that the future needs to be a clean nuclear if we are to avoid further Global warming.
Sadly, Sam Altman also believes it’s likely that the controversy over AGI is likely to trigger his assassination by a gun-toting American reactionary, preventing him from seeing the benefits that AI can deliver to the human race.
Unfortunately, I think of all his prophecies, this is the most likely to be right.