Sam Altman: Minister of Truth and Artificial Intelligence’s Biggest Struggle in Human History (New York Times Physicist X)

Sam Altman, who as CEO of OpenAI gave the world ChatGPT and became one of the most influential people in technology, has departed the company after losing the confidence of its board.

Mira was the chief technology officer, but you could call her its minister of truth. In addition to heading the teams that develop tools such as ChatGPT and Dall-E, it’s been her job to make sure those products don’t mislead people, show bias, or snuff out humanity altogether.

Altman posted Friday on X, formerly Twitter: “i loved my time at openai. it was transformative for me personally, and hopefully the world a little bit. most of all i loved working with such talented people. Will have more to say later.

He was thrust into the spotlight as the face of OpenAI after he became famous in the public eye. On a world tour earlier this year, he was mobbed by a crowd of adoring fans at an event in London.

He predicted artificial intelligence will be “the greatest leap forward of any technological revolution we’ve had so far.” The threat of quantum leaps in computers being harmful to humanity has made him acknowledge the need for guardrails.

A Conversation with Altman on the Future of Artificial Intelligence: Open AI, Microsoft, OpenAI, and the YCombinator

The board consists of the chief scientist of OpenAI, Ilya Sutskever, and three non-employees, according to the company.

Microsoft has a long-term partnership with Openai and they remain committed to Mira and their team as we bring the next era of artificial intelligence to our customers.

Since his early 20s, he has been seen as a Silicon Valley wunderkind. He was recruited in 2014 to take lead of the startup incubator YCombinator by its co-founder, venture capitalist Paul Graham.

Graham’s announcement that Sam was to become the incubator’s president was read by him as saying that “Sam is one of the smartest people and understands startups better than anyone I know.” “As one of the rare people who manage to be both fearsomely effective and still fundamentally benevolent, Altman was stated by Graham to be that kind of person.”

It shifted almost all of its staff into the business after the release of the first generation of the GPT large language model, for generating paragraphs of readable text. Around the same time, Musk, who had co-chaired its board, resigned from the board in a move that the startup tied to eliminating a “potential future conflict for Elon” due to Tesla’s work on building automated driving systems.

The surprising capabilities of ChatGPT, such as solving complex puzzles and handling questions that appear to require human-like reasoning, stunned AI researchers, amazed the public, and triggered an arms race among big tech companies to build more powerful AI. The bot’s success turned Altman into a tech celebrity, consulted by world leaders on the future path of AI technology.

He expressed belief that the technology will be beneficial, describing it as his life’s work from childhood, despite the fact that success wasn’t certain. “This will be the most transformative and beneficial technology humanity has yet invented,” he said.

“We’re on a path to self-destruction as a species right now,” he said, sitting alongside executives from Meta and Google. If we want to flourish for tens, hundreds, thousands, and millions of years more, we need new technology.

This interview was done in July of 2023 for WIRED which was doing a story on Openai. Today is the day it will be published to provide a peek at the thinking of the new boss after Sam’s sudden departure.

There are so many big-deal moments, it’s hard to remember. We live in the future and can see crazy things on a daily basis. But I do remember GPT-3 being able to translate. I speak a few languages: Italian, Albanian, and English. I remember just creating pair prompts of English and Italian. It could translate fairly well even though we never trained it to do so.

OpenAI: From a pure nonprofit to a for-profit entity: Where do you go? What do you feel about that? How did you feel when you left OpenAI?

You were at OpenAI early enough to be there when it changed from a pure nonprofit to reorganizing so that a for-profit entity lived inside the structure. How did you feel about that?

It was something done with care and thought. To really understand how to make our models better and safer, you need to deploy them at scale. That costs a lot of money. It requires you to have a business plan, because your generous nonprofit donors aren’t going to give billions like investors would. I’m not sure if there’s any other structure like this. The key thing was protecting the mission of the nonprofit.