A conversation with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman | Hosted by Elevate

[Applause] thank you for the warm welcome hello Toronto it's wonderful to be here it's wonderful to have you here Sam thanks for having me yeah I I was thrilled when I I got invited as the prompt engineer for this event it's super nice to do yes so let's start with a system message um uh so uh you are a CEO trained in part by open AI um and um uh please follow the instructions carefully I got this and no no no markdown necessary I got this great we got this awesome um so here's where I would like to start I have this like a really important memory to me like when I started my uh Shopify store before store I had my first sale and I remember everything about that day like literally like what I was wearing and like where I was what I ate tell me um releasing chat GDP was that such a day for you yeah it was uh yeah we weren't quite sure how the world was going to respond to chat gbt there were a lot of different opinions inside the company we knew it was good we wanted to release it because we thought it was good we had already had GPT for at that point for many months so we've gotten used to something much better we released chat gbt with GPT 3.5 and part of the reason that we decided we wanted to release it was realizing that part of our mission requires us to deploy these things gradually we want people to get used to the systems we want people to have time to adapt to think about it to give us feedback to decide what rules and regulation we want in society and so we're like well we'll put this thing out people will like it it's pretty good but we certainly didn't think it was going to be sort of the phenomenon that it turned out to be we thought that would come when we released GPT for several months later uh so we you know woke up that morning like we'd release many other products and put it out there and we were like we hope people like it um people did like it people did like it yes and by I would say two o'clock that afternoon it was clear that something big was about to happen um it wasn't clear like exactly how big because you can kind of like you know you always start with like the tech hyper early adopter crew but they were so excited about it they were like telling their friends and and that morning and then by that afternoon I was starting to hear from people who like don't normally follow Tech which is like I saw this thing it sounds wild like can you let me try it out or how do I do this um by the fifth day we had gotten a million users it kept going from there uh but but definitely that day it was like a sort of to hold how long did that take you to million users five five days five days um do you have a viral Loop in there like somewhere or like is there some viral Loop that's where invite only you know so before running open AI I ran this thing called black combinator which helps people we get started advice and I used to sit there and tell people if you don't have a viral Loop if you don't have some sharing functionality if you have something social if you don't have a network effect it is definitely not going to work and I feel very bad now because I like I clearly gave some bad advice uh but no we had none of that we put it out we put it out like not expecting this speed well no one would expect the speed of growth because it hadn't happened but we did we did not expect it you caught lightning in a bottle there like I again I I think a lot of us but our intuition support um like at least those of us who program computers we build an intuition of what computers can do and uh I remember sitting there with chat GTP um and and at some point I had this sort of realization with a friend of uh of a slack it's like hey Viet interviewing this piece of software to figure out what it can do that feels very different from anything we've ever done with something made from bites yeah look I I think it's it's so tempting to overanthropomorphize this but it's also so fun it is so fun and I I actually think that's one of the good parts about this is technology has not been that fun for a while it has not felt like a new sort of Frontier and this is like fun and it's certainly a new frontier um but it's very tempting to anthropomorphize it and I think we we have to like figure out a way to still have the fun but remind people that this is a tool and not a creature um but as a kind of really powerful interactive tool it is totally fun to sit there and explore the edges of it um a lot of people have done that there's there's a real talent for people who are good at this and they found amazing amazing things in a lot of them um I remember speaking of like early on in those first few days uh I was like sitting at home late one night kind of like catching up on reading the internet um all of it yes all of it um but but it was just incredible what people were doing and what people were finding and and the kind of creative power of humanity that these tools are going to that already are unleashing it's wild to watch yeah profound I remember Karen and I have a like sort of playing around with it and um first I asked it to do a guessing game just like guess the number I want you to find between zero no 100 and it kind of got itself like it just didn't do it well and I remember Fiona saying well why does it not understand the strategy here and asking it if it knows the strategy and then at the end it it wrote out how it should approach it and then can we play again and afterwards it approach of complete correct strategy and it's like something changed in that moment it's like oh what like this is different and and you know what we lots of us had access to g2b3 before yeah and of course it's a testament to the building of Brilliant Minds and open their eye to get it to this point through tweaking so I think there's a really there's several super important points in there um I'll just highlight a couple one is that we not open AI but we the field we Humanity it's been this like culmination I think we should like be collectively as proud of this as we were for the moon landing um after decades centuries of scientific and technological progress we have figured out a computer algorithm that can really truly know tricks no no sleight of hand it can actually learn as you saw in that and we can argue about what the definition of learn means but it's enough that it's useful and it's enough that it's like fulfilling this role for all these people and it gets predictably better with scale so those are two things taken together that are a profound thing for what's going to happen in the coming decade for Humanity I think it's going to be fantastic I think we're already seeing how people are using this to learn new skills uh to deliver sort of all sorts of new creative Services just got to meet with a bunch of people building on it in Toronto um but this is going to be a very different world and if you look at the progress from even before gpg3 which Toby just mentioned but gpt2 in 2019 people tried it and said this is like a dead end direction scale that up gpp3 people are like oh okay GPT 3.5 was like finally usable and gpt4 people are building entire companies around gbt five six and seven I think will continue in future years on on this trajectory of really increasing the utility they can provide um and this is like a a big new exciting thing to have in the world it's a it's like all Computing got an upgrade um you mentioned uh fourth and then went to five six seven um let's talk about like you you did a very carefully crafted brilliant um post right around the with the release of gtp4 and um it's going in a lot of details amongst those um you are describing that um it is quite predictable very early in the process of training a model how smart it will end up which is that feels like a profound and very overlooked kind of detail of this announcement the g2b free 5 seems to manage to pass the bar exam at like the bottom percentile gdp4 at the 90th percentile like the flying colors really um but the deduction here is you also know how to leave the percentiles and and make something that is um smarter or would be 100 offered by exam and other tests how how do you make a decision about when to start another training run and how to load it up and what to aim at here because we are like dealing in a fairly narrow spectrum of of intelligence percentiles within the human experience at some point we will have the tools to go beyond it yeah when is it time for that when is the time for that yeah or how how should we now actually not when it's the time for that how should we make the decision about when yeah together so let me touch on a few parts there first of all this I think we'll look back at this period like we look back at the period where people were discovering fundamental physics I think the fact that we're discovering how to predict the intelligence of a trained AI before we start training it um and that there is something something close to a natural law here and we can predictably say this much compute this big of a neural network this training data this will be the capabilities of the model now we can predict how it'll score on some tests what we're really interested in which gets to the latter part of your question is can we predict the sort of the qualitative new things just the new capabilities that didn't exist at all in gpt4 that do exist in future versions like gpt5 that seems important to figure out but right now we can say you know here's how we predict it'll do on this eval or this metric and and I really do think we'll look back at this like we were all living through one of the most important periods of human Discovery I think this will be that that big of a deal in terms of how we think about when we go beyond human intelligence and and I don't think that's quite the right framework because it'll happen in some areas and not others you know already these systems are superhuman in some limited areas and extremely bad in others and I think that's fine um I think humans will have a role Toby and I were talking earlier this analogy that like everybody's going to be the CEO of like all of the work they want to do and they'll have tons of people that they're able to coordinate and direct and sort of provide the taste and the feedback on um but they'll have like lots of agents for lack of a better word that go off and do increasingly complex tasks I think it's going to feel like this gradual thing it's it's these these AIS join Society they join the workforce it's not even like we feel like any one instant any single AI is way more powerful than a human we haven't made a decision we don't even make a decision there it's that we have you know eight billion humans and we have 8 billion AI workers that kind of just exist in society and give us all a lot of Leverage so if I run a small business um hi let's let's go just go in this future and let's talk about it like if if I'm a small business owner I might make the decision to hire Fred 1.1 joining my Google meets meeting and then afterwards doing a write-up and doing some accounting for a couple of hours um is this like is this a way to think about it are these team members that uh with presents and yeah and permanence I think that is definitely one way to think about it it's like a sort of fully remote virtual employee and that will have a lot of impact because we can have a lot of those I think there's another way to think about it which is when the AI systems can either semi-autonomously or just by helping us a lot really discover new science and if the rate of scientific progress that Humanity makes increases by a factor of 10 or 100 or a thousand in a year that somehow feels different than just a bunch more remote employees are you talking the on on the doing science part I think I mean in AI there's no other field that has ever existed or will ever exists who have a goal post keeps moving quite as much right um I Asimov books tend to people tend to identify that's something there's no AI behind some actor because AI could never be creative or could never be funny or something and so so the goal posts keep moving but with that in mind to do original science that feels like one of us things someone might offer as a point at which AI has transcended into something else look certainly by the time AI does original science we'll move the goal posts again and say well that just wasn't that impressive in the first place um if you look at the prediction from maybe 10 years ago maybe even five I think most experts would have say first AI comes for physical labor it's going to drive trucks it's going to work in factories then it comes from the sort of easier parts of cognitive labor then it comes from the stuff that's really hard maybe it can be you know maybe it can write computer code someday maybe not and then maybe someday in the distant future but probably never it can do creative work and of course it's gone the exact opposite direction uh every almost everybody predicted this wrong but the fact that it can do this this sort of creativity and the fact that it can use code to verify things actually gives me hope that we may have an AI that can do science before we have that factory robot that we can do everything else so I think intuitions here are just difficult it's fascinating to unwind a little bit the the steps of training office models like we obviously train them on reading all of Internet but there was a step function increase around teaching them to code right like at some point the models got trained on code and their ability to reason became significantly better which in my experience by the way is the same for executives that I work with so when they learn to code their number got trained on code are much better at reasoning I've observed that's a good that's a good Insight yeah yeah that makes me happy to hear so um and uh so now recording is part of a training and we've just kind of figured out something what else is out there like what else other experiences that children go through which would be amazing to expose to these models to make them more human-like so I do think coding is pretty special um coding has some nice structure to it you can run the code like an AI agent can run the code and look at the output and sort of say this is right this is wrong there's like debugging messages along the way there are a lot of things about coding that I think are particularly great modality to train these models on um but that won't be of course the last thing we train on I'm very excited to see what happens when we can really do video there's a lot of video content in the world there's a lot of things that are I think much easier to learn with video than text there's a huge debate in the field about whether a language model can get all the way to AGI can you represent everything that you need to know in language is language sufficient or do you have to have video I personally think it's a dumb question because it probably is possible but the fastest way to get there the easiest way to get there will be to have these other representations like video in these models as well again like text is not the best for everything even if it's capable of representing everything fundamentally these models are just sort of like bits of data in bits of data out and it turns out you can represent a lot that way but we should still try to figure out the best representations you've talked a lot of the questions in your interviews are around this safety aspects and I don't think we need to argue there's lots and lots of content of your opinions there um it strikes me about the work we are doing right now around the large language models um is of unbelievable utilitarian value to people uh like we can build it it's I think some people call it the end of a beginning um for us um for software at least and maybe even Beyond because we now can fold software and other kind of things that we've created over the last 20 30 years or since touring really like like integrate them into life in a way that's very lifelike huge value but it's not AGI as a tool yeah it's an augmentation of what the experience in the same wave a cell phone is there's a lot of to be made of at some point like emergence just strikes and then it becomes super intelligent as if you know like I don't know a Sandbox in a yard could spontaneously turn into a nuclear warhead and so um give me your take on like how can we like how do we set up the moments right now in such a way that we are going to get to the most optimistic outcomes that we all want to have happen because like a lot of us really want um AI definitely utiliteria value on maybe AGI if you can attain it in the timelines we are on because that's the most awesome version of planet Earth clearly yeah I'm really happy you asked the question that way I'm uh it's a little bit exhausting having to always talk about only the downsides and not to get to talk about the upsides too and I don't want to make light of the downsides because I think they're incredibly serious but we have a lot of people doing great work to figure out we're going to successfully mitigate them the reason that this is all happening the reason that we're having this debate the reason that people like people love this stuff and they love it because it's providing them real utility and that that doesn't come along too often we don't we don't get like a real new tool in the toolbox that fundamentally reshapes what we're capable of doing that often maybe the cell phone was the last one um I think this will be bigger than that yeah but it will at least be a similar magnitude and and I think the way we get to this awesome outcome is to unleash the creative power of the world and I think it's really happening I think it's at this point it's much more of a don't screw it up then we have to get it launched it took us a long time at open AI to figure out something that was going to work before we got to the sort of language model World um which was only four years ago that we figured that out we had a lot of like dead ends or bad paths the field did too you know AI winter is sort of this joke because it always was the at winter um but now I think like the revolution is launched and people are going to figure out how to integrate this into many aspects of society and significantly improve what we do um I'm I'm so excited about everything happening I like watching how kids use like when I was a kid we used to just go to these Wikipedia rabbit holes and you did eventually learn what you were trying to learn but it was like kind of a long and painful but very interesting process and now you just ask a language model and it teaches you whatever you want and you ask follow-up questions and if you don't understand something it knows that you don't understand it and explains what's different um you hear from doctors who are saying like I'm never going back I'm never going back to a world where I try to make diagnosis diagnoses without first inputting the symptoms of test results whatever um you're from creative people who are like this is now an indispensable part of my creative workflow I'm never going back and I don't know I'd say like most of the startup energy most of the developer energy I see is now trying to figure out what to do with these Technologies this is going to permeate everywhere I think it'll happen fairly quickly and I think it'll be great the I think um like what we want to do is like set this up well right now like like if you ever watch a movie like like it's like 40 50 years old you see like maybe the parents smoking in front of a car with the kids in the back you know and that seems insane now but that was perfectly normal back then right um so it's a little bit passovers ends up like um working in funny ways and and and and and opinions um evolve I think a better question is like think about the future and like figure out in which ways are we making mistakes right now and um what should be changed for the maximum like and this is maybe Beyond AI um what is what is lacking right now to steers to the um to maybe even the general recognition that the world is so much more awesome than I think we all could have possibly imagined knowing for well around the margins there's lots and lots of problems I'm not making light of those but boy is this like a Sci-Fi novel that's just like sometimes sounds actually like a bit on the nose right like we have cryptocurrencies flying around the world we have Global pandemics that make us lock up and like actually work in unison on biohacking to fight them back and then we have we have conversations with um a model that you put out there in the world and it's 100 million people interacting with it and not just the people in the sort of glass Towers in downtown like places like this New York and so often it's everyone yeah and it's a shared experience for first time again and a while after a lot of theater Bubbles and that's really really meaningful I think so um I've supplied a lot there the um question to you is like where what other edits you would make to the way people look at the word right now I I think we have lost our Collective sense of optimism about the future for good reason in some cases but I think all of us should act as our duty to bring that back I think we have lost a belief that the future can be radically better than than the current world I think a lot of people assume it's going to be worse again for good reason the only way that I know to return to that sense of optimism and that sense of growth is to use technology to create abundance this works this is like a long-term sustainable strategy as far as the systems that enable that like the social systems liberal Democratic Values the governments we have in much of the world today they enable the scientific and technological progress but that is the only thing that drives real sustainable long-term economic growth and if you don't have that the future does not get better and I think we have lost a belief that we can still do that we had a great run in society for maybe like you know 150 years and then it kind of ended a few decades ago and it's been hard to get it back but technology that can deliver abundance the technology that can deliver like a lot more a lot higher bar for quality of life I think AI is one of these big ones energy is another the stuff that's happening right now with bio is amazing uh there will still be a lot of it's like seems like very human nature to worry a lot about the future and to sort of feel a little bit zero-sum but the more we can get out of that the more we can just say like hey there's going to be plenty to go around the pie is going to get much bigger every year every year is going to be like dramatically better than the year before um and looking at technology is the only Vector to solve that and is the sort of like moral obligation of all of us to push forward I think that's the path forward I love that it's this is perfect the a lot of these advice about this um have really really benefited one way or another um the economically most privileged one billion people on cloud Earth which is an incredible story because up any point before the enlightenment things have definitely not helped the most people they had they had to pay a few people what can you do to make sure the next like what we're building now is gonna help the other seven billion people too I I think I think that's really happening I mean the the version of this I think about the most is AI but I've heard about this in other Technologies too and I think pretty compelling answers that one of the things that is powerful about this sort of chat interface of chat gbt is that small children can use it old people can use it people who are very uncomfortable with technology can use it people that have a 20 Android phone can use it and get access to the same thing um I think it's a fundamentally equalizing technology in a way that not everything has been there's of course a lot more we have to do to stick on the energy example I think driving the price of energy down by a factor of 10 or 100 will help the poorest 7 billion more than the richest 1 billion a lot and you're working hard on a solution to that too can you share that um well like just uh yeah that was a milestone recently um yeah this company called helion uh that I spend time on just signed a deal with Microsoft it was the first it is the first fusion power purchase agreement they'll begin delivery in 2028 still small scale but the fact that I think we now see a path towards delivering Fusion Energy and the whole goal of the company at this point is no longer the physics and the and the r d but how can we make enough of this energy for everyone on Earth at current needs and how can we bring the price down ambitiously by a factor of 100 at least by a factor of 10. um and you know Fusion has been like 30 years off forever but now that it's only like five years off that's a little better and I think we can figure out how to do this at mass mass scale it's like hard supply chain challenges but those eventually get solved and if we can just figure out how to build a factory that's like putting out two 500 gig 500 megawatt generators a day that'll make a real dent it's a tantalizing vision for a future we are like all problems in the world can be reduced to energy problems we are every war has been fought for usually resources that are Just Energy in the ground or land land use it took me a long time lot it took me a long time to understand how important energy was to everything yes I had like totally taken it for granted um but the more you think about it the more you realize that like that is the Crux of so much yeah yeah a dust Revolution on steam power we um you need to excuse Cola they found oil afterwards and build that economy then we did nuclear and built the nuclear economy when everyone told us to stop doing that and go back to that was a big mistake the place you're going to is a economy that needs uh fusion and uh delivering that is going to be making um all this little side quests and silly and Petty problems that occupy people day to day um seem very trivial if you can do it so um thank you for uh for investing in in this and like huge progress along those lines which is like the fact that you saw or you and helion signed a energy delivery agreement in five years the penalties for non-delivery is a amazing sign because if it's and one thing companies tend to be good at is not signing things which are going to hurt them later on so they're very good Sam thank you so much for joining us today Toby thank you so much let's give these two gentlemen a round of applause thank you thanks for doing that [Music] [Applause]

Channel: Elevate

Views: 146,024

Keywords: sam altman, samaltman, tobias lutke, tobiaslutke, openai, ai, shopify, artificial intelligence, tech, toronto, toronto tech, toronto tech events, elevate, innovation

Id: uRIWgbvouEw

Length: 28min 18sec (1698 seconds)

Published: Thu May 18 2023

Reddit Comments

[u/[deleted]]

Sam open the gate already, it's taken long enough

[u/Lumiphoton]

Altman casually talks about GPT-5, 6, and 7 enabling a world where superhuman AIs work alongside humans — "we'll have 8 billion humans and 8 billion AI workers, that exist in society and give us all leverage".

He also makes the prediction here that multimodal models will get us to AGI faster than LLMs alone will.

[u/czk_21]

I would like to pinpoint something for doomers here, Altman said:

I think we have lost belief that future can be radically better than the current world. I think lot of people assume its going to be worse, again, for good reason. The only way that I know to return to that sense of optimism and that sense of growth is to use technology to create abundance. This works. This is like long term sustainable strategy as far as the systems that enables that, like social systems, liberal democratic values, the governments we have in much of the world today, they enable scientific and technological progress, but that is the only thing that drives real, sustainable long term economic growth and if you dont have that, the future does not get better.

...every year is going to be like dramatically better than the year before and looking technology it is only vector to solve that and this is the sort of like moral obligation of all of us to push for it. I think thats the path forward.

[u/comorka45]

Sir, give me that 10-100 cheaper energy please. I am fed up with always thinking how much my energy consumption is to avoid being surprised by the bill next month.