The Man Behind ChatGPT (Sam Altman)

this video is brought to you by brilliant.org hi welcome to another episode of Cold Fusion in recent times we've only seen incremental advancements in the field of science and technology that was until Sam Altman's open AI ushered in a new era for artificial intelligence an open AI is the company of course behind the artificial intelligence tool chat GPT that is the potential to revolutionize how people work shop and interact I've been covering open AI on Cold Fusion since the middle of 2017 at this time their bot bit dendy a professional Dota 2 player in a 1v1 match at a major Esports tournament since then the technology has only gotten better the next thing I covered from open AI was their dextrose robot many years later The Firm brought out their smash hit AI generator darli followed closely by its text generator chat GPT and this has now become a global sensation we've talked about chat gbt and all of these things at length but what is hardly ever talked about is Sam Altman himself the main man leading the revolution in AI those who are following along in the technology space either see him as a villain or the future savior of the world in today's episode we'll take a look at Altman's history his inner psyche and his motivations for launching the company open AI you are watching telefusion TV AI news is everywhere at the moment so wouldn't it make sense to know how it works that's where today's sponsor brilliant.org comes in it's the best way to learn stem subjects brilliant has an interactive course on computer science which includes neural networks you can read about AI or you want but brilliant actually tests your learning and understanding in a fun way if you're looking to brush up on your stem knowledge or just want to satisfy your curiosity brilliant can help you reach your goals I particularly enjoyed the introduction to neural networks course it was a great refresher and really solidifies the building blocks of what Sam Altman is talking about go to brilliant.org coldfusion or click the link in the description to get a 30-day free trial the first 200 people will get 20 off their annual subscription okay so back to the video Sam Oldman was born on April 22nd 1985 in Chicago Illinois as a child he was incredibly curious and had a passion for Science and Technology at just the age of eight he got his first computer a Macintosh SE that computer became his gateway to the world he would soon discover AOL chat rooms it was transformational for him in his early development as a person although precocious and nerdy he was quite a bold kid at the age of 16 he would come out to his parents as homosexual at the time he was attending John Burroughs School a private prep school in St Louis Missouri there were incidents at the school about his sexuality that caused him to think a bit differently and challenge the world with new ideas [Music] after graduating high school he got into Stanford University to study computer science soon though with two of his classmates he started developing a mobile app called looped this was the early era of Facebook and Twitter everyone was curious about what each other was up to and what was on their mind but no one was able to share their location just yet looped was based on this exact idea it told your friends where you were although somewhat frowned upon for security reasons today back then in the early 2000s it was a cool and novel idea looped was one of the first mobile apps that allowed users to share their location selectively with other people to give you some context Google Maps was launched in 2005 but its location sharing feature was added in 2017. Twitter and Facebook implemented the feature in 2009 and 2010 respectively seeing the potential ultimate dropped out of Stanford in 2005 to establish his company but what he would need was a substantial amount of investment to further develop the product luckily he received funding from Y combinator and Sequoia capital at this point remember the name y combinator it will be a major part of Sam Altman's life which we'll cover in the next part of the episode in the summer of 2005 Altman worked tirelessly he was meeting with mobile carriers and convincing them to feature the app back then there was no app store neither Google nor Apple was providing a service like that remember smartphones look like this so knocking on the mobile carrier's doors was the only option his hard work did soon pay off and the app's valuation Rose to 175 million despite the valuation consumers never bought the app Altman later would say to the New Yorker quote we had the optimistic view that location would be all important the pessimistic view was that people would lie on their couches and just consume content and that is what happened end quote in 2012 he and other Founders sold the company for 43 million after selling the company he broke up with his long-term partner Nick sivo who was also the co-founder of looped so this was a major setback both in his personal and professional life despite the blow he made a name for himself remember why combinator a seed stage Venture firm that has funded many successful startups like Reddit Airbnb Dropbox twitch and Sam Altman's now obscure looped Altman had failed to establish his first company but he had caught the attention of Paul Graham the co-founder of Y combinator looped was one of the first eight companies that wire combinator funded Paul Graham was impressed by Sam's tonicity an entrepreneurial spirit he asked Sam to become a part-time partner at Y combinator in 2011. Altman joined and helped build key parts of the Y combinator experience for founders later in 2014 he'd become president when Paul Graham and his co-founder wife Jessica Livingston stepped down to look after their two young children [Music] ultimate is a force to be reckoned with he has a calm demeanor but sometimes that can be replaced with a frightening temper but that's only when it's crossed his quirky and somewhat of an oddball once at a party when asked about his Hobbies he famously remarked quote well I like racing cars I have five including two McLarens and an old Tesla I like flying rented planes all over California oh and an odd one I prep for survival seeing the Burmese look on the faces of his audience he further explained quote my problem is that when my friends get drunk they talk about the ways the world will end after a Dutch lab modified the h5n1 bird flu virus five years ago making it super contagious the chance of a lethal synthetic virus being released in the next 20 years well non-zero the other most popular scenario would be AI that attacks the US and Nations fighting with nukes over scarce resources just to clarify though Oldman said all of this in 2016. we all know what happened three years later in late 2019 as the Wall Street Journal reports according to American government officials it was the lackluster precautions taken at a research lab in China that caused a deadly virus to break out and cause the whole world to experience an insufferable pandemic I'm not going to get into discussing that here but the point is Altman was surely onto something that most people were oblivious to but what about the scenario of AI attacking well he took steps to make sure that this wouldn't happen we'll get to that later [Music] besides his quirky nature he really did want to change the world but not in a scummy Elizabeth Holmes kind of way after selling his first company looped Sam launched a small Venture fund called hydrazine Capital it would fund technology companies in education Specialty Foods Hospitality consumer networks enterprise software and internet connected Hardware Sam became known for his ability to spot hidden gems and fix their flaws interestingly Altman invested in and briefly served as the CEO of Reddit he helped the company raise 50 million dollars in 2014 when it was in shambles Altman also has a passion for nuclear energy and has invested and joined on the boards of multiple fission and fission startups his reasoning a challenging business tends to attract more interest think about it this way so you want to create another social media startup if you pitched the idea you'd probably get a board look from your potential investors but if you were to create an AI company with the computer science know-how to back it suddenly everyone wants to do the same thing as Sam progressed in his professional Endeavors he became a powerful figure in Silicon Valley as his mentor Paul Graham notes Sam is extremely good at becoming powerful 2012 was an interesting year for AI Jeffrey Hinton releases a seminal paper the proved for the first time that neural networks could recognize objects as accurately as humans in this same Year in 2012 Altman was out hiking with some of his friends in the North of San Francisco they were discussing human intelligence and AI as the discussion went on Altman suddenly realized that humans are not as unique as he thought he felt that there was no reason to believe that in 13 years the hardware could replace the human brain certain things are still uniquely human for example genuine creativity inspiration the ability to feel and to truly empathize but someday in the future computers will be able to mimic the outputs of humans and probably this is where Sam Altman's fear that one day AI might destroy humanity and strip us of our uniqueness began to manifest he would keep this Revelation close to his chest until much later in 2016 when he opened up in an interview to the New Yorker he said quote there are certain advantages to being a machine we humans are limited by our input output rate we only learn two bits a second so a ton is lost to a machine we must seem like slowed down whale songs he knew machines could someday become all too powerful and he felt he needed to do something Sam Altman was definitely not alone in his fears another key figure in the tech World Elon Musk had the same premonition musk had always been vocal about it though while some might think that such a fear would lead them to avoid the creation of an AI company altogether they opted for a different approach doing the exact opposite [Music] 2015 Altman and musk would join forces with other influential figures including Reed Hoffman co-founder of LinkedIn Jessica Livingston co-founder of Y combinator and Peter Thiel this was in addition to some highly qualified AI researchers and entrepreneurs another significant member who joined the team as Chief scientist of the company in January 2016 was Ilya satskova he's a computer scientist widely respected in the field of machine learning before joining the musk and Oldman project he was working at Google brain as a research scientist the group pledged over one billion dollars to fund its operations they also agreed to make their patents and research open to the public and to collaborate freely with other institutions and researchers hence the name open AI initially they set up open AI to be a non-profit entity that would focus on creating artificial general intelligence or AGI AI systems that are generally smarter than humans but in a safe and beneficial way they were particularly concerned that Google's deepmind Technologies division was seeking to reign supreme in the field of AI they thought that Google's Deep Mind could monitor the world for competitors and crush them musk would say in an interview quote if the AI that they develop goes awry we risk having an immortal and super powerful dictator forever he went on quote murdering all competing AI researchers as its first move strikes me as a bit of a character flaw open AI the non-profit AI research firm set off with great excitement and lofty expectations with a star-studded roster of big name investors and a Grand Vision for the future the world was eager to see what they would accomplish it was quite evident what they feared but not so much as what they adopted as their Vision open ai's approach was more like a curious Explorer constantly seeking to understand and discover new things they wanted to create an AI capable of writing a poem or composing a symphony but developing an AI system like this is not easy it requires patience dedication and a willingness to embrace the unknown Sam Oatman explained the system by comparing it to a child who was just learning about the world just like a child an AI system needs guidance and oversight that's why open AI planned to create a governance board that could allow people from all around the world to have a say in how this technology is being developed and deployed as time went on though it became clear that there was some fighting in the ranks in early 2018 Elon Musk had grown frustrated with the company's progress and suggested that he take control of the operation himself the other founders of open AI including Sam Altman and CTO Greg Brockman declined musk's proposal a power struggle soon ensued and musk in turn walked away from the project publicly though open Ai and musk both cited the reason as a conflict of interest and there was some truth to this Tesla was developing its autonomous driving program and they had already lured one of open ai's Engineers for that adding fuel to the fire was the fact that musk had promised to donate roughly one billion dollars to the organization over a period of years he stopped making payments after his departure this left the non-profit in a precarious position there are astronomical fees associated with training AI systems on supercomputers they were going to have to do something [Music] one year earlier in 2017 Google brain announced a neural network architecture called the Transformer it became a popular choice for natural language processing tasks such as machine translation and text generation it was revolutionary in the sense that any AI system could now be trained and improved endlessly as long as you can feed it data but it was costly to take advantage of the Transformer model open AI soon made a monumentous decision they announced that they would be a for-profit entity capping profits for investors and funneling any excess back into the original non-profit Altman however refused to take any equity in the new entity the move to for-profit turned off some investors but less than six months later Microsoft joined hands with open Ai and initially invested one billion dollars they provided open AI with the cloud computing infrastructure to train their massive AI models which eventually created chat GPT and the image generator Dali after the huge success of chat GPT in January 2023 Microsoft announced an additional 10 billion investment in open Ai and its technology in return Microsoft had gained access to some of the most advanced and popular AI models in the world and they could deploy it across their consumer and Enterprise products at will [Music] in some ways the deal with Microsoft was a deal with the devil it would cause open AI to diverge from their original ethos the research is no longer open and free it's hidden away away from the prying eyes of competitors Microsoft urged the company to stay ahead of the competition and put pressure to release AI products Microsoft and open ai's partnership as well as chat gpt's early success drove Google into a panic Google has traditionally kept its AI developments Under Wraps whereas open AI released them to the public for General use and this was the beginning of the famous AI War which I've talked about a lot but because these AI tools are still in their infancy the results have either been remarkable or absurd thus far why would anyone release an unfinished product according to Sam Oldman the benefits of democratizing such powerful technology far outweigh the potential risks of one individual being in control regardless the cat is out of the bag now and countless companies are using AI tools for developing their own and in the world of business when you see your competitor doing something that generates success there's going to be a bunch of unlimited copycats government and the general populace are behind the United States only had their first meeting with AI leaders in May of 2023 and I think my question is what kind of an innovation is it going to be is it going to be like the printing press that diffused knowledge and power and learning widely across the landscape that empowered ordinary everyday individuals that led to Greater flourishing that led above all to Greater Liberty or is it going to be more like the atom bomb huge technological breakthrough but the consequences severe terrible continue to haunt us to this day before we release gpt4 our latest model we spent over six months conducting extensive evaluations external red teaming and dangerous capability testing we are proud of the progress that we made gpt4 is more likely to respond helpfully and truthfully and refuse harmful requests than any other widely deployed model of similar capability however we think that regulatory intervention by governments will be critical to mitigate the risks of increasingly powerful models and the thing is this is the baby stages of AI it's only going to get better with time and fast who knows what could happen in the distant future it could be great or not so great in Sam Altman's own words quote I think it'd be crazy not to be a little bit afraid he also states that super intelligence and Rogue AI are not immediate threats the threats that we Face are quite mundane misinformation economic shocks his solution is to ensure that AI safe is highly aligned with human values and I'd like to think that the result of this could make a better world for us all but we still have to be careful and already it does miraculous things at Cincinnati Children's Hospital Dr John pestian and Dr Tracy glauser are training their own AI to head off suicide in children it can give a pediatrician an at a glance sense of which kids need immediate intervention an output will say this is a patient at high risk this is a patient at low risk where we just don't have enough data right now roughly 30 to 40 percent of mental illness adult mental illness started as a child and so you want to be able to pick that up early technology has always been a driving force in shaping our world from the invention of the wheel to the internet every new creation has faced its fair share of criticism we've all seen the negative sides of the internet how it can spread misinformation and division but with AI this is set to only grow but hey we can't just focus on the negatives AI is already revolutionizing game development video production copywriting coding and countless other fields it allows the heavy lifting of cognitive repetitive work that nobody likes to do to be automated so people can focus on what they enjoy within their profession and that's a great thing that we have to recognize there are also those who use it as a tool to enhance their creativity of course there are negatives but the key is to use this tool as wisely and responsibly as possible as Isaac Asimov the famous science fiction writer once said quote the saddest aspects of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than Society gathers wisdom so let's do our part to not let that happen use these tools with wisdom but what about the other side if things do go very wrong with AI in the future Sam Oldman may just become one of the most hated people in history at that point it might seem like he started off with pure goals but ended up becoming the very thing he was trying to prevent only time will tell ultimately so that's the story of Sam Altman and what his philosophies are I just find this so fascinating hope you enjoyed it thanks for watching and I'll see you again soon for another video my name is Togo and you've been watching cold fusion cheers guys have a good one [Music] [Music] cold fusion it's new thinking

Channel: ColdFusion

Views: 551,573

Keywords: Coldfusion, TV, Dagogo, Altraide, Technology, Apple, Google, Samsung, Facebook, Tesla

Id: GKaVb3jc2No

Length: 21min 28sec (1288 seconds)

Published: Tue May 30 2023