Sam Altman
The Visionary
The future, and what is barely possible, reads round the next corner.
Sam Altman is The Visionary in the fullest sense, publicly committed to artificial general intelligence as a civilisational turning point. What distinguishes his leadership at OpenAI is the fusion of long-horizon thinking with commercial pragmatism, converting abstract futures into concrete launches such as ChatGPT and GPT-4 that reshaped public discourse on AI.
“We started as a nonprofit. We learned early on that we were going to need far more capital than we were able to raise as a nonprofit. Our nonprofit is still fully in charge. There is a subsidiary capped profit so that our investors and employees can earn a certain fixed return and then beyond that everything else flows to the nonprofit.”
“So, the system message is a way to say, hey, model, please pretend like you, or please only answer this message as if you are Shakespeare doing thing X, or please only respond with JSON no matter what was one of the examples from our blog post. But you could also say any number of other things to that.”
“I want to be clear. I think these systems will make a lot of jobs just go away. Every technological revolution does. They will enhance many jobs and make them much better, much more fun, much higher paid. They'll create new jobs that are difficult for us to imagine even if we're starting to see the first glimpses of them.”
“The trade off of building in public, which is we put out things that are going to be deeply imperfect. We want to make our mistakes while the stakes are low. We want to get it better and better each rep. But the bias of ChatGPT when it launched with 3.5 was not something that I certainly felt proud of. It's gotten much better with GPT-4.”
Wikiquote: “Public record read”
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