YouSaid · the spoken record

Greg Brockman

lines on the record: 101
first: 2019-04-03
most recent: 2019-04-03
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Yeah. Assuming that you can actually do the technical side of AGI development, I think there's going to be two key problems with figuring out how do you actually deploy it, make it go well. The first one is the run-up to building the first AGI. You look at how self-driving cars are being developed, and it's a competitive race. And the thing that always happens in competitive race is that you have huge amounts of pressure to get rid of safety.”
2019-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Greg Brockman: OpenAI and AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And say, I think that we're doing this wrong. And you look at companies like Google that have had some collective action from employees to make ethical change around things like Maven. And so maybe there are mechanisms that other companies that work. But here, super easy for anyone to pull me aside to pull Sam aside, to pull Illia aside. People do it all the time”
2019-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Greg Brockman: OpenAI and AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah, for sure. I mean, I think that we actually have, I think that's like a pretty important part of how we operate and how we have, even again, with designing the charter and designing OpenAILP in the first place, that there has been a lot of conversation with employees here and a lot of times where employees said, wait a second, this seems like it's going in the wrong direction, and let's talk about it. And so I think one thing that's, I think, a really, and here's actually one thing that I think is very unique about us as a small company is that if you're at a massive tech giant, that's a little bit hard for someone who's a lined employee to go and talk to the CEO.”
2019-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Greg Brockman: OpenAI and AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And there, I think that the answer looks a lot like, well, how does any company's values get actualized? I think that a lot of that comes down to that you need people who are here because they really believe in that mission and they believe in the charter and that they are willing to take actions that maybe are worse for them, but are better for the charter. And that's something that's really baked into the culture. And honestly, I think it's, you know, I think that that's one of the things that we really have to work to preserve as time goes on. And that's a really important part of how we think about hiring people and bringing people into open AI.”
2019-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Greg Brockman: OpenAI and AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I think that first to zoom out, that the way that we structure the company is so that the power for sort of dictating the actions that OpenAI takes ultimately rests with the board. The board of the nonprofit and the board is set up in certain ways with certain restrictions that you can read about in the OpenAILP blog post. But effectively, the board is the governing body for OpenAILP. And the board has a duty to fulfill the mission of the nonprofit. And so that's kind of how we thread all these things together. Now, there's a question of, so day to day, how do people, the individuals who in some ways are the most empowered ones, right? The board sort of gets to call the shots at the high level, but the people who are actually executing are the employees, right? The people here on a day-to-day basis who have the keys to the technical kingdom.”
2019-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Greg Brockman: OpenAI and AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That we always get to make the decision that is right for the charter rather than even if it comes at the expense of our own stakeholders. And so I think that when I think about what's really important, it's not really about nonprofit versus for-profit. It's really a question of if you build AGI and you kind of, you know, humanities now in this new age, who benefits? Whose lives are better? And I think that what's really important is to have an answer that is everyone.”
2019-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Greg Brockman: OpenAI and AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that's really the case that we're optimizing for, right? That we're thinking about in the success case, making sure that the value we create doesn't get locked up. And I expect that in other for-profit companies that it's possible to do something like that, I think it's not obvious how to do it, right? And I think that as a for-profit company, you have a lot of fiduciary duty to your shareholders and that there are certain decisions that you just cannot make in our structure. We've set it up so that we have a fiduciary duty to the charter.”
2019-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Greg Brockman: OpenAI and AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're picking a road in between now. The thing I think is really important to recognize is that the way that we think about OpenAILP is that in the world where AGI actually happens, right? In a world where we are successful, we build the most transformative technology ever. The amount of value we're going to create will be astronomical. And so then in that case that the cap that we have will be a small fraction of the value we create and the amount of value that goes back to investors and employees looks pretty similar to what would happen in a pretty successful startup.”
2019-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Greg Brockman: OpenAI and AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When it turns out that we haven't set the guardrails correctly causes problems, right? Think about logging companies that go and deforest the rainforest. That's really bad. We don't want that. And it's actually really interesting to me that kind of this question of how do you get positive benefits out of a for-profit company, it's actually very similar to how do you get positive benefits out of an AGI, right? That you have this like very powerful system. It's more powerful than any human and is kind of autonomous in some ways. It's super human in a lot of axes. And somehow you have to set the guardrails to get good things to happen. But when you do, the benefits are massive. And so I think that when I think about nonprofit versus for-profit, I think just not enough happens in nonprofits. They're very pure, but it's just kind of, you know, it's just hard to do things there in for-profits in some ways. Like too much happens. But if kind of shaped in the right way, it can actually be very positive. And so with OpenILP.”
2019-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Greg Brockman: OpenAI and AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's right. And I think that there's some real truth here that the system that we set up, the system for kind of how today's world is organized, is one that really allows for huge impact and that kind of part of that is that you need to be, that for-profits are self-sustaining and able to kind of build on their own momentum. I think that's a really powerful thing. It's something that”
2019-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Greg Brockman: OpenAI and AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I think that's a really good question. There's some real longstanding debates in human society that are wrapped up in it. The way that I think about it is just think about what are the most impactful nonprofits in the world? The most impactful for profits in the world”
2019-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Greg Brockman: OpenAI and AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, it just boils down to the mission, right? Like I'm here and everyone else is here because we think this is the most important mission, right?”
2019-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Greg Brockman: OpenAI and AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One direction or the other is clearly not the correct answer. And so I think that even in terms of just how we talk about open AI and think about it, there's just like one thing that's always in the back of my mind is to make sure that we're not just saying open AI's goal is to build AGI, right? That it's actually much broader than that, right? That first of all, it's not just AGI, it's safe AGI that's very important. But secondly, our goal isn't to be the ones to build it. Our goal is to make sure it goes well for the world. And so I think that figuring out how do you balance all of those and to get people to really come to the table and compile a single document that encompasses all of that wasn't trivial.”
2019-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Greg Brockman: OpenAI and AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think this was the core tension as we were designing OpenAILP and really the OpenAI strategy, is how do you make sure that both you have a shot at being a primary actor, which really requires building an organization, raising massive resources, and really having the will to go and execute on some really, really hard vision, right? You need to really sign up for a long period to go and take on a lot of pain and a lot of risk. To do that, normally you just import the startup mindset, right? And that you think about, okay, like how do we out execute everyone? You have this very competitive angle. But you also have the second angle of saying that, well, the true mission isn't for open AI to build AGI. The true mission is for AGI to go well for humanity. And so how do you take all of those first actions and make sure you don't close the door on outcomes that would actually be positive and fulfill the mission? And so I think it's a very delicate balance, right? And I think that going 100%”
2019-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Greg Brockman: OpenAI and AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So if you look actually at the OpenAI Charter, there's almost two paths embedded within it. There is we are primarily trying to build AGI ourselves, but we're also okay if someone else does it. And this is a weird thing for a company.”
2019-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Greg Brockman: OpenAI and AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To do it and also stay true to what we stand for. And the place you got to start is to really align on what is it that we stand for, right? What are those values? What's really important to us? And so I'd say that we spent about a year really compiling the Open AI Charter and that that determines, and if you even look at the first line item in there, it says that, look, we expect we're going to have to marshal huge amounts of resources, but we're going to make sure that we minimize conflicts of interest with the mission and that kind of aligning on all of those pieces was the most important step towards figuring out how do we structure a company that can actually raise the resources to do what we need to do.”
2019-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Greg Brockman: OpenAI and AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, this was actually a really core question for us for the past couple years. Because I'd say that the way that our history went was that for the first year we were getting off the ground. We had this high-level picture, but we didn't know exactly how we wanted to accomplish it. And really two years ago is when we first started realizing in order to build AGI, we're just going to need to raise way more money than we can as a nonprofit. And we're talking many billions of dollars. And so the first question is, how are you supposed to do that and stay true to this mission? And we looked at every legal structure out there and concluded none of them were quite right for what we wanted to do. And I guess it shouldn't be too surprising if you're going to do something crazy unprecedented technology that you're going to have to come up with some crazy unprecedented structure to do it in. And a lot of our conversation was with people at OpenAI, right? The people who really joined because they believe so much in this mission and thinking about how do we actually raise the resource.”
2019-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Greg Brockman: OpenAI and AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Then investors are able to get a return, but that return is something that is capped. And so if you think of AGI in terms of the value that you could really create, you're talking about the most transformative technology ever created. It's going to create orders of magnitude more value than any existing company. And that all of that value will be owned by the world, like legally titled to the nonprofit to fulfill that mission. And so that's the structure.”
2019-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Greg Brockman: OpenAI and AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“OpenAI, the whole entity and OpenAI LP as a vehicle is trying to accomplish the mission of ensuring that artificial general intelligence benefits everyone. And the main way that we're trying to do that is by actually trying to build general intelligence ourselves and make sure the benefits are distributed to the world. That's the primary way. We're also fine if someone else does this. It doesn't have to be us. If someone else is going to build an AGI and make sure that the benefits don't get locked up in one company or with one set of people, like we're actually fine with that. And so those ideas are baked into our charter, which is kind of the foundational document that describes kind of our values and how we operate. It's also really baked into the structure of OpenILP. And so the way that we've set up OpenAILP is that in the case where we succeed, right, if we actually build what we're trying to build,”
2019-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Greg Brockman: OpenAI and AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That was the core question of we had this dinner in July of 2015 and that was really what we spent the whole time talking about. And, you know, because you think about kind of where AI was, is that it had transitioned from being an academic pursuit to an industrial pursuit. And so a lot of the best people were in these big research labs and that we wanted to start our own one that no matter how much resources we could accumulate would be pale in comparison to the big tech companies. And we knew that. And there was a question of are we going to be actually able to get this thing off? You need critical mass. You can't just do you and a co-founder build a product, right? You really need to have a group of five to ten people. And we kind of concluded it wasn't obviously impossible. So it seemed worth trying.”
2019-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Greg Brockman: OpenAI and AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would just say that when we were starting Open AI, that kind of the first question that we had is, is it too late to start a lab with a bunch of the best people? Is that even possible?”
2019-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Greg Brockman: OpenAI and AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But I think that then you start thinking about, well, what if we succeed? And how do we make sure that when we succeed, that the world is actually the place that we want ourselves to exist in? And almost in the Ralsey and Bale sense of the word. And so that's kind of the broader landscape. And OpenAI was really formed in 2015 with that high-level picture of AGI might be possible sooner than people think and that we need to try to do our best to make sure it's going to go well. And then we spent the next couple years really trying to figure out what does that mean? How do we do it? And I think that typically with a company, you start out very small, see you in a co-founder, and you build a product, you get some users, you get product market fit, then at some point you raise some money, you hire people, you scale, and then down the road, then the big companies realize you exist and try to kill you. And for open AI, it was basically everything in exactly the opposite order.”
2019-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Greg Brockman: OpenAI and AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so as soon as you believe that, everything else comes into focus, right? If you imagine that you may be able to, and that the timeline, I think, remains uncertain, but I think that certainly within our lifetimes and possibly within a much shorter period of time than people would expect, if you can really build the most transformative technology that will ever exist, you stop thinking about yourself so much, right? You start thinking about just like, how do you have a world where this goes well and that you need to think about the practicalities of how do you build an organization and get together a bunch of people and resources and to make sure that people feel motivated and ready to do it?”
2019-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Greg Brockman: OpenAI and AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's a third piece, which is the scalability. That one thing that has been shown time and time again is that if you have a larger neural network throw more compute, more data at it, it will work better. Those three properties together feel like essential parts of building a general intelligence. Now, it doesn't just mean that if we scale up what we have, that we will have an AGI, right? There are clearly missing pieces. There are missing ideas. We need to have answers for reasoning. But I think that the core here is”
2019-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Greg Brockman: OpenAI and AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Suddenly this became the best way of solving problems. And I think there are three core properties that deep learning has that I think are very worth paying attention to. The first is generality. We have a very small number of deep learning tools, SGD, deep neural net, maybe some RL. It solves this huge variety of problems speech recognition, machine translation, game playing, all of these problems, small set of tools. So there's the generality. There's a second piece, which is the competence. You want to solve any of those problems? Throw it 40 years worth of normal computer vision research, replace it with a deep neural net. It's going to work better.”
2019-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Greg Brockman: OpenAI and AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Suddenly meant that you could run these larger neural networks and then people started to do all these amazing things back propagation algorithm was invented and you know that the neural nets people were running were these tiny little like 20 neuron neural nets right like what are you supposed to learn with 20 neurons and so of course they weren't able to get great results and it really wasn't until 2012 that this approach that's almost the most simple natural approach that people had come up with in the 50s right in some ways even in the 40s before there were computers with the pits mccollin neuron”
2019-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Greg Brockman: OpenAI and AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But I actually think that people took the wrong lesson from AI history. And if you look back starting in 1959 is when the perceptron was released. And this is basically one of the earliest neural networks. It was released to what was perceived as this massive overhype. So in the New York Times in 1959, you have this article saying that the Perceptron will one day recognize people, call out their names, instantly translate speech between languages. People at the time looked at this and said this is like your system can't do any of that and basically spent 10 years trying to discredit the whole Perceptron direction and succeeded. And all the funding dried up and people kind of went in other directions. And the 80s, there was a resurgence. And I'd always heard that the resurgence in the 80s was due to the invention of back propagation and these algorithms that got people excited. But actually the causality was due to people building larger computers that you can find these articles from the 80s saying that the democratization of computing power”
2019-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Greg Brockman: OpenAI and AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so, what it boils down to then is a question of well, is there a path? Is there hope? Is there a way to build such a system? And I think that for 60 or 70 years that people got excited and that ended up not being able to deliver on the hopes that people had pinned on them. And I think that then that after two winters of AI development, that people, I think kind of almost stopped daring to dream, right? Really talking about AGI or thinking about AGI became almost this taboo in the community.”
2019-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Greg Brockman: OpenAI and AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Imagine you can build a computer system that could do that. What becomes possible? We have a lot of sci-fi that tells stories of various dystopias and increasingly you have movies like Heard that tell you a little bit about maybe more of a little bit utopic vision. You think about the impacts that we've seen from being able to have bicycles for our minds and computers. And I think that the impact of computers in the internet has just far outstripped what anyone really could have predicted. And so I think that it's very clear that if you can build an AGI, it will be the most transformative technology that humans will ever create.”
2019-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Greg Brockman: OpenAI and AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so I think that in some ways it really boils down to taking a look at the landscape. So if you think about the history of AI that basically for the past 60 or 70 years people have thought about this goal of what could happen if you could automate human intellectual labor.”
2019-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Greg Brockman: OpenAI and AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think it's not a question that we have ready answers to how do you have a world where all of the different countries that we have, United States, China, Russia, and the hundreds of other countries out there are able to continue to not just operate in the way that they see fit, but the world that emerges in these, where you have these very powerful systems operating alongside humans ends up being something that empowers humans more, that makes human existence be a more meaningful thing and that people are happier and wealthier and able to live more fulfilling lives. It's not an obvious thing for how to design that world once you have that very powerful system.”
2019-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Greg Brockman: OpenAI and AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I think that this actually blends into our third team, right, which is the policy team. And this is the one, the aspect I think people really talk about way less than they should, right? Because imagine that we build super powerful systems that we've managed to figure out all the mechanisms for these things to do whatever the operator wants. The most important question becomes, who's the operator? What do they want? And how is that going to affect everyone else? And I think that this question of what is good, what are those values? I mean, I think you don't even have to go to those very grand existential places to start to realize how hard this problem is. You just look at different countries and cultures across the world and that there's a very different conception of how the world works and what kinds of ways that society wants to operate. And so I think that the really core question is actually very concrete.”
2019-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Greg Brockman: OpenAI and AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Even say this in a different way. I mean, think about how do we align humans, right? Think about like a human baby can grow up to be an evil person or a great person. And a lot of that is from learning from data, right? That you have some feedback as a child is growing up. They get to see positive examples. And so I think that just like the only example we have of a general intelligence that is able to learn from data to align with human values and to learn values, I think we shouldn't be surprised that we can do the same sorts of techniques or whether the same sort of techniques end up being how we solve value alignment for AGIs.”
2019-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Greg Brockman: OpenAI and AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This question of what do humans want? How am I supposed to write that down? Can I even write down what I want? No way. And then they stop there. But the thing is, we've already built systems that are able to learn things that humans can't specify. Even the rules for how to recognize if there's a cat or a dog in an image. Out it's intractable to write that down, and yet we're able to learn it, and that what we're seeing with systems we build at OpenAI, and they're still in early proof of concept stage, is that you are able to learn human preferences. You're able to learn what humans want from data. And so that's kind of the core focus for our technical safety team. And I think that there actually we've had some pretty encouraging updates in terms of what we've been able to make work.”
2019-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Greg Brockman: OpenAI and AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To answer the question, you can really look at how we structure open AI. So we really have three main arms. We have capabilities, which is actually doing the technical work and pushing forward what these systems can do. There's safety, which is working on technical mechanisms to ensure that the systems we build are aligned with human values. And then there's policy, which is making sure that we have governance mechanisms, answering that question of, well, whose values? And so I think that the technical safety one is the one that people kind of talk about the most, right? You talk about like think about, you know, all of the desktop AI movies, a lot of that is about not having good technical safety in place. And what we've been finding is that, you know, I think that actually a lot of people look at the technical safety problem and think it's just intractable.”
2019-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Greg Brockman: OpenAI and AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But that being said, I actually have some hope, right? I think that the positive vision is something that I think can talk about. And I think that just simply saying this fact of, yeah, like there's positive, there's negatives, everyone likes to dwell on the negative. People actually respond well to that message and say, huh, you're right, there's a part of this that we're not talking about not thinking about. And that's actually something that's, I think, really been a key part of how we think about AGI at open AI, right? You can kind of look at it as like, okay, like Open AI talks about the fact that there are risks, and yet they're trying to build this system. Like, how do you square those two facts?”
2019-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Greg Brockman: OpenAI and AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Less in a physical sense and more just in an intellectual sense because I think that with creating something, you need to just get a bunch of things right and to destroy, you just need to get one thing wrong. And so I think that what that means is that I think a lot of people's thinking dead ends as soon as they see the negative story”
2019-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Greg Brockman: OpenAI and AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's imaginable, right? And now imagine being in 1950 and predicting Uber, right? And you need to describe the internet, you need to describe GPS, you need to describe the fact that everyone's going to have this phone in their pocket. And so I think that just the first truth is that it is hard to picture how a transformative technology will play out in the world. We've seen that before with technologies that are far less transformative than AGI will be. And so I think that one piece is that it's just even hard to imagine and to really put yourself in a world where you can predict what that positive vision would be like. And I think the second thing is that it is always easier to support the negative side than the positive side. It's always easier to destroy than create.”
2019-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Greg Brockman: OpenAI and AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I think there's kind of two problems entailed in that question. The first is more of the question of how can you even picture what a world with a new technology will be like Now imagine we're in 1950 and I'm trying to describe Uber to someone”
2019-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Greg Brockman: OpenAI and AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you have something that's capable as a human and that it's much more scalable, that you absolutely want that thing to go read the whole scientific literature and think about how to create cures for all the diseases, right? You want it to think about how to go and build technologies to help us create material abundance and to figure out societal problems that we have trouble with? Like how are we supposed to clean up the environment? And maybe you want this to go and invent a bunch of little robots that will go out and be biodegradable and turn ocean debris into harmless molecules. And I think that that positive side is something that I think people miss sometimes when thinking about what an AGI will be like. And so I think that if you have a system that's capable of all of that, you absolutely want its advice about how do I make sure that we're using your capabilities in a positive way for humanity.”
2019-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Greg Brockman: OpenAI and AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But I guess fundamentally, what it really comes down to is if you've built something really powerful and you think about, for example, the creation of shortly after the creation of nuclear weapons, the most important question in the world was, what's the world order going to be like? How do we set ourselves up in a place where we're going to be able to survive as a species? With AGI, I think the question is slightly different, right? That there is a question of how do we make sure that we don't get the negative effects. But there's also the positive side, right? You imagine that, you know, like, what will an AGI be like? Like, what will it be capable of? And I think that one of the core reasons that an AGI can be powerful and transformative is actually due to technological development.”
2019-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Greg Brockman: OpenAI and AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, we've already had the conversation with Illia, right? And everyone here. And so you want as many perspectives and a piece of wisdom as you can for answering this question. So I don't think you necessarily defer to whatever your powerful system tells you, but you use it as one input to try to figure out what to do.”
2019-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Greg Brockman: OpenAI and AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's right. I think that at that point, if you've really built a powerful system that is capable of shaping the future of humanity, the first question that you really should ask is how do we make sure that this plays out well? And so that's actually the first question that I would ask a powerful AGI system is.”
2019-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Greg Brockman: OpenAI and AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, maybe today things are starting to shift in a different direction. But I think that those initial conditions were really important to determine the next 40 years worth of progress.”
2019-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Greg Brockman: OpenAI and AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's right. That's right. And this kind of seems to play out in a bunch of different ways that there's some exponential that is being ridden and that the exponential itself, which one it is, changes. Think about Moore's law. An entire industry set its clock to it for 50 years. Like, how can that be? How is that possible? And yet somehow it happened. And so I think you can't hope to ever invent something that no one else will. Maybe you can change the timeline a little bit. But if you really want to make a difference, I think that the thing that you really have to do, the only real degree of freedom you have is to set the initial conditions under which a technology is born. And so you think about the internet, right? That there are lots of other competitors trying to build similar things. And the internet won and that the initial conditions where it was created by this group that really valued people being able to anyone being able to plug in this very academic mindset of being open and connected. And I think that the internet for the next 40 years really played out that way.”
2019-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Greg Brockman: OpenAI and AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One thing that I actually think a lot about with open AI is that we're kind of coming onto this insanely transformational technology of general intelligence, right, that will happen at some point. And there's a question of how can you take actions that will actually steer it to go better rather than worse. And that I think one question you need to ask is as a scientist, as an inventor, as a creator, what impact can you have in general, right? You look at things like the telephone invented by two people on the same day. Like, what does that mean? Like, what does that mean about the shape of innovation? And I think that what's going on is everyone's building on the shoulders of the same giants. And so you can kind of, you can't really hope to create something no one else ever would. You know, if Einstein wasn't born, someone else would have come up with relativity. You know, he changed the timeline a bit, right? That maybe it would have taken another 20 years, but it wouldn't be that fundamentally humanity would never discover these fundamental truths.”
2019-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Greg Brockman: OpenAI and AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That huge macro being will do and almost independent of what the individuals want. I actually have a second angle on this that I think is interesting, which is thinking about technological determinism.”
2019-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Greg Brockman: OpenAI and AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think this is actually a really interesting perspective to take and to think about that you sort of have this collective intelligence of all of society. The economy itself is the superhuman machine that is optimizing something, right? And it's in some ways a company has a will of its own, right? That you have all these individuals who are all pursuing their own individual goals and thinking really hard and thinking about the right things to do. But somehow the company does something that is this emergent thing and that it's a really useful abstraction. And so I think that in some ways, you know, we think of ourselves as the most intelligent things on the planet and the most powerful things on the planet, but there are things that are bigger than us. There are these systems that we all contribute to. And so I think actually, you know, it's interesting to think about if you've read Isaac Izimov's foundation that there's this concept of psychohistory in there, which is effectively this, that if you have trillions or quadrillions of beings, then maybe you could actually predict what that being that”
2019-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Greg Brockman: OpenAI and AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think it's really interesting to think about humans as just information processing systems and that it seems like it's actually a pretty good way of describing a lot of kind of how the world works or a lot of what we're capable of to think that again if you just look at technological innovations over time that in some ways the most transformative innovation that we've had has been the computer right in some ways the internet you know that what has the internet done right the internet is not about these physical cables it's about the fact that I am suddenly able to instantly communicate with any other human on the planet I'm able to retrieve any piece of knowledge that in some ways the human race has ever had and that those are these insane transformations”
2019-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Greg Brockman: OpenAI and AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so I think that the thing that really appeals to me about the digital world is that you can have this insane leverage, right? A single individual with an idea is able to affect the entire planet. And that's something I think is really hard to do if you're moving around physical atoms.”
2019-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Greg Brockman: OpenAI and AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source