Open AI Co-founder and CEO Sam Altman sat down for a wide-ranging interview with this editor late last week, answering questions about some of the most… Ambitious personal investmentas well as about the future of OpenAI.
There was a lot to discuss. The now eight-year-old outfit has dominated the national conversation in the two months since it launched ChatGPT, a chatbot that answers questions like a person. OpenAI’s products didn’t just amaze users; The company is reportedly in talks to oversee the sale of existing shares to new investors at a price $29 billion Rating though is relative nominal revenue.
Altman declined to talk about the company’s current business dealings, firing a bit of a cautionary shot when asked a pertinent question as we sat down.
However, he did reveal a bit about the company’s plans going forward. For one thing, in addition to ChatGPT and the popular digital art generator DALL-E, Altman confirmed that a video model is also coming, though he said he “won’t want to make an efficient prediction about time,” adding that “it could be close; it’s a research project.” Draft. It may take some time.”
Altman explained that OpenAI’s developing partnership is with Microsoft – which invested first in OpenA in 2019 And earlier today She confirmed that she plans To integrate AI tools like ChatGPT into all of their products – not an exclusive charter.
Furthermore, Altman emphasized that OpenAI can build its own software products and services, as well as license its technology to other companies. This is notable for industry observers who have wondered if OpenAI might one day compete directly with Google via its search engine. (In response to a question about this scenario, Altman said, “When someone talks about technology being the end of yet another giant company, it’s usually a mistake. People forget they have to take a countermove here, and they’re very smart, very competent.”)
As for when OpenAI plans to release version 4 of GPT, the evolving language model that ChatGPT is based on, Altman will only say that the highly anticipated product “will come out at some point when we’re confident we can.” [release] Safely and responsibly.” He, too He tried to temper expectations regarding GPT-4, saying “we don’t have an actual AGI”, meaning artificial general intelligence, or technology with its emerging intelligence, versus OpenAI’s existing deep learning models that solve problems and identify patterns through trial and error.
“I suspect [AGI] It’s kind of what’s expected of us” and GPT-4 “will disappoint” people with that expectation, he said.
Meanwhile, he was asked about when Altman expects to see an artificial general intelligence, he assumed it is closer than one might imagine but also that the shift to an “artificial general intelligence” would not be as sudden as some expect. “The closer we get [to AGI]I’m having a harder time answering because I think it’s going to be a lot murkier and it’s going to be a much more gradual transition than people think.”
Of course, before we wrap things up, we took a moment to talk about safety, including whether the community has enough guardrails for the technology OpenAI has already released into the world. Many critics believed We do notincluding anxiety educated who are increasingly Blocking Access to ChatGPT due to concerns that students will use it to cheat. (Google, in particular, is reported to have been reluctant to launch its own chatbot, LaMDA, due to concerns about “Reputational risk.)
Altman said here that OpenAI has an “internal process where we kind of try to break things down and study the effects. We hire external reviewers. We have external Red work team. We’re working with other labs and getting safety organizations to look at things.”
Meanwhile, he said, the technology is coming — from OpenAI and elsewhere — and people need to start learning how to live with it, he suggested. “There are societal changes that ChatGPT will cause or cause. The most important thing going on right now is its impact on education and academic integrity, all of that.” However, he said, “Start these [product releases] right Now [makes sense]where the stakes are still relatively low, rather than just asking what the whole industry will have in a few years with no time to refresh the community.”
In fact, teachers—and perhaps parents, too—should understand that there’s no putting back on the genie in the bottle. While Altman said that OpenAI and other AI devices will “test” watermarking and other verification techniques to help assess whether students are trying to abandon AI-generated copies as their own, he also hinted that a lot of focus is on this. The exact script is useless.
“There may be ways we can help educators increase the likelihood of discovering the output of a GPT-like system, but frankly, someone is designed to get around them, and I don’t think it’s going to be something that the community can or should count on in the long term.”
He added that it wouldn’t be the first time people had successfully adapted to major transitions. Noting that calculators have “changed what we experience in math classes” and that Google has made the need to memorize facts much less important, Altman said deep learning models represent a “more extreme version” of both developments. But he argued that “the benefits are more extreme, too. We hear from teachers who are very concerned about the impact this will have on homework. We also hear a lot of teachers who are like, ‘Wow, this is an incredible personal tutor for every child.'”
For the full conversation about OpenAI and Altman’s evolving views on the commodification of AI, regulations, and why AI is going in the “exact opposite direction” that many imagined five to seven years ago, it’s worth checking out the clip below.
You’ll also hear Altman talk about the best and worst case scenarios when it comes to the promise and pitfalls of AI. The short version? “The good condition is so unbelievably good that you sound like a really crazy person to start talking about it,” he said. “And the bad state – and I think it’s important to say – is, for example, the lights out for all of us.”