Sam Altman: 'Debates ignore the benefits of AI'
The OpenAI CEO said that the benefits of AI in making a big leap in quality of life are sometimes "left out of the discussion".
Sam Altman's comments came during his trip to Britain this week. According to the Guardian , the head of OpenAI believes that the development of artificial intelligence will be "the biggest step forward" in improving the quality of human life. AI tools are "more efficient and capable of doing more" in assisting humans.
Altman is on a world tour to discuss the consequences of artificial intelligence, including his company's ChatGPT.
Sam Altman. Photo: TNN
As the initiator of the AI race, Altman still wanted to address both the benefits of advanced AI development and the risks this technology can create.
Late last month, the Center for AI Safety (CAIS) in San Francisco posted on its website a warning message: "Reducing the risk of extinction caused by AI must be a global priority, alongside risks at the societal scale. like a pandemic or a nuclear war".
This message was signed by 350 people who are leading AI leaders and experts, including Sam Altman , Demis Hassabis, head of Google DeepMind, or Yoshua Bengio and Geoffrey Hinton , two people who are considered "godfathers". whose.
The unusual world of the boss ChatGPT
Sam Altman, co-founder and CEO of OpenAI, has a strong personality, likes to do the impossible but is afraid of death.
As a teenager, Sam Altman , born in 1985 in Missouri and of Jewish ancestry, dreamed of joining Google. This prompted him to enroll at Stanford University - the school where Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin attended.
One night, classmate Blake Ross, later the co-founder of Firefox, knocked on Altman's door to see how well his friend was doing on his computer science homework. At that time, the software running the program reported an error that confused Altman.
"30 minutes later, I stopped by again. It was like a crime scene," Ross told Business Insider . "He went into the compiler and disassembled them, the screen was full of low-level code." Finally, Altman found the problem, but it was an error in his assignment. But for Ross, that incredible tinkering made a big impression.
Sebastian Thrun, a former Googler who worked at Stanford's AI lab, made similar comments when he came into contact with Altman. "He always wanted to understand things on a very deep level," says Thrun.
Sam Altman. Photo: TNN
His exploratory personality helped Altman quickly succeed at a very young age. In his sophomore year at Stanford University, Altman dropped out to develop software for Loopt in 2005. The location-based social network was later sold to an online bank for $43 million - a small and feeble sum. double the amount invested. But even if it fails, Altman is still quite sought after by many companies.
He started as a part-time partner at startup incubator Y Combinator in 2011 and joined a year later. In February 2014, he was appointed president by co-founder Paul Graham at the age of 29. Two years later, he became Chairman of YC Group, which includes Y Combinator and other organizations, aiming to fund 1,000 startups every year.
In 2015, Altman and 8 people, including Elon Musk, founded the non-profit organization OpenAI . He envisions this startup as the crown jewel, creating tools that let people work smarter and faster. In 2019, Altman resigned from YC Group to focus on OpenAI. A year later, the big language model GPT was born and the most famous versions are GPT-3.5 on ChatGPT and the latest is GPT-4 .
"Scared to death"
Among Altman's favorite AI short stories is Gentle Seduction , about the love of a man named Jack and a woman. Jack, a technologist with a heart condition, tells his lover about his vision: a future in which technology eliminates all human problems, including death. The woman, a researcher, didn't believe the story at first but still did as Jack said. In the end, she became the supreme immortal being, able to identify with the universe. When she looks back at her lost lover for millennia, she realizes he is the mastermind behind it all.
In Altman there is a part of Jack. The OpenAI CEO imagines in the future humans can explore the farthest reaches of the universe. He wanted to "delay death". He even ordered Nectome - the company that allows to upload the human brain to the cloud, while waiting to resurrect in a simulated shape. According to a friend, thoughts of death increased after Altman's father passed away in 2018. "I was unprepared for losing my father at a young age and wished I had spent more time with him," Altman once said. .
However, according to him, immortality is "caricature". His goal is only "to give people 10 more years of health and vitality". He exercises regularly, is a vegan and follows a disciplined diet. In an interview with The New Yorker in 2016, Altman's mother said that her son is obsessed with many different diseases and often goes to the Internet to find out about them.
Altman also supports a company that researches the possibility of allowing men to conceive and have children, as well as another that offers polygenic embryo screening.
For him, spirituality and science go hand in hand. He likes to meditate, believes in spiritual matters. "Without the ego, I think you would think differently about what it means to die," he told journalist Laurie Segall on the 2020 podcast.
A few years ago, another friend of Altman said he started referring to "the light of consciousness" - a phrase that Silicon Valley long-termists, like Elon Musk or Jack Dorsey , pursue . It stems from the idea that humanity can be destroyed by any existential threat. To stop them, they need to step up to conquer space, develop biotechnology and human-friendly AI.
According to 2016's The New Yorker , Altman says he's always prepared for what's to come. He revealed "possibly possessing an arsenal of guns, gold, potassium iodide, antibiotics, batteries, water, respirators from the Israel Defense Forces" in the event of a nuclear war or a deadly synthetic virus. People.
The pandemic also scared Altman. Last year, he said that during the first few weeks of the Covid-19 lockdown, he stayed indoors, going out only when needed and disinfecting everything, so much so that a partner exclaimed that around Altman "smell like a swimming pool".
Pursue everything
Even before he was known to the world, Altman was a figure of interest in Silicon Valley. He played chess with billionaire Peter Thiel or hosted the wedding of investor Keith Rabois.
But Altman also raises concerns about his pursuit. He currently sits on the boards of seven major companies, including a psychedelic drug research startup and two nuclear energy laboratories. His home in San Francisco regularly hosts large parties with discussion topics ranging from cancer research to nuclear war.
In 2016, he transferred $375 million to the fusion company Helion to accelerate the product to market. In 2019, Jeeshan Chowdhury, a doctor is looking to raise capital to start a company that administers hallucinogens for addiction centers with the goal of treating addiction. Altman then sent millions of dollars to Chowdhury. Journey Colab company was established, expected to clinical trial of new products later this year.
According to venture capitalist Vinod Khosla, Altman is like "a learning model that takes in large amounts of data to make decisions". And according to famous technology developer Ric Burton, what Altman is doing is an unusual world. "It's Sam's world," says Ric Burton. "And we may all be living in that part of the world."