Co-founder and CEO of OpenAI; previously president of Y Combinator.
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5 of Sam Altman's claims fit 5 mental models. Most often: Feedback loops, Bottlenecks, Exponential growth.
Growth that doubles looks like nothing for a long time and then like everything; intuition is linear and gets it wrong.
Their wordsTrust the exponential, be patient, and be pleasantly surprised.
Shorten the loop between doing and finding out; whatever a loop rewards is what you become.
Their wordsAn iterative loop where society and this technology evolve together is what will lead to the highest chance of getting this right.
Their wordsIt is easy to imagine the degenerate case of AI video generation that ends up with us all being sucked into an RL-optimized slop feed.
A system moves only as fast as its narrowest point; speed up anything else and nothing changes.
Their wordsWe care very deeply about AI safety. We believe the entire field will have to coordinate on shared safety standards, but will act unilaterally in the meantime. We expect confidence in safety to increasingly set the pace of AI progress.
A longer horizon makes some problems solvable and some short-term wins look like what they are.
Mental modelSecond-order thinking
Their wordsI don't think any of us should want to be locked into one one AIS or one person's or one company's moral worldview.
Ask "and then what?": follow a decision past its first effect to the ones that come after.
Mental modelPlay long games
Their wordsI don't think any of us should want to be locked into one one AIS or one person's or one company's moral worldview.