A really interesting interview from Ben this month...best excerpts worth digesting

A little about Greg:

OpenAI President and co-founder Greg Brockman. Brockman dropped out of college in 2010 to join Stripe, and rose to become the company’s CTO; he left in 2015 and co-founded OpenAI, where he also served as CTO.

OpenAI and the Turing Test

Well, I have been excited about the idea of AI for a long time. I remember when I was first getting into programming, I read Alan Turing’s 1950 paper on the Turing test. It’s this really interesting paper, it’s like 70 pages or something. It starts out by saying, “Well, what does it mean for a machine to be intelligent? I don’t know what that means. Intelligent is not well-defined. So let’s have a well-defined version of it”. Turing very smartly sidestepped the question and said, “Let’s just have an operational definition of this, where if you can have a test where a human can’t tell the difference between an AI speaking to them and another human, we’ll define that machine as intelligent”. The thing that was very interesting, though, that gets much less airtime, is he said, “Well, how are you ever going to solve this? It’s just too hard to program an answer to it. You cannot write down all the rules for how to respond to questions. Instead, what if you could build a machine that learns? What if you could build what he called a child machine?”. I remember being so struck by this idea, because as a programmer, you only make progress by deeply understanding the solution to something. There are so many problems I don’t know the solution to, you don’t know the solution to, no person has ever come up with a solution to, we’re never going to be able to program the answer. But what if you could have a machine that could understand problems that we cannot, that could understand solutions that we could not?

First meeting with SAMA

I met up with Sam, and three minutes in, he’s like, “Okay, you’re clear you’re out, what are you thinking about doing next?”, I said, “Well, I’m thinking about doing something in AI”, he said, “I’m also thinking about doing something in AI”. And that was the start...the idea of being a non-profit is something that Sam had proposed, and I think that there are actually a lot of very important properties, and you see ones that have really rung true to today. The technology we are building, it’s just bigger than anything that’s been created, it’s bigger than the traditional structures and systems. There is no one corporate structure that exists that actually fully encapsulates the mission and the work we need to do. So I think starting that way made perfect sense, and there was always a question of what is it going to take to actually operationalize the mission? That’s something we spent a long time really thinking about. I think we’ve been the company that’s been the most innovative in really thinking about can you build a structure around all of the different aspects of both the commercial development that needs to happen, the distribution of benefits that needs to happen, the practical way of actually bringing forth this compute-powered economy, and doing all of that at once. So I think it’s been an important element, it remains a critical element to what we do. But again, I think we’ve innovated so much on corporate structure around the core of this mission, and that mission is invariant.

What happened in November 2023?

Look, I would say the way to think about it is that at the highest level, I think that 2023 really showed that there were tensions that had built up, really interpersonal tensions that had built up, that we had not sufficiently gotten ahead of. To me, that’s one of the most important lessons of OpenAI, the fact that we’re building technology, but it’s always about the people, in good and bad ways. It means that really managing people dynamics, that is one of the most important things that we do, and if we don’t get ahead of it, if we don’t have the hard conversation, then that is actually where things can become much rougher. So I’m happy to drill into more details, but I think that a lot of it, if you really get there, it’s not the more interesting technological things. think that to some extent, there maybe is an underlying theme of, as our technology has progressed, everyone feels the weight of the world on them, feels the stakes on them. Actually, one of the things that’s hardest is how do you just move forward? To me, the thing that I always remark upon is that the day-to-day activities that we do almost look the same as at every other company. You’re still debugging some low-level issue, someone’s upset at someone else because they said something, or they didn’t include them in the meeting, whatever it is. It’s just the human factors, the human work. But of course, the stakes are so massive.

Suddenly is sometimes sooner

So I think building infrastructure from first principles around what you see coming, that is something that I think is important. And to your point on when is it, “Oh, we can just let the AI do it” — again, we’ve seen this show before in different fields, in writing kernels, and thinking about the fact that, “Okay, we’re going to be in a world where in the future the AI is going to be able to write GPU kernels very well”, do the classic kinds of investments where it takes many months, sometimes a year, to get new infrastructure in place for thinking about new hardware, that kind of thing, or do we just say, “Ah, the AI will figure it out”? I think the answer is always that it takes a little bit longer than you expect for the AI to get there. But when it does, it is surprising and powerful in ways you didn’t imagine. Well, I think this is the core of the moment, of the new phase that we’re in, and in some ways I would say we’re into the AGI era now. I think that is the core of this moment, where — maybe it was the previous model, maybe it’s Astra, maybe it’s the next model, but somewhere in there, I think we’re going to cross most people’s AGI threshold.

Oh in case your curios about his Alan Turing comments. https://opencv.org/history-of-ai