OpenAI has been around for seven years now, so it's not,
it's not a very old organization, but it's also not a very new organization
either. The culture of OpenAI has changed
over time as we got more and more clarity about
how to make progress. In the first year,
our culture was a little bit more exploratory. We were trying to
understand what it is that we want to do and hone in on the big
ideas that we wanted to pursue. And then as time went on,
our culture started to adopt more
aspects of large scale engineering projects. Because our goal
is not just to invent something, our goal is also to build it.
And building requires a really strong
engineering culture where large teams are working together to produce
sophisticated engineering artifacts. I think all of computing has just
one goal right now, which is to actually build artificial
intelligence which loves humanity or some variant thereof. All the AI that
exists today is based on top
of deep learning, which is a relatively narrow
set of ideas compared to the broader computer science.
So in the past five years or seven years or so, there's been,
or maybe more 10 years, there's been this contraction where
previously there's been lots of activity all over in computer science
research and now it's all concentrated in AI on deep learning specifically.
So people go really deep and people understand those
techniques. Deep learning, which is basically ways
of building digital brains which
live inside large computers. That's what deep learning is.
Literally we build digital brains with artificial
neurons inside big computers and
there's a certain set of ideas that come with it. There are certain ways of
thinking which are more forward looking. And when people
work together and they internalize these forward looking ideas,
very substantial and productive progress is possible. What I
hope will happen is that as we keep
on, as the field keeps on making progress and artificial intelligence gets
smarter and smarter, it is eventually built and it's
used to solve a huge number of problems that society has
a lot of problems that have been intractable for a long time around.
From small things like global warming, to international
relationships, to massive
scale mega cheap autonomous healthcare, to curing lots
of diseases and extending life and living on other planets. I think all of this
could happen. It'd be rather nice.
In a nutshell, AI is
going to be incredibly, unbelievably powerful,
incredibly unbelievably impactful.
And with such tremendous power comes
the possibility that perhaps things
won't go quite the way we want. Will we be able to manage
such powerful tools? And also the technical
challenges of making those technical tools well behaved.
I think These are all very
significant risks, and it is my wish that
basically none of this happens.
Here's what a predict will happen. I think AI will continue
to make progress. I think we will
see AI becoming the single most discussed subject
in society. I think we will see a whole lot of
people starting to think about the questions that are posed by AIs,
and starting to come up with creative and unexpected solutions that we haven't
thought of yet. I think that we will see a huge number
of incredible applications and incredible uses of AI, and we'll
see lots of existing problems, indeed starting to be solved. We'll see
a huge amount of economic growth, and we'll also see new problems that
are caused by AI that we've never seen before. I think all
of these things will happen in the same time. The precise proportions are
unpredictable. But yeah, it will be
not boring.