May 5, 2024 3:00 p.m.
Most of us will agree that ChatGPT became the standard bearer for AI in general: its muscular responses to complex questions were at the center of how we see intelligence driven by linguistic models.
Starting with some background about himself, and describing his life in college as a “computer nerd” and water polo player, Sam Altman described parts of his career in technology, noting that he worked with very smart people and continued to work in network to achieve its legacy in deep learning and artificial intelligence.
At first, he said, AI was on the periphery, But he felt that things that weren’t working well could still be interesting, and he saw a path toward improvement.
“We thought if AI could work, it would be the coolest, most exciting thing worth pursuing,” he said. He also quoted Paul Graham talking about being “relentlessly resourceful” and suggested that we should always continue to look for vectors of attack.
And what about the timeline for the excitement around OpenAI’s pioneering AI? In 2015, Altman said, it was clear that something interesting was happening with deep learning. However, the teams remained perplexed about what exactly to do with that knowledge. “Nothing was clear,” he said, from the brainstorming sessions of the time, describing people looking around the room and saying “okay, what now?”
“Language models were still in the future,” he explained, noting that it is difficult to innovate without a practical plan. “If you start a for-profit company, you theoretically have to have some idea of what you’re going to do,” she said.
The initial idea of Altman’s people was a research laboratory, he said, but they couldn’t get it to work. However, as early as 2012, people were realizing that deep learning was better at scale.
“It took me a couple of years to get into it,” he said of his eventual move to ChatGPT development. Another puzzle, he added, was how to convince people of the value of AI. “It was surprisingly difficult,” he said.
Speaking of artificial neurons and sentimentality, he described a type of thinking in which it seemed that people who were in favor of AI were almost in a kind of “cult.” “We were wondering: how is this (technology) not like an earthquake for the world?” she said.
However, with the release of ChatGPT 3.5, things had really started to take off. Altman noted that ChatGPT 3, the previous version, was already pretty good, but it seems like it was the next iteration that sealed the deal.
It was a fascinating look at the career and mind of someone very important in the AI scene, something we are now paying a lot of attention to!
*With information from Forbes US.
