Sam Altman on AI and society
Altman expects AI to make society far richer and to become part of everyday life, much as the transistor did, with progress built on a shared scaffolding of human work. He worries about who captures the value and prefers a broadly distributed up-leveling of people to power concentrating in a few hands, floating ideas such as shared ownership of AI compute. He argues that no single person or company should control AGI, that people will misuse powerful tools but adapt, and that life after superintelligence should stay recognizably human.
16 points · 7 appearances · 2023–2026
How the view evolved
Cheap intelligence and energy will make society far richer → The social contract may need to change around compute
In 2023 he expected falling costs to make society richer with positive political effects; by 2025 he says the social contract may need to change and that access to AI compute may need to be shared.
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2023–2026 · changed view
“So I want to be very clear. I do not think we have yet discovered a way to align a super powerful system. We have something that works for our current scale called RLHF, and we can talk a lot about the benefits of that and the utility it provides. It's not just an alignment, maybe it's not even mostly an alignment capability. It helps make a better system, a more usable system. And this is actually something that I don't think people outside the field understand enough. It's easy to talk about alignment and capability as orthogonal vectors. They're very close. Better alignment techniques lead to better capabilities, and vice versa. There's cases that are different, and they're important cases, but on the whole, I think things that you could say like RLHF or interpretability that sound like alignment issues also help you make much more capable models, and the division is just much fuzzier than people think. And so in some sense, the work we do to make GPT-4 safer and more aligned looks very similar to all the other work we do of solving the research and engineering problems associated with creating useful and powerful models.”
2023–2026 · changed view
“People talk about like how many jobs is AI gonna do in five years and the framework that people have is what percentage of current jobs are just gonna be totally replaced by some AI doing the job? The way I think about it is not what percent of jobs AI will do, but what percent of tasks will AI do and over what time horizon. So if you think of all of the like-five second tasks in the economy, five-minute tasks, the five-hour tasks, maybe even the five-day tasks, how many of those can AI do? And I think that's a way more interesting, impactful, important question than how many jobs AI can do because it is a tool that will work at increasing levels of sophistication and over longer and longer time horizons for more and more tasks and let people operate at a higher level of abstraction. So maybe people are way more efficient at the job they do. And at some point, that's not just a quantitative change, but it's a qualitative one too about the kinds of problems you can keep in your head. I think that for videos on YouTube, it'll be the same. Many videos, maybe most of them, will use AI tools in the production, but they'll still be fundamentally driven by a person thinking about it, putting it together, doing parts of it, sort of directing it and running it.”
2023–2026 · changed view
“First of all, you can't ask it anything. That's very nice of you to say, but there's a lot of things that it's still embarrassingly bad at. But even if we fixed those, which hopefully we will, it doesn't continuously learn and improve. It can't go get better at something that it's currently weak at. It can't go discover new science and update its understanding and do that. And it also kind of can't — even if we lower the bar — it can't just sort of do any knowledge work you could do in front of a computer. Even without the sort of ability to get better at something it doesn't know yet, I might accept that as a definition of AGI. But the current systems — you can't say, like, hey, go do this task for my job, and it goes off and clicks around the internet and calls someone and looks at your files and does it. And without that, it feels definitely short of it.”
2023–2026
“When I was a kid, I assumed that there were always some adults in the room. Someone had a plan. Someone knew everything that was going to happen. Someone had it all figured out. And I sort of think why people like conspiracy theories is it's nice to think that someone's got a plan. It's nice to think someone that, you know, has it all figured out. And then I got a little bit older and I sort of started to suspect there are no adults in the room. No one, people have plans. I have plans, but no one has all the answers. No one knows where it's all going to go. And now that I am the adult in the room, I can say with certainty, no one knows where it's all going to go. Like, I'm the guy in the room and I have some guesses and I have some plans, and we're working really hard. But like, you know, we try to always say what we think the possibilities are, what we think is most likely. Often we're right. Sometimes it's in the broader set. And sometimes it goes in a totally different direction than anything we thought. And you know, we keep trying to make progress, figure out more. We try to tell people, not just tell, we try to show people by like deploying these systems and say, "You can go use it. Don't just take our word for it. Try it out. See what it can do."”