Sam Altman at Harvard
After having gone over a lot of the background of his journey with chatGPT and Open AI in a recent talk, Sam Altman also talked a little bit about how he envisions artificial superintelligence gaining ground.
He described potential for either a “utopic” or “dystopic” scenario, with ever more powerful sentient engines having more foundational effects on our societies.
“It’s this magic thing in the tower,” he imagined, “that we can ask any question, and it answers it, and it's constantly figuring out how to improve the world…”
One point Altman went into is that AI systems can make people more productive! But he also talked about AI having its own shared intelligence, in its joined infrastructure.
Humans, he noted, have this, too.
“This scaffolding exists between all of us,” he said. “Somebody contributes one insight about material science, generations become more capable…”
Student asking Sam Altman a question at Harvard
Likewise, he said, new artificial intelligence will be shared between neural networks.
“AGI is not about what exists in any one data center,” he said, “but it's this vast production – of intelligence and a technology tree that lets us – accomplish things well (beyond) the information and processing power of some (individual) neural network.”
He also touched on how people are feeling about AI. While many people think that advances in AI will drop off soon, the insiders, he said, mostly assume that progress is going to continue.
“Somehow that seems really hard to conceptualize,” he said, discussing the likely outcomes as AI scales and grows.
In question time, Altman talked about the times that we’re in and how that affects professionals.
In general, he said, it’s a great time to be starting out your career.
“There's a lot of dynamism,” he said. “What this means is that you can change course many times – you will benefit from being very adaptable – this is going to be an unusual time in terms of how much it rewards adaptability and quick movement.”
Sam Altman at Harvard
In terms of future advances, Altman suggested that the cost of compute will drop precipitously, to close to the cost of energy.
“If (AI services) become something that everyone gets for free, that should help poor people more than rich people,” he said.
Then there’s education. Altman talked about the possibility of every college freshman learning how to accomplish AI tasks, and about societal uses for AI in general.
Sam Atlman at Harvard
Lots to think about! Listening to Altman talk, you can sense the possibilities awaiting beyond the horizon….
