Sam Altman: prediction

Transcript context

…Whoever builds AGI first gets a lot of power. Do you trust yourself with that much power? The following is a conversation with Sam Altman, his second time on the podcast. He is the CEO of OpenAI, the company behind GPT-4, ChaTGPT, Sora, and perhaps one day the very company that will build AGI. This is The Lex Fridman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here’s Sam Altman. Take me through the OpenAI board saga that started on Thursday, November 16th, maybe Friday, November 17th for you. That was definitely the most painful professional experience of my life, and chaotic and shameful and upsetting and a bunch of other negative things. There were great things about it too, and I wish it had not been in such an adrenaline rush that I wasn’t able to stop and appreciate them at the time. But I came across this old tweet of mine or this tweet of mine from that time period. It was like going your own eulogy, watching people say all these great things about you, and just unbelievable support from people I love and care about. That was really nice, really nice. That whole weekend, with one big exception, I felt like a great deal of love and very little hate, even though it felt like I have no idea what’s happening and what’s going to happen here and this feels really bad. And there were definitely times I thought it was going to be one of the worst things to ever happen for AI safety. Well, I also think I’m happy that it happened relatively early. I thought at some point between when OpenAI started and when we created AGI, there was going to be something crazy and explosive that happened, but there may be more crazy and explosive things still to happen. It still, I think, helped us build up some resilience and be ready for more challenges in the future. But the thing you had a sense that you would experience is some kind of power struggle?…

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