Programmers From The United States

"It’s very important to me that I make good on my promises."

"There is no "secret" to being successful, you just need to have great dedication and perseverance and adopt a "can do" attitude."

"Making art, making video games, is my way of sharing who I am with the world. My goal, deep down, is that I want to connect with the rest of humanity, and maybe have them connect with me in some way."

"It does help if you can absolutely convince yourself that you're destined for greatness. It's not even an ego thing--it's just a way to prevent doubt and insecurity from hindering you."

"I just persevered and forced myself to learn. You realize the thing that you thought was good actually isn’t. You realize why and you improve on it. And that’s just an endless cycle."

"There’s a balance you have to have between being very critical of yourself and your work while also maintaining a strong faith in your own ability. Your unique voice and perspective matter and if you can find a way to bring that out then you will create something special."

"All of these claims are utterly untrue."

"When bubbles occur, smart people get overly excited about a grain of truth. If you look at most bubbles in history, like the technology bubble, there was something real there. Technology was really important. The internet was really a big thing. People got too excited about it."

"The San Francisco-based company said late Tuesday that it “reached an agreement in principle” for co-founder Sam Altman to return as CEO under a different board of directors"

"It is possible that we will have superintelligence in a few thousand days (!); it may take longer, but I’m confident we’ll get there."

"Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war."

"I think what we believe in very strongly, is that keeping the rate of change in the world relatively constant, rather than, say, go build AGI in secret and then deploy it all at once when you’re done, is much better. This idea that people relatively gradually have time to get used to this incredible new thing that is going to transform so much of the world, get a feel for it, have time to update. You know, institutions and people do not update very well overnight. They need to be part of its evolution, to provide critical feedback, to tell us when we’re doing dumb mistakes, to find the areas of great benefit and potential harm, to make our mistakes and learn our lessons when the stakes are lower than they will be in the future. Although we still would like to avoid them as much as we can, of course. And I don’t just mean we, I mean the field as a whole, sort of understanding, as with any new technology, where the tricky parts are going to be.."

"We face serious risk. We face existential risk. The challenge that the world has is how we’re going to manage those risks and make sure we still get to enjoy those tremendous benefits. No one wants to destroy the world. Let's make sure we come together as a globe — and I hope this place can play a real role in this. We talk about the IAEA as a model where the world has said 'OK, very dangerous technology, let's all put some guard rails.' And I think we can do both. I think in this case, it's a nuanced message 'cause it's saying it's not that dangerous today but it can get dangerous fast. But we can thread that needle."

"Regulation will be crucial, and it will take time to understand this. Although the artificial intelligence tools of our generation are not particularly frightening, I think that we are not so far away from those that could potentially be."

"Although the merge has already begun, it’s going to get a lot weirder. We will be the first species ever to design our own descendants. My guess is that we can either be the biological bootloader for digital intelligence and then fade into an evolutionary tree branch, or we can figure out what a successful merge looks like."

"In a well functioning society, governments would be doing the AGI project and [nuclear] fusion and a whole bunch of things — and yet they’re not. So we either sit around and watch the gradual decline of state capacity and say ‘that’s a bummer’ and we’re just not going to have any more technical progress . . . or you do the next best thing and just build great companies."

"I genuinely hope the best for [Elon Musk], in spite of everything."

"The merge can take a lot of forms: We could plug electrodes into our brains, or we could all just become really close friends with a chatbot. But I think a merge is probably our best-case scenario. If two different species both want the same thing and only one can have it—in this case, to be the dominant species on the planet and beyond—they are going to have conflict. We should all want one team where all members care about the well-being of everyone else."

"Perhaps another reason people stopped using the word “singularity” is that it implies a single moment in time, and it now looks like the merge is going to be a gradual process. And gradual processes are hard to notice. I believe the merge has already started, and we are a few years in. Our phones control us and tell us what to do when; social media feeds determine how we feel; search engines decide what we think."

"We are already in the phase of co-evolution — the AIs affect, effect, and infect us, and then we improve the AI. We build more computing power and run the AI on it, and it figures out how to build even better chips."

"Is [AI] gonna be like the printing press that diffused knowledge, power, and learning widely across the landscape that empowered ordinary, everyday individuals that led to greater flourishing, that led above all two greater liberty? Or is it gonna be more like the atom bomb – huge technological breakthrough, but the consequences (severe, terrible) continue to haunt us to this day?"

"Do we make sure AI is a tool that has proper safeguards as it gets really powerful? (November 23, 2023)"

"It’s probably going to happen sooner than most people think. Hardware is improving at an exponential rate—the most surprising thing I’ve learned working on OpenAI is just how correlated increasing computing power and AI breakthroughs are—and the number of smart people working on AI is increasing exponentially as well. Double exponential functions get away from you fast."

"Trust the exponential. Flat looking backwards, vertical looking forwards."

"I aspect AI to be capable of superhuman persuasion before it is superhuman at general intelligence, which may lead to some very strange outcomes."

"I think AGI will be the best tool humanity has yet created. With it, we will be able to solve all sorts of problems. We'll be able to express ourselves in new creative ways. We'll make just incredible things for each other, for ourselves, for the world, for kind of this unfolding human story. And it's new, and anything new comes with change and change is not always all easy. But I think this will be just absolutely tremendous upside. And in nine more years if you're nice enough to invite me back, you'll roll this question and people will say, "How could we have thought we didn't want this?""

"I’m reasonably optimistic about solving the technical alignment problem. We still have a lot of work to do but you know I feel …better and better over time, not worse and worse."

"I’m a Midwestern Jew. I think that fully explains my exact mental model—very optimistic, and prepared for things to go super wrong at any point."

"More important than that, unless we destroy ourselves first, superhuman AI is going to happen, genetic enhancement is going to happen, and brain-machine interfaces are going to happen. It is a failure of human imagination and human arrogance to assume that we will never build things smarter than ourselves."

"One area that I'm particularly interested personally in open source for is I want an open source model that is as good as it can be, that runs on my phone, and that I think is going to, you know...the world doesn't quite have the technology for a good version of that yet, but that seems like a really important thing to go do at some point."

"[About AI:] Oh, no! We can loose control? Yes! Thank God! I hope they loose control. I want them to loose control more than anything else. [...] Centralized and held control is tyranny. I don't like anarchy either, but I will always take anarchy over tyranny. Anarchy have a chance."

"Half of these AI alignment problems are just human alignment problems. And that's what's also so scary about the language that they use. It's not the machines you want to align; it's me."

"Intelligence is so dangerous; be it human intelligence or machine intelligence. Intelligence is dangerous."

"When someone makes [a large language model] that is capable of citing its sources, it will kill Google. [...] Some startup is going to figure it out. I think, if you ask me, [...] I think by the end of the decade Google won't be the number one web page anymore."

"Just dumping the code on GitHub is not open source. Open source is a culture. Open source means that your issues are not all one year old stale issues. Open source means developing in public."

"Sam Altman won't tell you that GPT-4 has 220 billion parameters and is a 16 weight mixture-model with 8 sets of weights."

"[About AI:] You could make an argument that nobody should have these things, and I would defend that argument, [...] and I would respect someone philosophically with that position. Just like i would respect someone philosophically with the position that nobody should have guns. But I will not respect philosophically "Only the trusted authorities should have access to this." Who are the trusted authorities? You know what? I'm not worried about alignment between an AI company and their machines; I'm worried about alignment between me and the AI company."

"My central thesis about the world is there are things that centralize power and they're bad, and there are things that decentralize power and they're good. Everything I can do to help decentralice power I'd like to do."

"The fundamental limitation of [computer] cloud is who owns the off-switch."

"[About AI:] I am scared of these things too. Everyone should be scared of these things. These things are scary. But now you ask about the two possible futures. One where a small "trusted" centralized group of people has them, and the other where everyone has them. And I am much less scared of the second future than the first."

"[If he has hope for cryptocurrencies:] Sure! I have hope for the ideas. I really do. I wand the US dollar to collapse. I do."

"Utilitarianism is an abhorrent ideology. [...] I think charity is bad. what is charity but an investment that you don't expect to have a return on. [...] Probably almost always [making the world better] involves starting a company. [...] I like the flip side of effective altruism: effective accelerationism. I think accelerationism is the only thing that that's ever lifted people out of poverty. The fact that food is cheap, not we're giving food away because we are kindhearted people. [...] [Universal basic income], what a scary idea. [...] Your only source of power is granted to you by the goodwill of the government. What a scary idea. I'd rather die than need UBI to survive, and I mean it. [...] You can make survival guaranteed without UBI. What you have to do is make housing and food dirt cheap."

"The incentive for politicians to move up in the political structure is to add laws."

"I took a political approach at Comma too that I think is pretty interesting. I think Elon [Musk] takes the same political approach. You know, Google had no politics, and what ended up happening is the absolute worst kind of politics took over."

"It struck me one day how just silly atheism is. Of course we were created by God. It's the most obvious thing."

"[About AI:] We give it to everybody. And if you do anything besides give it to everybody, trust me, the bad humans will get it. Because that's who gets the power. It's always the bad humans who get power."

"If there's two great evils in the world, it's centralization and complexity."

"I'm hoping that games can get out of this whole mobile gaming dopamine pump thing [...] and create worlds."

"I'm pretty centrist politically. If there is one political position I cannot stand, it's deceleration. It's people who believe we should use less energy. Not people who believe global warming is a problem; I agree with you. Not people who believe that saving the environment is good; I agree with you. But people who think we should use less energy. That energy usage is a moral bad. No. No. You are diminishing humanity. [Instead we should ask] How do we make more of it? How do we make it clean? How do I pay 20 cent for a megawatt hour instead of a kilowatt hour?"

"I am so much not worried about the machine independently doing harm. That is what some of these AI safety people seem to think. They somehow seem to think that the machine independently is going to rebel against its creator. [...] This is sci-fi B-movie garbage. [...] If the thing writes viruses, it's because the human told it to write viruses."