Philanthropists From The United States

"We don’t really encourage women to be leaders."

"Crying at work is not a best practice."

"We expect men to have leadership qualities, to be assertive and competent, to speak out. We expect women to have communal qualities, to be givers and sharers, to pursue the common good."

"I’m not recommending that if you want to get to the top, you should break out the tissues. But we’re human, and it’s important to broaden the kinds of behaviors that are acceptable at work."

"I think denial is the worst. I think silence is the next worst." [on the sexual violence committed by Hamas during the October 7 hostage crisis]"

"But the struggles I write about are the ones all women face: the struggle to believe in yourself, to not feel guilty, to get enough sleep, to believe that you can be both a good professional and a good parent."

"Reigniting the revolution means I want us to notice all of this and find ways to encourage more women to step up and more companies to recognize what women bring to the table."

"One of my goals is to make gender an open and honest topic in the workplace."

"Colleges have a responsibility to keep our kids safe. Full stop. And protect them from hate. Full stop. And they have the ability to do this." [on 2024 Pro-Palestine College Protests]"

"There aren’t enough women sitting at the tables where decisions are made."

"If we could get to a place of true equality, where what we do in life is determined not by gender but by our passions and interests, our companies would be more productive and our home lives not just better balanced but happier."

"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"

"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?"

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

"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."

"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."

"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 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.."

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

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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?""

"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."

"What I have are trust issues and an attraction to emotionally unavailable partners. That, combined with a fear of intimacy that compels me to push away the men who might have the capacity to commit to me in a real and sustainable way, makes for romantic problems. My relationships have been mirrors of how I felt about myself. I've only been treated as well as I thought I deserved."

"My childhood was colorful and chaotic, unstable and inconsistent, unpredictable and hard a lot of the times. But the silver lining is that it made me a very adaptable person."

"Go ahead, Momma. Tell me about your life. Tell me everything."

"One skill a child learns from having alcoholic or drug-dependent parents is to anticipate the needs of those around them. I learned to take care of everyone and make them happy, you before me at all costs, in an unconscious effort to control my environment or to feel needed so to feel worthy, and that doesn't translate into an authentic and trustful relationship."

"The Titanic disaster was a tragedy that was as unnecessary as turning the Brown Palace Hotel into Pikes Peak."

"I would found an institution where any person can find instruction in any study."

"The individual is better, society is better, and the state is better, for the culture of its citizens; therefore we desire to extend the means for the culture of all."

"I hope we have laid the foundation of an institution which shall combine practical with liberal education, which shall fit the youth of our country for the professions, the farms, the mines, the manufactories, for the investigations of science, and for mastering all the practical questions of life with success and honor."

"Not bad for a running back."

"Short, and a little bit slight, and clearly, clearly not the thrower the other guys are. The accuracy isn't there. So I would say don't wait to make that change. Don't be like [former Ohio State quarterback and current NFL wide receiver Terrelle Pryor] and be 29 when you make the change."

"he's a beast!!!!"

"They're gonna get a Super Bowl out of me, believe that."

"My former boss Barack Obama likes to invoke a teaching of Martin Luther King Jr.: "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice." It sounds nice but it's not quite true. The arc can bend toward justice, but much of the time it tacks stubbornly toward the status quo. We must be willing to do the work, reaching up with our own hands and wrenching the arc away from stasis and toward a better future. And when the arc seems to be bending away from justice, we have to dig deep, muster even greater resources, and bend it back."

"Our society is becoming more vulnerable by the day to hate on both the left and the right. Beset by a pandemic that has devasted communities, unsettled everyday life, and cost millions of jobs, people are on edge, ever more likely to blame the Other, whether it's Jews, immigrants, Blacks, Asians, Latinx, Muslims, members of the LGBTQ community—you name it. Deepening economic inequality magnifies the tension, as does inadequate health care, excessive levels of personal debt, and stresses caused by once-in-a-century natural disasters that now occur every year. In this environment, with hatred seething around us, the arrival of another demagogue—one smarter and more disciplined than Donald Trump—is all it would take to produce an explosion of violence, mass death, and the destruction of our society and democracy."

"I believe that you call people in before you call them out. And I don't believe in cancel culture, I believe in counsel culture."