Author: Sam Altman, CEO of Open AI; Compiled by: Wu Baht, Golden Finance

ChatGPT was born just over a month ago, and now we have transitioned to the next model paradigm that can perform complex reasoning. The New Year brings time for reflection, and I wanted to share some personal thoughts on how it's gone so far, and some of the things I've learned along the way.

As we get closer to AGI, now seems like an important time to take a look at the company's progress. There's still a lot to understand, a lot we don't know, and it's still early days. But we know a lot more than when we started.

We started OpenAI almost nine years ago because we believed AGI was possible and could be the most impactful technology in human history. We want to figure out how to build it and make it broadly beneficial; we're excited to try and leave our mark on history. Our ambitions are very high and we believe this work has the potential to benefit society in equally extraordinary ways.

At the time, few people cared, and if they did, it was mostly because they thought we had no chance of success.

In 2022, OpenAI is a quiet research lab working on something tentatively called "Chatting with GPT-3.5." (We're much better at research than we are at naming.) We've been watching people use the playground features of our API, and know that developers really enjoy talking to models. We thought building a demo around this experience would show people some important information about the future and help us make our model better and safer.

We eventually charitably called it ChatGPT and released it on November 30, 2022.

We have always known in the abstract that at some point we will reach a tipping point and the AI ​​revolution will begin. But we don’t know when that moment will be. To our surprise, this is how it turned out.

The launch of ChatGPT kicked off an unprecedented growth curve—in our company, in our industry, and around the world. We are finally seeing the huge benefits we have always hoped to get from artificial intelligence, and we can see more to come soon.

It’s not easy. The road is not smooth and the right choice is not obvious.

Over the past two years we have had to build a company almost from scratch around this new technology. There's no way to train employees other than by doing it yourself, and when the technology category is completely new, there's no one to tell you what to do.

Building a company at such a high rate with so little training is a chaotic process. Usually two steps forward, one step back (sometimes one step forward, two steps back). Mistakes will be made as you go alongCorrection, but when you're doing original work, there aren't really any manuals or guides. Moving quickly through uncharted waters is an incredible experience, but also very stressful for everyone involved. Conflicts and misunderstandings abound.

These years have been by far the most rewarding, interesting, best, interesting, tiring, and stressful years I have ever had, and the past two years in particular have been the most unpleasant. I feel a surge of gratitude; I know that one day I will retire and be a little bored on a farm watching plants grow and remember how cool it is to be able to do the job I have dreamed of since I was a kid. I try to remember this on any given Friday and by 1pm, seven things have gone wrong.

One Friday over a year ago, the worst thing that happened that day was that I was abruptly fired during a video call, and as soon as we got off the phone, the board of directors posted an article about it. blog post. I was in a hotel room in Las Vegas. It was a feeling, almost inexplicable, like a dream gone wrong.

Being fired in public without warning sparked hours of madness and then days of madness. The "fog of war" is the weirdest part. None of us can get a satisfactory answer as to what happened or why.

In my opinion, the entire episode is a colossal failure of governance by people of good intentions (myself included). Looking back, I certainly wish I had done things differently, and I want to believe that I am a better, more thoughtful leader now than I was a year ago.

I also learned the importance of having a board with diverse perspectives and experience when dealing with a complex set of challenges. Good governance requires a lot of trust and credibility. I’m grateful that so many people have come together to build a stronger governance system for OpenAI, which will enable us to achieve our mission of ensuring that AGI benefits all of humanity.

My biggest takeaway is that there are so many people I want to thank: thank you to everyone who works at OpenAI and chooses to spend time and energy pursuing this dream, Thank you to our friends who have helped us through times of crisis, to our partners and customers who have supported us and trusted us to help them succeed, and to the people in my life who have shown me how much they care. [1]

We all returned to work in a more united and positive way, and I'm very proud of our focus since then. The research we do is undoubtedly the best ever done. We grew from approximately 100 million weekly active users to over 300 million. Most importantly, we continue to bring technology to the world that people actually love and that solves real problems.

Nine years ago, we really had no idea where we would end up; even now, we only have a rough idea. The development of artificial intelligence has gone through many twists and turns, and we expect more twists and turns in the future.

Some twists and turns are joyous; some are difficult. looking at the sourceA steady stream of research has led to miracles happening, and interestingly enough, many naysayers have become true believers. We have also seen some colleagues break away and become competitors. Teams tend to turn over as they scale, and OpenAI scales very quickly. I think some of this is inevitable - startups typically see a lot of turnover at each new significant level of scale, and at OpenAI the numbers increase by orders of magnitude every few months. The past two years have been like ten years for a typical company. When any company grows and develops so quickly, interests naturally diverge. When a company in any important industry leads, many people will attack it for a variety of reasons, especially if they try to compete with it.

Our vision will not change; our strategy will continue to evolve. For example, when we started, we didn't know we had to build a product company; we thought we were just going to do great research. We also had no idea we would need such a large amount of funding. Now we have to build new things that we didn’t understand just a few years ago, and there will be new things in the future that we can barely imagine now.

We are proud of our record in research and deployment to date and are committed to continuing to advance our thinking on security and benefit sharing. We continue to believe that the best way to make AI systems safe is to iterate and gradually release them into the world, allowing society time to adapt and evolve with the technology, learn from experience, and continue to make the technology safer. We believe in the importance of being a world leader in safety and coordination research, and guiding this research through feedback from real-world applications.

We are now confident that we know how to build AGI according to our traditional understanding. We believe that by 2025 we may see the first AI agents “joining the workforce” and materially changing a company’s output. We continue to believe that putting great tools into people's hands, repeatedly, will lead to great results that are widely distributed.

We are beginning to shift our goals towards true superintelligence. We love our current product, but we're here for a brilliant future. With superintelligence, we can do anything. Super-intelligent tools could vastly accelerate scientific discovery and innovation far beyond what we are capable of on our own, thereby vastly increasing abundance and prosperity.

It sounds like science fiction, and even talking about it is a little crazy. That’s okay – we’ve been there before and we can go there again. We're very confident that over the next few years everyone will see what we see, and it's very important to act very carefully while still maximizing broad benefits and empowerment. Given the possibilities of our work, OpenAI cannot be an ordinary company.

What a blessing and privilege to be a part of this work.

(Thanks to Josh Tyrtips from angiel. I wish we had more time. )

Notes:

[1] There were a lot of people doing incredible work to help OpenAI and myself personally during those days, but two people stood out.

Ron Conway and Brian Chesky went above and beyond the call of duty, I don’t even know how to describe it. Of course, I'd heard about Ron's abilities and perseverance for years, and I'd spent a lot of time with Brian over the past few years and gotten a lot of help and advice.

But there’s nothing like being in the trenches with people and seeing what they can really do. I have reason to believe that OpenAI would collapse without their help; they worked around the clock until it was done.

Although they work very hard, they always remain calm, have clear strategic thinking and good advice. They stopped me from making a few mistakes without making any themselves. They use their vast network to meet every need and are able to navigate many complex situations. I'm sure they do a lot of stuff that I don't know about.

What I remember most, though, is their care, compassion, and support.

I thought I knew what it was like to support founders and companies, and to some extent I do. But I had never seen or even heard of what these men did, and now I understand more fully why they have legendary status. They are all different and all fully deserving of their truly unique reputation, but they have an extraordinary ability to move mountains and help, and an unwavering commitment when needed. The technology industry will be better off because of the two of them.

There are others like them; this is what is so special about our industry and they contribute so much more to making everything work than people realize. I look forward to giving them back.

On a personal note, a special thank you to Ollie for his support that weekend and throughout; he has been incredible in every way and couldn't have asked for a better partner.