TIME CEO of the Year 2023 | Sam Altman
Sam Altman is TIME's 2023 CEO of the Year
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00:00 Definitely one of the confusing parts of this technology is just the overall power.
00:10 It seems like everyone is suddenly talking about AI.
00:15 That is because they are.
00:16 At this point, I'm sure you've heard of ChatGPT.
00:18 ChatGPT.
00:19 You're going to say, "Yeah, man, ChatGPT."
00:21 Well, it was developed by the American company OpenAI.
00:24 OpenAI founder and CEO Sam Altman testifying on Capitol Hill later today.
00:29 He's going to face questions about artificial intelligence and the rapid growth of ChatGPT.
00:34 As this technology advances, we understand that people are anxious about how it could
00:39 change the way we live.
00:40 And the most consequential technology of our time, artificial intelligence.
00:44 Their attempts to instill AI as a normal operating procedure is literally dehumanizing the workforce.
00:51 The CEO of OpenAI was ousted, and now he's back in.
00:56 The company's board of directors said it had lost confidence in Altman.
01:00 Well, now all but one of those board members is being replaced.
01:09 In a deep sense, AI is the technology that the world, that society, people have always
01:15 wanted.
01:16 Sci-fi has been talking about this for a very long time.
01:17 Hello, I'm here.
01:18 Hi.
01:19 Hello.
01:20 Hi.
01:21 Wake up, Daddy Shum.
01:24 Welcome home, sir.
01:25 A chat interface is very powerful.
01:27 We all know how to use that.
01:29 You can represent a lot of simple or complex concepts in language.
01:33 And the new abilities that you give someone with an interface like this, I think clearly
01:38 resonated.
01:40 So you can kind of date the beginning of 2023 really to November 2022, which is when OpenAI
01:47 released ChatGPT.
01:49 They weren't necessarily the first to have developed this technology in-house, but they
01:53 were the first to release it into the world.
01:56 ChatGPT was followed by GPT-4, which is significantly more powerful and capable than ChatGPT.
02:04 It understands images and can express logical ideas about them.
02:09 For example, it can tell us that if the strings in this image were cut, the balloons would
02:14 fly away.
02:15 People extrapolated from the capabilities of ChatGPT to the capabilities of GPT-4 and began
02:21 thinking, "Okay, what's the technology that's going to come out in five years going to look
02:25 like?
02:26 What's the technology that's going to come out in 10 years going to look like?"
02:29 We think it's very important to our mission to deploy things like ChatGPT so that people
02:34 gain some experience and feeling of the capabilities and limitations of these systems.
02:41 Now there are some criticisms of this.
02:43 One is that it creates so-called race dynamics.
02:46 Companies all fighting to be first to market, to release these tools potentially dangerously,
02:52 cut back on safety research in order to move faster.
02:55 I don't think it's helpful to just sort of pretend like, "Oh, it's all certain to be
02:58 fine."
02:59 We can manage this.
03:00 I am confident about that, but we won't successfully manage it if we're not extremely vigilant
03:05 about the risks and if we don't talk very frankly about how badly it could go wrong.
03:10 Sam Altman is a very capable public speaker and public operator.
03:14 Over the course of 2023, he's really been on what you could call a victory tour and
03:19 you could call a listening tour as well.
03:22 He has been around the world.
03:24 He has testified in front of a Senate committee.
03:26 He has this kind of unique ability to be many things to many people.
03:30 And that requires a combination of skills.
03:33 It requires understanding the core scientific problems, sure, but it also requires being
03:38 effectively a businessman and also a politician.
03:43 When we first started, we thought we could just be a nonprofit, but the costs of compute
03:47 for these systems is quite intense.
03:50 And so we thought really hard and designed a structure where our nonprofit has full control
03:56 and governance over a capped for-profit subsidiary that can make a certain amount of money for
04:02 its investors and employees to let us do what we need to do because these models are extraordinarily
04:07 expensive.
04:08 Sam Altman, who has drawn comparisons to tech giants like Steve Jobs, was dismissed by the
04:14 OpenAI board Friday.
04:17 The board didn't come through with further information about why it had chosen to make
04:22 such a substantial decision.
04:24 Satya Nadella, the Microsoft CEO, said that Altman and Brockman could start up a new AI
04:29 lab within Microsoft.
04:31 And many of OpenAI's employees signed an open letter saying that they would go and join
04:36 Microsoft.
04:37 And what this did was it backed the board into a very difficult position.
04:41 Altman's ability to basically engineer himself back onto the CEO's chair of OpenAI is testament
04:46 to the incredible power that he wields.
04:50 One of the questions is now, is OpenAI trending towards a future where it's a traditional
04:55 tech company, where it sells its AI services to customers and where the incentives are
05:02 largely to stay ahead of competitors?
05:04 And to what extent is it going back to its original roots as a research lab, one that
05:08 is willing to take decisions that might hurt its financial incentives if it means developing
05:14 AI slightly more safely?
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