EMBRACE SUFFERING

“I would say that we, in general, are heading to a compute constrained world. Like if you think about the amount of value that these models can produce for someone, it's extreme. If you just wanted enough compute for, you know, you wanted one GPU for every person in the world, you're talking, like, 8,000,000,000 GPUs. We are not on a trajectory to build anywhere near that level of compute.”

“People get to acceptance pretty fast, and they're happier during the acceptance phase than they were before they were told they were gonna die. Now this is important. Right? This is an important thing because what that says is I mean, if you're taking it at its face and and, again, I mean, the data or the the research is the research, and it could be updated and everything's contested. But it what this suggests is that if you're doing it right, the more time you have, the more meaningful your life is going to be and the more you'll actually savor it.”

“Here's actually how you learn something and make it permanently part of your repertoire. Number one, you understand it. Number two, you practice it. And then number three, you share it. So it's an interesting thing. My father used to say this. My father was a PhD biostatistician, a lifelong mathematics and statistics professor. And I one time I saw him giving a graduate seminar in advanced calculus, a ninety minute lecture with no notes, and it was like watching Jascha Heifetz playing the violin.”

“Now there's a practical consideration as well, which is the Catholic church is kind of like Starbucks. It's ubiquitous and has a uniform high quality product. The great thing about being part of the universal Catholic Church is literally its ubiquitousness. The fact I go to mass every single morning and I travel forty eight weeks a year, and the fact is there's one every place is what it comes down to.”

“One of my friends was describing that his sister was describing this app that she really wished someone had created, that she had this picture of like exactly what she wanted And he in the meanwhile was typing into to codex uh-huh uh-huh and then pushed enter. And a few hours later he shows her this app and she's like wait what what what is this? Like where did this thing come from? Who built this? And he said you did.”

“But Tyler just said, hey, Arthur, I got a big problem. Both my parents were drunks and all four of my grandparents were bootleggers and and I guess I'm doomed to alcoholism. I'd say, Tyler, I have a new whiz bang technology for turning the genetic proclivity from 50% to 0%. It's called not drinking. In other words, when you understand your genetic tendency, you can tailor your habits and that's a beautiful thing.”

“What I am is called the spiral, which is a series of mini careers of your own design that lasts between seven and twelve years. Sometimes it's for profit, sometimes it's nonprofit, sometimes it's making more money, sometimes it's making less money, But it's your career is an adventure where you're impelled to go learn a big new thing.”

“It absolutely is teaching. And that's actually according to the research and according to not just my personal experience. It's very clear that the best teachers are 40, ideally over 60, and many even over 70, as a matter of fact. That's when you actually have the best ability to synthesize information, to recognize patterns, and to express ideas with greatest acuity in the language that nonspecialists can understand.”

“I think that that was a statement that that was really heard loudly. And I remember, you know, I probably got home around like 5AM or something, went to sleep and I woke up like forty five minutes later and I checked Twitter and I saw that Ilya had posted and had signed the petition. And it said that he wanted the company to come back together. And that was this real moment of relief. I felt so much gratitude that it just felt like, okay, like we can put this back together.”

“My favorite president in my lifetime is George w Bush. And how do I know? Because all the mistakes he made, I probably would have made too. And this is actually how you see somebody that you you really admire. You don't look at what they've done that's successful. Look at the things that they did that were unsuccessful and say, honestly, would I have made the same mistake? And if the answer is yes, then that's somebody who's in a way admirable in their view.”

“That's Dennis Brain, of course. Dennis Brain, who was the wunderkind who picked up the French horn at age two. And by a very young man, was the principal hornist in the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, was did the first major recordings of the Mozart concertos, of both Strauss concertos, died tragically at the age of 36, coming back from the Edinburgh Music Festival at night driving his high powered sports car, ran it into the base of a bridge, and died in a fiery accident, leaving the world without the world's greatest French horn player.”

“Happiness isn't a feeling at all. Happiness has feelings associated with it like the smell of the turkey is associated with your Thanksgiving dinner. But the the smell of the turkey isn't the same thing as the turkey dinner. The turkey dinner is protein, carbohydrates, and fat, which are the macronutrients. And and similarly, you can define and, you know, I think the most compelling definition of happiness is the combination of enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning.”

“That was an intense experience to go through an intense experience to come back to. And honestly, just one of the hardest moments for me at OpenAI was when Ilya left. And it was maybe the only moment in OpenAI's history where I felt like I didn't wanna do it anymore. I think I needed some time to kind of find my way back to remembering, like, why I was doing this and why it was so important and why it was worth the pin.”

“We had this insight when we first developed the reasoning paradigm that it gives us a interpretability mechanism we had not been anticipating because you can really read the model's thoughts. You can see exactly how it got to an answer. Now the problem is if you train the model to have a chain of thought that looks good, then you lose all the faithfulness. So we made an early decision to say we want to avoid any temptation to train these chain of thoughts to look favorable.”

“It's hard to know what percent of the code is not written by AI. It's a vanishing fraction. The actual writing of code currently, the AI is much better than humans at writing code given the right context, given the right structure. Now there's parts of the actual structure of the code that our human experts still are much better at. That's about thinking about how the module should be laid out, how the pieces should work, but the actual writing of code is essentially all AI now.”

“And so we set up a thing in Napa and I actually made t shirts. There was no official offers. No one had joined. We didn't have a structure. We had nothing. We just had an idea. We had a vision. We had a mission. And we flew people out. We drove up to to Napa together, and it was an amazing day. The ideas were flowing. We came up with what I would really say is almost the technical plan that we have pursued for the past ten years. Number one, solve reinforcement learning. Number two, solve unsupervised learning. And number three, was gradually learn more complicated in quotes things.”

“Like in the words of Ilya, Ilya always says that you have to suffer, Right? If you're not suffering, like you're not building value. And I think there's deep truth to it. This picture of suffering was something that that we thought about throughout the course of OpenAI where it's like, we had so much uncertainty from the beginning. Is this thing going to work? And there's many reasons why it might not work, why it should not work, why you could even say it cannot work.”

“I got a text saying, can we hop on a video call? So I hopped on the video call. I noticed that it was the board minus Sam who were on there. I was told that the board has decided that Sam would be removed, and effectively the message that I got was the same messaging that was in the public post. And I asked if I could have any more information. I was told no, not right now. Right after I hung up the call, I talked to my wife and I said, gotta quit. And she said, I agree.”

“One of the things that I'm really interested in is this new field of applied philosophy. Have you heard about this where you you study a philosopher and you try to live according to their precepts strictly for two one or two or three weeks at a time. I tried to live like a Kantian and tell exactly zero lies, and it's a miracle that my marriage survived. That's all I can say. And I'm not a Kantian, it turns out.”

“We learned very early on with GPT-three, we got to see this very concretely what it's like to deploy something where we spent a lot of time thinking about what are all the misuses of GPT-three, what are the ways it could go wrong, We thought about misinformation, we thought about these kinds of, you know, grand pictures. And you know what the number one misuse of GPT-three was? It was medical spam, like advertising different drugs to people. It's like not something we ever would have thought of as a problem.”

“It was very much the case that Google DeepMind was the 10,000 pound gorilla in the field. They just had lots of capital. They had the track record. This was before AlphaGo. AlphaGo came out a couple months later, but it wasn't a surprise. It's like very much the momentum was very clearly there. And so the question of, is it really possible to build something independent and new? It wasn't obvious.”

“Where should young people be investing today? Well, I really think leaning into this technology is going to be a critical skill. Just really understanding how do you get the most out of AI. Because we're all going to be heading to a world where we're managers of agents and soon maybe the CEO of an autonomous AI corporation. Just imagine if you had the workforce of, you know, a 100,000 person company all at your disposal operating on your behalf.”

“What do they do every day? And the the answer is they pay attention fundamentally to four big things. Their faith or life philosophy, they think deeply about the why questions, and and also they stand in awe of something bigger than themselves so they're not stuck in the looking in the mirror. They have strong family relationships. They have close friendships. They have real friends, not just deal friends. And they're certainly not isolated and lonely and spending all day on the Internet. And last but not least, they're doing something productive where they feel like they're earning their success through their merit and hard work, and they're serving other people.”

“AI is a magnificent extension of the left hemisphere of your brain. It's a how to and what engine, but it's not a why engine. Any real why question that matters, you can't put into chat g p t and get something meaningful to you. To say, why am I alive? For what would I be willing to give my life? You put that into chat GBT, it'll start by buttering you up and telling you what a smart question it is. Then it'll tell you how five different people have answered that question, and you're left completely unsatisfied as a result of that.”