Gavel shot! The book continues from the above, let's talk about the legendary history of OpenAI, which is now exploding all over the world. The starting point of the story is a dinner in Menlo Park, California, in July 2015. In addition to the well-known global top-ranking V Elon Musk, the participants of the luxurious dinner were also gathered, including YC at that time. President Sam Altman (YC is a well-known startup incubator in Silicon Valley, which has incubated about 1,900 companies), Greg Brockman, chief technology officer of top unicorn Stripe, and in 2019 for his contribution to deep learning and outstanding Free Hinton and Yang Likun won the Turing Award together with Joshua Bengio. These people constitute the founding team of OpenAI.
Sam Altman and Elon Musk
Greg Brockman and Ilya Sutskevi
Bengio gave a list of the best researchers in the field of deep learning, and Brockman contacted and persuaded the list one by one. Although there is a $1 billion investment commitment from the benefactor’s father, Microsoft, as a start-up organization, OpenAI still cannot offer a salary comparable to that of big companies such as Google and FB. In the end, it almost relies on great vision and feelings Convinced all the top talents to join us, it is the development of this direction (General Artificial Intelligence AGI) that can benefit all mankind, let's become figures that can be engraved in the century-old history of science and technology together!
It is not enough to have an amazing talent density (some departments of many large companies also have a high-density talent pool). To be able to make today's achievements, it is also thanks to OpenAI's firm belief in general artificial intelligence (AGI) from top to bottom. As well as the experimental mechanism that promotes innovation from the bottom up, it is possible to achieve positive results only after the top and bottom take all.
How strong is OpenAI's belief in AGI? OpenAI employees vote every year to predict the arrival time of the general artificial intelligence AGI. Even within this matter, there are relatively large differences of opinion, and different employees have their own ideas on this. But as early as February 2020, which was still in the period of GPT 2 (at that time, there were still four months before the release of GPT 3, and two years and nine months before the release of ChatGPT), half of the employees had already bet that AGI It will be realized within 15 years—that is, 2035. Let us remember this point in time and witness history together.
The early OpenAI was like a revolutionist, facing giants such as Google that had already laid out the front line, had sufficient human and financial resources and various resources, but it still hoped to become the first organization to realize AGI—because of deep Knowing how a large company will be driven by profit, held back by the stock price, dragged down by internal factional struggles, and how to consolidate its position and try to monopolize once it has achieved results, OpenAI's vision is to achieve general artificial intelligence and the resulting Benefits are distributed fairly to all.
OpenAI has never wanted to rule the world, but only to ensure that technology can develop safely and ultimately benefit all mankind. I once read an in-depth report a few years ago. The author once went to OpenAI to do a lot of first-hand interviews, and talked about many secrets of the OpenAI organization that were not known to outsiders. implied in the text:
The organization’s first statement said it would “create value for everyone, not shareholders”; its charter — a document so sacred that employees’ salaries depend on how well they adhere to its terms — further asserted that OpenAI The "primary responsibility is for humans, and the overall interest can be placed above the individual's own interest"; moreover, it is very important to achieve AGI safely, and even if another organization comes close to achieving this goal first, OpenAI will stop competing. Turn to work with it.
When I read these, I was deeply moved. This kind of thinking has begun to evolve into religious values. I used to think that AI and Crypto were completely opposite things. When Crypto tried to return power to the people and empower individuals, AI was a very symbol of monopoly, implying a greater centralization of power. But I didn't expect the early OpenAI charter to read a bit like Satoshi Nakamoto when he invented Bitcoin (an interesting timeline coincidence is that deep learning appeared in 2007, and Bitcoin appeared in 2008, a great invention on both feet. ).
I very much believe that the drafting of this charter contains the best idealism in the hearts of the first batch of founding members including Musk. When they wrote these words, they were sincere enough and believed. In fact, Musk himself has always been a representative of this kind of willingness to share the fruits of human wisdom. He has achieved maximum open source and collaboration in both Tesla and Twitter.
When OpenAI eventually compromised under the pressure of reality and betrayed its revolutionary ideals to a certain extent, Musk also directly left OpenAI's board of directors. Perhaps because he has seen the capabilities and potential of AI at the forefront, he has never stopped calling for AI safety over the years. He has used his public influence to make a lot of voices, even as an entrepreneur. The government demands regulation.
It's a pity that most people (including some members of our AI chain game research team) narrowly understand that his appeal and suspension are "to give yourself time to catch up with your opponents"-in fact, the direction of Tesla's early research and development has never been It's not AGI, and Musk's appeal didn't start after the appearance of ChatGPT—this is somewhat "human beings never thank Luo Ji" (from the famous sentence of the novel "Three-Body Problem", friends who haven't read Three-Body Problem Just skip it directly) means.
Altman, who stayed and took over as CEO, also has a lot of connections with Crypto. His other project outside of OpenAI is the encryption project Worldcoin. Compared with OpenAI’s hope to realize the liberation of all mankind through AGI, Worldcoin wants to start from The path of Crypto can also achieve human fairness and inclusiveness at the financial level.
Back to OpenAI. OpenAI actually chose three directions for its early development, one is robots (artificial intelligence in physical or hardware form), the other is game artificial intelligence (playing games), and the third is language models, which allow artificial intelligence to use text language Learning to understand the world is the GPT series. It can be seen that the exploration at this stage is relatively scattered. The team did not directly understand how to go about AGI with the script of the Chosen One, but finally completed the focus after various attempts.
The route of robots may be better understood by everyone, and it is also the most common imagination of human beings on artificial intelligence that is very intuitive.
The game path is recommended by Musk. There are many game-related books that like to compare everything humans do in the world to some kind of game. In fact, the process of human learning and understanding of the world, as well as the resulting behavior, and There are indeed many similarities between games, and I don't know whether to say that the world is a game or the game is a world. Sports such as chess and Go, which AI has successfully challenged before, are actually considered games. The OpenAI team chose Dota 2, and in the end the challenge was successful, all the way to the world championship. In the next article, we will gossip about how games promote the development of technological productivity.
The turning point happened in 2019. This year, GPT-2 with 1.5 billion parameters trained on 8 million Reddit forum posts and a total of 40 GB of text made the entire company really realize that it was on the right path that no one had traveled. The direction is confirmed to be correct, and the next step is to increase the size vigorously. In order to concentrate resources, the team aggressively cut down the teams that had already made some achievements in the other two directions, and went all out to make large-scale models. This time, GPT-3 was developed using hundreds of billions of words in English (English Wikipedia only accounts for 3% of the data volume) and tens of millions of dollars in computing resources, and then developed another order of magnitude larger GPT without stopping -4.
It may be hard for you to imagine that ChatGPT was only temporarily developed by OpenAI in mid-November 2022, and the whole process took only 13 days. I can’t help feeling that sometimes the course of history is rewritten inadvertently like this—the eagerness to release ChatGPT is because I am worried that Google will release similar products first, which will pose a threat to myself. threats and completely rewrite the industry landscape.
Many people describe that the significance of OpenAI’s approach to large-scale models is no less than that of Columbus’s arrival in the New World. After that, companies that enter the market can develop their own ChatGPT-like large language models at a relatively low cost and with very little risk. .
Today, when we look back on OpenAI’s magnificent development in just a few years, we feel that the competitive pressure and business environment have forced it to deviate from its original oath, while we can see that its compromise with reality is still within a sufficient limit. Inside, we are still doing our best to promote the realization of the great vision of a general artificial intelligence for the benefit of all mankind.
An era of artificial intelligence that is as important as the emergence of computers and the Internet and is about to profoundly change human society again has officially opened from the last month of 2022. Everyone excitedly played with the latest model and discussed the future of human beings and artificial intelligence. Some people are optimistic, thinking that they have the strongest productivity helper so far; some people are pessimistic, thinking that human beings have already walked on the road of self-destruction. And no matter which point of view you hold, the only certainty about the present is how lucky we are to be born at the right time, compared with the very uncertain future.
Welcome to reprint, originality is not easy, please indicate "Guadain Laboratory W Labs" produced
Welcome to reprint, originality is not easy, please indicate "Guadain Laboratory W Labs" produced
Melon Field Laboratory Website:http://www.wlabsdao.com/
