57 pages • 1 hour read
Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI
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Part 2Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of child sexual abuse, mental illness, racism, gender discrimination, sexual violence, self-harm, and graphic violence.
Part 2, Chapter 6 Summary: “Ascension”
In March 2019, Sam Altman left YC and began to work at OpenAI. He brought with him a belief that startups had to aggressively outperform their competitors to succeed. He pushed for OpenAI to scale up operations rapidly to create AGI while building on their partnership with Microsoft. Tensions grew within the company. Amodei and other AI “safety” people felt that the OpenAI was not doing its due diligence to ensure its bigger, newer models would not harm humanity in its push to scale up quickly. Meanwhile, Sam Altman grew increasingly concerned about corporate espionage and reduced the accessibility of the company’s data.
OpenAI developed an application programming interface (API) that would allow companies and developers to use GPT-3 for their own products without giving them access to the “model weights,” or the parameters GPT-3 used to process and collate data. The AI Safety team worried that this product was particularly dangerous because the API for GPT-3 was especially good at code generation; they worried that if the program could write effective code, it could rewrite its own code and override human control. Nevertheless, the program was released June 2020.
