Greg Brockman: OpenAI and AGI | Lex Fridman Podcast #17

The following is a conversation with Greg Brockman. He's the co founder and CTO of OpenAI, a world class research organization developing ideas in AI with a goal of eventually creating a safe and friendly artificial general intelligence, one that benefits and empowers humanity. OpenAI is not only a source of publications, algorithms, tools and data sets. Their mission is a catalyst for an important public discourse about our future with both narrow and general intelligence systems. This conversation is part of the Artificial intelligence podcast at MIT and beyond. If you enjoy it, subscribe on YouTube, iTunes or simply connect with me on Twitter lexfriedman, spelled F R I D. And now here's my conversation with Greg Brockman. So in high school and right after, he wrote a draft of a chemistry textbook. Saw that that covers everything from basic structure of the atom to quantum mechanics. So it's clear you have an intuition and a passion for both the physical world with chemistry and now robotics, to the digital world with AI, deep learning, reinforcement learning and so on. Do you see the physical world and the digital world is different? And what do you think is the gap?

A lot of it actually boils down to iteration speed. I think that a lot of what really motivates me is building things. Think about mathematics, for example, where you think really hard about a problem, you understand it, you write it down in this very secure form that we call a proof. But then this is in humanity's library, right? It's there forever. This is some truth that we've discovered and, you know, maybe only five people in your field will ever read it, but somehow you've kind of moved humanity forward. And so I actually used to really think that I was going to be a mathematician. And then I actually started writing this chemistry textbook. One of my friends told me, you'll never publish it because you don't have a PhD. So instead I decided to build a website and try to promote my ideas that way. And then I discovered programming. And that in programming you think hard about a problem, you understand it, you write down in a very obscure form that we call a program. But then once again, it's in humanities library, right? And anyone could get the benefit from it. And the scalability is massive. And so I think that the thing that really appeals to me about the digital world is that you can have this, this, this insane leverage, right? A single individual with an idea is able to affect the entire planet. And that's something I think is really hard to do if you're moving around physical atoms.

But you said mathematics. So if you look at the wet Thing over here, our mind, do you ultimately see it as just math, as just information processing? Or is there some other magic? As you've seen, if you've seen through biology and chemistry and so on, I.

Think it's really interesting to think about humans as just information processing systems. And it seems like it's actually a pretty good way of describing a lot of kind of how the world works or a lot of what we're capable of. To think that, again, if you just look at technological innovations over time, that in some ways the most transformative innovation that we've had has been the computer, in some ways, the Internet. What has the Internet done? The Internet is not about these physical cables. It's about the fact that I am suddenly able to instantly communicate with any other human on the planet. I'm able to retrieve any piece of knowledge that in some ways the human race has ever had, and that those are these insane transformations.

Do you see our society as a whole, the collective, as another extension of the intelligence of the human being? So if you look at the human being as an information processing system, you mentioned the Internet, the networking, do you see us all together as a civilization, as a kind of intelligent system?

Yeah, I think this is actually a really interesting perspective to take and to think about that you sort of have this collective intelligence of all of society. The economy itself is this superhuman machine that is optimizing something. Right. And in some ways, a company has a will of its own, right? That you have all these individuals who are all pursuing their own individual goals and thinking really hard and thinking about the right things to do, but somehow the company does something that is this emergent thing and that it's a really useful abstraction. And so I think that in some ways we think of ourselves as the most intelligent things on the planet and the most powerful things on the planet. But there are things that are bigger than us, that are these systems that we all contribute to. And so I think, actually it's interesting to think about, if you've read Isaac Isimov's foundation, that there's this concept of psychohistory in there, which is effectively this, that if you have trillions or quadrillions of beings, then maybe you could actually predict what that being, that huge macro being, will do, and almost independent of what the individuals want. I actually have a second angle on this that I think is interesting, which is thinking about technological determinism. One thing that I actually think a lot about with OpenAI is that we're kind of coming onto this insanely transformational technology of general intelligence, that will happen at some point. And there's a question of how can you take actions that will actually steer it to go better rather than worse? And that I think one question you need to ask is, as a scientist, as an inventor, as a creator, what, what impact can you have in general? You look at things like the telephone invented by two people on the same day. What does that mean? What does that mean about the shape of innovation? And I think that what's going on is everyone's building on the shoulders of the same giants. And so you can't really hope to create something no one else ever would. If Einstein wasn't born, someone else would have come up with relativity, he changed the timeline a bit, that maybe it would have taken another 20 years, but it wouldn't be that fundamentally humanity would never discover these, these fundamental truths.

So there's some kind of invisible momentum that some people like Einstein or OpenAI is plugging into, that anybody else can also plug into. And ultimately that wave takes us into a certain direction. That's what you mean by determinism.

That's right. That's right. And, you know, this kind of seems to play out in a bunch of different ways that there's some exponential that is being written and that the exponential itself, which one it is, changes. Think about Moore's Law, an entire industry set its cocked to it for 50 years, like, how can that be? How is that possible? And yet somehow it happened. And so I think you can't hope to ever invent something that no one else will. Maybe you can change the timeline a little bit, but if you really want to make a difference, I think that the thing that you really have to do, the only real degree of freedom you have, is to set the initial conditions under which a technology is born. And so you think about the Internet, right, that there are lots of other competitors trying to build similar things and the Internet won't. And that the initial conditions were that it was created by this group that really valued people being able to be, you know, anyone being able to plug in this very academic mindset of being open and connected. And I think that the Internet for the next 40 years really played out that way. You know, maybe today things are starting to shift in a different direction. But I think that those initial conditions were really important to determine the next 40 years worth of progress.

That's really beautifully put. So another example of that I think about, you know, I recently looked at it, I looked at Wikipedia, the formation of Wikipedia, and I wonder what the Internet would Be like, if Wikipedia had ads, you know, there's an interesting argument that why they chose not to make it put advertisement on Wikipedia. I think Wikipedia is one of the greatest resources we have on the Internet. It's extremely surprising how well it works and how well it was able to aggregate all this kind of good information. And essentially the creator of Wikipedia, I don't know, there's probably some debates there, but set the initial conditions and now it carried itself forward. That's really interesting. So you're. The way you're thinking about AGI, or artificial intelligence, is you're focused on setting the initial conditions for the progress.

That's right.

That's powerful. Okay, so look into the future. If you create an AGI system like one that can ace the Turing Test natural language, what do you think would be the interactions you would have with it? What do you think are the questions you would ask? Like, what would be the first question you would ask it? Her. Him.

That's right. I think that at that point, if you've really built a powerful system that is capable of shaping the future of humanity, the first question that you really should ask is, how do we make sure that this plays out well? And so that's actually the first question that I would ask a powerful AGI.

System is, so you wouldn't ask your colleague, you wouldn't ask, like Ilya, you would ask the AGI system, oh, we've.

Already had the conversation with Ilya. Right. And everyone here. And so you want as many perspectives and a piece of wisdom as you can for answering this question. So I don't think you necessarily defer to whatever your powerful system tells you, but you use it as one input to try to figure out what to do. I guess, fundamentally, what it really comes down to is if you built something really powerful, and you think about, for example, the creation of. Shortly after the creation of nuclear weapons, the most important question in the world was, what's the world order going to be like? How do we set ourselves up in a place where we're going to be able to survive as a species? With AGI, I think the question is slightly different, that there is a question of how do we make sure that we don't get the negative effects, but there's also the positive side. Right. You imagine that what will an AGI be like? What happen Will.