OpenAI cofounder Greg Brockman on the importance of the “initial conditions” of a technology

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 impact can you have in general? Right? You look at things like the telephone invented by two people on the same day. 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 giant. 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 fundamental truths. Think about Moore's Law. An entire industry set its clock to it for 50 years. 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 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, and that the initial conditions were that it was created by this group that really valued 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. 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.