Gates Interviews Sam Altman !!

The title tells it all ! An interesting interview with Altman by Gates. Not sure who is more famous — should I say Bill Gates interviews Altman or Gates Interviews Sam Altman ;o)

Anyway the podcast is [here] or [here]. Trust me, it’s a must-listen! — But, before you hit play, catch a sneak peek at my blog for a quick summary …

There is a summary by Anthropic’s Claud 2 [Here]. Please take a look after reading my blog and share your thoughts on whether I did a better job!

1st Impressions

Just beautiful — it is very important for all of us to tune in to this podcast and think about it. Lots of very important concepts and future trajectories !

• The podcast was taped (probably around Nov 10th ’23 or so) a little before the whole OpenAI drama — where Sam Altman was fired/rehired and then the board was shuffled ! My chronicles of the episode — I see AGI everywhere !! [Here]
• Bill called Altman and Sam says “the team has never felt more productive or more optimistic or better”, it is “a real moment of growing up” for them and “are ready for the challenges” in front of them !
• This interview has it’s place among the insightful discussions along with a) Fireside Chat w/ Ilya Sutskever (Chief Scientist Open AI) by Jensen Huang (CEO, Nvidia) (Here) ; b) An excellent interview of Ilya Sutskever (Chief Scientist Open AI) by Dwarkesh Patel (Here). I write about AGI touching upon these blogs [Here]
• Trivia : Gates asks his guests to bring their favorite music. Sam brought The New Four Seasons — Vivaldi Recomposed by Max Richter, performed by Chineke! Orchestra, played on period instruments. “Beautiful, Soaring and Optimistic” Naturally, I found the music at Amazon and promptly ordered this and this + the original Nigel Kennedy 25th Anniversary here !

Commentary : I bet you wouldn’t see the above in a GPT-created summary; Anthropic’s Claud definitely is not going to order Vivaldi from Amazon — at least not yet ! And when it starts ordering on it’s own, be afraid — very afraid !

2 In a Blink: Executive Snapshot for the ADHD Minds (In pictures !)

AGI is OpenAI’s target and they are committed. I had written about navigating the inevitable encounter with AGI and what makes AGI AGI [here]

On Societal Impact

• The best problems we should work on is applying AI to help humans to get along with each other ! Bill is troubled a lot by polarization and war — rightfully so.
• Sam believes that the technology will surprise us on the upside —on how much positive it can do. We just have to see — The only way out is through !!

Trivia : Most frequently used mobile app — Altman : Slack; Gates — Outlook (“old style e-mail guy”)

This interview throws some light on what Sam was doing on his world tour with the leaders of various countries ! He was socializing an IAEA for huge LLMs !! Testing methodology similar to how we handle nuclear bombs !!

• If we are right, modern AI technologies will impact society, geopolitical balance of power and so many other things
• Altman was socializing with the world leaders, a global regulatory body (because they have global impact) that looks at these super powerful systems (not like GPT-4, but 100,000 or million times the compute power of that) — a global body something like the IAEA !
• From a global cooperation perspective, asking for a slowdown would be hard. “Do whatever you want, but any computer cluster above a certain extremely high-power threshold — may be 5 in the world, has to submit to the equivalent of international weapons inspectors. The model has to be made available for safety audit, pass some tests during training and before deployment”

This can help us with the biggest tier of risks — “There are still going to be things that are going to go wrong with much smaller-scale systems, in some cases, probably pretty badly wrong”

• “Both annoying, motivating and fun”. Pushes them to be better and do things faster
• OpenAI is very confident in their approach … to AGI !

• They started robots too early, so had to put the project on hold.
• It wasn’t helping them make progress with the difficult parts of the ML research and … also realized that they need intelligence and cognition 1st and then adapt it to physicality
• They have started investing in robotics and “really exciting new (robotics) platforms are being built”
• The consensus prediction (10 years ago) was that the impact is going to be blue-collar 1st, white-collar work 2nd, creativity — may be never or certainly last as that was magic & human
• But now it has gone exactly the other direction !

One reason is the creativity, the hallucination (a feature not a bug) enabled the machine to discover new things !

• Certainly a case of, you got to follow where technology goes — we have preconceptions, but sometimes science doesn’t want to go that way

Couple of backward pointers to my referred blogs (for those who came in late) and other interviews:

• Navigating the inevitable encounter with AGI [Here]
• Fireside Chat w/ Ilya Sutskever (Chief Scientist Open AI) by Jensen Huang (CEO, Nvidia) (Here)
• An excellent interview of Ilya Sutskever (Chief Scientist Open AI) by Dwarkesh Patel (Here)

And, my GitHub repositories collection of Papers, Benchmarks and Frameworks on LLM Evaluation, Red Teaming, NeurIPS2023 et al [Here]

Rumors

Of course, rumors are rumors and can’t be fully correct, otherwise they wouldn’t be rumors !! Source : The AIGrid and The Standard

• OpenAI has developed a powerful model names “Arrakis” a.k.a GPT-5 (code named after one my favorite books The Dune, Of course)
• Multimodal, has near human capabilities + priorities from above (Roadmap)
• Hallucinates much less than GPT-4

Not sure if the last is progress, as I really think Hallucination is a feature, not a bug and the best value we get from GPT models is leveraging their hallucinations not muzzling them — of course, based on the context.

• Trained with more than 50% synthetic data (This is interesting)
• Has agent capabilities (Good)
• Scheduled for 2024 (duh !)

Finally

I leave you with a presentation from the past (1979, IBM) …