I’m Binge Watching Interviews with Sam Altman…

…so you don’t have to… and here are my takeaways. (Article 2)

Drew Wolin

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3 min readMar 21, 2023

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This is a continuation from a series of articles found HERE.

2023-ABC Interview, mostly about Open-AI

“It doesn’t work to do this (develop A.I.) in a lab. We have to get these out into society.”

“I think if I said I were not (scared of A.I.), you should either not trust me or be very unhappy I’m in this job.”

“(A.I.) will be the greatest technology that humanity has yet developed.” Sam lists a few benefits such as for creativity, health, and learning.

Note: I believe that A.I. Language Models (LLMs) will be to medical discovery what big data is so quantitative discovery.

(Those are not mutually exclusive, but still, I am highlighting a NEW field / possibility).

What do I mean?

There is much information hidden within text, especially within medical literature. It is too much for a human to make connections. LLM can make those connections. Similar to how field of Analytics can ingest enormous amounts of data and point out trends. And a computer’s ability to do this is necessarily vast(!) compared to a human’s ability to do it.

LLM will be able to, or can, ingest vast amounts of medical literature and start making connections that were previously not possible. Best of all, it can, and will, work in conjunction with quantitative insights.

“The right way to think of A.I. is as a reasoning engine, and not as a fact database. We want them to be able to reason, not memorize.”

If a machine can reason, what do you need a human for? “A lot! It turns out. We want these tools to be an amplifier of humans.

In general, Sam is an optimist, acknowledging that there is a lot that can go wrong. But he is optimistic that the right people are working on this, and is excited about the direction we are headed in.

“If you are thinking about (ChatGPT) as Search, that is sort of the wrong framework. I think it is a fundamentally different kind of product (compared to Google search).”

Sam thinks that he and Elon Musk fundamentally agree on most A.I. related issues. It seems there is tension between Sam and Elon, that Sam acknowledged.

Is the government prepared for this (A.I.)? “They are beginning to pay attention, which is great… We really need the government’s attention. We really need thoughtful policy here. And that takes a while to do.”

My Biggest Takeaway from this Interview

I am very excited about what I highlighted in the analogy earlier about LLM being to medical information what Big Data Analytics is to quantitative insights and information.

More to come!

I’m Binge Watching Interviews with Sam Altman…

…so you don’t have to… and here are my takeaways. (Article 2)

2023-ABC Interview, mostly about Open-AI

My Biggest Takeaway from this Interview

Articles in Series:

Written by Drew Wolin