Sam Altman is a master of empathy. He listens to you as if you were the most interesting person in the world, learn what he needs about you and his speech fits what you want. And so convince you. It is one of the first conclusions that Karen Hao arrives in her new book ‘Empire of ai’. In it we are narrated OpenAI origins and its evolution Thanks to hundreds of interviews with employees and former employees of the company, in addition to those made to professionals from other companies in the artificial intelligence industry. Altman is loved or hated, there is no middle ground We actually know the story – in Xataka We have been Speaking of Openai – but what Hao proposes to us is a visit to what happens behind the scenes, contributing many details that help us understand the past, present and perhaps the future of the company. Many of those details focus on the figure of Sam Altman, which does not go especially well stopped. Brilliant as a seller of apparently impossible projects, Altman is sparse in words in his communications with other colleagues. Write emails with a single word, “Meet”to arrange appointments, and sometimes use a simple “?” Because who writes less seems to win the game. Of that Jeff Bezos knows a lot. That, of course, when I wrote something, because according to Hao Altman leaves almost nothing written. Everything is verbal, something that allowed him to argue after people did not remember well what he had talked to him. The opinions of those who talk about him in the book are significant. One of them commented that “it is so attentive. But partly uses it to find out how to influence you in different ways.” Others commented how Altman avoids expressing negative emotions and also confrontation. He dodged the word “no” in conversations with other people. “Others began to see him as someone diabolically capable of beating situations in his favor.” Ilya Sutskever, one of the co -founders who came after her differences with him, left A disturbing statement: “I don’t think Sam is the right person to be the one who has your finger on the AGI button.” OpenAi lives his own ‘Game of Thrones’ Paul Graham, his mentor in Yc Combinator, left two citations that leave a clear idea of what Sam Altman is like. In the first commented that “you could throw in parachute to an island full of cannibals, return in five years and he would be the king.” In the second reinforced That vision of his protégé: “Sam is extremely good when it comes to becoming someone with power.” It is something that Hao often mentions in the book and that makes it clear that Altman does very well one thing: win the battles for power. There are two clear examples, also known. The first, when managed to snatch Musk The direction of Openai at the beginning of that unique adventure. The second, when After his scandalous dismissal He returned more force than ever as the almighty CEO of OpenAi. Those two moments in the history of this company are actually reflecting what happens in any empire: the view seen is usually impeccable, great, powerful. The hidden face is full of internal conflicts and wars, battles for power, and rivalries and differences of criteria that end badly. In all these battles an Altman was imposed again and again that according to Hao used a singular tactic: he changed his speech according to the interlocutor. What he had told A was often what he had told B. The problem arose when A and B were talking about what Altman had told both of them. That also happened with Openai’s original vision. Created as a laboratory for the development of a beneficial for the world, The approach would change soon. To share knowledge and details about its models, the company became a secretism bunker. Seeking to be the AI monopoly Like Oppenheimer, Altman Believe That “technology occurs because it is possible”, and like others before him – including one of his mentors and friends, Peter Thiel – his goal (such as his competitors, of course) is clear according to Hao: What he wants is to create an AI monopoly. We have seen that with the evolution of their models, increasingly powerful, and that They were there to earn money. That was the vision that has ended up winning. The other, to try to develop a safe and “aligned with the objectives of the human race” has been in the background. In fact Hao reflects it well in the book. If Openai is leading the AI career today it is not only for having been the first to launch a chatbot like Chatgpt, but for its apparently disproportionate climbing. He has invested more than anyone from the beginning. To start, to capture talent. When the project began to create OpenAi Ilya Sutskever, I worked in Google Brain and was already considered a superlla of this segment. The rest of the founding members were offered a salary of $ 175,000 and shares of YC Combinator or Spacex. But Sutskever was offered almost two million dollars annuallybut Google counteroffierted on a bid whose final figure is not known. What is known is that Sutskever ended up abandoning Google to sign for Openai –And then leave it-. In 2016 of the 11 million that Openai spent, seven were for salaries. Initially the company “did not really know what I was doing,” explains Hao: few of the things they worked worked, and those who did it “seemed little original or something someone had already done.” There were more ambitious bets. It is demonstrated by the famous demo of that kind of “GPT 2.5” that made Bill Gates in April 2019. Until then those who investigated the development of foundational models of AI did so training those models with a few dozen gpus. Darío Amodei – who ended up leaving Openai to co -confound … Read more
