Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI

by Karen Hao

“He didn’t just want to build a startup,” Lessin wrote about the experience. “He wanted to write the rules.”

“Either you’re growing, or you’re slowly dying,”

“I really feel like we as Americans have stopped daring to dream.”

“The human brain has about 100 trillion parameters, or synapses,” Hinton told me in 2020. “What we now call a really big model, like GPT-3, has 175 billion. It’s a thousand times smaller than the brain.

He knocked urgently on Hinton’s door and declared that he was eager to join the professor’s lab. Hinton told him to schedule a meeting. “Okay,” Sutskever said, unbudging. “How about now?”

You know a technology is accessible to anyone when your mother tells you about it,”

“If we are going to develop this technology in the same way that we used to, we are going to devastate the earth.”