“My Path to OpenAI”, 2016-05-03 ():
…In college, I found a field that captured what drew me to AI: programming languages. I was thrilled that a compiler or static analyzer could “understand” a program in a way that I couldn’t, and then apply that understanding to do something very useful (such as generate fast code or prove correctness).
I kept trying to find time for programming language research. But I also kept getting distracted by new startup ideas (generally pretty bad), and new people to work on them with (generally pretty good). I’d started out at Harvard and transferred to MIT, trying to constantly surround myself by people who I could learn from and build something useful with…So I left school, never to actually get our buffer overrun detector working.
Stripe: That company is now Stripe. I helped scale it 4 → 250 people, and in the year since I left it’s continued scaling without any of my help to over 450.
When I considered leaving, it was primarily because I felt like the company was in a great place, and it would continue to do great things with or without me. I cared most about working with great people to make something amazing happen—but developer infrastructure wasn’t the problem that I wanted to work on for the rest of my life.
…Leaving Stripe: Before I finalized my decision to leave, Patrick Collison asked me to go talk to Sam Altman. He said Sam had a good outsider’s perspective, had seen lots of people in similar circumstances, and would probably have a good recommendation on what I should do. [A lot of Stripe people were early to OpenAI]
Within 5 minutes of talking to Sam, he told me I was definitely ready to leave. He said to let him know if he could be helpful in figuring out my next thing.
…Fortunately, I had some friends working in AI, Dario Amodei and Chris Olah. I asked them for some pointers, and they gave me some good starter resources. The most useful of these was Michael Nielsen’s book, and after reading it I practiced my newfound skills on Kaggle. (I was even number 1 for a while on my first contest!)
…Kindling: Along the way, I kept meeting super smart people in AI, and reconnected with some of my smartest friends from college, such as Paul Christiano and Jacob Steinhardt, who were now working in the field. This was a strong signal.
The more I dug, the more I became convinced that AI was poised for impact…I remember saying this to one of my friends who had built Facebook News Feed back in the day. His reply was skeptical. “Simple algorithms, lots of data.” Everyone tries to peddle cool new AI algorithms, but in reality, if you just scale up a logistic regression it works really well. I then pulled out the Google Translate app from my pocket, put it in airplane mode, and demonstrated how it translates the text under the camera directly on the image. He was suitably impressed, and admitted simple algorithms wouldn’t help there. (It’s mostly but not 100% deep learning, but that’s not the point—the point is it works.)
…Initial spark: In June, Sam pinged me asking if I’d figured out yet what to do next. I told him my current plan was to start an AI company within the next year. We jumped on a call, where he mentioned that they were moving forward with the YC AI project. I asked Sam what the purpose of the lab was.
“To build safe human-level AI”, he said.
At that moment I knew he was the right partner to build my next company with. Very few people today would have the audacity to explicitly try building human-level AI. I realized that sometimes an effort needs only someone bold enough to pronounce a goal, and then the right people will join them.
[Note that ‘safe’ dropped out of Brockman’s version of the mission; cf. his 2016 description of AI safety as the concern of “a few weirdos”, and OA co-founder Wojciech_Zaremba’s description of them as “crazy people”.]
The dinner: About a month later, Sam set up a dinner in Menlo Park. On the list were Dario Amodei, Chris Olah, Paul Christiano, Ilya Sutskever, Elon Musk, Sam Altman, and a few others.
…It was clear that such an organization needed to be a non-profit, without any competing incentives to dilute its mission. It also needed to be at the cutting edge of research (per the Alan Kay quote, “the best way to predict the future is to invent it”). And to do that, it would need the best AI researchers in the world.
So the question became: would it be possible to create from scratch a lab with the best AI researchers? Our conclusion: not obviously impossible.
This was my first time meeting Elon and Ilya, and I strongly remember my impressions of both. I was struck by how inquisitive Elon was, and how much he sought others opinions and really listened to them. Ilya on the other hand was a source of grounding: he was a clear technical expert with a breadth of knowledge and vision, and could always dive into the specifics of the limitations and capabilities of current systems.
After the dinner concluded, Sam gave me a ride back to the city. We both agreed that it seemed worth starting something here. I knew it would only happen if someone was willing to go full-time on figuring out exactly what that would be and who would be a part of it. I volunteered myself as tribute.
And so the next day, I had something impactful to build once again.
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