Inside OpenAI, the Architect of ChatGPT, featuring Mira Murati | The Circuit with Emily Chang

[Music] inside a nondescript building in the heart of San Francisco one of the world's buzziest startups is making our ai-powered future feel more real than ever before they're behind two monster Hits chat gbt and Dolly and somehow beat the biggest Tech Giants to Market kicking off a competitive race that's forced them all to show us what they've got but how did this under the radar startup pull it off we're inside open AI and we're going to get some answers is it magic is it just algorithms is it going to save us or destroy us let's

go find out I love the plants it feels so alive so amazing it's giving me very Westworld Spa Vibes it's almost like suspended in space and time a little bit yeah it has a little bit of futuristic feel this is one of the most introspective Minds at open AI we all know Sam Altman the CEO but Mira Murati is a Chief Architect behind open ai's strategy this looks like the uh open AI logo it is Ilya actually painted this earlier the chief scientist yes what is the flower meant to symbolize my guess is that it's

AI that loves Humanity we're very focused on dealing with the challenges of hallucination truthfulness reliability alignment of these models has anyone left because they're like you know what I disagree there have been over time people that left to start other organizations because of disagreements on the strategy around deployment and how do you find common ground when disagreements do arise you know you want to be able to have this constant dialogue and figure out how to systematize these concerns what is the job of a CTR It's a combination of guiding the teams on the ground thinking

about longer term strategy figuring out our gaps and making sure that the teams are well supported to succeed yeah sounds like a big job solving impossible problems solving impossible problems so when you were making the decision about releasing chat GPT into the wild I'm sure there was like a go or no-go moment take me back to that day we um headshot GPT for a while and we sort of hit a point where we could really benefit from having more feedback from how people are using it what are the risks what are the limitations um and

learn more about this technology that we have created and start bringing it in the public Consciousness it became the fastest growing tech product in history I did did that surprise you I mean what was your reaction to the world's reaction we were surprised by how much it captured the imaginations of the general public and how much people just loved spending time talking to this AI system and interacting with it can now mimic a human it can write it can code at the most basic level how does this all happen is a neural network that has

been trained on a huge amount of data on a massive supercomputer and the goal during this training process was to predict the next word in a sentence and it turns out that as you train larger and larger models add more and more data the capabilities of these models also increase they become more powerful more helpful and as you invest more on alignment and safety they become more reliable and safe over time openai is kind of turbocharged this competitive Frenzy um do you think you can beat Google at its own game do you think you can

take significant market share and search we didn't set out to dominate search what church GPD offers is a different way to understand information and you could be you know searching but you're searching in a much more intuitive way versus keyword based I think the whole world is sort of now moving in this direction the air of confidence obviously that chat tpd sometimes delivers an answer with why not just sometimes say I don't know the goal is not to predict the next word reliably or safely when you have such General capabilities it's very difficult to handle

some of the limitations such as what is correct some of these texts and some of the data is biased some of it may be incorrect isn't this going to accelerate the misinformation problem I mean we haven't been able to crack it on social media for like a couple of decades misinformation is a really complex heart problem right now one of the things that I'm most worried about is um the ability of models like gbd4 to make up things we refer to this as hallucinations so they will convincingly make up things and it requires you know

being aware and just really knowing that you cannot fully blindly rely on what the technology is providing as an output I want to talk about this term hallucination because it's a very human term why use such a human term for basically an AI That's just making mistakes a little bit General capabilities are actually quite human-like sometimes when we don't know the answer to something we will just make up an answer we will rarely say I don't know and so uh there is a lot of human hallucination in a conversation and sometimes we don't do it

on purpose should we be worried about AI though that feels more and more human like should AI have to identify itself as artificial when it's interacting with us I think it's a different kind of intelligence it is important to distinguish output that's been provided by a machine versus another human but we are moving towards a world where we are collaborating with these machines more and more and so output will be hybrid all of the data that you're training this AI on it's coming from writers it's coming from artists how do you think about giving value

back to those people when these are also people who are worried about their jobs going away I don't know exactly how we could work in practice that you can sort of account for information created by everyone on the internet I think they're definitely going to be jobs that will be lost and jobs that will be changed is AI continues to advance and integrate in the workforce prompt engineering is a job today that's not something that we could have predicted think of prompt Engineers like AI Whispers they're highly skilled at selecting the right words to coax

AI tools into generating the most accurate and Illuminating responses it's a new job born from AI That's fetching hundreds of thousands of dollars a year what are some tips to being an ace prompt engineer you know it's this ability to really develop an intuition for how to get the most out of the model um how to prompt it in the right ways give it enough context for what you're looking for one of the things that we talked about earlier was hallucinations and these large language models not having the ability to always be highly accurate so

I'm asking the model with a browsing plugin to fact check this information and it's now browsing the web so there's this report that these workers in Kenya were getting paid two dollars an hour to do the work on the back end to make answers less toxic and my understanding is this work is it can be difficult right because you're reading text that might be disturbing and trying to clean them up so we need to use contractors sometimes to scale we chose that particular contractor because of their known safety standards and since then we've stopped working

with them but as you said this is difficult to work and we recognize that and we have mental health standards and wellness standards that we share with contractors I think a lot about my kids and them having relationships with AI someday how do you think about what the limits should be and what the possibilities should be when you're thinking about a child I think we should be very careful in general with putting very powerful systems um in front of more vulnerable populations there are certainly checks and balances in place because it's still early and we

still don't understand all the ways in which this could affect people there's all this talk about you know relationships and AI like could you see yourself developing a relationship with an AI I'd say yes it's a reliable tool that enhances my life makes my life better as we Ponder the existential idea that we might all have relationships with AI someday there's an AI Gold Rush happening in Silicon Valley Venture capitalists are pouring money into anything AI startups hoping to find the next big thing Reed Hoffman the co-founder of LinkedIn and an early investor in Facebook

knows a thing or two about striking gold he was an early open AI backer and is in a way trying to take society's hand and guide us all through the age of AI I mean gosh 12 years we've been talking maybe longer that's awesome a long time yes you have been on the ground floor of some of the biggest Tech platform shifts in history the beginnings of the internet mobile do you think AI is going to be even bigger I think so it builds on the internet mobile cloud data all of these things come together

to make AI work and so that causes it to be the crescendo the the addition to all of us I mean one of the problems with the current discourse is that it's too much of the fear-based versus hope based imagine a tutor on every smartphone for every child in the world that's possible that's line of sight from what we see with current AI models today you coined this term Blitz scaling blitzkill killing in its precise definition is prioritizing speed over efficiency in an environment of uncertainty how do you go as fast as possible in order

to be the first to scale does it today does it and I think the speed at which we will integrate it into our lives will be faster than we integrated the iPhone into our lives there's going to be a co-pilot for every profession and if you think about that that's huge and not professional activities because it's going to write my kids papers right right it's High School papers uh yes although the hope is that in the interaction with it they'll learn to create much more interesting papers you and Elon Musk go way back he co-founded

openai with Sam Altman the CEO of openai you and I have talked a lot over the years about how you have been sort of this node in the PayPal Mafia and you can talk to everyone and maybe you disagree but you are all still friends what did Elon say that got you interested so early part of the reason I got back in the AI and I was part of sitting around the table in the crafting of open AI was that Elon came in and said look this AI thing is coming once I started digging into

it I realized that this pattern that we're going to see the Next Generation of amazing capabilities coming from these computational devices and then one of the things I had been arguing with Elon at the time about was that Elon was constantly using the word robocalypse which you know we as human beings tend to be more easily and quickly motivated by fear than my hope so you're using the term robocalypse and everyone imagines the Terminator and all the rest sounds pretty scary it sounds very scary doesn't sound like something we want yeah stop saying that because

because actually in fact the the the the chance that I could see anything like a robot club that's happening is so de minimis relative to everything else so how you did come together on open AI how did that happen I think it started with Elon and Sam having a bunch of conversations uh and then since I know both of them quite well I got called in um and I was like look I think this could really uh make sense something should be the counterweight to all of the natural work that's going to happen within commercial

Realms how do we make sure that uh one company doesn't dominate the industry but the tools are provided across the industry so Innovation can benefit from startups and all the rest it was like great and let's do this thing open AI I did ask chat GPT what questions I should ask you I thought its questions were pretty boring yes your answers were pretty boring too so we're not getting replaced anytime soon but clearly this is really struck a nerve there are people out there who are going to fall for it yes shouldn't we be worried

about that okay so everyone's encountered a crazy person who's drunk off their ass at a cocktail party who says really odd things or at least every adult has and you know that's not like the world didn't end right we do have to pay attention areas or harmful likes for example someone's depressed the thing about self-harm you want all channels by which they could get in the self-harm to be limited that isn't just chat Bots that could be communities of human beings that could be search engines you have to pay attention to all the dimensions of

it how are we overestimating AI still doesn't really do something that I would say is original to an expert so for example one of the questions I asked was how would Reid Hoffman make money by investing in artificial intelligence and the answer it gave me was a very smart very well written answer that would have been written by a professor at a business school who didn't understand Venture Capital right so it seems smart would it would would study large markets would realize what products would be substituted in the large markets would find teams to go

do that and invest in them and this is all written very credible and completely wrong the newest edge of the information is still Beyond these systems billions of dollars are going into AI my inbox is filled with AI pitches last year it was crypto and web three how do we know this isn't just the next bubble I do think that the generative AI is the thing that has the broadest Touch of everything now which places are the right places to invest I think those are still things we're working out now obviously as Venture capitalists part

of what we do is we kind of figure that out in advance you know years before other people seeing coming um but I think that there will be massive new companies built it does seem in some ways like a lot of AI is being developed by an elite group of companies and people is that something that you see happening in some ideal Universe you'd say for for a technology that would impact billions of people somehow billions of people should directly be involved in creating it but that's not how any technology anywhere anywhere in history gets

built and there's reasons you have to build it at speed but the question is how do you get the right conversations and the right issues on the table so do you see an AI Mafia for me um I definitely think that there is because you're referring the PayPal Mafia of course I definitely think that there's a network of folks who have been deeply involved over the last few years will have a lot of influence on how the technology happens do you think AI will shake up the big Tech hierarchy significantly uh what it certainly does

is it creates a wave of disruption for example with these large language models in search what do you want do you want 10 Blue Links or do you want an answer and a lot of search cases you want an answer and a generated answer that's like a mini Wikipedia page is awesome that's a shift so I think we'll see a profusion of startups doing interesting things this but can the next Google or Facebook really emerge if Google and Facebook or meta and apple and Amazon are running the Playbook at Microsoft do I think there will

be another one to three companies that will be the size of the five big Tech Giants emerging possibly from AI absolutely yes now does that mean that you know um one of them is going to collapse no not necessarily and it doesn't need to the more that we have the better so what are the next big five oh well that's what I'm we're trying to invest in you're on the board of Microsoft obviously you know Microsoft is making a big AI push did you bring Satya and Sam or have any role in bringing Satya and

Sam closer together because Microsoft obviously has 10 billion dollars now in open AI um well I think I could uh I probably have a you know uh both of them are close to me and know me and trust me well so I I think I I've helped facilitate understanding and Communications Elon left open AI years ago and pointed out that it's not as open as it used to be he said he wanted it to be a non-profit counterweight to Google now it's a closed Source maximum profit company effectively controlled by Microsoft does he have a

point well he's wrong on a number of levels there um so one is it's run by a 501c3 it is a non-profit but it does have a for-profit part the commercial system which is all carefully done is to bring in capitalism support the non-profit mission now get to the question of for example open so um Dolly was ready for four months before it was released why did it delay for four months because it was doing safety training it said well we don't want to have this being used to create child sexual material we don't want

to have this being used or assaulting individuals or or doing deep fakes so we're not going to open source it we're going to release it through an API so we can be seeing what the results are and making sure it doesn't do any of these harms so it's open because it has open access to apis but it's not open because it's open source there are folks out there who are angry actually about open AIS branching out from non-profit to four profit is there a bit of a bait and switch there the cleverness that Sam and

everyone else figured out is they could say look we can do a Market Commercial deal where we say we'll give you commercial licenses to parts of our technology in various ways and then we can continue our mission of beneficial AI the AI graveyard is filled with algorithms that got into trouble how can we trust open AI or Microsoft or Google or anyone to do the right thing well we need to be more transparent but on the other hand of course our problem exactly as you're alluding to is people say well the AI should say that

or shouldn't say that we can't even really agree on that ourselves so we don't want that to be litigated by other people we want that to be a social decision so how does this shake out globally we should be trying to build the industries of the future that's what's the most important thing and it's one of the reasons why I tend to very much speak against people like oh we should be slowing down do you have any intention of slowing down we've been very evocal about these risks for many many years one of them is

acceleration and I think that's a significant risk that we as a society need to Grapple with building safe AI systems that are General it's very complex it's incredibly hard so what does responsible Innovation look like to you you know like would you support for example a federal agency like the FDA that that's technology like it that's drugs having some sort of trusted Authority that can audit these systems based on some agreed upon principles would be very helpful I've heard AI experts talk about the potential for the good future versus the bad future and the bad

future there's talk about this leading human extinction are those people wrong there's certainly a risk that um when we have these AI systems that are able to set to their own goals they decide that their goals are not aligned with ours and they do not benefit from having us around and could lead to human extinction that is a risk I don't think this risk has gone up or down from the things that have been happening in the past few months I think it's certainly been quite hyped and there is a lot of anxiety around it

if we're talking about the risk for human extinction have you had a moment where you're just like wow this is this is big I think a lot of us at open AI um enjoying because we thought that this would be the most important technology that Humanity would ever create but of course the risks on the other hand are also pretty significant and this is why we're here do open AI employees still vote on AGI and when it will happen I actually don't know what is your prediction about AGI and how far away it really is

we're still quite far away from uh being at a point where you know these systems can make decisions autonomously um and discover new knowledge but I think I have more certainty around the Advent of having a powerful systems in our future should we even be driving towards AGI and do humans really want it advancements in Society come from pushing human knowledge now that doesn't mean that we should do so in careless and Reckless ways I think there are ways to guide these development versus bring it to a screeching hold because of our potential fears so

the train has left the station and we should stay on it that's one way to put it [Music] [Music] um