Reflections
The second birthday of ChatGPT was only a little over a month ago, and now we have transitioned into the next paradigm of models that can do complex reasoning. New years get people in a reflective mood, and I wanted to share some personal thoughts about how it has gone so far, and some of the things I’ve learned along the way.
As we get closer to AGI, it feels like an important time to look at the progress of our company. There is still so much to understand, still so much we don’t know, and it’s still so early. But we know a lot more than we did when we started.
We started OpenAI almost nine years ago because we believed that AGI was possible, and that it could be the most impactful technology in human history. We wanted to figure out how to build it and make it broadly beneficial; we were excited to try to make our mark on history. Our ambitions were extraordinarily high and so was our belief that the work might benefit society in an equally extraordinary way.
At the time, very few people cared, and if they did, it was mostly because they thought we had no chance of success.
In 2022, OpenAI was a quiet research lab working on something temporarily called “Chat With GPT-3.5”. (We are much better at research than we are at naming things.) We had been watching people use the playground feature of our API and knew that developers were really enjoying talking to the model. We thought building a demo around that experience would show people something important about the future and help us make our models better and safer.
We ended up mercifully calling it ChatGPT instead, and launched it on November 30th of 2022.
We always knew, abstractly, that at some point we would hit a tipping point and the AI revolution would get kicked off. But we didn’t know what the moment would be. To our surprise, it turned out to be this.
The launch of ChatGPT kicked off a growth curve like nothing we have ever seen—in our company, our industry, and the world broadly. We are finally seeing some of the massive upside we have always hoped for from AI, and we can see how much more will come soon.
It hasn’t been easy. The road hasn’t been smooth and the right choices haven’t been obvious.
In the last two years, we had to build an entire company, almost from scratch, around this new technology. There is no way to train people for this except by doing it, and when the technology category is completely new, there is no one at all who can tell you exactly how it should be done.
Building up a company at such high velocity with so little training is a messy process. It’s often two steps forward, one step back (and sometimes, one step forward and two steps back). Mistakes get corrected as you go along, but there aren’t really any handbooks or guideposts when you’re doing original work. Moving at speed in uncharted waters is an incredible experience, but it is also immensely stressful for all the players. Conflicts and misunderstanding abound.
These years have been the most rewarding, fun, best, interesting, exhausting, stressful, and—particularly for the last two—unpleasant years of my life so far. The overwhelming feeling is gratitude; I know that someday I’ll be retired at our ranch watching the plants grow, a little bored, and will think back at how cool it was that I got to do the work I dreamed of since I was a little kid. I try to remember that on any given Friday, when seven things go badly wrong by 1 pm.
A little over a year ago, on one particular Friday, the main thing that had gone wrong that day was that I got fired by surprise on a video call, and then right after we hung up the board published a blog post about it. I was in a hotel room in Las Vegas. It felt, to a degree that is almost impossible to explain, like a dream gone wrong.
Getting fired in public with no warning kicked off a really crazy few hours, and a pretty crazy few days. The “fog of war” was the strangest part. None of us were able to get satisfactory answers about what had happened, or why.
The whole event was, in my opinion, a big failure of governance by well-meaning people, myself included. Looking back, I certainly wish I had done things differently, and I’d like to believe I’m a better, more thoughtful leader today than I was a year ago.
I also learned the importance of a board with diverse viewpoints and broad experience in managing a complex set of challenges. Good governance requires a lot of trust and credibility. I appreciate the way so many people worked together to build a stronger system of governance for OpenAI that enables us to pursue our mission of ensuring that AGI benefits all of humanity.
My biggest takeaway is how much I have to be thankful for and how many people I owe gratitude towards: to everyone who works at OpenAI and has chosen to spend their time and effort going after this dream, to friends who helped us get through the crisis moments, to our partners and customers who supported us and entrusted us to enable their success, and to the people in my life who showed me how much they cared. [1]
We all got back to the work in a more cohesive and positive way and I’m very proud of our focus since then. We have done what is easily some of our best research ever. We grew from about 100 million weekly active users to more than 300 million. Most of all, we have continued to put technology out into the world that people genuinely seem to love and that solves real problems.
Nine years ago, we really had no idea what we were eventually going to become; even now, we only sort of know. AI development has taken many twists and turns and we expect more in the future.
Some of the twists have been joyful; some have been hard. It’s been fun watching a steady stream of research miracles occur, and a lot of naysayers have become true believers. We’ve also seen some colleagues split off and become competitors. Teams tend to turn over as they scale, and OpenAI scales really fast. I think some of this is unavoidable—startups usually see a lot of turnover at each new major level of scale, and at OpenAI numbers go up by orders of magnitude every few months. The last two years have been like a decade at a normal company. When any company grows and evolves so fast, interests naturally diverge. And when any company in an important industry is in the lead, lots of people attack it for all sorts of reasons, especially when they are trying to compete with it.
Our vision won’t change; our tactics will continue to evolve. For example, when we started we had no idea we would have to build a product company; we thought we were just going to do great research. We also had no idea we would need such a crazy amount of capital. There are new things we have to go build now that we didn’t understand a few years ago, and there will be new things in the future we can barely imagine now.
We are proud of our track-record on research and deployment so far, and are committed to continuing to advance our thinking on safety and benefits sharing. We continue to believe that the best way to make an AI system safe is by iteratively and gradually releasing it into the world, giving society time to adapt and co-evolve with the technology, learning from experience, and continuing to make the technology safer. We believe in the importance of being world leaders on safety and alignment research, and in guiding that research with feedback from real world applications.
We are now confident we know how to build AGI as we have traditionally understood it. We believe that, in 2025, we may see the first AI agents “join the workforce” and materially change the output of companies. We continue to believe that iteratively putting great tools in the hands of people leads to great, broadly-distributed outcomes.
We are beginning to turn our aim beyond that, to superintelligence in the true sense of the word. We love our current products, but we are here for the glorious future. With superintelligence, we can do anything else. Superintelligent tools could massively accelerate scientific discovery and innovation well beyond what we are capable of doing on our own, and in turn massively increase abundance and prosperity.
This sounds like science fiction right now, and somewhat crazy to even talk about it. That’s alright—we’ve been there before and we’re OK with being there again. We’re pretty confident that in the next few years, everyone will see what we see, and that the need to act with great care, while still maximizing broad benefit and empowerment, is so important. Given the possibilities of our work, OpenAI cannot be a normal company.
How lucky and humbling it is to be able to play a role in this work.
(Thanks to Josh Tyrangiel for sort of prompting this. I wish we had had a lot more time.)
[1]
There were a lot of people who did incredible and gigantic amounts of work to help OpenAI, and me personally, during those few days, but two people stood out from all others.
Ron Conway and Brian Chesky went so far above and beyond the call of duty that I’m not even sure how to describe it. I’ve of course heard stories about Ron’s ability and tenaciousness for years and I’ve spent a lot of time with Brian over the past couple of years getting a huge amount of help and advice.
But there’s nothing quite like being in the foxhole with people to see what they can really do. I am reasonably confident OpenAI would have fallen apart without their help; they worked around the clock for days until things were done.
Although they worked unbelievably hard, they stayed calm and had clear strategic thought and great advice throughout. They stopped me from making several mistakes and made none themselves. They used their vast networks for everything needed and were able to navigate many complex situations. And I’m sure they did a lot of things I don’t know about.
What I will remember most, though, is their care, compassion, and support.
I thought I knew what it looked like to support a founder and a company, and in some small sense I did. But I have never before seen, or even heard of, anything like what these guys did, and now I get more fully why they have the legendary status they do. They are different and both fully deserve their genuinely unique reputations, but they are similar in their remarkable ability to move mountains and help, and in their unwavering commitment in times of need. The tech industry is far better off for having both of them in it.
There are others like them; it is an amazingly special thing about our industry and does much more to make it all work than people realize. I look forward to paying it forward.
On a more personal note, thanks especially to Ollie for his support that weekend and always; he is incredible in every way and no one could ask for a better partner.
