Sam Altman: 智慧時代

本文轉載自Sam Altman blog

2024.09.24

「在接下來的幾十年裡，我們將能夠做到一些在我們祖父母的眼中堪稱魔法的事情。

這個現象並不新鮮，但它的速度會前所未有地加快。隨著時間的推移，人類的能力顯著提升；我們現在能夠完成的事情，過去的人們會認為根本不可能。

我們變得更有能力，並非因為基因上的變化，而是因為我們得益於社會的基礎建設變得比我們個人更加智慧和強大；從某種重要的角度來看，社會本身就是一種先進的智能。我們的祖父母以及他們之前的世代創造了偉大的成就，這些成就是我們今天所依賴的人類進步基石。人工智慧（AI）將為人類提供解決難題的工具，並幫助我們加強這些基石，使我們能夠做到原本無法做到的事情。進步的故事將繼續發展下去，我們的孩子將能夠完成我們無法想像的事情。

這一切不會在一夜之間發生，但不久的將來，我們將能夠與AI合作，完成超越我們能力範圍的事情；最終，每個人都能擁有一支由虛擬專家組成的個人AI團隊，這些專家來自不同領域，能夠協力創造出我們想像的幾乎任何東西。我們的孩子將擁有虛擬導師，這些導師能夠以個人化的方式教學，無論是任何科目、任何語言，還有任何他們所需的學習速度。類似的想法也可以應用於更好的醫療保健、創建各種軟體，以及更多領域。

擁有這些新能力，我們能夠實現現在難以想像的共享繁榮；未來，每個人的生活都可以比現在任何人的生活更好。僅僅繁榮並不一定能讓人快樂——世界上有許多痛苦的富人——但它確實能夠大幅改善全球人們的生活。

這是人類歷史的一個狹隘的觀點：經過數千年的科學發現和技術進步，我們學會了如何熔化沙子，加入一些雜質，並以驚人的精度在極其微小的尺度上排列成電腦晶片，然後通過它運行能量，最終創造出越來越強大的人工智慧系統。

這可能成為迄今為止整個歷史中最重要的事實。我們可能會在幾千天內（！）擁有超級智能；也許需要更長的時間，但我相信我們會達到那個目標。

那麼，我們是如何來到這個新繁榮時代的門檻呢？

用三個字總結：深度學習成功了。

用15個字總結：深度學習成功了，並隨著規模的增大而變得更好，我們投入了越來越多的資源。

事實就是如此；人類發現了一種能夠真正學習任何資料分佈的算法（或更準確地說，學習產生任何資料分佈的基礎「規則」）。隨著運算資源和資料的增加，它在幫助人們解決難題方面變得越來越精確。無論我花多少時間思考這個問題，我都無法真正內化它的深遠影響。

儘管我們還有很多細節需要解決，但我們不應該被任何特定的挑戰所分心。深度學習有效，我們將解決剩下的問題。我們可以對接下來的事情說很多，但主要的一點是：AI將隨著規模的增長而變得更好，這將為全球人民的生活帶來有意義的改善。

很快，AI模型將作為自主的個人助理，為我們執行具體的任務，例如協調醫療照護。在未來的某個時刻，AI系統將變得如此強大，它們能夠幫助我們創建更好的下一代系統，並推動全方位的科學進步。

技術帶我們從石器時代進入農業時代，接著是工業時代。從現在開始，通往智慧時代的道路由運算能力、能源和人類的意志所鋪就。

如果我們希望AI能夠觸及更多的人，就需要降低運算成本，並使其充沛（這需要大量的能源和晶片）。如果我們不建立足夠的基礎設施，AI將成為一種非常有限的資源，可能引發戰爭，並最終成為富人手中的工具。

我們需要明智但果斷地行動。智慧時代的曙光是一個充滿複雜性和極高風險的重大發展。這不會是一個完全正面的故事，但它的潛力是如此巨大，我們有責任為了我們自己和未來去探索如何應對眼前的風險。

我相信未來將會如此光明，以至於沒有人能夠通過現在的文字來準確描述；智慧時代的一個關鍵特徵將是大規模的繁榮。

雖然這一切將是漸進式的，但一些令人驚嘆的成就——解決氣候問題、建立太空殖民地，以及發現所有物理學的奧秘——最終將變得司空見慣。隨著幾乎無限的智能和充沛的能源——創造偉大想法的能力以及實現這些想法的能力——我們能做的事情將非常多。

正如我們在其他技術上所見，也會有一些負面影響，因此我們需要現在就開始努力，最大化AI的好處，同時將其危害降到最低。舉例來說，我們預計這項技術在未來幾年會對勞動市場產生顯著的影響（既有好處也有壞處），但大多數工作將比大多數人預期的變化來得更慢，而且我完全不擔心我們會沒有事情可做（即便這些事情在我們今天看來可能不像「正經的工作」）。人類天生有創造和互助的渴望，AI將讓我們前所未有地放大自己的能力。作為一個社會，我們將再次回到一個不斷擴展的世界，並能專注於進行正和遊戲。

我們今天做的許多工作，對幾百年前的人來說可能看起來微不足道，但沒有人會想回到過去，成為一名點燈人。如果點燈人能看到今天的世界，他會認為周圍的繁榮是無法想像的。而如果我們能快進到今天的一百年後，周圍的繁榮也會同樣令人難以置信。」

原文:

In the next couple of decades, we will be able to do things that would have seemed like magic to our grandparents.

This phenomenon is not new, but it will be newly accelerated. People have become dramatically more capable over time; we can already accomplish things now that our predecessors would have believed to be impossible.

We are more capable not because of genetic change, but because we benefit from the infrastructure of society being way smarter and more capable than any one of us; in an important sense, society itself is a form of advanced intelligence. Our grandparents – and the generations that came before them – built and achieved great things. They contributed to the scaffolding of human progress that we all benefit from. AI will give people tools to solve hard problems and help us add new struts to that scaffolding that we couldn’t have figured out on our own. The story of progress will continue, and our children will be able to do things we can’t.

It won’t happen all at once, but we’ll soon be able to work with AI that helps us accomplish much more than we ever could without AI; eventually we can each have a personal AI team, full of virtual experts in different areas, working together to create almost anything we can imagine. Our children will have virtual tutors who can provide personalized instruction in any subject, in any language, and at whatever pace they need. We can imagine similar ideas for better healthcare, the ability to create any kind of software someone can imagine, and much more.

With these new abilities, we can have shared prosperity to a degree that seems unimaginable today; in the future, everyone’s lives can be better than anyone’s life is now. Prosperity alone doesn’t necessarily make people happy – there are plenty of miserable rich people – but it would meaningfully improve the lives of people around the world.

Here is one narrow way to look at human history: after thousands of years of compounding scientific discovery and technological progress, we have figured out how to melt sand, add some impurities, arrange it with astonishing precision at extraordinarily tiny scale into computer chips, run energy through it, and end up with systems capable of creating increasingly capable artificial intelligence.

This may turn out to be the most consequential fact about all of history so far. It is possible that we will have superintelligence in a few thousand days (!); it may take longer, but I’m confident we’ll get there.

How did we get to the doorstep of the next leap in prosperity?

In three words: deep learning worked.

In 15 words: deep learning worked, got predictably better with scale, and we dedicated increasing resources to it.

That’s really it; humanity discovered an algorithm that could really, truly learn any distribution of data (or really, the underlying “rules” that produce any distribution of data). To a shocking degree of precision, the more compute and data available, the better it gets at helping people solve hard problems. I find that no matter how much time I spend thinking about this, I can never really internalize how consequential it is.

There are a lot of details we still have to figure out, but it’s a mistake to get distracted by any particular challenge. Deep learning works, and we will solve the remaining problems. We can say a lot of things about what may happen next, but the main one is that AI is going to get better with scale, and that will lead to meaningful improvements to the lives of people around the world.

AI models will soon serve as autonomous personal assistants who carry out specific tasks on our behalf like coordinating medical care on your behalf. At some point further down the road, AI systems are going to get so good that they help us make better next-generation systems and make scientific progress across the board.

Technology brought us from the Stone Age to the Agricultural Age and then to the Industrial Age. From here, the path to the Intelligence Age is paved with compute, energy, and human will.

If we want to put AI into the hands of as many people as possible, we need to drive down the cost of compute and make it abundant (which requires lots of energy and chips). If we don’t build enough infrastructure, AI will be a very limited resource that wars get fought over and that becomes mostly a tool for rich people.

We need to act wisely but with conviction. The dawn of the Intelligence Age is a momentous development with very complex and extremely high-stakes challenges. It will not be an entirely positive story, but the upside is so tremendous that we owe it to ourselves, and the future, to figure out how to navigate the risks in front of us.

I believe the future is going to be so bright that no one can do it justice by trying to write about it now; a defining characteristic of the Intelligence Age will be massive prosperity.

Although it will happen incrementally, astounding triumphs – fixing the climate, establishing a space colony, and the discovery of all of physics – will eventually become commonplace. With nearly-limitless intelligence and abundant energy – the ability to generate great ideas, and the ability to make them happen – we can do quite a lot.

As we have seen with other technologies, there will also be downsides, and we need to start working now to maximize AI’s benefits while minimizing its harms. As one example, we expect that this technology can cause a significant change in labor markets (good and bad) in the coming years, but most jobs will change more slowly than most people think, and I have no fear that we’ll run out of things to do (even if they don’t look like “real jobs” to us today). People have an innate desire to create and to be useful to each other, and AI will allow us to amplify our own abilities like never before. As a society, we will be back in an expanding world, and we can again focus on playing positive-sum games.

Many of the jobs we do today would have looked like trifling wastes of time to people a few hundred years ago, but nobody is looking back at the past, wishing they were a lamplighter. If a lamplighter could see the world today, he would think the prosperity all around him was unimaginable. And if we could fast-forward a hundred years from today, the prosperity all around us would feel just as unimaginable.