Interview, Fireside Chat
Sam Altman on Choosing Projects, Creating Value, and Finding Purpose
- The upcoming Y Combinator batch is expected to be significant, following interviews with over 1,000 companies, with future funding mechanisms for long-term, uncertain projects anticipated for release in the first quarter of 2019.
- OpenAI's research strategy involves pursuing AGI by testing numerous initiatives and allocating increased resources to those showing early success, a process expected to yield innovation surpassing the total of humanity's past achievements once realized.
- A recurring operational pattern involves exploring many projects with a beginner's mind at low cost and speed, expecting most to fail while anticipating that the successful few will yield substantial results, with the realization of failure viewed as an acceptable and frequent outcome.
- Personal productivity strategies include writing down annual reviews and to-do lists on December 31st, aiming for eight consecutive hours of super productivity, and potentially utilizing accountability groups to maintain discipline after official structures dissolve.
- Strategic focus plans involve cutting non-working activities to concentrate on one or two effective areas, rejecting uniform measurement rubrics across endeavors, and dismissing the "deferred life plan" in favor of committing to a single serious time horizon to avoid a lack of perceived commitment.
- Risk management emphasizes avoiding the trap of jumping to new projects within three months if world problems remain unsolved, recognizing that long-term chronic career waste is a greater danger than short-term catastrophic risk, and accepting that major investment convictions are frequently wrong.
- Career development expectations include highly recommending a one-year sabbatical to learn new fields and travel, warning that 98% of people may try to discourage ambition, and noting that holding a perspective shift becomes increasingly difficult with age.
- Physical fitness goals for the current year have been met, with a specific goal for 2019 expected to be set by December 31st, alongside the acknowledgment that 16 hours of daily work is currently impossible but may become feasible after human evolution.
- Political work undertaken in the past is expected to yield eventual results, while future success in raising capital, such as for rocket companies, is contingent on the ability to secure funding or pivot to alternative ideas.
- Long-term biological perspectives suggest that human biological intelligence will offer little advantage compared to physical strength over a 60,000-year horizon in the arrival of AGI, with the rate of human change in the last decade already described as "crazy."