Gentle Singularity

Sam Altman's new short essay "The Gentle Singularity" is generating positive chatter among my peers this week.

In the essay Sam says that we've already entered the singularity, but that everything appears to be better-than-expected because previous notions of machines superseding human intelligence under-appreciated how beneficial the change could be.

IMO, the essay's value is in its clarity.

Sam says that to avoid the worst outcomes associated with superintelligence, the industry needs to deal with two things (1) the alignment problem and (2) providing equal access to users.

To be sure, this is a marketing piece written for a general audience. There is no discussion of models, arenas, benchmarks, parameters, tokens, context windows. And yet it addresses a key tension - that Open AI's leadership understands the moment and has its priorities straight.

After making a difficult pivot and facing the fallout with Open AI's board of directors, Sam seems to have come into his own as a leader. In the essay his tone is very "TIME CEO of the Year" and brings to mind Tim Cook's early position-making takes on consumer data privacy.

Read it here.