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.
不久前才刚过完 ChatGPT 的第二个生日，现在我们已经过渡到了下一个模型范式，这些模型可以进行复杂的推理。新年让人陷入沉思，我想分享一些关于到目前为止进展如何的个人想法，以及一路上我学到的一些东西。
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.
随着我们越来越接近 AGI，现在似乎是审视我们公司进展的重要时刻。还有很多东西需要理解，还有很多东西我们不知道，而且现在还为时过早。但我们比刚开始时了解得更多了。
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.
大约九年前，我们创立了 OpenAI，因为我们相信 AGI 是可能的，并且它可能是人类历史上最具影响力的技术。我们想要弄清楚如何构建它并使其广泛受益；我们很高兴能尝试在历史上留下自己的印记。我们的雄心壮志非常高，我们也同样坚信这项工作可能会以同样非凡的方式造福社会。
At the time, very few people cared, and if they did, it was mostly because they thought we had no chance of success.
当时，很少有人关心，如果他们关心，那主要是因为他们认为我们没有成功的机会。
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.
2022 年，OpenAI 还是一家默默无闻的研究实验室，正在开发一个临时名为“与 GPT-3.5 聊天”的项目。（我们在研究方面比在命名方面强得多。）我们一直在观察人们使用我们 API 的 Playground 功能，并且知道开发人员非常喜欢与模型交谈。我们认为围绕这种体验构建一个演示将向人们展示有关未来的重要内容，并帮助我们使我们的模型更好、更安全。
We ended up mercifully calling it ChatGPT instead, and launched it on November 30th of 2022.
我们最终还是仁慈地将其命名为 ChatGPT，并在 2022 年 11 月 30 日发布。
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.
我们一直抽象地知道，在某个时刻，我们将达到一个临界点，人工智能革命将被启动。但我们不知道那一刻会是什么时候。令我们惊讶的是，结果就是现在。
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.
ChatGPT 的推出开启了一条前所未有的增长曲线——在我们的公司、我们的行业以及整个世界范围内。我们终于看到了我们一直希望从人工智能中获得的一些巨大好处，并且我们可以看到很快会有更多的好处到来。
It hasn’t been easy. The road hasn’t been smooth and the right choices haven’t been obvious.
这并不容易。这条路并不平坦，正确的选择也并不明显。
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.
在过去的两年里，我们不得不围绕这项新技术，几乎从零开始建立起一家完整的公司。除了实践，没有其他方法可以培训员工，而且当这项技术类别是全新的时，根本没有人能告诉你到底该怎么做。
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.
在如此短的时间内，以如此快的速度建立一家公司，而培训却如此之少，这是一个混乱的过程。通常是前进两步，后退一步（有时是前进一步，后退两步）。错误会在你前进的过程中得到纠正，但在进行原创工作时，并没有真正的手册或指南可供参考。在未知的海域中快速前进是一种难以置信的体验，但对所有参与者来说，这也是一种巨大的压力。冲突和误解比比皆是。
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.
到目前为止，这些年是我一生中最有意义、最有趣、最美好、最精彩、最累人、压力最大，尤其是最近两年——也是最不愉快的几年。最强烈的感觉是感激；我知道总有一天我会在我们的牧场退休，看着植物生长，有点无聊，然后回想起从小就梦想的工作是多么的酷。我试着在任何一个星期五，当下午 1 点前有七件事情出错时，记住这一点。
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.
一年多前，在一个特别的星期五，那天发生的主要问题是，我在一次视频通话中意外被解雇了，然后就在我们挂断电话后，董事会发布了一篇关于这件事的博文。当时我在拉斯维加斯的一间酒店房间里。这感觉就像一场出错的梦，其程度几乎无法解释。
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.
在没有任何预警的情况下被公开解雇，引发了非常疯狂的几个小时，以及非常疯狂的几天。“战争迷雾”是最奇怪的部分。我们都无法得到关于发生了什么或为什么发生的令人满意的答案。
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.
在我看来，整个事件是一次由善意的人们（包括我自己在内）导致的重大治理失败。回想起来，我当然希望我当时能以不同的方式做事，而且我愿意相信，今天的我比一年前的我是一位更好、更深思熟虑的领导者。
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.
我还认识到一个拥有不同观点和广泛经验的董事会在管理一系列复杂挑战中的重要性。良好的治理需要大量的信任和信誉。我很欣赏这么多人共同努力，为 OpenAI 建立一个更强大的治理体系，使我们能够追求我们的使命，即确保 AGI 造福全人类。
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]
我最大的收获是，我有多少要感恩的，以及有多少人我应该表示感谢：感谢在 OpenAI 工作的每一个人，他们选择花费时间和精力去追逐这个梦想，感谢帮助我们度过危机时刻的朋友们，感谢支持我们并委托我们帮助他们取得成功的合作伙伴和客户，以及感谢我生命中那些向我展示了他们有多么关心我的人们。[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.
我们都以一种更具凝聚力和积极性的方式回到了工作中，我为我们从那时起的专注感到非常自豪。我们所做的事情很容易成为我们有史以来最好的一些研究。我们的周活跃用户从大约 1 亿增长到超过 3 亿。最重要的是，我们继续向世界推出人们似乎真正热爱并能解决实际问题的技术。
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.
九年前，我们确实不知道我们最终会变成什么样；即使是现在，我们也只是略知一二。人工智能的发展经历了许多曲折，我们预计未来还会有更多。
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.
有些曲折令人欣喜，有些则令人感到艰难。看着一个又一个研究奇迹接连发生，许多曾经的质疑者转变为真正的信徒，这非常有趣。我们也看到一些同事分道扬镳，成为了竞争对手。团队在规模扩大的过程中往往会发生人员变动，而 OpenAI 的规模扩张速度非常快。我认为其中一些是不可避免的——初创公司通常在每个新的主要规模级别都会看到大量的人员流动，而在 OpenAI，数字每隔几个月就会上升一个数量级。过去两年就像是一家普通公司经历了十年。当任何一家公司如此快速地成长和发展时，利益自然会产生分歧。而且，当任何一家在重要行业处于领先地位的公司，都会有很多人出于各种原因对其进行攻击，特别是当他们试图与之竞争时。
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.
我们的愿景不会改变；我们的策略将继续演进。例如，当初创时，我们并不知道需要打造一家产品公司；我们以为我们只会做优秀的研究。我们也不知道我们需要如此庞大的资金。现在我们需要构建几年前无法理解的新事物，而在未来，还会有我们现在几乎无法想象的新事物。
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.
我们为迄今为止在研究和部署方面的过往记录感到自豪，并将致力于继续推进我们在安全和利益共享方面的思考。我们仍然相信，使一个 AI 系统安全可靠的最佳方法是将其迭代地、逐步地推向世界，让社会有时间适应这项技术并与之共同发展，从经验中学习，并不断提高技术的安全性。我们相信在安全和对齐研究方面成为世界领导者的重要性，并利用来自现实世界应用的反馈来指导这项研究。
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.
我们现在有信心知道如何构建我们传统上理解的 AGI。我们相信，在 2025 年，我们可能会看到第一个 AI 代理“加入劳动力大军”，并实质性地改变公司的产出。我们仍然相信，不断地将优秀的工具交到人们手中会带来伟大的、广泛分布的成果。
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.
我们开始将目光投向那之外，投向真正意义上的超级智能。我们热爱我们当前的产品，但我们是为了辉煌的未来而来。拥有超级智能，我们可以做任何其他事情。超级智能工具可以极大地加速科学发现和创新，远远超出我们自身的能力，进而极大地增加富足和繁荣。
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.
这听起来像是科幻小说，甚至谈论它都有些疯狂。没关系——我们以前也经历过这种情况，并且可以再次经历。我们非常有信心，在未来几年，每个人都会看到我们所看到的，并且在最大化广泛利益和赋权的同时，谨慎行事的需求是如此重要。鉴于我们工作的可能性，OpenAI 不可能是一家普通的公司。
How lucky and humbling it is to be able to play a role in this work.
能够参与这项工作是多么幸运和荣幸。
(Thanks to Josh Tyrangiel for sort of prompting this. I wish we had had a lot more time.)
（感谢 Josh Tyrangiel 某种程度上的推动。我希望我们当时有更多的时间。）
[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.