Elon Emails

Hi Elon, Thank you for the thoughtful note. I have always been impressed by your focus on the big picture, and agree completely we must change trajectory to achieve our goals. Let's speak tomorrow, any time 4p or later will work. My view is that the best future will come from a major expansion of OpenAI. Our goal and mission are fundamentally correct, and that will increasingly be a superpower as AGI grows near. Fundraising Our fundraising conversations show that: - Ilya and I are able to convince reputable people that AGI can really happen in the next ≤10 years - There's appetite for donations from those people - There's very large appetite for investments from those people I respect your decision on the ICO idea, which matches the evolution of our own thinking. Sam Altman has been working on a fundraising structure that does not rely on a public offering, and we will be curious to hear your feedback. Of the people we've been talking to, the following people are currently my top suggestions for board members. Would also love suggestions for your top picks not on this list, and we can figure out how to approach them. - <redacted> - <redacted> - <redacted> - <redacted> - <redacted> - <redacted> (she heads Partnership on AI, originally created by Demis to steal OpenAI's thunder – would bring a lot of outside credibility) The next 3 years Over the next 3 years, we must build 3 things: - Custom AI hardware (such as <redacted> computer) - Massive AI data center (likely multiple revs thereof) - Best software team, mixing between algorithm development, public demonstrations, and safety We've talked the most about the custom AI hardware and AI data center. On the software front, we have a credible path (self-play in a competitive multiagent environment) which has been validated by Dota and AlphaGo. We also have identified a small but finite number of limitations in today's deep learning which are barriers to learning from human levels of experience. And we believe we uniquely are on trajectory to solving safety (at least in broad strokes) in the next three years. We would like to scale headcount in this way: - Beginning of 2017: ~40 - End of 2018: 100 - End of 2019: 300 - End of 2020: 900 [redacted passage] Moral high ground Our biggest tool is the moral high ground. To retain this, we must: - Try our best to remain a non-profit. AI is going to shake up the fabric of society, and our fiduciary duty should be to humanity. - Put increasing effort into the safety/control problem, rather than the fig leaf you've noted in other institutions. It doesn't matter who wins if everyone dies. Related to this, we need to communicate a "better red than dead" outlook — we're trying to build safe AGI, and we're not willing to destroy the world in a down-to-the-wire race to do so. - Engage with government to provide trusted, unbiased policy advice — we often hear that they mistrust recommendations from companies such as <redacted>. - Be perceived as a place that provides public good to the research community, and keeps the other actors honest and open via leading by example. The past 2 years I would be curious to hear how you rate our execution over the past two years, relative to resources. In my view: - Over the past five years, there have two major demonstrations of working systems: AlphaZero [DeepMind] and Dota 1v1 [OpenAI]. (There are a larger number of breakthroughs of "capabilities" popular among practitioners, the top of which I'd say are: ProgressiveGAN [NVIDIA], unsupervised translation [Facebook], WaveNet [DeepMind], Atari/DQN [DeepMind], machine translation [Ilya at Google — now at OpenAI], generative adversarial network [Ian Goodfellow at grad school — now at Google], variational autoencoder [Durk at grad school — now at OpenAI], AlexNet [Ilya at grad school — now at OpenAI].) We benchmark well on this axis. - We grew very rapidly in 2016, and in 2017 iterated to a working management structure. We're now ready to scale massively, given the resources. We lose people on comp currently, but pretty much only on comp. I've been resuming the style of recruiting I did in the early days, and believe I can exceed those results. - We have the most talent dense team in the field, and we have the reputation for it as well. - We don't encourage paper writing, and so paper acceptance isn't a measure we optimize. For the ICLR chart Andrej sent, I'd expect our (accepted papers)/(people submitting papers) to be the highest in the field. - gdb