萨姆·奥尔特曼：回顾

ChatGPT的二周年纪念日才刚过去一个多月，而我们现在已进入能够进行复杂推理的模型新范式。新年总让人陷入反思，我想分享一些个人感受，谈谈迄今为止的历程以及我一路学到的经验。随着我们越来越接近通用人工智能（AGI），现在是审视我们公司进展的重要时刻。我们仍有许多未知，仍有许多未解之谜，现在依然为时过早。但相比起步时，我们已经了解得多了。

The second birthday of 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 Year's 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. 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.

我们几乎九年前创立了OpenAI，因为我们相信通用人工智能是可能实现的，并且它可能成为人类历史上最具影响力的技术。我们希望弄清楚如何构建它，并使其广泛造福人类。我们渴望在历史上留下自己的印记。我们的抱负极高，也坚信这项工作将以同样非凡的方式造福社会。当时，几乎没人关心。

We started OpenAI almost nine years ago because we believe 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. At the time, very few people cared.

即使有人关注，也多半是因为他们认为我们根本不可能成功。2022年，OpenAI只是一个默默无闻的研究实验室，正在研究一个暂时被称为“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。我们一直在观察用户使用我们API的游乐场功能，知道开发者们非常享受与模型对话的体验。我们觉得围绕这种体验做一个演示，能让人们看到未来的重要图景，同时帮助我们改进模型，使其更安全。

And if they did, it was mostly because they thought we had no chance of success. In 2022, OpenAI was a quiet research lab working on something temporarily called chat with GPT three to five. We're much better at research than we are at naming things. We've 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.

最终，我们仁慈地将其命名为ChatGPT，并于2022年11月30日发布。我们一直从抽象意义上知道，总有一天我们会迎来一个转折点，人工智能革命将由此启动。但我们并不知道那个时刻会是什么时候。令我们惊讶的是，它竟然是这一刻——ChatGPT的发布，开启了我们公司、整个行业乃至全世界前所未有的增长曲线。

We ended up mercifully calling it ChatGPT instead and launched it on 11/30/2022. 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. The launch of ChatGPT kicked off a growth curve like nothing we have ever seen in our company, our industry, and the world broadly.

我们终于开始看到人工智能一直以来所承诺的巨大潜力，并且能预见未来还将涌现更多成果。这条路并不轻松，过程也非一帆风顺，正确的选择也从不明显。过去两年里，我们必须围绕这项新技术几乎从零开始建立一家公司。除了亲身实践，没有其他方式能让人为此做好准备。

We are finally seeing some of the massive upside we've always hoped for from AI, and we can see how much more will come soon. It hasn't been easy. The road hasn't been smooth, and the right choices haven't been obvious. 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.

当一个技术类别完全崭新时，根本没有人能告诉你它究竟应该如何被构建。以如此高速度、在几乎没有培训的情况下建立一家公司，是一个混乱的过程。常常是前进两步，后退一步，有时甚至前进一步，后退两步。错误会在过程中被修正，但当你从事开创性工作时，根本没有任何手册或指南。在未知领域高速前行是一段非凡的经历，但也让所有参与者承受着巨大的压力。

And when the technology category is completely new, there is no one at all who can tell you exactly how it should be done. 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.

冲突与误解层出不穷。这些年是我生命中最充实、最有趣、最棒、最引人入胜，同时也最疲惫、最紧张，尤其是过去两年最不愉快的岁月。但压倒一切的感受是感恩。我知道，总有一天我会在牧场退休，看着植物生长，略感无聊时，回想起自己有幸实现了儿时的梦想，是多么酷的一件事。每当我周五下午一点前七件事都搞砸时，我都会努力提醒自己这一点。

Conflict and misunderstanding abound. 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 1PM.

一年多前的一个星期五，那天最糟糕的事就是我在一次视频通话中被突然解雇了。挂断电话后，董事会立刻发布了一篇关于此事的博客文章。我当时在拉斯维加斯的一家酒店房间里，那种感觉几乎无法形容，就像一场噩梦。在毫无预警的情况下被公开解雇，引发了一连串疯狂的几小时和几近疯狂的几天。

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 to a degree, that is almost impossible to explain, like a dream gone wrong. Getting fired in public with no warning kicked off a really crazy few hours and a pretty crazy few days.

最奇怪的部分是战争的迷雾。我们没有人能获得关于发生了什么以及为什么发生的满意答案。在我看来，整个事件是一场由善意之人——包括我自己——造成的治理失败。回过头看，我当然希望当时能有不同的做法，我也相信今天的我比一年前更成熟、更富有思虑。我还学到了一个重要的教训：一个拥有多元观点和丰富经验的董事会，对于应对复杂挑战至关重要。

The fog of war was the strangest part. None of us were able to get satisfactory answers about what had happened or why. 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. I also learned the importance of a board with diverse viewpoints and broad experience in managing a complex set of challenges.

良好的治理需要大量的信任与信誉。我非常感激许多人共同努力，为OpenAI构建了一个更强大的治理体系，使我们能够实现让通用人工智能造福全人类的使命。我最大的感悟是，我有多么值得感恩，以及我欠了多少人的感激之情。感谢所有在OpenAI工作、选择投入时间和精力追逐这一梦想的人；感谢在危机时刻帮助我们的朋友；感谢支持我们、信任我们并让我们助力他们成功的合作伙伴与客户；也感谢生命中那些向我展示他们关心我的人。首先，我们所有人以更团结、更积极的方式重新投入工作，对此我感到非常自豪。

Good governance requires a lot of trust and credibility. I appreciate the way so many people work 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. 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. One, we all got back to the work in a more cohesive and positive way, and I'm very proud of our focus since then.

我们完成了可能是有史以来最出色的几项研究之一。我们的每周活跃用户从约一亿增长到超过三亿。最重要的是，我们持续向世界推出人们真正喜爱、并能解决实际问题的技术。九年前，我们根本无法预知自己最终会成为什么样子。即使到现在，我们也只是大致知道人工智能的发展经历了许多曲折，未来还会有更多变化。

We have done what is easily some of our best research ever. We grew from about 100,000,000 weekly active users to more than 300,000,000. Most of all, we have continued to put technology out into the world that people genuinely seem to love and that solves real problems. Nine years ago, we really had no idea what we were eventually gonna become. Even now, we only sort of know AI development has taken many twists and turns, and we expect more in the future.

有些曲折令人欣喜，有些则十分艰难。看着一项项研究奇迹持续涌现，许多曾经的怀疑者如今变成了坚定的支持者，这非常有趣。我们也看到一些同事离职并成为竞争对手。随着团队规模扩大，人员更替是常态，而OpenAI的扩张速度尤其惊人。

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.

我认为这其中一些是不可避免的。初创公司在每个新的规模化阶段通常都会经历大量人员流动。而在OpenAI，每几个月，人数就会增长一个数量级。过去两年的经历，相当于普通公司十年的发展。当任何公司如此迅速地成长和演变时，人们的兴趣自然会产生分歧。

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.

当一家公司处于重要行业的领先地位时，总会有很多人出于各种原因攻击它，尤其是当他们试图与之竞争时。我们的愿景不会改变，我们的策略将继续演进。例如，当初我们起步时，根本没想到自己必须建立一家产品公司，我们原以为只是做些出色的研究而已。

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. 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 gonna do great research.

我们当时也没想到会需要如此庞大的资金。如今我们不得不去开发一些几年前根本无法理解的新事物，未来还会有更多我们现在几乎无法想象的新方向。我们为迄今为止在研究和部署方面取得的成就感到自豪，并致力于持续深化对安全性和利益共享的思考。我们依然相信，让人工智能系统逐步、渐进地进入世界，给社会足够的时间去适应并与技术共同演进，从实践中学习，从而不断让技术变得更安全，这是最有效的方式。我们坚信，在安全与对齐研究方面成为全球领导者，并以真实应用场景的反馈来指导研究，具有至关重要的意义。

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. 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 benefit 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 for 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.

我们现在有信心，已经掌握了按照传统定义构建通用人工智能的方法。我们相信，到2025年，我们可能会看到首批AI代理进入劳动力市场，并实质性地改变企业的产出。我们依然坚信，将强大的工具逐步交到人们手中，能够带来广泛而深远的积极成果。如今，我们的目标正开始超越这一阶段，转向真正意义上的超级智能。我们热爱当前的产品，但我们的使命是迎接辉煌的未来。

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. 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.

有了超级智能，我们就能做任何其他事情。超级智能工具将极大加速科学发现与创新，远远超越我们自身的能力，进而大幅提升资源丰富度与繁荣水平。这听起来现在像科幻小说，甚至让人觉得荒谬到不值得讨论。但这没关系——我们曾经走过这条路，现在也愿意再次踏上它。

With superintelligence, we can do anything else. Superintelligence 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. 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 okay with being there again.

我们相当确信，在未来几年内，每个人都会看到我们所看到的景象，而以极大的谨慎行事，同时最大化广泛的利益与赋能，将变得至关重要。鉴于我们工作的可能性，OpenAI不可能是一家普通公司。能够参与这项工作，是多么幸运又令人敬畏的事情啊。

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. How lucky and humbling it is to be able to play a role in this work.