Can Sam Altman Be Trusted with the Future?

In 2017, soon after Google researchers invented a new kind of neural network called a transformer, a young OpenAI engineer named Alec Radford began experimenting with it. What made the transformer architecture different from that of existing A.I. systems was that it could ingest and make connections among larger volumes of text, and Radford decided to train his model on a database of seven thousand unpublished English-language books--romance, adventure, speculative tales, the full range of human fantasy and invention. Then, instead of asking the network to translate text, as Google's researchers had done, he prompted it to predict the most probable next word in a sentence. The machine responded: one word, then another, and another--each new term inferred from the patterns buried in those seven thousand books. Radford hadn't given it rules of grammar or a copy of Strunk and White.