The Optimist by Keach Hagey

Author:Keach Hagey
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2025-04-18T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 12

ALTRUISTS

GREG BROCKMAN ONCE described Ilya Sutskever as “an artist who expresses himself through machine learning (and sometimes through paint).”1 But in daily interactions, Sutskever was more like a musician whose preferred instrument was the whiteboard. The dry-erase markers needed to be fresh and numerous. Without a place to scrawl his diagrams of artificial neurons and mathematical formulas, it was almost as if he couldn’t think. With them—colorful felt tips squeaking against shiny white laminate—he was an oracle, beaming pure conviction with sensorium-stretching mantras like “It just wants to work” and “Feel the AGI.”2

The weeks before OpenAI got started on January 4, 2016, had been too chaotic—and Sutskever’s participation too uncertain—for Altman and Brockman to even think about office space, so the gang that was supposed to go after DeepMind started out in Brockman’s San Francisco apartment, plopped on sectional couches, crouched around his oval-shaped dining room table, and occasionally, in the case of Andrej Karpathy, napping in his bed. At one point, Sutskever and his fellow researcher John Schulman hopped up mid-discussion to write on a whiteboard, only to discover there wasn’t one. Brockman quickly set about rectifying that.3

In these early days, the team that Altman and Brockman had put together still had no real idea what it ought to be doing. Brockman resolved to make himself useful in other ways. Sometimes this meant ordering office supplies or handwashing all the cups in his kitchen. “Our team really likes to drink a lot of water,” he said. At Stripe, he had spent the prior few years stewing about his career, sometimes writing long, confessional blog posts about the conflict between his outsize ambition and his drive to just code all the time, a process he called “thinking about my role.” (One Stripe colleague said Brockman’s departure was partly driven by his desire, as Stripe’s fourth employee, to be classified as a co-founder; both Patrick Collison and Brockman deny this, with Collison pointing to the blog posts as evidence that Brockman’s motivations were existential, not about equity stakes or his title at Stripe.) Whatever it was, the stewing had become unbearable. “I just don’t want to think about those things,” Brockman said to himself. “I just want to think about this problem that I care so much about, and how to maximally contribute to it.” He desperately wanted to shift from ego to cause. “It felt like I was building AGI by washing cups. What could be better?”

Brockman installed a whiteboard between the living room couch and dining room table, and the team stepped into the fog of the unknown. They set off in the direction of DeepMind’s Atari-playing agent, which could learn directly from pure pixels, showing the promise of combining deep neural networks with an algorithm of reinforcement learning. The neural network was capable of finding patterns in the pixels. The algorithm created a system of rewards, but no information about how to get them. It was up to the neural net to decipher the patterns in front of it in ways that would lead to a reward.

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