On this week’s episode of Free Lunch by The Peak, we sat down with Jeremie Harris to talk about what happened amid the OpenAI executive shake-up, and what’s next for the industry.
What has OpenAI been working on lately that’s so contentious?
“OpenAI is two entities: A for-profit company and a non-profit parent company. When they build AI that surpasses human ability across commercially valuable tasks (artificial general intelligence), they'll basically have a big money-printing machine. But then the question is how do you redistribute wealth because it's absurd to have one entity capture all that value.”
What are some of the actual use cases of artificial general intelligence?
“One thing is there are lots of tasks right now that are bottlenecked by intelligence, by cheap intelligence. Think about, like, literally any white-collar job where you don't move physical objects around the world all day, but bits around on a computer all day. I mean, if you can bottle human-level intelligence and deliver it on tap, you can automate all white-collar jobs.”
What role does effective altruism play in current AI development?
“This ideology starts with a question: You have a hundred dollars. You want to donate that money to do the maximum good in the world. What do you do with it? A whole community arose out of Silicon Valley mostly in response to really a massive amount of wealth that was being generated there and people were trying to figure out what is efficient philanthropy.”
This interview has been edited for clarity and length. Listen to the full conversation here.