Sam Altman Is Back at OpenAI. I Have a Question for Him. - The New York Times

Can one organization, or one person, maintain the brain of a scientist, the drive of a capitalist and the cautious heart of a regulatory agency? Or, as Charlie Warzel wrote in The Atlantic, will the money always win out?

It’s important to remember that A.I. is quite different from other parts of the tech world. It is (or at least was) more academic. A.I. is a field that had a research lineage stretching back centuries. Even today, many of the giants of the field are primarily researchers, not entrepreneurs — people like Yann LeCun and Geoffrey Hinton, who won the Turing Award (the Nobel Prize of computing) together in 2018 and now disagree about where A.I. is taking us.

It’s only in the last several years that academic researchers have been leaving the university aeries and flocking to industry. Researchers at places like Alphabet, the parent company of Google; Microsoft; OpenAI; and Meta, which owns Facebook, still communicate with one another by publishing research papers, the way professors do.

But the field also has the intensity and the audacity of the hottest of all startup sectors. While talking with A.I. researchers over the past year or so, I have often felt I was on one of those airport moving walkways going three miles per hour and they were on walkways going 4,000 miles per hour. The researchers kept telling me that this phase of A.I.’s history is so exhilarating precisely because nobody can predict what will happen next. “The point of being an A.I. researcher is you should understand what’s going on. We’re constantly being surprised,” the Stanford Ph.D. candidate Rishi Bommasani told me.

The people in A.I. seem to be experiencing radically different brain states all at once. I’ve found it incredibly hard to write about A.I. because it is literally unknowable whether this technology is leading us to heaven or hell, and so my attitude about it shifts with my mood.