9月24日，OpenAI CEO山姆·奧特曼（Sam Altman）罕見地在其個人社交平臺X上發(fā)表了一篇長文，題為《智能時代》（"The Intelligence Age"），引發(fā)了超過百萬次的觀看。
在這篇長文中山姆·奧特曼講述了他對人工智能驅(qū)動的技術(shù)進(jìn)步將帶來全球繁榮的未來愿景。他認(rèn)為，超級人工智能可能在未來十年內(nèi)出現(xiàn)。 奧特曼將我們現(xiàn)在所處的時代稱之為“智能時代”的黎明，深度學(xué)習(xí)算法的成功是這個新時代的催化劑，隨著規(guī)模擴(kuò)大表現(xiàn)越好，人類可能在幾千天內(nèi)實現(xiàn)超級智能。 不過，他也提到，AI技術(shù)也會有缺點(diǎn)，“會對勞動市場產(chǎn)生顯著變化（好與壞）”，我們需要現(xiàn)在開始努力，最大化人工智能的好處，同時最小化其危害?！彼A(yù)測，人工智能在未來，將使教育、醫(yī)療、軟件開發(fā)和其他領(lǐng)域取得突破。 以下是奧特曼《智能時代》全文： 在接下來的幾十年里，我們將能夠做些被祖父母視為魔法的事情。 這一現(xiàn)象并不新鮮，但將會加速。隨著時間的推移，人類的能力將顯著提升，我們現(xiàn)在我們能夠完成一些前輩們認(rèn)為不可能的事情。 我們的能力并不是因為基因的改變，而是因為我們受益于社會的基礎(chǔ)設(shè)施的支持，讓我們變得比任何一個人都要聰明和強(qiáng)大；從某種重要意義上講，社會本身就是一種高級智能。我們的祖父母和之前的幾代人取得了偉大成就，他們?yōu)槲覀內(nèi)祟愡M(jìn)步搭建了基礎(chǔ)架構(gòu)，我們都從中受益。人工智能將為人們提供復(fù)雜問題的工具，幫助我們添加新的支柱，這是我們自己無法想象的。進(jìn)步的故事將繼續(xù)，我們的孩子將能夠做我們現(xiàn)在無法做到的事情。 這一切不會很快發(fā)生，但我們很快能與人工智能合作，完成比以往更多的任務(wù)。最終，每個人都可以擁有一個自己的人工智能團(tuán)隊，里面有各領(lǐng)域的虛擬專家，他們共同協(xié)作創(chuàng)造出幾乎我們能夠想象的任何事物。我們的孩子將擁有提供個性化指導(dǎo)的虛擬導(dǎo)師，能夠覆蓋任何科目、任何語言，并以他們所需的速度學(xué)習(xí)。我們可以想象類似的方案，用于更好的醫(yī)療保健、開發(fā)任何人能夠想象的軟件，等等。 擁有這些新能力后，我們可以實現(xiàn)共享繁榮，達(dá)到今天難以想象的高度。未來，每個人的生活都可以比現(xiàn)在任何人的生活都要好。雖然繁榮本身并不一定使人快樂——有許多富有卻痛苦的人——但它將顯著改善全球人們的生活品質(zhì)。 從一個狹義的角度來看待人類歷史：經(jīng)過數(shù)千年的科學(xué)發(fā)現(xiàn)和技術(shù)進(jìn)步的積累，我們已經(jīng)找到了如何溶化沙子，添加雜質(zhì)，以令人驚訝的精度在極小的尺度上排列成計算機(jī)芯片，給它們通電，最終得到能夠創(chuàng)造日益強(qiáng)大的人工智能的系統(tǒng)。 這可能是迄今為止歷史上最重要的事實。我們有可能在幾千天內(nèi)實現(xiàn)超級智能！可能會需要更長的時間，但我相信我們最終會實現(xiàn)這一目標(biāo)。 那么，我們?nèi)绾螌崿F(xiàn)下一次繁榮飛躍？ 可以用六個字來概括：深度學(xué)習(xí)有效。 用一句話來說：深度學(xué)習(xí)取得成功，隨著規(guī)模的擴(kuò)大，可以預(yù)見它會變得更好，我們?yōu)榇送度肓烁噘Y源。 就這么簡單；人類發(fā)現(xiàn)了一種算法，能夠真正學(xué)習(xí)任何數(shù)據(jù)分布（或者說，產(chǎn)生任何數(shù)據(jù)分布的基本“規(guī)則”）。令人震驚的是，計算能力和數(shù)據(jù)越多，它在幫助人們解決難題時的表現(xiàn)就越好。我發(fā)現(xiàn)，無論我花多少時間思考這一點(diǎn)，我都無法真正內(nèi)化它的重要性。 我們?nèi)匀恍枰鉀Q很多細(xì)節(jié)，但被任何特定挑戰(zhàn)分散注意力是個錯誤。深度學(xué)習(xí)有效，我們將解決剩下的問題。關(guān)于未來可能發(fā)生的事情，我們有很多設(shè)想，但最主要的是，人工智能將隨著規(guī)模的擴(kuò)大而變得更好，這將為全球人們的生活帶來實質(zhì)性的改善。 人工智能模型很快將作為自主個人助手，代表我們完成特定任務(wù)，比如協(xié)調(diào)醫(yī)療護(hù)理。在未來某個時刻，隨著技術(shù)的進(jìn)步，人工智能系統(tǒng)將變得更加出色，幫助我們創(chuàng)造更好的下一代系統(tǒng)，并推動各領(lǐng)域的科學(xué)進(jìn)步。 技術(shù)將我們從石器時代帶入農(nóng)業(yè)時代，再到工業(yè)時代。從這里開始，通往智能時代的道路鋪滿了計算能力、能源和人類的意志。 如果我們想把人工智能放在盡可能多的人手中，就需要降低計算成本，使其變得豐富（這需要大量的能源和芯片）。如果我們不建設(shè)足夠的基礎(chǔ)設(shè)施，人工智能將成為一種非常有限的資源，可能會引發(fā)戰(zhàn)爭，并主要成為富人的工具。 我們需要明智而堅定地行動。智能時代的到來是一個重要的發(fā)展，伴隨著非常復(fù)雜且高風(fēng)險的挑戰(zhàn)。這并不是一個完全積極的故事，但其潛力如此巨大，我們有責(zé)任為自己和未來找出如何應(yīng)對眼前的風(fēng)險。 我相信，未來將會如此光明，只是現(xiàn)在無人能用文字準(zhǔn)確地描述它，但智能時代的一個定義特征將是巨大的繁榮。 雖然這一切將逐步發(fā)生，但令人震驚的成就最終將變得司空見慣，比如修復(fù)氣候問題、建立太空殖民地和發(fā)現(xiàn)所有物理法則——最終將變得司空見慣。憑借近乎無限的智慧和豐富的能源——創(chuàng)造偉大想法的能力，以及實現(xiàn)這些想法的能力——我們將能夠創(chuàng)造出許多偉大的想法，并將其變?yōu)楝F(xiàn)實。 正如我們在其他技術(shù)中看到的，也會有缺點(diǎn)，我們需要現(xiàn)在就開始努力，最大化人工智能的好處，同時最小化其危害。例如，我們預(yù)計這項技術(shù)在未來幾年可能會對勞動市場產(chǎn)生顯著變化（好與壞），但大多數(shù)工作會比人們想象的變化得更慢，我不擔(dān)心我們會用盡可以做的事情（即使這些事情在今天看起來并不是“真實的工作”）。人們天生渴望創(chuàng)造和對彼此有用，而人工智能將使我們以前所未有的方式放大自身能力。作為一個社會，我們將回到一個不斷擴(kuò)展的世界，重新關(guān)注于積極的和共贏的游戲。 如今我們做的許多工作，在幾百年前的人看來可能是微不足道的，是在浪費(fèi)時間，但沒有人希望成為充當(dāng)點(diǎn)燃街燈的燈夫。如果一個點(diǎn)燈人能看到今天的世界，他會認(rèn)為周圍的繁榮是難以想象的。如果我們能從今天起，快進(jìn)100年，我們周圍的繁榮將同樣難以想象。 In the next couple of decades, we will be able to do things that would have seemed like magic to our grandparents. This phenomenon is not new, but it will be newly accelerated. People have become dramatically more capable over time; we can already accomplish things now that our predecessors would have believed to be impossible. We are more capable not because of genetic change, but because we benefit from the infrastructure of society being way smarter and more capable than any one of us; in an important sense, society itself is a form of advanced intelligence. Our grandparents – and the generations that came before them – built and achieved great things. They contributed to the scaffolding of human progress that we all benefit from. AI will give people tools to solve hard problems and help us add new struts to that scaffolding that we couldn’t have figured out on our own. The story of progress will continue, and our children will be able to do things we can’t. It won’t happen all at once, but we’ll soon be able to work with AI that helps us accomplish much more than we ever could without AI; eventually we can each have a personal AI team, full of virtual experts in different areas, working together to create almost anything we can imagine. Our children will have virtual tutors who can provide personalized instruction in any subject, in any language, and at whatever pace they need. We can imagine similar ideas for better healthcare, the ability to create any kind of software someone can imagine, and much more. With these new abilities, we can have shared prosperity to a degree that seems unimaginable today; in the future, everyone’s lives can be better than anyone’s life is now. Prosperity alone doesn’t necessarily make people happy – there are plenty of miserable rich people – but it would meaningfully improve the lives of people around the world. Here is one narrow way to look at human history: after thousands of years of compounding scientific discovery and technological progress, we have figured out how to melt sand, add some impurities, arrange it with astonishing precision at extraordinarily tiny scale into computer chips, run energy through it, and end up with systems capable of creating increasingly capable artificial intelligence. This may turn out to be the most consequential fact about all of history so far. It is possible that we will have superintelligence in a few thousand days (!); it may take longer, but I’m confident we’ll get there. How did we get to the doorstep of the next leap in prosperity? In three words: deep learning worked. In 15 words: deep learning worked, got predictably better with scale, and we dedicated increasing resources to it. That’s really it; humanity discovered an algorithm that could really, truly learn any distribution of data (or really, the underlying “rules” that produce any distribution of data). To a shocking degree of precision, the more compute and data available, the better it gets at helping people solve hard problems. I find that no matter how much time I spend thinking about this, I can never really internalize how consequential it is. There are a lot of details we still have to figure out, but it’s a mistake to get distracted by any particular challenge. Deep learning works, and we will solve the remaining problems. We can say a lot of things about what may happen next, but the main one is that AI is going to get better with scale, and that will lead to meaningful improvements to the lives of people around the world. AI models will soon serve as autonomous personal assistants who carry out specific tasks on our behalf like coordinating medical care on your behalf. At some point further down the road, AI systems are going to get so good that they help us make better next-generation systems and make scientific progress across the board. Technology brought us from the Stone Age to the Agricultural Age and then to the Industrial Age. From here, the path to the Intelligence Age is paved with compute, energy, and human will. If we want to put AI into the hands of as many people as possible, we need to drive down the cost of compute and make it abundant (which requires lots of energy and chips). If we don’t build enough infrastructure, AI will be a very limited resource that wars get fought over and that becomes mostly a tool for rich people. We need to act wisely but with conviction. The dawn of the Intelligence Age is a momentous development with very complex and extremely high-stakes challenges. It will not be an entirely positive story, but the upside is so tremendous that we owe it to ourselves, and the future, to figure out how to navigate the risks in front of us. I believe the future is going to be so bright that no one can do it justice by trying to write about it now; a defining characteristic of the Intelligence Age will be massive prosperity. Although it will happen incrementally, astounding triumphs – fixing the climate, establishing a space colony, and the discovery of all of physics – will eventually become commonplace. With nearly-limitless intelligence and abundant energy – the ability to generate great ideas, and the ability to make them happen – we can do quite a lot. As we have seen with other technologies, there will also be downsides, and we need to start working now to maximize AI’s benefits while minimizing its harms. As one example, we expect that this technology can cause a significant change in labor markets (good and bad) in the coming years, but most jobs will change more slowly than most people think, and I have no fear that we’ll run out of things to do (even if they don’t look like “real jobs” to us today). People have an innate desire to create and to be useful to each other, and AI will allow us to amplify our own abilities like never before. As a society, we will be back in an expanding world, and we can again focus on playing positive-sum games. Many of the jobs we do today would have looked like trifling wastes of time to people a few hundred years ago, but nobody is looking back at the past, wishing they were a lamplighter. If a lamplighter could see the world today, he would think the prosperity all around him was unimaginable. And if we could fast-forward a hundred years from today, the prosperity all around us would feel just as unimaginable. |
