2025-01-06 Sam Altman.Reflections

Refer To：《Reflections》。

The second birthday of ChatGPT was only a little over a month ago, and now we have transitioned into the next paradigm of models that can do complex reasoning. New years get people in a reflective mood, and I wanted to share some personal thoughts about how it has gone so far, and some of the things I’ve learned along the way.

ChatGPT的第二个生日刚过去一个多月，而我们现在已经过渡到能够进行复杂推理的下一代模型范式。新年常常让人沉浸在反思中，我想分享一些关于迄今为止的历程以及我在这过程中学到的点滴的个人感想。

As we get closer to AGI, it feels like an important time to look at the progress of our company. There is still so much to understand, still so much we don’t know, and it’s still so early. But we know a lot more than we did when we started.

随着我们离AGI越来越近，现在似乎是一个重要的时刻，来审视公司取得的进展。仍有许多需要理解，仍有许多未知，一切仍然很早。但相比我们刚开始时，我们已经了解得多了。

We started OpenAI almost nine years ago because we believed that AGI was possible, and that it could be the most impactful technology in human history. We wanted to figure out how to build it and make it broadly beneficial; we were excited to try to make our mark on history. Our ambitions were extraordinarily high and so was our belief that the work might benefit society in an equally extraordinary way.

我们在大约九年前创立了OpenAI，因为我们相信AGI是可能的，而且它可能成为人类历史上最具影响力的技术。我们希望弄清楚如何构建它，并使其具有广泛的益处；我们满怀热情地想为历史留下我们的印记。我们的抱负极高，同时我们也坚信这项工作可能以同样非凡的方式造福社会。

At the time, very few people cared, and if they did, it was mostly because they thought we had no chance of success.

当时，几乎没有人关心，即使有，也主要是因为他们认为我们毫无成功的可能。

In 2022, OpenAI was a quiet research lab working on something temporarily called “Chat With GPT-3.5”. (We are much better at research than we are at naming things.) We had been watching people use the playground feature of our API and knew that developers were really enjoying talking to the model. We thought building a demo around that experience would show people something important about the future and help us make our models better and safer.

在2022年，OpenAI是一个安静的研究实验室，正在研究一个临时称为“与GPT-3.5聊天”的项目。（我们在研究方面比命名方面强得多。）我们一直在观察人们使用我们API的操场功能，了解到开发者非常喜欢与模型对话。我们认为围绕这种体验构建一个演示，可以向人们展示一些关于未来的重要内容，并帮助我们让模型更好、更安全。

We ended up mercifully calling it ChatGPT instead, and launched it on November 30th of 2022.

最后，我们幸运地将其命名为ChatGPT，并于2022年11月30日发布。

We always knew, abstractly, that at some point we would hit a tipping point and the AI revolution would get kicked off. But we didn’t know what the moment would be. To our surprise, it turned out to be this.

我们一直抽象地知道，在某个时候，我们会达到一个临界点，AI革命将由此开启。但我们不知道那个时刻会是什么。令我们惊讶的是，结果竟然是这个时刻。

The launch of ChatGPT kicked off a growth curve like nothing we have ever seen—in our company, our industry, and the world broadly. We are finally seeing some of the massive upside we have always hoped for from AI, and we can see how much more will come soon.

ChatGPT的发布引发了一场前所未有的增长浪潮——不仅在我们公司和行业内，更在全球范围内如此。我们终于开始看到AI带来的部分巨大益处，这正是我们一直以来所期待的，而且我们可以预见未来还会有更多的成果接踵而至。

It hasn’t been easy. The road hasn’t been smooth and the right choices haven’t been obvious.

这并不容易。前进的道路并不平坦，正确的选择也并非显而易见。

In the last two years, we had to build an entire company, almost from scratch, around this new technology. There is no way to train people for this except by doing it, and when the technology category is completely new, there is no one at all who can tell you exactly how it should be done.

在过去两年里，我们不得不围绕这项新技术几乎从零开始建立整个公司。除了通过实践，没有任何其他方式可以培养团队。而当技术领域完全是新的时，没有人可以准确告诉你应该如何做。

Building up a company at such high velocity with so little training is a messy process. It’s often two steps forward, one step back (and sometimes, one step forward and two steps back). Mistakes get corrected as you go along, but there aren’t really any handbooks or guideposts when you’re doing original work. Moving at speed in uncharted waters is an incredible experience, but it is also immensely stressful for all the players. Conflicts and misunderstanding abound.

在如此高速度、几乎没有多少培训的情况下建立公司是一个混乱的过程。通常是两步向前，一步退后（有时是一步向前，两步退后）。错误会在过程中得到纠正，但当你从事原创性工作时，实际上并没有任何手册或指引。在未知领域快速推进是一种令人难以置信的体验，但对所有参与者来说，这也是极其有压力的。冲突和误解比比皆是。

These years have been the most rewarding, fun, best, interesting, exhausting, stressful, and—particularly for the last two—unpleasant years of my life so far. The overwhelming feeling is gratitude; I know that someday I’ll be retired at our ranch watching the plants grow, a little bored, and will think back at how cool it was that I got to do the work I dreamed of since I was a little kid. I try to remember that on any given Friday, when seven things go badly wrong by 1 pm.

这些年来，是我人生中最有回报、最有趣、最精彩、最累人、最有压力的时光——尤其是过去两年，甚至还有些不愉快。最强烈的感受是感激；我知道，总有一天我会退休，坐在我们的农场里，看着植物生长，有点无聊，然后回想起小时候梦寐以求的工作，我真的有机会去做了。我努力在每个“某些事情在下午1点之前就出了七个问题”的周五提醒自己这一点。

并不喜欢自己正在做的事，备受噪音的折磨。

A little over a year ago, on one particular Friday, the main thing that had gone wrong that day was that I got fired by surprise on a video call, and then right after we hung up the board published a blog post about it. I was in a hotel room in Las Vegas. It felt, to a degree that is almost impossible to explain, like a dream gone wrong.

一年多以前的某个周五，那天最大的意外是，我在一次视频通话中突然被解雇，然后我们挂断电话后，董事会立即发布了一篇关于此事的博客。我当时在拉斯维加斯的一间酒店房间里。这种感觉几乎难以用语言形容，就像一个美梦变成了噩梦。

Getting fired in public with no warning kicked off a really crazy few hours, and a pretty crazy few days. The “fog of war” was the strangest part. None of us were able to get satisfactory answers about what had happened, or why.

被毫无预警地公开解雇引发了几个疯狂的小时，以及接下来几天的疯狂。“战争迷雾”是最奇怪的部分。我们没有人能够获得关于发生了什么、或为什么发生的令人满意的答案。

The whole event was, in my opinion, a big failure of governance by well-meaning people, myself included. Looking back, I certainly wish I had done things differently, and I’d like to believe I’m a better, more thoughtful leader today than I was a year ago.

整个事件在我看来，是一些好意的人（包括我自己）治理失败的一大案例。回首过去，我确实希望自己能以不同的方式处理事情，而且我愿意相信，我今天是一个比一年前更优秀、更深思熟虑的领导者。

I also learned the importance of a board with diverse viewpoints and broad experience in managing a complex set of challenges. Good governance requires a lot of trust and credibility. I appreciate the way so many people worked together to build a stronger system of governance for OpenAI that enables us to pursue our mission of ensuring that AGI benefits all of humanity.

我还认识到一个拥有多元化观点和丰富经验的董事会在应对复杂挑战时的重要性。良好的治理需要建立在大量信任和信誉的基础上。我感谢这么多人齐心协力，为OpenAI构建了一个更强大的治理体系，使我们能够追求确保AGI造福全人类的使命。

My biggest takeaway is how much I have to be thankful for and how many people I owe gratitude towards: to everyone who works at OpenAI and has chosen to spend their time and effort going after this dream, to friends who helped us get through the crisis moments, to our partners and customers who supported us and entrusted us to enable their success, and to the people in my life who showed me how much they cared.

我最大的收获是意识到自己有多么值得感激，有多少人需要我表达谢意：感谢每一位在OpenAI工作并选择将时间和精力投入到这个梦想中的人，感谢帮助我们渡过危机时刻的朋友，感谢支持我们并信任我们帮助他们取得成功的合作伙伴和客户，也感谢我生活中那些让我感受到关心的人们。

We all got back to the work in a more cohesive and positive way and I’m very proud of our focus since then. We have done what is easily some of our best research ever. We grew from about 100 million weekly active users to more than 300 million. Most of all, we have continued to put technology out into the world that people genuinely seem to love and that solves real problems.

我们以更加团结和积极的方式重新投入工作，我为我们自那以后专注的成果感到非常自豪。我们完成了一些可以说是我们有史以来最出色的研究。我们的每周活跃用户从大约1亿增长到超过3亿。最重要的是，我们持续将技术推向世界，人们真正喜爱这些技术，它们也解决了现实问题。

Nine years ago, we really had no idea what we were eventually going to become; even now, we only sort of know. AI development has taken many twists and turns and we expect more in the future.

九年前，我们对自己最终会成为怎样的存在几乎没有概念；即使是现在，我们也只能说大致有点方向。AI的发展经历了许多曲折，我们预计未来还会有更多变化。

对AI缺少哲学方面的思考，生理上就没有这个功能。

Some of the twists have been joyful; some have been hard. It’s been fun watching a steady stream of research miracles occur, and a lot of naysayers have become true believers. We’ve also seen some colleagues split off and become competitors. Teams tend to turn over as they scale, and OpenAI scales really fast. I think some of this is unavoidable—startups usually see a lot of turnover at each new major level of scale, and at OpenAI numbers go up by orders of magnitude every few months. The last two years have been like a decade at a normal company. When any company grows and evolves so fast, interests naturally diverge. And when any company in an important industry is in the lead, lots of people attack it for all sorts of reasons, especially when they are trying to compete with it.

其中一些曲折令人欣喜；另一些则十分艰难。目睹一连串研究奇迹的诞生是一件有趣的事情，许多怀疑者也因此转变成了真正的信徒。同时，我们也看到一些同事分道扬镳，成为了竞争对手。随着规模扩大，团队往往会发生人员变动，而OpenAI的规模增长非常迅速。我认为这其中一些情况是不可避免的——初创公司通常在每一个新的主要规模水平都会经历大量人员流动，而在OpenAI，规模每隔几个月就以数量级的速度增长。过去的两年对于我们来说，相当于一家普通公司经历了十年的历程。当任何一家重要行业的公司处于领先地位时，总会因为各种原因受到攻击，尤其是在竞争对手试图追赶的时候。

Our vision won’t change; our tactics will continue to evolve. For example, when we started we had no idea we would have to build a product company; we thought we were just going to do great research. We also had no idea we would need such a crazy amount of capital. There are new things we have to go build now that we didn’t understand a few years ago, and there will be new things in the future we can barely imagine now.

我们的愿景不会改变，但我们的策略会不断演变。例如，刚开始时，我们完全没想到自己需要建立一家产品公司；我们原以为只需要进行出色的研究。同样，我们也没想到会需要如此庞大的资本。现在有一些新任务是我们几年前未曾理解的，而未来也会出现我们目前几乎难以想象的新任务。

We are proud of our track record on research and deployment so far, and are committed to continuing to advance our thinking on safety and benefits sharing. We continue to believe that the best way to make an AI system safe is by iteratively and gradually releasing it into the world, giving society time to adapt and co-evolve with the technology, learning from experience, and continuing to make the technology safer. We believe in the importance of being world leaders on safety and alignment research, and in guiding that research with feedback from real world applications.

我们为迄今在研究和部署方面的成绩感到自豪，并致力于继续推进我们在安全性和利益共享方面的思考。我们依然相信，让AI系统更安全的最佳方法是通过迭代和逐步将其发布到世界中，让社会有时间适应并与技术共同进化，从经验中学习，不断提高技术的安全性。我们相信，在安全性和对齐研究方面成为全球领导者非常重要，并且用来自现实应用的反馈引导这些研究同样至关重要。

We are now confident we know how to build AGI as we have traditionally understood it. We believe that, in 2025, we may see the first AI agents “join the workforce” and materially change the output of companies. We continue to believe that iteratively putting great tools in the hands of people leads to great, broadly-distributed outcomes.

我们现在确信，我们知道如何按照传统理解来构建AGI。我们相信，在2025年，我们可能会看到第一批AI代理“加入劳动力队伍”，并实质性地改变企业的产出。我们仍然坚信，通过迭代将优秀工具交到人们手中，会带来伟大而广泛分布的成果。

We are beginning to turn our aim beyond that, to superintelligence in the true sense of the word. We love our current products, but we are here for the glorious future. With superintelligence, we can do anything else. Superintelligent tools could massively accelerate scientific discovery and innovation well beyond what we are capable of doing on our own, and in turn massively increase abundance and prosperity.

我们正在将目标进一步扩展至真正意义上的超级智能。我们热爱当前的产品，但我们的目标是实现辉煌的未来。借助超级智能，我们可以实现任何目标。超级智能工具能够极大地加速科学发现和创新，远超我们自身能力范围，并由此大幅提升社会的富足与繁荣。

This sounds like science fiction right now, and somewhat crazy to even talk about it. That’s alright—we’ve been there before and we’re OK with being there again. We’re pretty confident that in the next few years, everyone will see what we see, and that the need to act with great care, while still maximizing broad benefit and empowerment, is so important. Given the possibilities of our work, OpenAI cannot be a normal company.

这听起来像是科幻小说，现在甚至谈论它都有些疯狂。这没关系——我们以前也经历过这种情况，我们也接受再次经历。我们很有信心，在未来几年里，每个人都会看到我们所看到的，并认识到，在谨慎行事的同时最大化广泛的益处和赋能，是多么重要。鉴于我们的工作所蕴含的可能性，OpenAI不能是一家普通的公司。

How lucky and humbling it is to be able to play a role in this work.

能够在这项工作中扮演一个角色，真是幸运又令人谦卑。

(Thanks to Josh Tyrangiel for sort of prompting this. I wish we had had a lot more time.)

（感谢乔什·泰朗杰尔在某种程度上的启发。我希望我们能有更多时间。）

备注：

There were a lot of people who did incredible and gigantic amounts of work to help OpenAI, and me personally, during those few days, but two people stood out from all others.

在那几天里，有很多人为了帮助OpenAI和我个人而付出了难以置信的巨大努力，但其中两个人尤为突出。

Ron Conway and Brian Chesky went so far above and beyond the call of duty that I’m not even sure how to describe it. I’ve of course heard stories about Ron’s ability and tenaciousness for years and I’ve spent a lot of time with Brian over the past couple of years getting a huge amount of help and advice.

罗恩·康威和布莱恩·切斯基做得远远超出了职责范围，我甚至不知道该如何形容。当然，我多年来一直听说罗恩的能力和韧性，而在过去几年里，我也与布莱恩共事了很多次，得到了大量的帮助和建议。

But there’s nothing quite like being in the foxhole with people to see what they can really do. I am reasonably confident OpenAI would have fallen apart without their help; they worked around the clock for days until things were done.

但是，没有什么比与人一起身处险境更能看清他们真正能力的了。我相当确信，如果没有他们的帮助，OpenAI可能会解体；他们连续几天不分昼夜地工作，直到事情解决。

Although they worked unbelievably hard, they stayed calm and had clear strategic thought and great advice throughout. They stopped me from making several mistakes and made none themselves. They used their vast networks for everything needed and were able to navigate many complex situations. And I’m sure they did a lot of things I don’t know about.

尽管他们工作得令人难以置信的努力，但他们始终保持冷静，清晰的战略思维贯穿始终，并提供了极好的建议。他们阻止了我犯下几次错误，而他们自己没有犯任何错误。他们利用自己庞大的网络资源，解决了所需的一切问题，并成功应对了许多复杂的情况。我也确信他们还做了很多我不知道的事情。

What I will remember most, though, is their care, compassion, and support.

不过，我最记得的是他们的关怀、同情和支持。

I thought I knew what it looked like to support a founder and a company, and in some small sense I did. But I have never before seen, or even heard of, anything like what these guys did, and now I get more fully why they have the legendary status they do. They are different and both fully deserve their genuinely unique reputations, but they are similar in their remarkable ability to move mountains and help, and in their unwavering commitment in times of need. The tech industry is far better off for having both of them in it.

我曾以为自己知道支持一位创始人和一家公司是怎样的样子，在某种程度上，我确实知道一点。但我以前从未见过，也未曾听说过像他们那样的支持，现在我完全明白了为什么他们拥有传奇般的地位。他们是与众不同的，都完全值得拥有他们独一无二的声誉，但他们在两点上是相似的：他们惊人的能力可以移山填海并提供帮助，以及他们在需要时的坚定承诺。科技行业因为有他们而更加美好。

There are others like them; it is an amazingly special thing about our industry and does much more to make it all work than people realize. I look forward to paying it forward.

也有其他人像他们一样；这是我们行业中一个非常特别的现象，它为让这一切运转所做的贡献远超人们的想象。我期待能够回报这一切。

On a more personal note, thanks especially to Ollie for his support that weekend and always; he is incredible in every way and no one could ask for a better partner.

更个人一点来说，特别感谢奥利在那个周末以及一直以来的支持；他在各方面都非常出色，没有人能要求一个更好的伴侣了。

2025-01-06 Sam Altman.Reflections

2025-01-06 Sam Altman.Reflections

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